Georgian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Georgian Era’
In 1609, Englishman Thomas Harriot turned his new-fangled telescope on the moon, and sketched for the first time the face of another world.
Three hundred years after the death of Thomas Harriot or Hariot (?1560-1621), the American journal Science sketched the life of a man who, though almost forgotten by succeeding generations, was involved in some of the greatest discoveries of European science, and embroiled in some of the most stirring events in English politics.
After word came that Harry Demane had been lured aboard a slave-ship, Granville Sharp had only a few hours in which to make sure he did not sail.
Thanks to campaigner Granville Sharp, ‘Somersett’s Case’ in 1772 proved that slave owners could expect no help from our courts. But they could still sell their African servants into slavery in far-off British colonies, and when Mr Jeffries of Bedford Street did just that, the race was on to find Harry Demane before his ship left port — even as London was settling down for the weekend.
During his tour of England in 1782, Karl Philipp Moritz dropped in on the House of Commons, and thought the histrionics in the Chamber better than any play.
In 1782, German tourist Karl Philipp Moritz visited the Commons chamber, and heard Viscount Feilding rebuke Charles Fox, the Foreign Secretary, for wanting to make war hero Admiral Rodney a Lord: had the Rt Hon. Gentleman not recently declared Rodney’s second-in-command, Admiral Hood, unworthy even of a seat in the Commons? Fox’s despatch-box-thumping reply whetted Moritz’s appetite for more.
On realising that he had the edge on his rivals, music publisher John Brand moved quickly to secure one of Haydn’s peerless Quartets.
A contributor calling himself ‘A Constant Reader’ submitted this story to the Musical World in 1836. He declared that he could vouch for the truth of it, as he had heard it from ‘the originator,’ music publisher John Bland (1750-1840), who was still alive at the time and in a position to refute it. He never did, and the story found its way into Carl Ferdinand Pohl’s influential biography and thence into musical folkore.
Aeneas Anderson, who accompanied Lord Macartney on Britain’s first embassy to China, shared a tale illustrating the Qianlong Emperor’s notion of fair play.
In 1792-93, George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney, led England’s first embassy to China. The Emperor was obstructive throughout and haughtily declined King George III’s invitation to trade. ‘We entered Pekin like paupers’ wrote Macartney’s valet, Aeneas Anderson; ‘we remained in it like prisoners; and we quitted it like vagrants.’ But his farewell to his readers was intended to leave a favourable impression.
Richard Price argued that the true patriot does not scold other countries for being worse than his own; he inspires his own country to be better than it is.
In 1789, Non-conformist minister Richard Price preached a sermon urging fellow Englishmen to welcome the stirring events in Paris on July 14th that year. Only John Bull’s patriotic prejudice, he said, prevented him from admitting that what was happening was a mirror of our own Glorious Revolution of 1689, and he enlarged on what a more generous love of country, a Christian duty, should look like.