Stuart Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Stuart Era’
Richard Steele goes to Bath for his health, and is cured of more ailments than he had ever had in his life.
Eighteenth-century Bath was a fashionable spa city to which the Quality would retire for ‘the cure’. However, the health-giving waters were seemingly not enough by themselves, and doctors clustered round with all the medical treatments visitors could possibly want or need — plus a good many more.
Joseph Addison complains that the famous Cries of London are a lot of fuss about nothing.
‘The Cries of London’, the various musical and not-so-musical calls of street vendors in Queen Anne’s capital, were widely regarded with affection and pride. But the endless drumming of tins and kettles left Joseph Addison’s nerves raw, and the medley of slogans and doggerel verses was if anything worse.
Lord Macaulay describes the toils of a typical country gentleman visiting London in the time of Charles II.
Macaulay’s influential history of England, which first appeared in 1848, was a paean to Progress and especially to progress in Britain. By his day, London was truly England’s capital, a cosmopolitan railway hub; back in the 1660s, however, it was an island entire of itself, and any rural squire who struggled in over the dirty and rutted roads found himself in a foreign land.
The Dutch explorer ran across two islands in the Pacific of which Europeans knew nothing, but his chief desire was to get past them.
New Zealand came under British control with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; James Cook had charted its coasts in the 1770s, but Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had set the first European eyes on the islands, over a century before. As William Reeves notes, however, he was interested only in getting past them.
The first battle of the English Civil War was a cautious affair, but rumours persisted that it went on long after it had finished.
The Battle of Edgehill in Warwickshire on October 23rd, 1642, marked the opening exchanges in the English Civil War. It was indecisive, and neither side could have foreseen the military coup in December 1648 that would lead so quickly to a brief Republic. Indeed, following the skirmish King Charles was more interested in paranormal activity.
The East India Company’s top agent in India was also the man who put Calcutta on the world map.
Calcutta (Kolkata) in West Bengal was the capital of British India from the start of the Raj in 1857 to 1911, when King George V announced a move to Delhi. Calcutta was not the first choice location for British commercial activity in Bengal, but it proved to be the best, and that was to the credit of one man, Job Charnock.