Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Great Britain - Georgian Era (1714-1837)

One April evening in 1779, Martha Ray, the pretty mistress of a famous aristocrat, was shot dead at point-blank range by a young clergyman who then attempted to take his own life. Instead he was arrested, tried and hanged. In this fascinating new book, John Brewer, a leading historian of eighteenth-century England, asks what this peculiar little story was all about. Then as now, crimes of passion were not uncommon, and the story had the hallmarks of a great scandal--yet fiction and fact mingled confusingly in all the accounts, and the case was hardly deemed appropriate material for real...

In her own time and in ours, Hannah More (1745-1833) has been seen as a benefactress of the poor, writing and working selflessly to their benefit. Mona Scheuermann argues, however, that More's agenda was not simply to help the poor but to control them, for the upper classes in late eighteenth-century England were terrified that the poor would rise in revolt against Church and King.

As much social history as literary study, In Praise of Poverty shows that More's writing to the poor specifically is intended to counter the perceived rabble rousing of Thomas Paine and other...

She was a spirited young heiress. He was a handsome baronet with a promising career in government. The marriage of Lady Seymour Dorothy Fleming and Sir Richard Worsley had the makings of a fairy tale--but ended as one of the most scandalous and highly publicized divorces in history.

In February 1782, England opened its newspapers to read the details of a criminal conversation trial in which the handsome baronet Sir Richard Worsley attempted to sue his wife's lover for an astronomical sum in damages. In the course of the proceedings, the Worsleys' scandalous sexual arrangements,...