Robert Peal - Meet the Georgians

ROBERT PEAL is joint Head Teacher and teacher of history at the West London Free School. He was awarded a double first in history from the University of Cambridge and studied for his masters at the University of Pennsylvania. He qualified as a teacher through the Teach First Programme before working as a policy advisor at the Department for Education. He is the author of a number of history textbooks for use in secondary schools.

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Introduction

The best introduction to Georgian society I have read remains Roy Porters English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982), a classic of scrupulous but readable historical scholarship. Porter had an eye for telling detail and wrote with a pace and humour befitting the age he covered. For London specifically, Jerry Whites monumental London in the 18th Century (2012) is a cracking read, as is Lucy Ingliss Georgian London (2014). A thorough account of the lives of Black Georgians can be found in David Olusogas Black and British (2016), a fascinating corrective to the often whitewashed image we have of Britains past. The emergence of a new British national identity is a story told in Linda Colleys Britons (1992), a book I first read while studying A-level history and have revisited with increasing enjoyment ever since. For the Royal Navy, such an integral part of Georgian Britain, I relied on Ben Wilsons excellent Empire of the Deep (2013).

Chapter 1: Anne Bonny and Mary Read

There is tantalisingly little evidence about the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, therefore much that has been written about them is shrouded in conjecture. What we do know is almost all taken from A General History of the Pyrates (1724) by Captain Charles Johnson, generally considered a pen name and thought by some to have been Daniel Defoe (author of Robinson Crusoe). The only other source that testifies to Anne and Marys existence is a Jamaican pamphlet from 1721 entitled The tryals of Captain John Rackam and other pirates. For background on the Golden Age of Caribbean piracy, David Cordingly is one of Britains leading experts. In 1992, he curated the Pirates: Fact and Fiction exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which I still remember visiting as an excitable young child. His book Life Among the Pirates (1995) brings the story of Caribbean piracy right up to the modern day, via Victorian novels and Hollywood films. Colin Woodards The Republic of Pirates (2007) is a well-researched and rip-roaring profile of the pirates who made Nassau their base, and of Governor Rogers campaign to bring them to heel.

Chapter 2: Bonnie Prince Charlie

There is no shortage of Bonnie Prince biographies to choose from. For a page-turning, swashbuckling account, Carolly Ericksons Bonnie Prince Charlie (1989) is a good place to start. For a more academic account of his life, Frank McLynns Charles Edward Stuart (1988) remains one of the best available. Jacqueline Ridings recently published Jacobites (2017) has earned its place as the authoritative account of the 45 uprising and is particularly good at sorting romance from reality in this much mythologised tale. For primary sources on the uprising, The Lyon in Mourning (1895) is a collection of letters, memoirs and speeches, compiled in the three decades following the events by Robert Forbes, a Scottish bishop and Jacobite. It was later published in three volumes by the Scottish History Society.

Chapter 3: John Wilkes

I first encountered the eighteenth-century political phenomenon that was John Wilkes in Linda Colleys Britons, in which she retells the story of his Middlesex campaign as an early example of patriotic populism in British politics. The most recent full biography is John Wilkes (2006), an authoritative account written by Arthur Cash with real affection for his subject. As an American, Cash is particularly good on Wilkess transatlantic impact, which included being the namesake of Abraham Lincolns assassin. Helpful accounts of Wilkess political campaigns can be found in two essays from History Today, Wilkes and Liberty (1957) and John Wilkes and the Middlesex Election (1961), both written by the esteemed historian of eighteenth-century radicalism George Rud.

Chapter 4: Tipu Sultan

Tipu Sultan is long overdue a full-length biography. The most recent offering was Tiger of Mysore (1970) by Denys Forrest. It is a lively, detailed account, but having been written from the India Office on Blackfriars Road half a century ago, it does retain some glow of imperial nostalgia. A more recent account of his life can be found in Tipus Tigers (2009) by Susan Stronge, published by the Victoria and Albert Museum to provide the historical context behind one of their most popular exhibits: Tipus mechanical, redcoat-mauling tiger. For background detail about the rise of British power in India, I had the benefit of writing this chapter shortly after the publication of William Dalrymples masterly history of the East India Company The Anarchy (2019). In terms of primary sources from Tipus palace, many of his documents were seized following the Siege of Seringapatam and translated by members of the East India Company for publication. Thus, where we do hear Tipus voice, it is frustratingly through the filter of his colonial interpreters.

Chapter 5: Olaudah Equiano

The most recent academic biography of Equiano is the meticulously researched Equiano, the African (2005) by Vincent Carretta, an American professor of English and expert on Equianos work. Carretta edited and wrote the introduction for the Penguin Classics edition of The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (2003), still in print 230 years after its original publication, and the source for much of the detail in this chapter. For the wider story of the struggle for abolition in Britain, Bury the Chains (2005) by Adam Hochschild is an authoritative account. The aforementioned Black and British by David Olusoga contains an excellent account of how freed slaves such as Equiano could expect to be treated in Georgian Britain.

Chapter 6: Mary Wollstonecraft

The two best Wollstonecraft biographies remain The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974) by the renowned historical biographer Claire Tomalin, and Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000) by Janet Todd, a leading expert on Wollstonecrafts life and works. Todd is the editor of