Voice of the Enlightenment

“…She was a woman of much deeper feeling than the world imagined,’ one friend of Anna Barbauld said. She was also a woman of extraordinary sense, writing at the height of invasion fever in 1803, ‘I am sure we do not believe in the danger we pretend to believe in; and I am sure that [...]

Austen and The Woolf

“When she was laid in the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had already chosen her kingdom.”
It is unusually long for a blogpost I know but I can’t resist posting this essay in it’s entirety. Virginia Woolf’s essay on Jane Austen was published in her 1925 collection of essays [...]

Seymour: A Woman of Spirit and Friends

Lady Worsley’s Whim 2008 by Hallie Rubenhold is an excellently researched and written account of a real-life  Georgian sex scandle. ‘To have Criminal Conversation with’ is an 18th century euphemism for adultery and the 1782 Crim Con trial involving George Bisset, his lover Lady Seymour Worsley and her husband Sir Richard Worsley, 7th Baronet Worsley of Appuldercombe [...]

The Diodati Stories and Their Authors: Lord Byron

Diodati 1816
by By Robert Gordon
1963 
Byron and Shelley and Mary and Claire,
Braced by the grandeur and quick Alpine air,
Clustered themselves in a Genevese site,
Telling of spirits and ghosts in the night,
Byron was piqued by the whispering gloom;
Shelly had visions and ran from the room;
Claire became pregnant (her passion, his wine);
And Mary, bright Mary, begot Frankenstein.
[...]

Peaches and Cream: Lady Hamilton

Emma, Lady Hamilton
1765 – 1815
Undoubtedly the most well remembered scandal of Georgian England was the devoted alliance between Emma, Lady Hamilton and the hero of the nation, Horatio Nelson. Like any public and unconventional woman, an inordinate amount has been written about Lady Hamilton, much of it unflattering and most of it untrue. The daughter [...]

Curriculum Vitae: Joseph Priestley 1733 – 1804

Joseph Priestley
by Ellen Sharples, probably after James Sharples
circa 1797
National Portrait Gallery London UK NPG 175
A native of West Yorkshire, Joseph Priestley was a natural philosopher, chemist, educator and Dissenting clergyman, and he is credited with the discovery of the existence of oxygen. A clergyman-chemist, Priestley called the gas he discovered, “dephlogisticated air.” It was French physicist [...]

The Interesting Narrative of Life

Olaudah Equiano

Portrait of Olaudah Equiano
Circa 1780
Previously attributed to Joshua Reynolds
Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter
Although forms of bondage had existed in West and Central Africa (and indeed in Europe) before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, human beings were rarely the main commodity at the African marketplace. In the modern world however, the enslaved African was inspected, [...]

Fielding Picaresque

Between the years 1729 and 1737 Henry Fielding wrote 25 plays, including his most well known, Tom Thumb but he acclaimed critical notice with his novels. The best known are The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), a picaresque novel in which the tangled comedies of coincidence are offset by the neat, architectonic structure [...]

Council of One

The Big Three of the Napoleonic Wars: Nap, Nel and Well, Part Three

Napoleon I of France
15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821

Napoleon Bonaparte First Consul
1802
Antoine-Jean Gros
Musée Nationale de la Légion d’Honneur, Paris
Napoleon Bonaparte was born to a minor Corsican noble family – the Buonapartes – in 1769, not long after the island [...]

Armed Neutrality

The Big Three of The Napoleonic Wars II

Vice-Admiral Horatio, Lord Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson
29 September 1758 – 21st October 1805
Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson
1800
Lemuel Francis Abbot
National Maritime Museum, UK

If Wellington is regarded as Britain’s greatest soldier, another Georgian must be considered their greatest sailor. Horatio Nelson won three of the most decisive naval [...]

Chawton Cottage

For eight years, from 1809 until her death in 1817, Austen lived with her mother, her sister Cassandra and their friend Martha Lloyd, in the village of Chawton in Hampshire. The cottage is open to the public as a museum and after acquiring new funding, Austen’s letters have become part of the displayed collection. [...]

Field Marshal, His Grace

Field Marshal His Grace Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington c. 1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852.

Portrait of The Duke of Wellington
1812
Francisco Goya
National Gallery, London
Born to an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family in Ireland, Wellesley joined the army in 1787. He fought against the French in Flanders and in 1796 went to India, where he [...]