613
Sir William Hunter looks back over a Government committee’s plan to introduce tea cultivation to India in 1834.
The British drink almost 36 billion cups of tea each year, a trend set by King Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Queen Catherine. The tea itself came exclusively from China, which by the early Nineteenth Century had become a cause for concern. What if China were to close her ports to Europe, as neighbouring Japan had done? So the Government set up a Tea Committee.
Posted May 13 2020
614
In the days of King James I, Thomas Coryat visited Italy and came home with an affected Continental habit: eating with a fork.
When Peter Damian, Bishop of Ostia, learnt that the late Maria Argyropoulaina (?-1007), daughter-in-law to the Doge of Venice, had eaten with a little fork rather than her fingers, he denounced it as unnatural. But on a tour of Italy in 1608, Englishman Thomas Coryat found that forks were now everyday items, and he even brought the fashion back home.
Posted May 9 2020
615
A London barrister indulges in courtroom theatrics to win a case, but it turns out that not everything is as it seems.
In 1858, a witness testified in a US court to seeing a man murdered in bright moonlight; but in a dramatic twist, defence attorney Abraham Lincoln swept out an almanac showing this was not possible, and the case fell through. Over twenty years earlier, Robert Southey had recorded a bizarre parallel involving a barrister at the Old Bailey, only there was an even more dramatic twist to that tale.
Posted May 8 2020
616
On the day that Manfred, Prince of Otranto, expected his son Conrad to marry the Marquis of Vicenza’s daughter, grotesque tragedy struck.
Horace Walpole’s ‘Castle of Otranto’ (1765) was suggested by a dream, and the tumbled nightmare of a tale, masquerading as an historical document, left many a Georgian reader cowering under the bedclothes. It opens with Manfred, Prince of Otranto, waiting impatiently for the marriage of his son Conrad to Isabella, daughter of the Marquis of Vicenza.
Posted May 7 2020
617
Robert Browning, aboard ship in sight of Gibraltar, reflects on the momentous events in British history that have happened nearby.
In this poem from his travels in 1838, Robert Browning is aboard a ship just off Tangiers. Cape St Vincent in Portugal has faded from view, but he can see Cadiz and Cape Trafalgar clearly, and just make out Gibraltar. He thinks of the stirring events in British history that took place hereabouts, and wonders what an ordinary Englishmen can still do for his country.
Posted May 7 2020
618
After Oliver Goldsmith’s landlady lost patience with her cash-strapped tenant, Dr Johnson took charge and a literary classic entered the world.
Irish novelist and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) was perpetually hard up, living hand-to-mouth on his writing. There came a day however when his landlady lost patience, and would not let her tenant out of her sight until he paid up. Goldsmith turned in desperation to his friend Samuel Johnson, the famous critic and lexicographer.
Posted May 6 2020