Georgian

From Georgian to Victorian

Nicholas Dixon asks whether there was a radical transition between the two eras.

Brain Box: Amanda Vickery on BBC2

Amanda Vickery’s new series on the 18th-century home is part of an enlightened new strategy from the BBC, writes Paul Lay.

Flights of Georgian Fancy

Lucy Worsley reveals the strange stories of the cast of characters on the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace, painted by William Kent for George I in the 1720s.

Peter the Wild Boy

A mysterious child from northern Germany, portrayed by William Kent on the King’s Grand Staircase, became one of the sensations of the Georgian age, as Roger Moorhouse explains.

General Wolfe’s fatal wounding at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, 1759, by Richard Caton Woodville, 1925. Prints, Drawings and Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. Public Domain.

In 1759 a British army under General James Wolfe won a momentous battle on the Plains of Abraham. A neglected ingredient in Wolfe’s dramatic victory was the professionalism of the army he had helped to create.

Myth, Reality and William Pitt the Younger

R. E. Foster examines the career of Pitt the Younger.

A slaveowner violently seperates a family, engraving by Alexander Anderson based on oral testimony given to the Select Committee Appointed to Take the Examination of Witnesses Respecting the African Slave Trade, 1791. New York Public Library. Public Doma

The Survival of the Nefarious Slave Trade

British traders in enslaved Africans found ways around the Slave Trade Act of 1807, while commerce flourished through the import of slave-grown cotton.

Celebrity in 18th-Century London

Stella Tillyard asks what fame meant to individuals and the wider public of Georgian England, and considers how much this has in common with today’s celebrity culture.