HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-01-10T11:39:02.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Week one – Introduction to the Regency
items: Regency Masterclass, with Dr Lizzie Rogers
items: Regency quiz – week four
items: Regency Britain: an age of war and revolution
items: Reading between the lines: the real-life events that inspired Jane Austen
items: 1816: the year without summer
items: Becoming Jane Austen
items: How to survive a Regency marriage
items: Visiting Brighton Royal Pavilion, the Prince Regent's decadent getaway
items: Everything you wanted to know about Jane Austen's England

Week one – Introduction to the Regency
type: item
date: 2024-08-20T10:41:09.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: In the first week of our HistoryExtra Academy Regency short course, Dr Lizzie Rogers explores the backdrop of Georgian Britain, and introduces one of its biggest characters: the Prince Regent

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Regency Masterclass, with Dr Lizzie Rogers
type: item
date: 2024-02-09T23:55:50.000Z
creator: Charlotte Hodgman
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: Dr Lizzie Rogers and Charlotte Hodgman explore some of the key learnings from the recent HistoryExtra Academy Regency course
encoded: View Green Video on the source website

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Regency quiz – week four
type: item
date: 2024-01-28T21:43:41.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Quiz
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: How much have you learned about the Regency so far? Test your knowledge of your learnings in week four with our quiz
encoded: 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

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Regency Britain: an age of war and revolution
type: item
date: 2024-01-19T18:13:55.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: Jane Austen’s lifetime coincided with near-constant conflict and bloodshed on both sides of the Atlantic
encoded: 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…

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Reading between the lines: the real-life events that inspired Jane Austen
type: item
date: 2024-01-19T18:13:04.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: Beneath the genteel surface of decorous society, unrest simmered in the world – and works – of Jane Austen
encoded: 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 i…

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1816: the year without summer
type: item
date: 2024-01-18T11:04:23.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Georgian
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: 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
encoded: 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 ha…

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Becoming Jane Austen
type: item
date: 2024-01-14T23:02:40.000Z
creator: Jonathan Wright
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: At first glance, Jane Austen’s life seems to have been uneventful – but those initial appearances are somewhat deceptive
encoded: 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 supplemen…

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How to survive a Regency marriage
type: item
date: 2024-01-14T21:51:37.000Z
creator: Felicity Day
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: Anyone who has read Jane Austen will have an idea of how much effort a high society woman in Regency Britain gave to finding a husband. Felicity Day lays out what they needed to know, how they could meet that special someone, and why getting married had its dangers...
encoded: Weigh up the pros and cons before tying the knot Marriage was socially expected, but it certainly had its drawbacks Marriage was “the great object of female hope according to one (male) writer of the Regency period. He mused that it was “the natural wish and expectation of every amiable girl, to settle happily in marriage”. Becoming a wife certainly did have advantages, offering the chance for a woman to break free from constant chaperonage and to become (respectably) a mother. There was a profound stigma associated with single life, too, with spinsters the subject of much derision. Yet matrimony had definite downsides. A wife in the Regency period – the late Georgian era, commonly considered to stretch from around 1790 to 1830 – lost various legal rights and potentially some of her property the moment she said ‘I do’. Her husband could lawfully beat and imprison her, and prevent her seeing their children. Love and companionship aside, marriage did not look particularly enticing. And contrary to what we’re often told, if you were a woman from a wealthy, aristocratic family, staying single was usually a viable option. In fact, Emily Nugent, Marchioness of Westmeath, who found herself shackled to a serially unfaithful and abusive husband, became convinced that she would have been better off had she never married. She could have lived comfortably on the combined income of her £15,000 marriage portion and inheritance from an unmarried aunt, together giving her as much as £1,300 a year – more than triple what many clergymen earned. Emily could have joined those single ladies who made homes for themselves in Mayfair and continued to take part in the social round. Put in the hard work if you do want to make a match Finding a suitor wasn’t easy, and women had to be seen in the right places For the many women who did want to marry, or at least wanted to do what was expected, their best chance of making a match was to throw themselves into the Regency season. This whirl of ba…

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Visiting Brighton Royal Pavilion, the Prince Regent's decadent getaway
type: item
date: 2024-01-14T21:51:15.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: The Prince of Wales wanted something bold and spectacular when he built a pleasure palace in the seaside town of Brighton, and that is exactly what he got
encoded: There is a sight you cannot miss on the Old Steine thoroughfare of Brighton, as it stands out so brashly against the backdrop of this English seaside town. The Royal Pavilion – with an Indian-style exterior and Chinese- influenced interior, blending with Regency-era gardens – exudes both opulence and the exotic. The palace was the decadent getaway of George, Prince of Wales and son of George III. Vain and hedonistic, he enjoyed dining, dancing and drinking to go with his gambling, racing and womanising. He first came to Brighton in 1783, aged 21, already suffering from a life of excess, which his physicians hoped the therapeutic seawater could alleviate. Instead, George hired architect Henry Holland to enlarge his modest lodging house into a neoclassical villa. As the years went by, all the while with George throwing parties and showing off the Chinese furnishings, this ‘Marine Pavilion’ grew. Most notably, he added extravagant glass-domed stables, large enough for 62 horses, and sleeping quarters for the grooms. (They are now home to a museum and concert hall.) The major redesign that transformed the pavilion into today’s structure began in 1815, after George became Regent. Using cast-iron frames, architect John Nash built a host of domes, minarets and towers on top of the original roof, giving it an Indian aesthetic. New rooms for entertaining were luxuriously decorated and state-of-the-art heating, gas lighting and plumbing installed. The garden similarly received an overhaul, complete with Regency-style winding paths, flower beds, shrubs and lawns. Nash needed eight years and a fortune to finish, by which time George was King. In a cruel twist, though, George had grown so overweight and suffered from numerous maladies that he could only visit his magnificent, eccentric palace twice more before his death in 1830. People's palace Ultimately, it would be the people of Brighton who benefited from the Royal Pavilion, not least because it helped the town’s reputation …

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Everything you wanted to know about Jane Austen's England
type: item
date: 2024-01-14T21:50:57.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Regency Course
description: Dr Lizzie Rogers answers questions about the author and the social conventions of the world in which she lived and wrote
encoded: What do we know about Jane Austen's life? Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, the seventh of eight children born to Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. The family lived in Hampshire, where George was a cleric, and Austen spent the first two to three decades of her life there. Although she and her sister, Cassandra, went to school for a while, most of their education took place at home. After her father retired in 1800, Austen spent some time in Bath, but after her father’s death in 1805 until 1809, she, her mother, sister, and their friend Martha Lloyd were forced to live off the kindness of relatives, since they had little income of their own. In 1809, Austen’s brother, Edward, offered them a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire – now Jane Austen’s House Museum – and it was there that she edited a lot of her early writing, including early versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Austen started publishing her work in 1811, with Sense and Sensibility being her first novel, but all her works were published anonymously, initially as “By a Lady” and then as “the author of [previous book]”. Sadly, Jane’s health started to decline, and she died on 18 July 1817, in Winchester, at the age of 41; she was buried in Winchester Cathedral. What was the Austen family’s position in Regency society? Austen and her family were part of what is often referred to as the ‘pseudo- gentry’. While they had connections to wealthier families and established gentry, their own financial status was sometimes unstable. Austen’s brother Edward was adopted by a wealthy childless couple, the Knights, who owned the Chawton estate in Hampshire, and the two sisters didn’t have large marriage dowries, which were important during the Regency period. So, although the family wasn’t impoverished, money was occasionally a concern. But Austen enjoyed an artistically and culturally rich life, with access to her father’s extensive library of over 300 books, and she and her sibli…

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