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"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial machinery (Image by Getty Images)" /> General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides. Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching. Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too? What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals. The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions. Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool. Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL44583webready-ef1bf1a-e1771951145854.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Workers inside a brick‑walled workshop tend large heated pans built into furnaces while others handle tall conical molds set over containers, with steam rising from the equipment. Metal vessels filled with processed gunpowder materials are scattered across the floor, showing multiple stages of early gunpowder production." title="Gunpowder is made at the Woolwich Arsenal, c1750. Controlling large reserves of Indian saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, Britain became a major player in arms manufacture (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750. Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history. Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims. Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption. England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city. London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital. By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL87937webready-7efb6df-e1771951291786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A busy 19th‑century city street where a crowd of men in top hats gathers in animated discussion, while two barefoot newsboys hold up papers in the foreground. Behind them, tall commercial buildings with large signs and a horse‑drawn streetcar marked “Broadway” frame the bustling urban setting." title="Crowds throng Wall Street, New York City’s banking hub, during a financial panic in 1857. The United States’ rise as an economic heavyweight was boosted by its ability to convert the wealth it accrued from the killing of bison, beaver and whales into capital for investment (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit. England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes. Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900. Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales. People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries. But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-517213402webready-820476d-e1771951455442.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicting a slave auction. A man in a blue suit and grey top hat stands on top of a large box, talking to a crowd of gentleman, pointing towards a group of people of colour sitting on the floor, looking sad" title="Enslaved African people are sold at auction in the US, c1852. Vast numbers perished as a result of the transatlantic slave trade (Image by Getty Images)" /> However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”. People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement. Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured. We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible. Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery. These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death. Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
The prince and the brothel: 6 scandals that rocked the British monarchy
At a time when the royal family is under significant strain, historians shine a spotlight on some of the biggest crises to have enveloped the British monarchy over the past three centuries
The prince, the brothel and a culture war Katie Hindmarch-Watson describes a sex scandal that consumed Queen Victoria’s grandson On 7 July 1889, a policeman arrested a sometime telegraph boy, Henry Newlove, at his mother’s house in Camden Town. Newlove had been recruiting younger telegraph boys at London’s Central Telegraph Office to provide sexual services for affluent male clients at a brothel on Cleveland Street. Defiant, Newlove said that he thought it “very hard that I should get into trouble while men in high position are allowed to walk around free… Why, Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house at Cleveland Street; so does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois.” Within months, Newlove was in prison and Somerset was in exile. Yet Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, triumphed in a libel suit that exonerated him from any “gross indecency”, and Colonel Jervois received no further mention in police records or the press. However, another man in high position became the focus of speculation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL11686324webready-dfc0737-e1770036564257.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A newspaper depicting several scenes of men in top hats and young boys standing in the street" title="The Cleveland Street Scandal, as reported in The Illustrated Police News on 25 January 1890. The affair – which embroiled Prince Albert Victor – “evolved into a morality tale about rich men’s predatory vices” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> We still don’t really know why Prince Albert Victor – or ‘Eddy’, grandson of Queen Victoria and oldest son of the Prince of Wales – became linked to the story. Arthur Somerset had been his father’s equerry, but there is no evidence that the two men associated with one another, and no proof has emerged one way or another about Eddy’s propensity for sex with teenage telegraph boys. The Cleveland Street Scandal evolved from Newlove’s revelations into a morality tale about rich men’s predatory vices, unequal treatment before the law, and the public’s right to private revelations. Prince Eddy was a potent symbol in a class culture war that pitted aristocratic privilege against aspiring youths in a modernising city. The rumours were enough to spark royal intervention. The Prince of Wales instructed courtiers to keep his son’s name out of the British press, and crown prosecutors used coded language to discuss the persistent suggestion that Eddy was involved. Eddy’s death of pneumonia in 1892 quashed any further need to protect his reputation – but something shady still clings to his memory. Katie Hindmarch-Watson is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University Did Queen Victoria marry her servant? When the widowed monarch fell for the son of a farmer, the nation was scandalised, says Fern Riddell Just a few years after Prince Albert died, the widowed Victoria found herself in the middle of a huge scandal. She was accused of falling in love – and even marrying – her Highland servant, John Brown. For the Victorians, the idea that their monarch might be having a passionate love affair with the son of an Aberdeenshire farmer was truly shocking. Their society was ruled by class, and John was very clearly outside Victoria’s. Her court despised John for his ordinary background, and her government was convinced that he was a threat to both her security and that of the crown. Rumours filled the newspapers that Victoria was mad, and that John was her keeper. Meanwhile, gossips insinuated that he was using supernatural powers to control her and make her fall in love with him. Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: historian Fern Riddell explains all For 20 years, John stood at Victoria’s side in silence, enduring personal attacks in the press and the threat of violence from Victoria’s public, who believed that he was the reason she was living in seclusion. But Victoria refused to listen to the criticism. She didn’t care who hated John – her family, her court, her government or her people. She refused to be parted from him. By the time John died in 1883, many were convinced that they had privately married. When Victoria attempted to publish a manuscript exposing their life together, the papers were seized and burned by her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, to avoid another terrible scandal. Twenty years later, when Victoria left private instructions for her own burial, she directed that she should be buried with John’s mother’s wedding ring on her finger, and with a lock of his hair and his photograph in her hand. For the next 150 years, John’s family kept a secret archive of Victoria’s letters, jewellery and artefacts about their relationship. They believed that it was too dangerous to expose the truth of their love for one another – until today. Luckily for us, what was scandalous for the Victorians has now been revealed as the greatest love affair of Victoria’s reign. Fern Riddell’s latest book is Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen (Ebury, 2025) Edward VIII puts love before duty The king’s insistence on marrying Wallis Simpson caused a constitutional crisis, writes Alexander Larman The expulsion of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew) from the royal family has undoubtedly been the most scandalous story that ‘the Firm’ has weathered in decades. But it does not even come close to 1936 in constitutional significance. Andrew is, after all, the second son of the late Elizabeth II, whereas Edward VIII was king – albeit a reluctant one. After ascending to the throne following the death of his father, George V, he made it clear that ruling was of secondary importance to his love affair with the married American socialite Wallis Simpson. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-141556826webready-4b8a928-e1770036748150.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The former Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson on their wedding day, 3 June 1937. The monarchy’s current woes don’t “even come close” to Edward’s abdication in constitutional significance, writes Alexander Larman (Image by Getty Images)" title="The former Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson on their wedding day, 3 June 1937. The monarchy’s current woes don’t “even come close” to Edward’s abdication in constitutional significance, writes Alexander Larman (Image by Getty Images)" /> It was a sign of the respect in which the monarchy was held at the time that no mention of that relationship was ever made in the British papers, despite it being common knowledge (and freely speculated upon in the European and American media). Had the king been content to keep Wallis as his mistress, the press magnates Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere would have continued to keep the potentially embarrassing story quiet. Yet Edward would not agree to be crowned king in 1937 unless Wallis could become queen. This was impossible for both religious and social reasons, so he announced his intention of abdicating. Constitutionally, this was more difficult than he had imagined, because of the settlement following the deposition of James II & VII, which ensured that the king ruled by consent of parliament. Only the interventions of the king’s lawyer, Walter Monckton, and prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, allowed Edward to quit the throne, assume the title of Duke of Windsor, and marry Wallis. He left England still well regarded by his subjects, but later revelations about his alleged support for the Nazis irrevocably tarnished this affection. The Duke of Windsor is today regarded as one of Britain’s least popular – if most consequential – monarchs. I suspect that Edward and the abdication will be remembered long after Andrew has become a footnote in royal history. Alexander Larman is a historian, journalist and author of books including The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication (W&N, 2020) The Prince Regent’s marital misery Few royal marriages can have been more hellish than that of Caroline of Brunswick and the wastrel Prince Regent, writes Nigel Jones Thanks to the brilliantly illustrated scandal sheets of Regency Britain, the disastrous marriage of the Prince Regent, later King George IV, to Princess Caroline of Brunswick kept the country entertained and outraged for a quarter of a century. George, a spendthrift wastrel, was hopelessly in debt. Though secretly married to the Roman Catholic Maria Fitzherbert, in 1795 the prince reluctantly took (sight unseen) a legitimate, Protestant bride – his first cousin, Caroline of Brunswick – in the hope that her money would pay off his creditors. It was hate at first sight. George told Lord Malmesbury, who had brought his bride from Germany, “Harris, I am not well: pray get me a glass of brandy.” Equally unimpressed, Caroline found her husband fatter than she’d been led to believe. Meanwhile, Malmesbury noted her poor personal hygiene. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-464476543webready-588f5c4-e1770036889924.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful cartoon showing a couple in the centre, each being dragged in opposite directions by other couples" title="An 1820 cartoon pokes fun at George IV’s attempt to dissolve his marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. The disastrous union “kept the country entertained and outraged for a quarter of a century”, says Nigel Jones (Image by Getty Images)" /> Despite drinking for three days before their wedding, George performed his marital duties: nine months later Caroline gave birth to a daughter, Charlotte. But he made his wife’s life so hellish that she soon went into exile in Europe. She settled in a lakeside villa near Como, met (and joked about having sex with) the pope, and reportedly threw parties at which she danced topless. Read more | The illness and decline of King George III George sent spies to report on her misdeeds, hoping to obtain evidence for a divorce. Caroline’s lovers reputedly included a young Italian and – more scandalously still – Marshal Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law and ruler of Naples, at a time when Britain was at war with France. When George III died in 1820, Caroline returned to claim her place as queen. But not only did the new king have her tried by the House of Lords for adultery, he had the doors of Westminster Abbey barred when she tried to attend his coronation. The hypocritical adultery accusations having been dropped, Caroline was cheered by the London mob, who saw her as a symbol of opposition to the king. Broken by her humiliation, though, she died three weeks later. Nigel Jones is a historian and writer. His books include Kitty’s Salon (John Blake, 2023) Georgian Britain’s disobedient rake The disreputable Duke of Cumberland caused no end of trouble, writes Felicity Day George III started his reign with noble ambitions: to be a moral leader, faithful to his wife and head of a united royal family. Regrettably, not all of his clan got the memo. George’s younger brother Henry, Duke of Cumberland was notionally a naval officer but in reality a rake-about-town. A dispute with a courtesan had already dragged him into the newspapers before he hit the headlines in 1769 over a more scandalous affair with Lady Grosvenor. The couple were caught by her husband’s servants in a bedchamber in a coaching inn in St Albans, their clothing in disarray. Henry was hauled into court to account for his ‘criminal conversation’ with another man’s wife. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL416311webready-df88fb0-e1770036955185.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a young woman in a gold dress, with a high, grey hairdo" title="In 1771, George III’s younger brother Henry secretly married widow and commoner Anne Horton (shown in a c1777 portrait). Henry’s spirited antics strained the public’s tolerance for the monarchy (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> With revelations ranging from the disguises he donned for secret trysts to the inarticulate and ungrammatical style of his love letters, the duke was made to look ridiculous. A £13,000 bill for damages and costs had to be covered from the Civil List – and, to the king’s further shame, the press was filled with comment about un-princely conduct dragging the nation into disrepute. Then, in 1771, it emerged that Henry had secretly married. His bride was the widow Anne Horton – a commoner, and daughter of a notorious libertine. Furious, the king exiled them from court, and refused to provide financial support. In an attempt to prevent any further such disobedience, he pushed his government into passing the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which made it illegal for royals under the age of 25 to wed without the monarch’s consent. Read more | Charlotte and Diana: the parallel lives of two Princesses of Wales whose deaths sent the nation into mourning It didn’t stop the outcast couple causing trouble. The Cumberlands set up a lively rival court, consorting with opposition politicians and befriending the future George IV and his eldest brothers – who followed their uncle into lives of gambling, womanising and general extravagance, causing countless more PR crises and pushing public support for the royals to the brink. The determined respectability of Victoria’s court was without doubt a direct reaction to their steady drumbeat of scandals. Felicity Day is a journalist and author of The Game of Hearts: True Stories of Regency Romance (Blink Publishing, 2024) Elizabeth II misreads the public mood When the Queen seemed to stay silent in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, she was seen as out of touch, says Shrabani Basu It was meant to be a lazy Sunday at the end of the summer holidays. But on 31 August 1997, Britons woke to the shocking news that Diana, Princess of Wales had died following a car crash in a Paris tunnel. Her friend Dodi Fayed and the car’s driver Henri Paul had also lost their lives. Diana had rarely been away from the headlines. From the Panorama interview in which she famously said that “there were three of us in this marriage”, to the latest round of holiday photos with Dodi Fayed, the end of her fairy-tale wedding to Prince Charles had fuelled tabloid sales for years. Now a pall of gloom descended over Britain. Within hours of the crash, Kensington Palace had turned into a shrine for the late princess. Everyone from Mother Teresa to heads of state was expressing their grief. But though a short statement expressing shock and distress was issued from Buckingham Palace, Diana’s former mother-in-law remained at Balmoral Castle, 500 miles from London, seemingly unmoved. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-73389657webready-1d8b4e5-e1770037044850.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing lots of flowers and written tributes along a spiked metal fence. To the right, a young boy ties something around one of the fence posts" title="A boy attaches a tribute to the railings of Kensington Palace following the death of Princess Diana, 1997. This would “become one of the most trying moments in Elizabeth II’s reign”, writes Shrabani Basu (Image by Getty Images)" /> The Queen was following the rule book – Diana was technically no longer a royal. But the press reflected public sentiment. “Where is our Queen?” screamed The Sun. “Show us you care,” demanded The Express. For once, Elizabeth had not read the national mood. Speculation mounted in the vacuum, with some blaming Charles for his infidelity and for driving Diana into Dodi’s arms. All in all, it would become one of the most trying moments in Elizabeth II’s reign, when the monarchy seemed to have lost the plot. Eventually, an intervention by the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, convinced the Queen that she needed to be heard. Four days later Elizabeth appeared at the gates of Balmoral and looked at the wreaths. Five days after Diana’s death, she finally made a live broadcast from Buckingham Palace, speaking as a “Queen and as a grandmother”. The people forgave her, and faith in the monarchy was restored. Shrabani Basu is author of Victoria & Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant (The History Press, 2010) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Sex, slavery and royal scandal: how Jane Austen's novels exposed a darker side of Georgian Britain
The author's books depict an evocative slice of early 19th-century life, but many aspects of the Regency era are only hinted at in her novels, as Lizzie Rogers reveals
Ever felt like you could be Elizabeth Bennet? You’re not alone. Entering Jane Austen’s world can feel like an immersive experience. Reading her books (or watching television or film adaptations, or the many spin-offs and lookalikes), it’s easy to believe that somehow we’ve really got to know her England – and, by extension, the people who lived in it. That feeling is encapsulated in the 2008 ITV series Lost in Austen, which follows the adventures of 21st-century heroine Amanda Price. Stepping through a portal into the world of Pride and Prejudice, Price (played by Jemima Rooper) finds herself in the bosom of the Bennet family, messing up episodes in the novel, trying – with varying degrees of success – to fix them and, inevitably, falling in love with Mr Darcy (Elliot Cowan). Her opening voiceover declares that “I’ve read [Pride and Prejudice] so many times now the words just say themselves in my head and it’s like a window opening. It’s like I’m actually there – it’s become a place I know so intimately… I can see that world, I can touch it.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/shutterstockeditorial912719bewebready-5e6f127-e1765974181648.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a modern-day adaptation of a Regency ball. A couple dance in the middle, with the man spinning the woman around. Around them, several other couples dance" title="A scene from ITV’s Lost in Austen, where 21st-century heroine Amanda Price steps into Pride and Prejudice, which she describes as “a place I know so intimately” (Image by Shutterstock)" /> This is far from a new sentiment. In March 1826, after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time, the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal that Austen “had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with… the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment... What a pity such a gifted creature died so early.” Her undeniable talent for character study is one of the key reasons why Austen’s work resonates so loudly across the world. Creative retellings of her novels show how the themes, characters and plotlines easily transcend their bounds of Regency England and fit well in other countries, other cultures and other times, with new representations amending the ages, social class and genders of characters. In the 250 years since Austen’s birth, her work has morphed into a behemoth that we simultaneously modernise and have made emblematic of life in late 18th and early 19th-century England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-113633139webready-0bd035d.jpg" width="2083" height="1388" alt="An image showing an old man with a straight face, wearing a suit and coat" title="A 19th-century engraving of author Sir Walter Scott, who wrote glowingly of Austen’s writing after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time (Image by Getty Images)" /> Obscuring obsession Thanks to her gift for evoking that era, its environment and inhabitants, it’s easy to envision ourselves inside her world. We feel able to enter it through the plots of her novels and their adaptations for stage and screen, as well as the extension of her unfinished novel Sanditon, fleshed out vividly in the ITV series running from 2019. But there is a danger that we conflate her writing too fully with the history of the time, obscuring swathes of this period through our obsession. The picture we receive is one that’s been enhanced by layers of interpretation, adaptation and the historical distance between us and the source material. The effect of them all together is “to make us read novels that aren’t actually there”, argued Helena Kelly in her 2016 book Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, echoing the views of other Austen scholars. Because Austen’s work feels so modern and accessible, we miss wider perspectives that are alluded to through her clever study of the world around her – but also, importantly, many that she simply could not give us and did not have to. One person cannot capture every aspect of life in their era, nor act as the singular voice of a generation. No matter how brilliant or important the writer in question is, they cannot speak to the experience of everybody. Yes, Jane Austen was a genius, through whose pen the novel was changed forever. She defied her circumstances in life – being a woman with very little money – to become one of the world’s best-loved authors, thanks solely to her immense talent. And she does open a window into this period of history from which we can learn so much – but her work, and the questions it raises, invites us to widen our gaze. Our knowledge of both her and the time in which she lived is only enriched by expanding our understanding by exploring the work of other writers and figures that populated her world, opening our eyes to that diverse, fast-changing and momentous era. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-173344128webready-9d2cff4-e1765974152772.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white pictures showing large groups of people in states of undress, fighting and drinking in the street" title="William Hogarth’s Gin Lane provides a stark portrayal of a teeming urban environment in which drunkenness and debauchery were rife (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fascinated by the intelligent satire of Austen’s novels, we might look at the art of William Hogarth. Though he died in 1764, more than a decade before the author’s birth, many of his images of 18th-century London highlight the blight of corruption and the terrible conditions endured by Britain’s urban poor well into the 19th century. His famous prints Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751) could be seen as demonising the drinking habits of the working class. But his work does at least feature ordinary folk as more than just background elements. A portrait of his own servants from the early 1750s, for instance, presents distinct faces and personalities. Hogarth’s father spent time in debtors’ prison, a place more often associated with the Victorian work of Charles Dickens, and many other figures from the Georgian period also found themselves inmates. The actress and writer Mary Robinson (c1757–1800), who later became famous for her portrayal of Perdita in A Winter’s Tale (and for her brief affair with the Prince of Wales), lived with her profligate husband in debtors’ prison for several months from 1775; while there, she became the family breadwinner by publishing her poetry. Read more | Beyond the podcast: Jane Austen Robinson’s memoirs, prepared from 1798 and published the year after her death, charted a life beset with immense ups and downs. They give us an insight into her youth and first marriage (“I considered chastity as the brightest ornament that could embellish the female mind,” she writes) and trace the struggles that continued to beset her into her later years. In fact, much of the preparations for those memoirs was done on envelopes because she couldn’t afford to buy fresh paper. Crime and poverty To continue our trip into the murkier corners of London during this period, consider the business dealings, crime and poverty prevalent in lower-class areas of the city. One publication that illustrates this side of urban life was Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a salacious bestseller published annually from 1757 to 1794 that detailed names and talents of dozens of sex workers. It was interrogated by Hallie Rubenhold in her 2005 book The Covent Garden Ladies, which itself inspired the television series Harlots (2017–19). These aspects of London are hinted at in Pride and Prejudice, in the form of the poverty and depravity that Mrs Bennet fears will be the fate of her daughter Lydia after she runs away to the capital with George Wickham. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2E4A0NWwebready-e008451.jpg" width="1639" height="1093" alt="A drawing of a black man with one leg, dressed in a blue jacket, checked shirt and a feathered hat, playing the violin" title="An early 19th-century illustration of sailor-turned-street performer Billy Waters, whose life “highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period” (Image by Alamy)" /> Strength in diversity Sanditon introduces Austen’s only black character: Miss Lambe, an heiress from the West Indies. During the 18th century, it is estimated there were more than 20,000 black Britons – a significant number, in a British population that had exceeded 10 million by 1801. To explore the lives of some of these people, read Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History (2022) and Mary L Shannon’s biography Billy Waters Is Dancing (2024). The latter gives a voice to a black sailor in Regency Britain whose presence as a street performer was so famed across London that his name became legendary, his life shaped by those who aimed to profit from his talent. Living from around the 1770s until 1823, Waters’ life maps closely onto Austen’s, and highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period. Read more | Everything you wanted to know about Jane Austen's England Mansfield Park, Austen’s third and perhaps most divisive novel, makes clear the links between slavery, the country house and aristocratic wealth. The titular house is built on a fortune sustained by plantations worked by enslaved people in Antigua, and its name may come from Lord Mansfield, whose judicial decisions enabled the advancement towards the abolition of slavery. Austen’s favourite poet was William Cowper, whose work fervently supported antislavery campaigns. But there were also first-person accounts of the experiences of black people in Britain in that period. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2H492WTwebready-9bef977-e1765974356801.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An open book with a portrait of a black man in a suit on the left page, and a title page on the right" title="First-person accounts written by the formerly enslaved – such as the letters of Ignatius Sancho (above) – helped rally Britons to the cause of abolition (Image by Alamy)" /> The letters of Ignatius Sancho, born into slavery on an Atlantic ship in 1729 and brought to England at two years old, were published in 1782, after his death. One of them – written to John Wingrave, a London bookseller, in 1778 – contains a stinging rebuke of Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. “I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom, and for the many blessings I enjoy in it, shall ever have my warmest wishes – prayers – and blessings;) I say, it is with reluctance that I must observe your country’s conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East – West Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea.” Olaudah Equiano was another high profile supporter of the British abolitionist movement whose writings shone a light on the iniquities of the slave trade. His Interesting Narrative autobiography – telling the story of his enslavement in Africa, arrival in Britain as a young man and life after purchasing his freedom in 1766 – was hugely popular when it was published in 1789. The enslaved female poet Phillis Wheatley revealed in verse her desire for intellectual fulfilment. Travelling to London from Boston with her enslavers, she was able to publish Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773 – believed to be the first set of poems published by an African American. Such writings enable us to understand experiences of black people during the era, reminding us of the often-forgotten diversity of England at this time. In this vein, the second season of Bridgerton (2022) highlighted – albeit through a fictionalised lens – the experiences of south Asian people in Britain. During Jane Austen’s lifetime, the British empire was in rapid ascendency, fuelled by commerce, trade and the ruthless actions of the East India Company. The author’s own cousin, Eliza Hancock – who later married Jane’s brother Henry – grew up in India as the daughter of a British surgeon to the East India Company. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-90779123webready-cbf67a0-e1765974523630.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of three workers working in a factory, turning large wheels with cloth hanging over them into buckets" title="An 18th-century illustration of workers dyeing cloth. Jane Austen lived through a boom in industry, but others would document the struggles of the labouring poor (Image by Getty Images)" /> Long-lost sister William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, which was set during the Regency period though published in 1848, highlights through the character of Jos Sedley the wealth that could be accumulated by young people capitalising on travelling to India. Historian Durba Ghosh has noted that Thackeray had a long-lost (and possibly mixed-heritage) sister, Amelia – also known as Sarah Redfield – in India, and explored the stories of many south Asian women, demonstrating the strong connections between Britain and India at the time. Read more | Strange and surprising pastimes of the Regency Ton Thackeray’s dramatic novel is more specifically set during the Napoleonic Wars, hinted at in Austen’s work through the regular presence of a militia or naval characters, though this inclusion is often overlooked as a reflection of the lived experience of constant war and unrest. Two of Austen’s brothers were in the navy and one was in a militia regiment, while her cousin Eliza lost her first husband, the Comte de Feuillide, to the guillotine. The absence of peace and a sense of perpetual uncertainty were harrowing facts of life. This tumult extended to Britain’s shores as violence broke out over questions of religion and parliamentary representation. Through the late 18th and early 19th century, villages, towns and cities grew rapidly while at the same time the voices of ordinary people were not heard. Burgeoning industry created a new class of wealthy people, while also fostering extremely testing working conditions for the labouring poor. We tend to think of these subjects as uniquely endemic to the Victorian period, taking centre stage in the writing of Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, but the boom in industry was firmly rooted in Austen’s lifetime. For instance, Lancashire’s cotton industry was in full swing by the late 18th century, with some 20,000 apprentices working in cotton mills in 1800. Textile magnate Robert Peel (1750–1830), long-term MP for Tamworth and father of the future prime minister of the same name, began campaigning and introducing legislation on child labour in the early years of the 19th century. Spending time in London, Bath and Southampton, Jane Austen would have been offered significant insights into the growth of industry and urban overcrowding. We celebrate Austen’s novels for the questions she raises about the position of women in society, a subject that preoccupied many of her contemporaries. Early feminist writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft argued fervently for the recognition of women as rational creatures who deserved rights accordingly in a world that granted them few, if any. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects she wrote: “One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers.” Wollstonecraft’s words caused a sensation – and when, after her premature death in 1797, her husband, William Godwin published her biography, so did the story of her life. She lived frequently outside the bounds of accepted social propriety – a point that enables us to delve deeper into the world of reputation, of making spaces to safely subvert societal expectations and legal doctrine, and of understanding how relationships, freedom and restriction truly worked in practice. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1441698253webready-9c87b29-e1765974624755.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A detail from a postcard showing the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. Their relationship attracted a lot of attention in late 18th-century Britain (Image by Getty Images)" title="A detail from a postcard showing the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. Their relationship attracted a lot of attention in late 18th-century Britain (Image by Getty Images)" /> The third season of Sanditon (2023) presented a slow-burn romance between two gay men, Arthur Parker and Lord Harry Montrose – the storyline breathing a small piece of fictional life into the rich LGBTQ+ history of this period. A visible real-life example can be found in the cottage named Plas Newydd in Llangollen, Wales where from 1780 the couple Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler created a sanctuary for queer happiness. They became famous within their own lifetimes, visited by Sir Walter Scott and given a royal pension by George III upon the intercession of Queen Charlotte. We cannot – and should not expect to – learn everything about the history of the Regency period from the pages of Jane Austen’s novels. But as fans, readers and historians, we are indebted to her for providing a gateway into this tumultuous period, into which new research is being undertaken all the time, shining light on previously unheard voices and hidden faces. It is all these lived experiences that weave a rich tapestry, helping us to better know the period in which Jane Austen lived – one that indelibly shaped her and the masterpieces she left behind.
Dominic Sandbrook revisits the life of the naval hero who led the British fleet to victory at Trafalgar, but whose torrid affair scandalised Georgian society
Nelson is one of the most well-known historical figures from British history. His leadership of the British fleet to victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and his death in the same battle, rendered him a national hero for generations. However, Nelson was also embroiled in a huge scandal during his lifetime, due his passionate affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, and recently questions have been raised about his attitude towards slavery and the slave trade. Historian and co-host of The Rest is History podcast, Dominic Sandbrook has written a book for children about the life of Nelson as part of his Adventures in Time series. Here, he discusses the complexities of the man, and the challenges of writing history for young people, with David Musgrove. (Ad) Dominic Sandbrook is the author of Nelson: Hero of the Seas (Particular Books, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon
Regency Masterclass, with Dr Lizzie Rogers
Dr Lizzie Rogers and Charlotte Hodgman explore some of the key learnings from the recent HistoryExtra Academy Regency course
View Green Video on the source website
How much have you learned about the Regency so far? Test your knowledge of your learnings in week four with our quiz
View Riddle on the source website Explore more content from week four of our Regency course: Slavery and Abolition, with Dr Lizzie Rogers – watching time 12 mins The children who fought for the abolition of slavery – reading time 10 mins The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France – reading time 8 mins Did George III support the slave trade? – reading time 7 mins African American abolitionists in Britain – listening time 43 mins 9 key places connected to the abolition of the British slave trade – reading time 13 mins The Zong Massacre: what the dark episode meant for the British slave trade and abolition – reading time 8 mins David Olusoga on the extraordinary story of Olaudah Equiano - reading time 10 mins
Regency Britain: an age of war and revolution
Jane Austen’s lifetime coincided with near-constant conflict and bloodshed on both sides of the Atlantic
The American Revolutionary War (1775–83) Born eight months after the outbreak of the American Revolution, Jane Austen entered a world on the brink of seismic change. Although the conflict that ended with the independence of 13 North American colonies from British rule did not affect her directly, its geopolitical legacy shaped the world in which she came of age. During the 1760s and 1770s, colonists in North America grew increasingly frustrated with taxation by Britain, and by its legislative supremacy over their lives. In 1773, the Tea Act effectively gave the East India Company a monopoly on importing tea to America – and levied taxes on that tea, payable to the British Government. In response, colonists disguised as Mohawk Native Americans boarded British ships and dumped an entire shipment of tea into Boston Harbour – a protest known as the Boston Tea Party. Westminster responded by passing the Intolerable Acts, ending local self- government and commerce in Boston. Tensions boiled over in April 1775, when British troops in Massachusetts attempted to confiscate weapons in Lexington and Concord. When they met resisting local militia, the “shot heard ‘round the world” was fired – marking the start of the Revolutionary War. The following year, on 4 July 1776, delegates from 13 colonies assembled in Philadelphia declared their independence and established the United States of America. Over the next five years, on battlefields from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, the colonists – led by figures including George Washington – fought for liberty and self-governance. And, with support from France and other European powers, the tide turned in their favour. Signing the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Britain formally recognised the US as an independent nation, ending the conflict. But the ideals championed in that war opened the era of the Atlantic Revolutions. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) On 22 August 1791, the French colony of Saint- Domingue, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, was shaken by an uprising. Inspired by the French Revolution, more than 100,000 enslaved Africans overthrew the oppressive regime, leaving many of its 8,000 plantations in ruins and more than 1,000 Europeans dead. The colony was the most lucrative in the Caribbean, producing around half of the world’s coffee and sugar, so in 1792 Paris dispatched a 6,000-strong force to pacify it. Following the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars, in 1793 British and Spanish troops arrived on the island, exacerbating the turmoil as these European powers recruited people to their war aims. Amid this chaos, Toussaint L’Ouverture – who had been born into slavery on Saint-Domingue – emerged as a figurehead. In 1796/97, he became deputy governor and then commander-in- chief of the French forces and, after expelling the British and Spanish, he established a new regime over much of Hispaniola, assuming dictatorial powers and launching efforts to revive its damaged economy. In 1802, another French expedition ousted L’Ouverture and whisked him to France, where he died in captivity a year later. When Napoleon restored slavery in Saint-Domingue, the revolution erupted afresh and, led by the formerly enslaved Jean-Jacques Dessalines, revolutionary forces decisively expelled the French. On 1 January 1804, the Republic of Haiti – the first led by people of colour –was declared, galvanising the international anti-slavery movement. Just three years later, Britain’s Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was signed into law. Though Austen’s views on the Haitian Revolution aren’t known, many in her circle supported abolitionism. And both her brother Francis and the fictional Captain Wentworth in Persuasion were present at the Napoleonic battle of Santo Domingo (the Spanish colony on Hispaniola) in 1806, so Jane was clearly familiar with events on the island. The French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) Having provided support for the American independence cause, France's King Louis XVI grappled with a mounting economic crisis. In 1789, hunger and widespread discontent sparked revolution: on 14 July, a Parisian mob stormed the Bastille prison, reviled symbol of royal tyranny. But the movement's pursuit of liberty, equality and fraternity - and the revolutionary government's aspiration to spread these principles beyond France's borders - spooked Europe's monarchies. Over time, factionalism and infighting split the revolutionaries. In an effort to rally national unity, the government targeted France's historic enemies, and in April 1792 declared war on Austria. Later, Louis and his Austrian-born queen, Marie Antoinette, were toppled and executed. A series of coalitions formed by European powers including Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia aimed to contain and reverse the revolutionary changes in France in wars spanning much of the next decade. These conflicts spread revolutionary and nationalist ideals, and pioneered strategies such as national conscription. But their most significant legacy would be the meteoric rise of a Corsican corporal, Napoleon Bonaparte. After a decade of turmoil, the 1802 Treaty of Amiens was signed by France and Britain, bringing to an end the Revolutionary Wars - though not auguring a lasting peace with France. The Austen family wasn't untouched by these events. Of Jane's brothers, Henry joined the Oxfordshire Militia, while Francis and Charles enlisted in the Royal Navy. Jane was horrified by a description by her cousin (and, later, sister-in-law) Eliza de Feuillide of her first husband's guillotining in 1794, during the bloody period of the French Revolution known as the Terror. Like her contemporaries, Jane eagerly followed events. She even sported an Egyptian-style 'Mamalouc' cap to a ball honouring Lord Nelson's victory over the French at the battle of the Nile. Did you know? Winston Churchill, musing on Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice, once quipped: "What calm lives they had... No worries about the French Revolution, or the crushing struggles of the Napoleonic Wars" The Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) Jane Austen’s career as a writer reached its zenith during the series of wars involving Napoleonic France. Her most famous novels were penned as those conflicts raged and, though war itself is absent from her stories, the military characters she created, and the references to everyday hardship in her books, attest to her lived reality. Two of her brothers were fighting in the Royal Navy, and the threat of a French invasion of England remained credible until Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in October 1805. Napoleon Bonaparte was a skilled military leader who rose to prominence during the French Revolution. After seizing power in 1799, Napoleon – who later crowned himself Emperor of the French – aimed to establish an empire and exert his influence globally. Through military campaigns, he drove a rapid expansion of French territory, conquering numerous European nations and bringing them under his rule. His military victories – including in battles at Austerlitz in 1805 and Jena-Auerstedt in 1806 – demonstrated his tactical brilliance and reshaped the political landscape of the continent. Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria and other nations joined forces in coalitions pushing back against Napoleonic France. A series of battles and campaigns followed, notably the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal, and the Russian campaign of 1812. Despite his military prowess, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia proved disastrous, and led to his first abdication in April 1814, followed by exile to the Mediterranean island of Elba. The following year, while European statesmen were gathered in Vienna to establish a new continental order, Napoleon escaped from Elba and landed in southern France. Arriving in Paris in March 1815, he resumed hostilities – culminating in French defeat at the battle of Waterloo in June 1815 by a combined British and Prussian force led by the Duke of Wellington and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. Napoleon was subsequently exiled once more, to the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, marking the end of the Napoleonic era and decades of warfare. The War of 1812 (1812–15) In a letter dated 2 September 1814, Jane Austen wrote: “I place my hope of better things on a claim to the protection of Heaven, as a Religious Nation, a Nation in spite of much Evil improving in Religion, which I cannot believe the Americans to possess.” Despite her reticence in discussing many of the global events that defined her era, the coincidence of this scathing verdict with a conflict then raging in North America is perhaps telling. So-called ‘War Hawks’ in Congress asserted that Britain’s presence in Canada posed a threat to the US, and called for military action. Tensions had arisen as a direct result of two decades of near-constant warfare between Britain and France. Factors that frustrated the US included impressment (forced recruitment) into the Royal Navy of American sailors believed to be deserters; competing Anglo-French trade restrictions imposed on neutral powers such as the US; and British support for Native American resistance to US expansion westwards across North America. So, on 18 June 1812, the US declared war on Britain, launching a conflict that would last nearly three years. Despite initial American naval victories, the British were able to maintain blockades of key US ports. On 24 August 1814, in retaliation for American attacks on York (modern-day Toronto), British soldiers burned public buildings in Washington DC – including the White House and the Capitol. War fatigue and economic stresses forced both sides to the negotiating table, and on 24 December 1814 the Treaty of Ghent was signed. Even so, the distances involved delayed ratification of the treaty by Congress until 16 February 1815 – after US victory at the battle of New Orleans on 8 January. Explore more content from week three of our Regency course: War and Conflict, with Dr Lizzie Rogers – watching time 11 mins Uncertainty and unrest: the madness of the Regency period – reading time 8 mins Peterloo: the story of a massacre – listening time 37 mins Reading between the lines: the real-life events that inspired Jane Austen – reading time 6 mins 1816: the year without summer – reading time 9 mins The Napoleonic Wars: everything you wanted to know – listening time 1 hour, 3 mins The Peterloo Massacre: what did it achieve? – reading time 6 mins
Reading between the lines: the real-life events that inspired Jane Austen
Beneath the genteel surface of decorous society, unrest simmered in the world – and works – of Jane Austen
While the novels of Jane Austen might suggest an endless schedule of middle- and upper-class gaiety, disgruntlement was rumbling beneath the surface across the country – and, during this tail end of the Georgian era, it often erupted in violent, sometimes lethal protest. Not that Austen herself completely ignored what was happening in the country beyond Barton Cottage and Netherfield Park. For instance, her fifth novel, Northanger Abbey, refers to the unrest erupting in England’s larger cities. Although she writes about a riot as imagined by one of the characters, the rather visceral description depicts: “a mob of three thousand men assembling in St George’s Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood”. Whether real or imagined, Austen’s inspiration for this tableau does seem to have come from real-life events. The episode appears to be a conflation of at least two separate disturbances that occurred prior to Northanger Abbey’s publication. In 1808, perhaps 6,000 weavers from the local – and rapidly growing – textile industry in Manchester gathered in St George’s Fields to protest about the lack of a minimum wage in their trade. Eight years later, not long before Austen’s novel was published, another riot broke out in London at the end of a hitherto peaceful protest. During the violence, the rioters even planned to attack the Tower of London – so it was surely not mere coincidence that Austen’s imagined account of the unrest included the Tower being “threatened”. Fighting for fair pay The weavers’ protest in Manchester may have been violent but it did achieve a modicum of success. Though dragoons were called in to restore peace (and one protester died during this response), the rioting was replicated in surrounding towns in Lancashire, and the weavers won a small concession in the form of a modest rise in their wages. Some scholars of Jane Austen believe that the Gordon Riots of 1780 also contributed to her description in Northanger Abbey, though those events took place when the author was only four years old. In particular, these scholars cite her reference to a deadly disturbance during which “the streets of London [were] flowing with blood”, as well as an attack on the Bank of England. The Gordon Riots were certainly bloody, a violent response to the Papists Act 1778, which aimed to reduce discrimination faced by Catholics. Anti-Catholic protests, led by the head of the Protestant Association, Lord George Gordon, exploded into chaos, with a week of rioting, burning and looting following in the capital, resulting in several hundred deaths. Religion was also the cause of the 1791 Priestley Riots in Birmingham, in which non-Anglicans who supported the French Revolution were attacked and their property damaged or destroyed. Local taxation was the reason for the Bristol Bridge Riot two years later; the militia were called to quell this disturbance, and 11 people died. Headstrong heroines As well as including occasional references to events playing out across the country, Austen didn’t confine her social commentary to the romantic politics of the gentry. Although by no means a polemical feminist, she put the disparity between men and women in the late Georgian period at the heart of her novels. They focus heavily on marriage, the ways women are defined by their husband, and what society’s expectations of women. Women seldom owned property; they couldn’t vote; they were barred from higher education; and they were rarely able to access prestigious professions. Certainly, a middle-class woman who had to work was looked down upon. Despite the absence of women’s rights, Austen’s headstrong heroines are by no means shrinking violets in their marriages or in their pursuit of suitable husbands. Although she can’t give her female characters the rights that society has denied them, Austen does empower them with purpose and intent. Women lower down the social strata simply had to work if their husband’s income wasn’t sufficient – those who were married, that is. Women were also required to maintain a functioning household, even when conditions beyond their control intervened. Such conditions arose in 1795, when a savagely cold winter brought the average temperature in the English Midlands down below –3°C. When the rivers thawed, great floods raged, so that crops didn’t grow, and animals couldn’t graze. Angry women tackled the resulting food scarcity head-on in what was later dubbed the ‘Revolt of the Housewives’ or the ‘Food Riots’. Unscrupulous merchants took full advantage of the fact that demand far outstripped supply, pushing up the prices of items such as flour and meat – but the rioters weren’t having high prices dictated to them. They seized merchants’ goods and sold them at what they believed were true market prices, giving the proceeds to the merchants. Such direct action was one way that women, with no electoral power, could effect change. But other people were also denied the vote in Austen’s time. Indeed, only 200,000 individuals – all of them property-owning men – had the vote. So a wave of vociferous reformers fiercely pushed for a large-scale extension of electoral suffrage – in the face of equally implacable opposition. Did you know? Initial goverment responses to the Gordon Riots were weak and badly planned. But when the army was called out to protect the Bank of England on 7 June 1780, the result was mass bloodshed – around 285 protesters were shot dead. Boasting nearly 30 MPs among its ranks, the Society of the Friends of the People filed a petition in the House of Commons in 1793, demanding electoral reform. This was heavily quashed in a parliamentary vote by MPs concerned about the redistribution of power to the masses after the French Revolution four years earlier. And while that Society was trying to put the subject of reform on the political agenda, organisations such as the Hampden Clubs and the London Corresponding Society, whose more radical proposals included extending the vote to all adults, met with even greater opposition. It wasn’t until the Reform Act of 1832 that the growing metropolis of Manchester gained any representation in the Commons. Unsurprisingly, then, the protection of entrenched interests in Parliament, and the means by which this was legitimised by a very limited notion of democracy, poured extra fuel on the bonfire of disquiet that flared among large swathes of the population. Problems at the pinnacle While the fabric of wider society was being unpicked, unease also proliferated right at the pinnacle of the British elite. While George III bounced between bouts of madness and lucidity, the threat of a constitutional crisis always hung heavy in the air. In 1788, a bill was passed in the Commons that would see the king’s eldest son, another George, become regent. The king emerged intact from that episode of mental ill health, and the bill was withdrawn before it had progressed through the House of Lords. By 1811, though, his insanity had become permanent, and another regency bill successfully negotiated its way through Parliament. With the Care of King During His Illness etc Act 1811, George III was replaced as head of state by his son, who eventually became King George IV on his father’s death in 1820. By then, Jane Austen had also died, passing away three years earlier, in 1817, at the age of just 41. Her great success and renown arrived only posthumously. Yet her legacy proved to be not only her artfully plotted novels, populated by enduring characters, but also her ability to depict – albeit subtly – the late Georgian period as it approached the crossroads of change. The industrial age cometh Austen’s writing did little to reflect the vast changes taking place in Britain’s cities Jane Austen’s novels might be set on rolling country estates and in well-heeled towns and cities, but the Industrial Revolution was well underway during her lifetime. Although more commonly associated with the early Victorian age, industrial development was progressing at lightning speed during Austen’s lifetime, and the largely rural economy that had dominated the countryside was being undermined. Towns and cities grew rapidly, their skylines soaring and their populations booming. The nature and pace of everyday life was irrevocably changed within a generation, and the world became driven by steam, not horse. Who knows what themes Austen’s novels might have touched on had she been born 50 years later, or if she’d grown up in the dirty heart of a city dominated by factories and chimneys. As it is, her works remain lasting memorials to a fading, possibly more innocent era. Explore more content from week three of our Regency course: War and Conflict, with Dr Lizzie Rogers – watching time 11 mins Uncertainty and unrest: the madness of the Regency period – reading time 8 mins Peterloo: the story of a massacre – listening time 37 mins 1816: the year without summer – reading time 9 mins Regency Britain: An age of war and revolution – reading time 6 mins The Napoleonic Wars: everything you wanted to know – listening time 1 hour, 3 mins The Peterloo Massacre: what did it achieve? – reading time 6 mins
Two centuries ago, Britons had to endure biting cold and driving rain from April to August. They blamed everyone from Napoleon to Benjamin Franklin for the filthy weather but, says Robert Hume, the real culprit was far more remote
Lake Geneva, 1 June 1816. An "almost perpetual rain" confined the small group of writers to the house. The night was stormy. In the mountains lightning flashed from peak to peak. In a letter to her half sister, Mary Shelley wrote: The lake was lit up, the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness." Shelley was not the only famous writer to complain about the weather in the summer of 1816. "Oh! It rains again," lamented Jane Austen from her home in Chawton, Hampshire, on 9 July. “Such weather gives one little temptation to be out. It is really too bad, & has been for a long time, much worse than anybody can bear, & I begin to think it will never be fine again.” The painter JMW Turner captured driving rain and red-tinged clouds in his painting Lancaster Sands, while Shelley drew inspiration from that “wet, ungenial summer” to write her classic novel, Frankenstein. Shelley, Austen and Turner’s words and watercolour provide a glimpse of an extraordinary summer, unlike anything anyone could remember. People across the northern hemisphere shivered and sought shelter as, for month after month, they were assailed by freezing temperatures and relentless rain. Ireland suffered no less than eight weeks of precipitation. Nationalist politician Daniel O’Connell grumbled about the “dreadful weather... There is nothing but rain and wretchedness.” Travellers felt the full brunt of these pelting rains. In France, Lady Caroline Capel was drenched to the skin from “the torrents of rain that here follow every day”, while in Switzerland it bucketed down on 130 out of 152 days between April and August. It was also extremely cold. Ice four inches thick was recorded in Essex at the end of August. Visiting London, John Quincy Adams was astonished to find fires lit in almost every house. “There has not been one night when a coverlet and blanket could have been thrown off with comfort,” noted the future US president in his diary. But in his country too “teeth chattered”, as one woman visiting New Hampshire wrote. Although there were occasional mild days, the cold bit deeply. In Plymouth, Connecticut, a clockmaker still remembered many years later going to work, dressed in thick woollen clothes and an overcoat: “My hands got so cold that I was obliged to lay down my tools and put on a pair of mittens.” Vermont saw 18 inches of snowfall in June. Farmers tried to tie fleeces back on to recently shorn sheep, but most of the poor animals still froze. On the bitter night of 6/7 June, when icicles nearly a foot long were reported, the feet of an 88-year-old man froze and his toes had to be amputated. Not without good reason did contemporaries call 1816 ‘Eighteen-Hundred-And- Froze-To-Death’. “The whole country is in a very disastrous state,” declared The Times on 5 September 1816. Dead fish floated on the surface of ponds, scores of birds lay dead on the ground. Crops crumbled into frosty mush. Outside Maidstone, Kent, wheat and barley were ruined by hailstones “as large as nuts”; frost devastated hops in Worcester; and in Barnet, north London, the livelihoods of haymakers were destroyed by the incessant rain. Seemingly, nowhere in Europe was spared. It was remarked in Portugal how the unusually cool weather had “evil consequences” on fruit, making it unpleasant to taste. Switzerland suffered more than any other country. Both grape and grain harvests were ruined, and thousands of peasants were forced to beg. Across the Atlantic, no corn could be gathered in New Hampshire and people in Vermont were reduced to foraging for nettles, wild turnips and hedgehogs. Bread prices rocketed. In Paris a loaf that had cost 16 sous in the spring quickly rose to 32. The price more than tripled in Switzerland, and hostesses asked guests to bring their own loaves to dinner parties. Riots broke out in East Anglia in late May, when labourers armed with pitchforks and carrying banners saying “Bread or Blood” marched on Ely and held its magistrates hostage. Banging kettles and blowing horns, hundreds of protestors gathered in Guildford in October, and demolished the house of a baker whose prices, they said, were too high. It was not until November that the Corn Laws allowed cheaper foreign grain into Britain. Some turned to emigration as a solution. Forty families from a Protestant sect in Württemberg, Germany, set off for the Holy Land. During a single week more than 700 men, women and children applied to leave Ireland where potatoes had failed, wheat fields were black, and oats lay flattened by rain. To remain was to risk catching typhus fever, which struck down more than 60,000 inhabitants between 1816 and 1819. As cold numbed the eastern United States, many farmers headed west. Wagons piled high with household goods trundled towards milder Ohio. Among those who left Vermont for western New York state was Joseph Smith, future founder of the Mormon religion. End of the world The weather showed no signs of relenting, and the gloom deepened. Lord Byron composed his poem Darkness, while his fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a bleak reference to the “end of the World Weather”. As The Times tried reassuring readers that such prophesies were farfetched, 62-year-old Eleanor Saunders, a London servant, hanged herself in “a fit of melancholy”. For those living in 1816, these extraordinary events were baffling and unsettling. Something had gone seriously wrong with the weather. All sorts of explanations were concocted to make sense of what was happening. Noticing a large irregular spot on the surface of the sun, surrounded by many other spots, some contemporary astronomers claimed that they were responsible for blocking out heat. A Bologna astronomer asserted that the sun was “ill”, that it would become encrusted in sunspots and plunge the Earth into darkness. Although the greatest astronomer of the day, William Herschel, argued that sunspots were too small to harm the weather, the public remained sceptical. Cold north-easterly winds, and large masses of ice floating in the Great Lakes were also blamed for keeping the air much cooler than normal. But a German writer put the cold down to a lack of gunpowder in the atmosphere following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, which had enabled cold air to sneak in. Even Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, was apparently responsible. Franklin was an enthusiastic exponent of placing lightning conductor rods on buildings, so they could draw out “electrical fire” before lightning could strike. His critics argued that the rods had stopped the Earth releasing heat into the atmosphere and condemned people to perpetual winter. The disturbance was ascribed by others to a higher being. “By the breath of God frost is given,” mused one Vermont newspaper, quoting Old Testament scripture, while the Missionary Herald magazine went further to proclaim: “God has expressed His displeasure towards the inhabitants of the Earth by withholding the ordinary rains and sunshine.” Terrified by what seemed a looming apocalypse, people from Ghent to Gothenburg crammed into churches to pray for an improvement in the weather. In France processions were hastily organised to beg God’s forgiveness: 80 young women paraded through the streets of Paris in late July, holding lighted candles and praying for the rain to stop. But it went on and on. When prayers failed, outlandish theories gained plausibility. English satirist William Hone found a sure culprit in the former French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte who, after returning from his exile on St Helena in 1815, had invaded the sun in revenge for his defeat at Waterloo. The sunspots were nothing but shadows created by different parts of his body. Pirates attack But the real culprit for the weather disturbance was not a higher being, nor was it the fault of Napoleon. Shortly before sunset on 5 April 1815, a series of explosions had shaken the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia. Local chiefs attributed the blasts to the spirit queen Nyai Loro Kidul celebrating the marriage of one of her children. British soldiers 800 miles away on Java mistook the sounds for cannon fire from ships under attack from pirates. Over the next few days, the explosions gradually subsided. But around seven o’clock on the evening of 10 April, Mount Tambora, their true source, erupted again. This time the explosions were much louder. Cascading lava slammed into the ocean, creating tsunamis 15-foot high. Trees were torn up; people, cattle and horses swept away; houses flat- tened. The village of Tambora disappeared. Showers of thick ash began to fall, and by 11 o’clock it was so black, according to one ship’s captain, that he could not see his hand even when held right up against his eye. When the eruptions finally stopped some three months later, on 15 July 1815, around 12,000 people were dead. Winds gradually carried Tambora’s huge cloud of sulphurous gases westward, throw- ing the world’s weather into chaos for the next three years. No one at the time linked a remote Indonesian volcano to the torrential rains and freezing temperatures across Europe and North America in 1816 – in fact, scientists didn’t establish a link between volcanic eruptions and climate change until the second half of the 20th century. In recent years extreme weather has provided plenty of material for Britain’s favourite topic of conversation: sunshine to freak storms in just five minutes; hail stones as large as golf balls; floods regularly deluging towns. In the future, climate change might cause such events to be more the norm than the exception. Since an “effusive volcanic eruption” ranks highly on the current UK National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies, we might also have to suffer the catastrophic effects of another year without a summer. Dr Robert Hume is a writer and former head of history at Clarendon House Grammar School, Kent Toxic pea soupers. Five extreme weather events to strike Britain 1. The Great Frost, 1683–84 The Great Frost of 1683–84 saw the Thames frozen solid to a depth of nearly two feet. Londoners made the most of it by creating a frost fair consisting of shops, taverns, coffee and chocolate sellers, and even a brothel. Other amusements included puppet shows, carriage races and bear-baiting. James Chipperfield exhibited a menagerie of performing animals on the frozen river. From the week before Christmas until early February, the frost fair was the place to be. Charles II is supposed to have enjoyed a spit-roasted ox there. 2 . The Great Storm, 1703 On 26 November 1703, booming thunder terrified southern England. Houses collapsed, and 4,000 oaks were destroyed in the New Forest. At sea, shipwrecks killed a third of the navy, and the 120-foot Eddystone Lighthouse was swept away. In Whitstable, Kent, witnesses described a ship being lifted from the water and tossed 800 feet ashore by a waterspout. At his palace in Wells, Somerset, a falling chimney stack killed Bishop Richard Kidder and his wife in their bed. The lead roofing was ripped off Westminster Abbey, and at St James’s Palace, Queen Anne was forced to spend the night sheltering in a wine cellar. 3. Avalanche in Lewes, 1836 Heavy snowfall began across south-east England on 24 December 1836 and continued over Christmas. In East Sussex, 20 feet of snow had accumulated on Cliffe Hill, Lewes, whipped up by the wind into a great ledge overhanging its western side. People were warned to leave their homes, but nobody obeyed. At about 10.15 in the morning of 27 December snow plummeted down the steep slope towards a row of workers’ cottages, killing eight inhabitants. “The mass appeared to strike the houses first at the base, heaving them upwards, and then breaking over them like a gigantic wave,” reported The Sussex Weekly Advertiser. 4. The Great Smog, London, 1952 The mix of fog and smoke from factories and fireplaces that blanketed London on 5 December 1952 was unlike any ‘pea-souper’ the city had seen before. With no wind to disperse it, the toxic yellowy smog remained for five long days, killing more than 4,000 people. Transport was brought to a standstill. Pedestrians could not see their feet, and there were instances of some falling into the Thames. Smog seeped into buildings, and theatres closed because the audience could not see the stage. Prize cattle on show at Earls Court choked to death. Thieves had a “busy time”, commented The Guardian. 5. The drought of 1976 With perfect blue skies and record hours of sunshine, summer 1976 was a time of barbecues,dips in London fountains, and long queues for ice creams and cold drinks. At Wimbledon ball boys fainted and 400 spectators experienced heatstroke in one day. Even Big Ben suffered metal fatigue and stopped chiming. When reservoirs dried up, the government imposed a hosepipe ban. Householders were asked to use bathwater on their gardens, and to flush the toilet less often. Britain appointed a minister for drought, Denis Howell, who was nicknamed minister for rain when, during his first few days in office, the heavens opened. Explore more content from week three of our Regency course: War and Conflict, with Dr Lizzie Rogers – watching time 11 mins Uncertainty and unrest: the madness of the Regency period – reading time 8 mins Peterloo: the story of a massacre – listening time 37 mins Reading between the lines: the real-life events that inspired Jane Austen – reading time 6 mins Regency Britain: An age of war and revolution – reading time 6 mins The Napoleonic Wars: everything you wanted to know – listening time 1 hour, 3 mins The Peterloo Massacre: what did it achieve? – reading time 6 mins
At first glance, Jane Austen’s life seems to have been uneventful – but those initial appearances are somewhat deceptive
On 16 December 1816, her 41st birthday, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh. Edward, as he was known, had recently gone to study at Oxford. Perhaps gently poking fun at Edward, a budding novelist, she wrote of his “strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of variety and Glow”. Discussing her own work, she asked modestly: “How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour?”Austen was comparing herself to a miniraturist, painting tiny portraits. The letter, held at the British Library, is one of about 160 by Jane Austen to have survived. It is significant because it’s rare and, more subtly, because it seems to confirm what we think we know about Austen. Here is the spinster chronicler of the domestic, a writer who famously saw no need to directly reference the Napoleonic Wars (1803– 15) in her fiction. Yet this sketch, suggesting someone living a modest life, is at best only a partial picture. In her own lifetime, Austen was a successful novelist. Although she never married, she was part of a large family. In A Memoir of Jane Austen (1869), Edward describes her as “the delight of all her nephews and nieces”. She was also someone whose place in society – essentially that of the poor relation – meant that she observed the English landed gentry up close without the sense of security and status enjoyed by those who inherited or married money. Cultural capital Jane was born in 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, where her father, George (1731–1805), was the rector. Though the Reverend Austen’s family had made money as wool merchants, George’s branch weren’t well off. In 1764, he married Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827), whose father was a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1768 until the turn of the century, the Austens lived in Steventon’s rectory. Jane had six brothers and a beloved older sister, Cassandra (1773–1845). George supplemented his modest clerical income by farming and teaching. Though money was perennially tight, the Austens – a close and warm family - had cultural capital aplenty. Ideas were discussed freely in a home that often welcomed visitors from the wider world. Well educated by the standards of her time, Jane was able to access her father’s library and that of a family friend, colonial administrator Warren Hastings (1732–1818). In addition, family and friends staged plays. From a young age, Jane wrote poems, plays and stories, often with the kind of satirical edge familiar from her novels. It was an apprenticeship for a professional writing career that began in earnest around 1795, though it was not until 1811 that one of her novels, Sense and Sensibility, made it into print. Jane never married, though she was attracted to Tom Lefroy (1776–1889), a dashing and intelligent trainee barrister from Ireland. Marriage between the pair was impossible, because neither had any money. In 1802, Jane briefly accepted a proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, the charmless heir to extensive estates, but immediately regretted her decision and recanted her acceptance. In their different ways, both of these men appear to correspond to Austen archetypes. Era of uncertainty In 1800, George unexpectedly decided to retire from the church, heralding an period of uncertainty in Jane’s life. The following year, the Austen family moved to Bath, where George and Cassandra had married. In 1805, George died, which left Jane, her sister and their mother in a precarious financial position. Cassandra later destroyed a cache of Jane’s letters from this period, which suggests it was a difficult time. In 1809, after a period living in Southampton, the Austen women at last began to enjoy a more settled life again. They moved to Chawton, Hampshire, where Jane’s brother Edward gifted them the use of a cottage after he inherited the Elizabethan country pile Chawton House from a childless cousin, Thomas Knight. Jane’s literary life came fully into focus in Chawton, though her books were initially published anonymously, as was common in this period. But then, in 1816, just as her career began building momentum following the publication of Emma (1815), Jane fell ill. She died in July 1817, possibly from Addison’s disease or Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Since 1833, Jane Austen’s novels have never been out of print. But why are they so popular? One answer may lie in the idea that Jane wrote about marriage, money, status and family not because these were small themes but because, for women of her class, these represented huge forces shaping their lives. Think of her less as a miniaturist, more as a supremely gifted writer who focused on the most revealing details. Austen's literary contemporaries We look at four fellow writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries who proved influential in Jane’s life and work Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) Whereas Austen subtly chronicled women’s lives, Mary Wollstonecraft (novelist Mary Shelley’s mother) railed at the patriarchy. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she argued that women were not – as many men rather conveniently supposed – inherently inferior to men, but were denied education and opportunities. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) The Gothic stories penned by Radcliffe, the most popular novelist of her era, were dark romances. Austen satirised Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) in the posthumously published Northanger Abbey (1817). This probably affected Radcliffe’s reputation, which has recovered in recent years as scholars have reassessed her work. Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) A towering literary figure in his day, Scott’s well-known novels include Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817) and Ivanhoe (1819). Though his own work was widescreen and romantic, he was a huge admirer of Austen’s fiction – and, as is clear in both of their writings, the feeling was mutual. James Stanier Clarke (1766–1834) In 1805, Clarke became librarian to George, Prince of Wales, later both the monarch and an Austen fanboy. Clarke helpfully offered writing advice to Jane. In response to his mansplaining, she wrote a humorous essay, ‘Plan of a Novel, according To Hints from Various Quarters’, which wasn’t published until long after her death. Explore more content from week two of our Regency course: Regency culture, with Dr Lizzie Rogers – watching time 12 mins Everything you wanted to know about Jane Austen's England –reading time 7 mins The Romantics: everything you wanted to know – listening time 39 mins Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: the birth of a gothic monster – reading time 6 mins How to survive a Regency marriage – reading time 7 mins Visiting Brighton Royal Pavilion, the Prince Regent's decadent getaway – reading time 3 mins