Cultural

P.W. Kingsford tells the story of a Regency buck, who became a Parliamentary champion of the depressed classes in early nineteenth-century England.

The Grace Darling legend as an early manifestation of the terrifying power of sustained publicity; Richard Armstrong writes that she may well have been its first victim.

Arnold Whitridge introduces two powerful newspaper editors, who greatly exacerbated public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic during the American Civil War.

Unlike everybody else in his generation, writes Arnold Whitridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson understood, loved and castigated the two different, but closely related, strains in American life and represented the national conscience.

Thomas J. Brady offers a study of a fashionable photographer who became the great visual recorder of the American Civil War.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, writes D. Pepys Whiteley, an easy-going Royal Duke was deeply embarrassed by the scandalous revelations of a discarded mistress, and by the publication of his private letters.

Though the Duke did not pretend to be a highly educated man, he had a real respect for books, and made resolute attempts to supervise the education of his son and heir. By Elizabeth Longford.

Born on the banks of the Rhone, this enlightened French missionary was the first European to carry out a comprehensive survey of the manners and customs of the Hindus. Roderick Cameron describes how the book that he wrote, which he published with the encouragement of the British East India Company, remains a classic in its own field.

“The son of a cotton millionaire scouring the auction rooms of Europe and building lavishly in the latest architectural style,” the Tory leader was a highly representative early nineteenth-century figure. By J. Mordaunt Crook.

A series of cases over a period of sixty years had raised the question of whether juries could pronounce on the substance of charges of libel and sedition or merely on the facts of publication. H.M. Lubasz writes how Fox’s Libel Act of 1791 put an end to doubt and thereby admitted the public to a larger vote in political affairs.