It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
I recently came across a striking passage in Samuel Pepy's diary in which he receives advice on how to get his wife Elizabeth pregnant. At the time of writing, July 1664, he and Elizabeth had been married for eight years, but they remained childless. While attending a dinner on 26th July, Samuel asked the women …
The Georgian era (1714-1837) was the golden age of English print satire. Gillray, Rowlandson and the Cruikshank family made themselves famous with their exuberant, brightly-coloured caricatures which lampooned everything from government to the clergy, from fashion to the French. Here are some of their satirical takes on marriage. They point out the problems so often …
Continue reading The torments of marriage in Georgian caricatures
Following several festive-themed posts, a three week Christmas break and the latest installment of Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on English History, now for something completely different. For most people in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, Danish history is a blank, perhaps filled in only by vague memories of Hamlet's line "something is rotten in the state …
Continue reading Johann Struensee, the German doctor who ruled Denmark