Thanks to everyone who participated in the comments! It’s never too late to put in your 2 cents worth … feel free to comment if you must have your share of the conversation! Day 1 ~ Just Jane 1813 Day 2 ~ Diary of An Eccentric Day 3 ~ Savvy Verse and Wit Day 4… Read more Fanny Price vs. Mary Crawford – The Debate Rages On!
English poet, essayist, playwright, and novelist Thomas Love Peacock was born on 18 October 1785 in Weymouth, Dorset, into a lower-middle class family. From there he rose to become both an admired writer and wealthy, “a rare instance of a man improved by prosperity.” While working as a clerk with Ludlow Fraser Company in London,… Read more The Laughing Philosopher, Thomas Love Peacock
On 17 October 1814 beer vats belonging to the Meux and Company Brewery ruptured at the Horseshoe Brewery, inundating the neighboring streets with a tidal wave more than 15 feet high of more than 323,000 gallons (1,470,000 liters) of alcohol. The aptly named London Beer Flood sounds funny at first, but it was an industrial… Read more Poverty, Beer, and an Act of God
Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, was born on 19 September 1778, the eldest son of Henry Brougham and Eleanora Syme Brougham, a famous and influential lawyer in Edinburgh. Young Henry grew up in a Georgian townhouse at no. 21 St Andrew Square, and followed in his father’s legal footsteps. Brougham graduated from… Read more Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
First, let me just say I love the name Mungo. I’ve loved it forever. I first loved it when I found the name St Mungo in a book of Scottish folk tales and saints that I read in high school. I loved it when it popped up in the Harry Potter series as St Mungo’s… Read more Mungo Park, I presume?
On 8 September 1761 King George III married Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom he had first met less than six hours before the wedding, in the Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace. Remarkably, the two feel deeply in love and both remained faithful throughout their 57 years of marriage. George had been come king on… Read more The Marriage of King George III and Queen Charlotte
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the future Marquis de La Fayette and hero of the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830, was born on 6 September 1757 in south central France. Lafayette’s family were among the most illustrious soldiers in French history, and he was… Read more America’s Lafayette
William Wilberforce, the spearhead and focal point of the English abolitionists, as well as one of my favorite historical personages, was born in Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, on 24 August 1759. He was the only son of Robert Wilberforce, whose family had become wealthy thanks to maritime trade with Baltic countries,… Read more William Wilberforce, a Truly Great Man
On 18 August 1783 sometime between 21:15 and 21:30 an unusually bright bolide was seen over Britain. This became know as the 1783 Great Meteor and was an intense topic of discussion in the early scientific publication, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Analysis indicates that the meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere somewhere over the… Read more The Great Meteor of 1783
One of the most enduring effects of the French and American Revolution in England was the governmental crackdown on ‘radicalism’, which was typically considered anything remotely resembling a call for sociopolitical reform. The government didn’t want a bunch of poor workers meeting and talking about inequality. The next thing you knew the poors would be… Read more The Peterloo Massacre