England

David Hopkinson introduces a liberal-minded Victorian poet, seriously concerned with the effects of education.

In the early eighteenth century, writes Zélide Cowan, John Lethbridge spent some forty years salvaging treasure from sunken ships.

Gerald Morgan introduces Byron’s friend and executor; a radical Whig and head of the East India Company during the Afghan troubles of 1835-43.

Alan Haynes describes how Italian scholars, merchants and craftsmen were welcomed in Elizabethan London and enjoyed high patronage.

The Charity school movement in the eighteenth century, writes L.W. Cowie, was the first attempt to provide for the education of the children of the poor in England.

Barbara Kerr profiles a nineteenth-century country vicar who was a militant reformer in sewage and sanitation.

The author of the History of My Own Time was both a keen churchman and a compulsive writer. Mary Delorme describes how Burnet's style, whether graphic, humorous or pompous, was usually as free and expansive as the historian himself.

During the Victorian Age, writes Courtney Dainton, when many social reformers came from the upper classes, Smith was a philanthropist who had himself experienced the hardships of the very poor.

Maurice Ashley profiles the younger George Goring, one of the more successful of Cavalier generals, but one whose brave deeds and eclectic character have been little discussed.

‘England’s loss was the United States’ gain’, writes William Noblett, when the fiery eighteenth century radical Joseph Gales established a prosperous foothold in the New World.