British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
Horace Walpole, a loyal patron of Vauxhall pleasure gardens, visits newly-opened rival Ranelagh gardens in Chelsea.
Richard, Viscount Ranelagh, opened the formal gardens of his house next to the Chelsea Hospital to the public in 1742. Horace Walpole was there the very next evening, but told his friend Horace Mann that he still preferred the older (and more rumbustious) pleasure gardens at Vauxhall.
Daniel Defoe argues that it is in every man’s interest to watch the women in his life realise their full potential.
One of the first public men in England to address inequality between the sexes was Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), author of ‘Moll Flanders’. Defoe wanted a ‘female academy’ set up to educate women to their full potential, and argued that it was in every man’s interest.
Victorian England was agog at the prospect of Tom Sayers meeting a confident but unproven challenger from the USA.
Boxing’s first world title bout, on April 17th, 1860, featured England’s own Tom Sayers against a challenger from the USA, John Heenan, ‘the Benicia Boy’. It was the boxing event of a whole generation, and bare-knuckle fighting’s swansong.
Charles Villiers Stanford found it necessary to play dumb on a visit to snowy Leipzig.
Composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford has been reminiscing about his time in Germany, and the devotees of ‘Mensur’, academic fencing. They were nothing if not courageous, taking a baffling pride in the scars; but they hung like a sword of Damocles over the heads of the merely careless, as Stanford discovered for himself on a visit to Leipzig in 1875.
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.
Edith left behind her a distraught Archbishop Dunstan, but also a legacy of love for the suffering.
Edith of Wilton died on September 16th, 984, at the age of just twenty-three. That August, the elderly Archbishop of Canterbury, Dunstan, had crowned a project dear to her, the building and beautifying of a chapel dedicated to St Denis of Paris, with a personal visit, and had taken to her right from the start.