Georgian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Georgian Era’
Having brought hundreds of convicts to New South Wales, Arthur Phillip then had to conjure order out of their chaos.
The first British settlement in Australia was established at Sydney Cove on January 26th, 1788, and named after the Home Secretary. The policy of penal transportation was barbarity, but out of it Captain Phillips and his successors conjured civilisation — and began by disobeying orders.
Blake throws heart and soul into an impassioned expression of his dream of a new England.
In a fiery Preface to his epic poem ‘Milton’, William Blake scolded Georgian Britain’s materialistic Establishment for making idols of war, empire, science and money. He ended with a stirring appeal to rediscover the country’s soul, drawing on a legend that Jesus Christ once visited England.
A Portuguese merchant assesses Great Britain’s market under the Hanoverians.
Manoel Gonzales tells us that he was a native of Lisbon, educated by the Jesuits. His mother pulled him from the school on suspicion that the priests were after his inheritance, so Manoel set himself to expand his father’s business instead. On April 23rd, 1730 – St George’s Day, as he noted — Gonzales set out for Falmouth, intending to reconnoitre his chosen market.
Several English pianists impressed Joseph Haydn on his visits to London, but Maria Hester Park was a particular favourite.
What sort of piano music should we imagine Elizabeth Bennet playing in the drawing rooms of Longbourn and Meryton? The only name dropped in Jane Austen’s novels is John Baptist Cramer, but we do know of other widely published composers of the day; several were women, and one of the most celebrated was Maria Hester Park, née Reynolds.
William Cobbett recalls his first taste of classic literature, for which he had to go without his supper.
At eleven, William Cobbett’s (1763-1835) ambition was to be a gardener at Kew. It would be a step up from clipping hedges and weeding flower beds for the Bishop of Winchester back home in Farnham, but it meant walking all the way to Richmond, a distance of nearly thirty miles as the crow flies, and with threepence all his wealth.
Economist Adam Smith so changed the conversation in Britain that most people take his groundbreaking insights for granted.
Adam Smith’s free market ‘Wealth of Nations’ had an immediate and highly beneficial impact on British economic policy, one whose ripples spread across the world. Yet as biographer Richard Haldane explains, so successful was Smith in changing the conversation that most people have now forgotten all about him.