It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
To hear church bells ringing continuously for as long as half an hour, several evenings a week, is no surprise if you live in central Oxford as I do, so I was particularly amused at something I read about today. In 1797 a book called Travels in England During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth was …
A taste for salacious gossip is nothing new. It's a stereotype, but true, that Georgian London was a bawdy place and had no shortage of scandal to go round. The spreading of scandalous stories was helped by the 18th century explosion in the newspaper trade. In 1770, London had 5 daily papers; by the 1780s …
Continue reading Sex, the law and the press in Georgian London
Because the popular representation of the 18th century is intimately bound up with the Enlightenment, many tend to think of it as a time when society was inexorably moving towards a golden rational future and climbing out of the dark, superstitious seventeenth century/medieval era/Dark Ages/whichever awful period you care to name. However, looking at the …
Continue reading Criminal (in)justice in 18th-century England