Blends humor with factual storytelling, turning kings, queens, and historic events into witty, irreverent narratives.“Nothing now succeeds unless it’s in the comic line. We have comic Latin grammars, and comic Greek grammars; indeed, I don't know but what English grammar, too, is a comedy altogether. All our tragedies are made into comedies by the way they are performed; and no work sells without comic illustrations to it. I have brought out several new comic works...

An analysis of the builders of the British Empire, how they were represented in popular culture of the day, and how that vision has changed over time.From the sixteenth until the twentieth century, British power and influence gradually expanded to cover one quarter of the world's surface. The common saying was that "the sun never sets on the British Empire." What began as a largely entrepreneurial enterprise in the early modern period, with privately run joint stock...

Throughout history brave Englishmen and women have never been afraid to rise up against their unjust rulers and demand their rights. Barely a century has gone by without England being witness to a major uprising against the government of the day, often resulting in a fundamental change to the constitution. This book is a collection of biographies, written by experts in their field, of the lives and deeds of famous English freedom fighters, rebels, and democrats who have had a major impact ...

The Georgian era, we are told, was a "polite and commercial" era. The supposedly refined aristocracy governed the nation while the bourgeoisie, at the center of the largest empire the world had ever known, expanded the nation's overseas trading interests while currying royal favors. It was an era which witnessed the flowering of art, literature, and music. But at the heart of the British Empire was something rotten: Vice, corruption, and crime reigned supreme. Someone had had enough and de...

"Pestilence entered… The ordinary pursuits of society were paralysed; all previously-formed plans of happiness, business, trade, occupation, and domestic arrangement, were checked as cruelly and abruptly as if every principle of the human mind were in a moment subverted… The physicians saw that human aid was vain, and that destruction inevitably awaited all who approached the infected. Terrific mortality! Appalling scourge of the human race!" — George W.M. Reynolds Throughout history human...

Traces how apocalyptic fears and visions have shaped popular culture from medieval times to today.People have always imagined that human history has an end point. The way this has been imagined has varied according to time, place, and culture. In medieval England people lived in expectation of the Biblical Day of Judgment, when the world would end and people would be judged by God according to their sins. In art and literature from the early modern period onwards, ...

A fascinating historical survey of the world's most infamous outlaws.For as long as human societies have existed there have always been people who have transgressed the laws of their respective societies. It seems that whenever new laws are made, certain people find ways to break them.This book will introduce you to some of the most notorious figures, from all parts of the world, who have committed heinous crimes such as highway robbery, murder, and forgery...

This book offers a challenge to the current study of nineteenth-century British medievalism, re-examining its general perception as an elite and conservative tendency, the imposition of order from above evidenced in the work of Walter Scott, in the Eglinton Tournament, and in endless Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights. Whilst some previous scholars have warned that medievalism should not be reduced to the role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and everywhere ...