Social

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?

J.L. Kirby describes the reign of a sovereign with a ‘genius for popular kingship’; Henry V was probably the first English ruler to address his subjects in their native language.

Helena Snakenborg came to London in the train of a visiting Swedish Princess. Appointed a Maid of Honour to Queen Elizabeth, writes Gunnar Sjögren, she married twice and lived in England for seventy years.

Robert Hermstorff describes how Goethe moved to Weimar in 1775 and during the rest of his long life made the small Saxon town the centre of German letters and learning.

Arnita Ament Jones describes the collaboration of Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen in the American movement for reform and the conduct of Utopian communities.

Since before Roman times, writes Marjorie Sykes, pearl-fishing has been practised in North Wales, Cumberland and Perth.