Download or read book The Secret History of Georgian London written by Dan Cruickshank and published by Arrow. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our leading historians describes how Georgian London was shaped by the sex industry

Download or read book The Courtiers written by Lucy Worsley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kensington Palace is now most famous as the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but the palace's glory days came between 1714 and 1760, during the reigns of George I and II . In the eighteenth century, this palace was a world of skulduggery, intrigue, politicking, etiquette, wigs, and beauty spots, where fans whistled open like switchblades and unusual people were kept as curiosities. Lucy Worsley's The Courtiers charts the trajectory of the fantastically quarrelsome Hanovers and the last great gasp of British court life. Structured around the paintings of courtiers and servants that line the walls of the King's Staircase of Kensington Palace-paintings you can see at the palace today-The Courtiers goes behind closed doors to meet a pushy young painter, a maid of honor with a secret marriage, a vice chamberlain with many vices, a bedchamber woman with a violent husband, two aging royal mistresses, and many more. The result is an indelible portrait of court life leading up to the famous reign of George III , and a feast for both Anglophiles and lovers of history and royalty.

Download or read book Georgian London written by Lucy Inglis and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Georgian London: Into the Streets, Lucy Inglis takes readers on a tour of London's most formative age - the age of love, sex, intellect, art, great ambition and fantastic ruin. Travel back to the Georgian years, a time that changed expectations of what life could be. Peek into the gilded drawing rooms of the aristocracy, walk down the quiet avenues of the new middle class, and crouch in the damp doorways of the poor. But watch your wallet - tourists make perfect prey for the thriving community of hawkers, prostitutes and scavengers. Visit the madhouses of Hackney, the workshops of Soho and the mean streets of Cheapside. Have a coffee in the city, check the stock exchange, and pop into St Paul's to see progress on the new dome. This book is about the Georgians who called London their home, from dukes and artists to rent boys and hot air balloonists meeting dog-nappers and life-models along the way. It investigates the legacies they left us in architecture and art, science and society, and shows the making of the capital millions know and love today. 'Read and be amazed by a city you thought you knew' Jonathan Foyle, World Monuments Fund 'Jam-packed with unusual insights and facts. A great read from a talented new historian' Independent 'Pacy, superbly researched. The real sparkle lies in its relentless cavalcade of insightful anecdotes . . . There's much to treasure here' Londonist 'Inglis has a good ear for the outlandish, the farcical, the bizarre and the macabre. A wonderful popular history of Hanoverian London' London Historians In 2009 Lucy Inglis began blogging on the lesser-known aspects of London during the Eighteenth Century - including food, immigration and sex- at GeorgianLondon.com. She lives in London with her husband. Georgian London is her first book.

Download or read book London s Sinful Secret written by Dan Cruickshank and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georgian London evokes images of elegant mannered buildings, but it was also a city where prostitution was rife and houses of ill repute widespread in a sex trade that employed thousands. In London's Sinful Secret, Dan Cruickshank explores this erotic Georgian underworld and shows how it affected almost every aspect of life and culture in the city from the smart new streets that sprang up in Marylebone, to the squalid alleys around Charing Cross to the coffee houses, where prostitutes plied their trade, to the work of artists such as William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. Cruickshank uses memoirs, newspaper accounts and court records to create a surprisingly bawdy portrait of London at its most-mannered and, for the first time, exposes its secret, sinful underside. "A lively work of social history, full of surprises and memorable characters." - Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book The Georgian Menagerie written by Christopher Plumb and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth century, it would not have been impossible to encounter an elephant or a kangaroo making its way down the Strand, heading towards the menagerie of Mr. Pidcock at the Exeter Change. Pidcock's was just one of a number of commercial menagerists who plied their trade in London in this period the predecessors to the zoological societies of the Victorian era. As the British Empire expanded and seaborne trade flooded into London's ports, the menagerists gained access to animals from the most far-flung corners of the globe, and these strange creatures became the objects of fascination and wonder. Many aristocratic families sought to create their own private menageries with which to entertain their guests, while for the less well-heeled, touring exhibitions of exotic creatures both alive and dead satisfied their curiosity for the animal world. While many exotic creatures were treasured as a form of spectacle, others fared less well turtles went into soups and civet cats were sought after for ingredients for perfume. In this entertaining and enlightening book, Plumb introduces the many tales of exotic animals in London.

Download or read book The Grim Almanac of Georgian London written by Cate Ludlow and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Georgian era was perhaps one of the most shocking, gory, vice-ridden, and downright surprising in the capital's history. From an anaconda attack at the Tower of London to a ghost in Regent’s Park, a murder at the House of Commons, a body-snatching case which horrified all of London, a murderer who advertised for a new wife in The Times, and a decapitated head in the churchyard of St Margaret’s in Westminster, it will terrify, disgust and delight residents and visitors alike. With 100 incredible illustrations from the rarest and most sensational true-crime publications of the age, no London bookshelf is complete without it!

Download or read book The Country House Revealed written by Dan Cruickshank and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the architectural history of the country house from the disarming Elizabethan charm of South Wraxall, the classical rigour of Kinross in Scotland, the majesty and ingenuity of Hawksmoor's Easton Neston, the Palladian sweep of Wentworth Woodhouse, with over 300 rooms and frontage of 600 feet, the imperial exuberance of Clandeboye, through to the ebullient vitality of Lutyens' Marshcourt, the stories of these houses tell the story of our nation. All are the are buildings of the greatest architectural interest, each with a fascinating human story to tell, and all remain private homes that are closed to the public. But their owners have opened their doors and allowed Dan Cruickshank to roam the corridors and rummage in the cellars as he teases out the story of each house - who built them, the generations who lived in them, and the families who lost them. Along the way he has uncovered tales of excess and profligacy, tragedy, comedy, power and ambition. And as these intriguing narratives take shape, Dan shows how the story of each house is inseparable from the social and economic history of Britain. Each one is built as a wave of economic development crests, or crumbles. Each one's architecture and design is thus expressive of the aims, strengths and frailties of those who built them. Together they plot the psychological, economic and social route map of our country's ruling class in a rich new telling of our island story.

Download or read book The Secret History of the Pink Carnation written by Lauren Willig and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-12-27 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nothing goes right for Eloise. The one day she wears her new suede boots, it rains cats and dogs. When the subway stops short, she’s always the one thrown into some stranger’s lap. Plus, she’s had more than her share of misfortune in the way of love. In fact, ever since she realized romantic heroes are a thing of the past, she’s decided it’s time for a fresh start. Setting off for England, Eloise is determined to finish her dissertation on that dashing pair of spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian. But what she discovers is something the finest historians have missed: the secret history of the Pink Carnation—the most elusive spy of all time. As she works to unmask this obscure spy, Eloise stumbles across answers to all kinds of questions. Like how did the Pink Carnation save England from Napoleon? What became of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian? And will Eloise Kelly escape her bad luck and find a living, breathing hero all her own?

Download or read book Early Modern Improvisations written by Katherine Scheil and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-03 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a panoramic sweep across continents and topics, Early Modern Improvisations is an interdisciplinary collection that analyzes the relationship between early modern literature and history through lenses such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and politics. The book engages readers interested in texts that range from Shakespeare and Tudor queens to Anglican missionary work in North America; from contemporary feminist television series to Ancient Greek linguistic and philosophical concepts; from the delicate dance of diplomatic exchange to the instabilities of illness, food insecurity, and piracy. Its range of contributions encourages readers to discover their own intersections across literary and historical texts, a sense of discovery that this collection’s contributors learned from its dedicatee, John Watkins, a major literary and cultural historian whose work moves effortlessly across geographical, temporal, and political borders. His work and his personality embody the spirit of creative improvisation that brings new ideas together, allowing texts and figures of history to haunt later eras and encourage new questions. This volume is aimed at scholars and students alike who wish to explore early modern culture and its reverberations in ways that engage with a world outside the grand narratives and centralized institutions of power, a world that is more provisional, less scripted, and more improvisational. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC)] 4.0 license.

Download or read book Soho written by Dan Cruickshank and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soho - illicit, glamorous, sordid, louche, poverty-stricken, squalid, exhilarating. One of Britain's best-loved historians, Dan Cruickshank, grants us an intimacy with centuries of rich and varied history as he guides us around the Soho of the last five hundred years. We learn of its original aspirations towards respectability, how it became London's bohemian quarter and why it was once home to its criminal underworld. The bars, clubs, theatres and their frequenters are described with detail that evokes the heart of the district. The history of Soho is written in its surviving architecture. Cruickshank points out the streets that were the stamping grounds of criminal dynasties and directs our attention towards the homes of renowned prostitutes, revealing Georgian sexual mores and surprising visitors - amongst them eighteenth-century painter Joshua Reynolds, whose peculiar 'caprice' was simply drawing the girls. Soho has been home to characters as diverse as Mrs Goadby's girls to the Maltese mafia, and Cruikshank draws these threads together with kaleidoscopic verve. Even as he mourns some of the changes, he pays testament to the district's resilience. He observes how the common denominator over the centuries is that it has always been a destination for immigrants: from French Huguenots to the East European Jewish community and recent Chinese diaspora - and that this is the foundation of its spirit and success.

Download or read book Mother Clap s Molly House written by Mark Ravenhill and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Like bawdy Shakespeare meets wild Wycherley filtered through the formalised camp of John Osborne's A Patriot for Me...how wonderful to see the rabid raw talent of Ravenhhill given the full works' Michael Coveney, Daily Mail It's London 1726, and Mrs Tull's got problems. The whores are giving her a hard time, a man in a dress is looking for a job, her husband has a roving eye and the apprentice boy keeps disappearing for 'a wander'. Meanwhile in 2001 a group of wealthy gay men are preparing for a raunchy party.Mother Clap's Molly House, a black comedy with songs is a celebration of the diversity of human sexualtiy, an exploration of our need to form families and a fascinatig insight into a hidden chapter in London's history.'Ravenhill's writing is tough, eloquent, sardonic, with some of the barbed formality of the Resotration style, which gets brutally peeled off in the present-day scenes. This is not a play you "enjoy". This is not a gay play either...The message of this play is not "Come out", but "Come in".' John Peter, Sunday Times.'Mark Ravenhill clearly likes to have it both ways. In this wonderfuly exuberant new musical play, he celebrates Sodom like there's no Gomorrah... Delicate souls may be offended but there is no doubting the sincerity of Ravenhill's assault on the tranformation of sex into a dirty business.' Michael Billington, Guardian'A theatrical manifesto for sexual tolerance that teeters wildly between the politics of Bertolt Brecht and the in-your-face deviancy of a gay nightclub... Ravenhill combines graphic sex with a generosity of spirit' Charles Spencer, Daily TelegraphMother Clap's Molly House premiered at the Royal National Theatre, London in October 2001.

Download or read book The Secret Life of the Georgian Garden written by Kate Felus and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-09 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georgian landscape gardens are among the most visited and enjoyed of the UK's historical treasures The Georgian garden has also been hailed as the greatest British contribution to European Art, seen as a beautiful composition created from grass, trees and water – a landscape for contemplation. But scratch below the surface and history reveals these gardens were a lot less serene and, in places, a great deal more scandalous. Beautifully illustrated in colour and black & white, this book is about the daily life of the Georgian garden. It reveals its previously untold secrets from early morning rides through to evening amorous liaisons. It explains how by the eighteenth century there was a desire to escape the busy country house where privacy was at a premium, and how these gardens evolved aesthetically, with modestly-sized, far-flung temples and other eye-catchers, to cater for escape and solitude as well as food, drink, music and fireworks. Its publication coincides with the 2016 tercentenary of the birth of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, arguably Britain's greatest ever landscape gardener, and the book is uniquely positioned to put Brown's work into its social context.

Download or read book The Profligate Son written by Nicola Phillips and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Regency England a profligate son was regarded as every parent's worst nightmare: he symbolized the dangerous temptations of a new consumer society and the failure of parents to instil moral, sexual, and financial self-control in their sons. This book tells the dramatic and moving story of one of those 'profligate sons': William Jackson, a charming teenage boy, whose embattled relationship with his father and frustrated attempts to keep up with his wealthy friends, resulted in personal and family tragedy. From popular public school boy to the pursuit of prostitutes, from duelling to debtors' prison and finally, from fraudster to convicted felon awaiting transportation to Australia, William's father (a wealthy East India Company merchant) chronicled every step of his son's descent into depravity and crime. This remarkable source provides a unique and compelling insight into the relationship between a father and son at a time when the gap between different generations yawned particularly wide. Diving beneath the polished elegance of Britain in Byron's 'age of surfaces', the tragic tale of William Jackson reveals the murky underworld of debt, disease, crime, pornography, and prostitution that lay so close beneath the veneer of 'polite society'. In a last flowering of exuberant eighteenth-century hedonism before the dawning of Victorian respectability, young William became disastrously familiar with them all. The Profligate Son combines a gripping tale with cutting-edge historical research into early nineteenth-century family conflict, attitudes towards sexuality, credit, and debt, and the brutal criminal justice system in Britain and Australia at the time. It also offers challenging analogies to modern concerns by revealing what Georgians believed to be the best way to raise young men, what they considered to be the relative responsibilities of parents and children, and how they dealt with the problems of debt during the first age of mass consumer credit.

Download or read book Sex and the Church in the Long Eighteenth Century written by William Gibson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Long Eighteenth Century was the Age of Revolutions, including the first sexual revolution. In this era, sexual toleration began and there was a marked increase in the discussion of morality, extra-marital sex, pornography and same-sex relationships in both print and visual culture media. William Gibson and Joanne Begiato here consider the ways in which the Church of England dealt with sex and sexuality in this period. Despite the backdrop of an increasingly secularising society, religion continued to play a key role in politics, family life and wider society and the eighteenth-century Church was still therefore a considerable force, especially in questions of morality. This book integrates themes of gender and sexuality into a broader understanding of the Church of England in the eighteenth century. It shows that, rather than distancing itself from sex through diminishing teaching, regulation and punishment, the Church not only paid attention to it, but its attitudes to sex and sexuality were at the core of society's reactions to the first sexual revolution.

Download or read book The Jewish Eighteenth Century written by Shmuel Feiner and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth century was the Jews' first modern century. The deep changes that took place during its course shaped the following generations, and its most prominent voices still reverberate today. In this first volume of his magisterial work, Shmuel Feiner charts the twisting and fascinating world of the first half of the 18th century from the viewpoint of the Jews of Europe. Paying careful attention to life stories, to bright and dark experiences, to voices of protest, to aspirations of reform, and to strivings for personal and general happiness, Feiner identifies the tectonic changes that were taking place in Europe and their unprecedented effects on and among Jews. From the religious and cultural revolution of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) to the question of whether Jews could be citizens of any nation, Feiner presents a broad view of how this century of upheaval altered the map of Europe and the Jews who called it home.

Download or read book The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins written by Antonia Hodgson and published by HMH. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively tale of “pitch-perfect suspense” set in eighteenth-century England—one of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Crime/Mystery Novels of the Year. Winner of the CWA Historical Dagger Award London, 1728. Tom Hawkins is headed to the gallows, accused of murder. Gentlemen don’t hang, and Tom will be damned if he’s the first—he is innocent, after all. It’s hard to say when Tom’s troubles began. He was happily living in sin with his beloved—though their neighbors weren’t happy about that. He probably shouldn’t have told London’s great criminal mastermind that he was in need of adventure. Nor should he have joined the king’s mistress in her fight against her vindictive husband. And he definitely shouldn’t have trusted the calculating Queen Caroline. She’s promised him a royal pardon if he holds his tongue, but there’s nothing more silent than a hanged man. Now Tom’s scrambling to save his life and protect those he loves. But as the noose tightens, his time is running out.

Download or read book Spitalfields written by Dan Cruickshank and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 1115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE HESSELL-TILTMAN HISTORY PRIZE 2017 AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 Religious strife, civil conflict, waves of immigration, the rise and fall of industry, great prosperity and grinding poverty – the handful of streets that constitute modern Spitalfields have witnessed all this and much more. In Spitalfields, one of Britain's best-loved historians tells the stories of the streets he has lived in for four decades. Starting in Roman times and continuing right up to the present day, Cruickshank explains how Spitalfields' streets evolved, what people have lived there, and what lives they have led. En route, he discovers the tales of the Huguenot weavers who made Spitalfields their own after the Great Fire of London. He recounts the experiences of the first Jewish immigrants. He evokes the slum-ridden courts and alleys of Jack the Ripper's Spitalfields. And he describes the transformation of the Spitalfields he first encountered in the 1970s from a war-damaged collection of semi-derelict houses to the vibrant community it is today. This is a fascinating evocation of one of London's most distinctive districts. At the same time, it is a history of England in miniature.