The Long Eighteenth Century
The Profligate Son
From Jane Austen’s Wickham through Charles Dicken’s array of extravagant cads to the latest Regency romance, the dissipated wastrel who throws away his family fortune, or at least his good name, is a familiar character to anyone who reads novels written (or set) in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. They drink,…
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Jane Austen’s England
Even if you’ve never read Jane Austen’s novels you probably have a clear image of what life was like for her characters thanks to excellent adaptations for film and television. Women wore white muslin dresses. Gentlemen wore precisely tied cravats and really tight pants. Red-coats wore, well, red-coats. People went to dances, visited great houses,…
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Shin-Kickers From History: William Wilberforce and the Abolition of the British Slave Trade
Unlike many other shin-kickers from history, William Wilberforce was a card-carrying member of the privileged classes–wealthy, educated, male, white. Born in 1759 to a wealthy merchant family in the Yorkshire port of Hull, Wilberforce spent his teen years and early adult life in what he later described as “utter idleness and dissipation”. While a student…
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