Social

The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote Charlotte Lindgren, found much to criticize both in Great Britain and in his own country.

Courtney Dainton describes how the enquiring middle class trained at the grammar schools of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries went on to influence late medieval English society.

In England, medieval hospitals flourished until the beginning of the 15th century, funded by taxes, tolls, and wealthy doners. 

‘Give me truth: cheat me by no illusion’ demanded this intrepid American enthusiast, who, during her early middle age, landed in Europe for the first time. There, writes Joyce Clark Follet, she found love, adventure, hardship and the revolutionary cause she needed.

On June 9th, 1774, a fête champêtre, magnificent even by eighteenth-century standards, attracted an appreciative concourse of the English nobility and gentry. Olive Fitzsimmons describes the event.

Frances Austin reads the lively late eighteenth century letters of a great surgeon’s apprentice to his family in Cornwall.

John Wesley spent two years as a chaplain in Georgia in the 1730s; Stuart Andrews describes how forty years later he was much preoccupied with the War of Independence.

The East India Company, writes R. Cecil, had at first shown a ‘modest interest’ in the civilization of their native subjects; but Evangelical pressure groups recommended a very different attitude.

Versatile artist and vagrant man of the world, Johan Zoffany has left us a vivid and exquisitely detailed record of the late eighteenth-century social scene from Scotland to the Indian subcontinent. By Aram Bakshian Jr.

Uniquely of engineers, the reputation of Brunel lives on, commemorated by a university, dockyards, steamships, and countless other works of his discipline. But what, asks Walter Minchinton, were his achievements?