A Typical Landing Place for Contraband It wasn’t job you could just walk into. Before you…
William Savage
A Hiatus in Posting
There will be fewer posts over the next few months. I am immersed in completing the…
Eighteenth-century City Streets
What would it have been like for my character Ashmole Foxe to have walked through the…
Stannard & Taylor: A Lesson from History
Ipswich Journal, September 15th, 1770 How the collapse of a Norwich cloth merchant through rash over-expansion…
Norfolk Fends off Napoleon
Caricature of Napoleon hearing the news of Trafalgar by Gilray Fears of a French invasion were…
Uses and Abuses of the Press Gang
The Press Gang, Caricature, 1780 The purpose of the Impress Service, as the Press Gang was…
Georgian Ghosts
The “Brown Lady” of Raynham Hall, Norfolk, supposedly photographed in 1936. With Halloween approaching, I thought…
“If You Want A Job Done Properly …”
Edinburgh Castle (Photo: David Monniaux (CC BY-SA 3.0)) Turning once again to the pages of the…
“Great Cry and Little Wooll …”
Former Theatre Royal Dublin (photo: Marcia Stubbeman (CC)) One of the joys of looking through editions…
Georgian Household Goods
Photo CC Tyssil Much of what we can see today of the contents of a Georgian…
A Personal View of the Gordon Riots
Laetitia Hawkins (1760–1835) was the daughter of a wealthy London lawyer and magistrate. She never married,…
Melancholy and the Romantic Movement
First Edition of Gray’s “Elegy” How did the concept of melancholy came to be seen as…
Fears of Terrorism and the ‘Swinish Multitude’
Cruikshank’s View of the French Revolutionaries My series of mysteries featuring Dr Adam Bascom are all…
Melancholy and Madness
Engraving by Hogarth In the eighteenth century, melancholia was thought of not as a curable mental…
Competing Pleasure Gardens
The most famous pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century were undoubtedly those in London. However, other…
Was Melancholy THE English Malady of the 18th Century?
Photo: Immanuel Giel “Mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy… which…
Electioneering and Corruption in Georgian England
Voting in parliamentary elections in Georgian England was neither democratic nor free from undue influence. By…
Some Georgian Medicine (from the archives)
Elizabeth Postlethwaite in 1777 (© Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London) A little while ago, rummaging in…
‘Party’ in 18th-century English politics
In our own times, most of us are familiar with partisan, party-based politics. That makes it…
The 18th-century Apothecary
An 18th-century Apothecary’s Shop(CC) Wellcome Images Those of you who have read any of my Georgian…
Organised Crime in the 18th Century
Fighting a Smuggling Gang It’s often said that there is nothing new under the sun, and…
“The Trouble with Servants …”
It’s easy to look back on the eighteenth century and imagine how wonderful it must have…
The Case of the Amorous Footman
This is a follow-up to my earlier article about the problems of managing servants in the…
William Windham and the Fight against France and Napoleon
William Windham III The story of the Norfolk squire who became the British government’s principal agent…
“Naming and Shaming” in Georgian Newspapers
In Georgian times, as today, not all marriages were happy — or even tolerable. Wives ran…