HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-02-09T15:30:05.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Who is the most overrated person in history? 9 experts reveal their choiceshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/who-is-the-most-overrated-person-in-history-9-experts-reveal-their-choices/2026-02-09T15:30:00.000ZHomer
Composite figment of imaginations
The writer credited with composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, and often regarded as one of the most important authors of all time, is to my mind the most overrated historical figure. That’s mostly because it’s likely that there was no one person called Homer.
Careful study of those works, as well as other surviving epic fragments, has shown that they weren’t written at a single time by one person. Instead, it is likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed over generations by poetry performers known as rhapsodes. Each of these improved on the work of their predecessors, curating these epics and honing them to a point of perfection. From that time, probably around 700 BC, these works started to be transmitted in a more stable format. By around 550–500 BC, they were written down for the first time.
By then, the belief was circulating that their genesis lay with one particular poet, Homer – not least because the idea of a single, genius author is simpler and more attractive than a slow process of evolution involving hundreds. A whole narrative was woven about the likely fictitious Homer: that he lived on Chios, that he was blind, even that he may have had some divine parentage.
In fact, the notional Homer became so popular that later rhapsodes, doing performances of these now ‘finished’, stable poems, liked to claim themselves as ‘sons of Homer’ to give themselves more gravitas and fame. Ancient historians even wrote biographies of Homer as a historical figure, and busts were created of him. Yet, as a single man, he probably never existed at all.
Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick
Charles Dickens
Verbose Victorian who distorted views of his era
At the risk of being tarred and feathered next time I show my face at a Victorian history conference, I’d have to say that Dickens is overrated.
It’s not that I dislike his work. Critics usually object to his long-winded prose, or baulk at the mawkish sentimentality of characters such as Little Nell, but I enjoy his writing. The callous way he treated his wife is harder to forgive – but his claim to greatness never rested on his qualities as a husband.
No, my objection to Dickens is one that he – always a relentless self-publicist – might actually enjoy. He is simply too famous. Dickens is often feted as the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol have been inflicted on generations of schoolchildren and adapted into endless period dramas (the best of which feature Muppets).
As a result, many people see the 19th century purely through a Dickensian lens: as a world of cruel workhouses, smoke-filled factories and desperate poverty. I’ve spent my career as a historian trying to reveal the lighter sides of Victorian life – to prove that things weren’t as miserable as some of Dickens’ more pointed critiques suggest.
Dickens was just one of many great writers who made their names in the Victorian era. I’m not suggesting that we consign him to the dustbin of history – but perhaps the time has come to stop him from hogging all of the limelight.
Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University
Mary, Queen of Scots
Unwise architect of her own downfall
Some historical figures, such as Richard III and Anne Boleyn, attract a cult following. Mary is another. She’s typically presented as a tragic heroine: a woman of courage who battled against adversity throughout her life, only to have it savagely cut short by her cold-hearted cousin, Elizabeth I.
Yet the truth is far removed from this beguiling image. Yes, Mary was dogged by tragedy in her life, but much of it could have been avoided if she had shown greater wisdom and restraint. Instead, she made a series of catastrophic decisions that eventually lost her the crown – and her life.
After a pampered upbringing in France, Mary returned to her native Scotland in 1561, aged 18. She then married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, one of the most unsuitable consorts in history, before eloping with the chief suspect in his murder, James Hepburn, Lord Bothwell.
Having lost all credibility, and been forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, James, Mary fled to England, naively expecting that Elizabeth would help her regain her throne. She spent almost 19 years a prisoner there, during which time she was involved in numerous plots against the English queen, finally leaving a paper trail exposing her parts in conspiracies.
Mary’s execution in 1587 propelled her to the status of Catholic martyr and tragic heroine. In truth, she was not the hapless victim of circumstance but the architect of her own downfall.
Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster
Petrarch
Painted a dim picture of the Middle Ages
The writing of early Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) is certainly not overrated. He was responsible for an exquisite body of lyric poetry, an extraordinary scholar who rediscovered the letters of Cicero, and one of the greatest contributors to the Italian language. Reading or listening to his poetry truly feeds the soul.
As a medieval historian, though, I am bound to take issue with Petrarch’s comments on the nature of history – because these truly are overrated. His remarks have long misled and deceived, producing a vision of world history that has become embedded in the European and American historiographical imagination.
It was Petrarch who came up with the idea of the ‘Dark Ages’. He described the Middle Ages as a period of intellectual obscurity in which the glories of the great Roman empire had been forgotten, inhabited by benighted and stupid people. “This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever,” he opined. “When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.”
This condemnation of 800 years of history was taken up by 16th-century Protestants and then 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers. It’s still common today, with the Middle Ages often dismissed as poorly documented, boring and dogmatic. It’s just not true! These were centuries of extraordinary intellectual discovery, of philosophical thinking about the nature of the self and society, of artistic vibrancy and sophisticated political theory. The Middle Ages matter: we study them to challenge our assumptions and better understand our common humanity.
Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford
Cicero
Rome’s most shameless self-promoter
The first-century BC Roman statesman and writer is often hailed as the voice of Republican virtue and a defender of democracy, justice and reason in a corrupt age. But this reputation owes more to his own words than to his actual achievements. In truth, Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of history’s most successful self-publicists.
Cicero was elected consul in 63 BC. It was a remarkable achievement for a novus homo (‘new man’ without aristocratic ancestry) – and he never stopped reminding people of it. That same year, he crushed a conspiracy to overthrow the Republic, and had several citizens executed without trial – an act he later declared showed moral courage. In reality, it was a serious abuse of power, and deeply divisive.
Despite his modest background, Cicero consistently sided with Rome’s conservative elite, opposing reforms that might have redistributed wealth or power to the poor. He praised virtue, yet defended the clearly guilty Milo on a murder charge. He was undeniably a gifted speaker and writer, but as a statesman he was relatively irrelevant. He had no army, no loyal faction and little influence over the major figures of his time, such as Caesar, Pompey and Octavian (later Augustus).
More than 800 of his letters and 58 speeches survive, far more than those left by any contemporary, giving his version of events an over-amplified voice. Through them he cast himself as the Republic’s moral guardian – but without them he’d be remembered as what he truly was: a gifted lawyer with more bluster than power.
Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author
Winston Churchill
A flawed leader who could never live up to his idealised image
Churchill is one of Britain’s greatest heroes. He’s the subject of countless movies and television shows. His statue stands in Parliament Square. In a nationwide poll in 2002, he was voted the greatest figure in British history. Ever.
Though I have great respect for Churchill as a symbol of British courage and determination during the Second World War, the man himself cannot possibly live up to this image. In many ways, he was a terrible politician. Even by the standards of the time, his views were objectionable. He actively opposed equal rights for women, and he frequently made racist comments – particularly about Indians, calling them a “beastly people with a beastly religion”. During most of the 1930s he was shunned by the political establishment, including many in his own party. He was often drunk on the job.
There is no question that Britain needed a leader with Churchill’s energy to see it through the war. Yet his own Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, claimed that Churchill often made it impossible for the armed forces to do their work. He came up with ridiculous plans, then acted “like a spoilt child” when military experts pointed out that they were impossible.
Churchill was certainly a heroic figure. He was one of the very first to oppose Hitler, and his inspiring speeches galvanised the country in its hour of need. But can he live up to our idealised image of him? Of course not. How could anyone?
Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017)
Erik Bloodaxe
Spectacular nickname, underwhelming legacy
I love a Viking-Age hero with a dramatic nickname as much as the next person, but let’s not kid ourselves: they were masters of their own propaganda. Look for the men behind the myths (and we are mostly talking men here) and the historical reality can be a little… underwhelming. Take Erik Bloodaxe, twice ruler of Northumbria in the mid-10th century. Most of what we think we know about his colourful life comes from the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas, recorded long after his lifetime.
In these, he’s portrayed as a larger-than-life character: favourite son of King Harald Fairhair, slayer of his own brothers, locked in a bitter feud with Icelandic poet Egill Skallagrimsson. His wife, Gunnhild, is depicted as a shapeshifting, murderous sorceress said to have commissioned another source for Erik’s life – or, rather, afterlife – the poem Eiríksmál (‘The Lay of Erik’), in which the god Odin orders his warriors and Valkyries to prepare Valhalla for the arrival of this great hero.
But beyond the vivid details of his legend, what do we know about the historical figure? Coins and chronicles tell us that he was a key political player in 10th-century Northumbria. But his brief reigns (947–48 and 952–54) were turbulent, to say the least, challenged by Anglo-Saxon Wessex to the south and Viking Dublin to the west. In 954, he came to a sticky end, driven from York and ambushed in the wilds of Cumbria. His death brought an end to Viking rule in the north of England. So, not a brilliant legacy. But still a great nickname.
Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile, 2024)
Ronald Reagan
Seemingly a candidate for sainthood – but with questionable principles
Making heroes out of historical figures requires some selective forgetting. In the US, where the cult of Ronald Reagan has many adherents, forgetting is almost an art form. Popular writing treats Reagan as a principled example of free-market rectitude who ended the Cold War and heralded morning in America. Critics of the contemporary Republican Party often invoke Reagan to signal how far his heirs have gone astray. The GOP is “no longer the party of Reagan”, critics lament in publications such as The Washington Post, Time or USA Today. Rhetorically, harking back to Reagan makes a claim of legitimacy and ideological fidelity. To invoke Reagan is to touch the hem of the saints.
This gives Reagan too much credit for accomplishments that were not his, and overlooks wrongdoing that was. Did Reagan end the Cold War? Many would argue that dynamics within the USSR – Mikhail Gorbachev’s embrace of democratic socialism, for example – sparked the transformation of the Soviet Union more than any external force did. Was Reagan’s administration principled? Anyone recalling the manipulative illegality of the Iran–Contra Affair might marvel at the question.
- Read more | Did Ronald Reagan 'Make America Great Again'?
Did Reagan mean “morning in America” to apply to all Americans? As candidate, he gave a speech celebrating “states’ rights” in Neshoba County, Mississippi near where three voting rights activists had been murdered in 1964. For years, he publicly ignored the decade-defining public health crisis that was the HIV epidemic. He scaled back on social programmes while intensifying the war on drugs. He busted unions while preaching ‘trickle-down’ economics.
Without selective forgetting, the Reagan era feels less like the antithesis of our present and more like its progenitor.
Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University
Simon de Montfort
A history of violence
Some 760 years after his death, Simon de Montfort still enjoys a fairly sturdy reputation as a social reformer – the man who summoned what’s claimed to have been the first English parliament. A portrait of him is carved above the doors of the US House of Representatives, among a pantheon of democratic worthies. An English university was named after him as recently as 1992.
But this reputation rests almost entirely on modern myth. Kings of England had been summoning consultative assemblies for hundreds of years before Montfort did so in 1265, and were calling them parliaments as early as 1236. Montfort’s contribution was long reckoned to have been the introduction of representation by including knights and townsmen, but both these groups had already been attending parliaments for several decades.
Montfort was undoubtedly a skilled politician – clever, persuasive and quick-witted – but his preferred method of getting things done was usually violence. He had put himself into power in 1263 by leading attacks on the supporters of his brother-in-law, Henry III, and he reduced Henry to a puppet the following year by defeating him in battle.
Montfort was also a pioneering antisemite. As soon as he became Earl of Leicester in 1231, he expelled all of the Jews from that town – the first such expulsion in England – and in the 1260s he led violent massacres of other Jewish communities. A capable warrior and a charismatic leader, Montfort was expert at exploiting the grievances of others for his own ends. A founder of parliamentary democracy he was not.
Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster
This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
]]>Swings and roundabouts: a history of Britain's playgroundshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/swings-and-roundabouts-a-history-of-britains-playgrounds/2025-07-17T08:00:18.000ZA pub might seem a strange place to begin a history of Britain’s playgrounds. Yet in June 1858, Charles Dickens delivered a speech at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street that, he hoped, would transform the lives of children across the imperial capital.
As the guests dined on seasonal delicacies and fine wines, Dickens gave an impassioned plea on behalf of the Playground and Recreation Society, an organisation that had been established just a few months earlier with the express aim of providing “playgrounds for poor children in populous places”. To the accompaniment of music laid on by the band of the 1st Life Guards, the celebrated author extolled the benefits that having a “playground near to their own dwellings where they knew their children would be safe” conferred on parents.
“I venture to assert that there can be no physical health without play; and there can be no efficient and satisfactory work without play; that there can be no sound and wholesome thought without play,” he declared.
It was a powerful argument, and one to which Dickens’ audience evidently listened – for, by the end of the following year, the Recreation Grounds Act had made its way into law. Henceforth, local authorities across the land would be allowed to create and own playgrounds for children and young people. It marked a turning point in British children’s access to play. Or did it?
The new legislation – and Dickens’ high-profile support – could have been a Big Bang moment for the playground movement in Britain. But, despite celebrity endorsement, political backing and widespread publicity, by 1860 the Playground Society had collapsed in a heap. It had amassed considerable debts – largely from putting on extravagant fundraising dinners. More damningly still, it had failed to create a single space in which London’s children could play.
The movement was hardly in full swing elsewhere, either. While dedicated play space was set aside in Salford and Manchester in the 1840s, unaccompanied children were barred from entering some city parks – notably Saltaire Park in Bradford – altogether.
This sorry Dickensian tale contrasts starkly with the state of play in modern Britain. Fast-forward to 2025 and you’ll find more than 26,000 children’s playgrounds in cities, towns and villages across the UK. And while the best efforts of Britain’s great novelist failed to save the Playground Society from financial disaster, today more than £85m is spent on maintaining playgrounds each and every year.
No one’s arguing that playground provision in modern Britain is perfect. Far from it. In fact, it’s a live debate as to whether playgrounds remain the best places for our children to be playing in the 21st-century city at all. However, one thing can’t be doubted. And that’s that to tell the story of the British playground is also to shine a light on what it’s meant to be a child in this country over the past 200 years.
Pollution and disease
Of course, child’s play didn’t begin with the Victorians. Archaeologists have discovered rag balls from ancient Egypt and sculptures of playing children from ancient Greece. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s remarkable Children’s Games (1560) depicts more than 200 children playing in 80 different ways.
We know that most Victorian working-class children played outside, often in the streets close to home. Although children and their families faced many difficulties at this time – including overcrowding, pollution and disease – finding places to play and friends to play with was rarely an issue. As more children spent their day in education rather than work, there was also more time to play after school, too.
And yet social elites and urban reformers increasingly imagined the street as a bad place to play, long before cars were common on British roads. For William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, poor city children had a “miserable subsistence” and their play was “curtailed to the running gutter”. For housing reformer Octavia Hill, children learnt “lessons of evil” while playing in streets and alleys. In response to this growing sense of disquiet, the elaborately named Metropolitan Public Garden, Boulevard and Playground Association was founded in 1882 and became the leading advocate for children’s playgrounds in the late 19th century. But could it succeed where the Playground Society had failed?
The association was concerned by the “pale faces, stunted figures, debilitated forms, narrow chests, and all the outward signs of a low vital power” that it saw in urban working-class children. To address these alleged physical imperfections, it set out to create “a children’s playground divided into two portions, one for boys and one for girls, both supplied with gymnastic apparatus” within a quarter of a mile of every working-class home. Strong and healthy children would, after all, create more effective and efficient factory workers, soldiers and sailors.
By the early 1890s, the association had spent more than £14m in today’s money on upwards of 50 open spaces, including 20 with children’s gymnasiums. In Southwark, Little Dorrit’s Playground – named after the eponymous star of one of Charles Dickens’ most celebrated novels – cost the equivalent of £2.4m to buy and kit out.
Such spaces bore little resemblance to the playgrounds we know today. The separate areas for boys and girls reflected the inequitable gender norms of the time. And they were fitted with equipment that we would probably associate with Olympic gymnastics, including parallel bars, vaulting horses and gymnastic rings. At Spa Fields playground in Clerkenwell, a large gravel area doubled as a parade ground for local army reservists.
Whatever the expectations of adults, children seem to have enjoyed using such spaces. On a visit to a playground in 1896, the campaigner Isabella Holmes described a boy “whose clothes were literally dropping to pieces… and he twisted himself about on the handle swings, putting his toes through the handles, and performing all sorts of gyrations which many a well-fed boy, clad in the best of flannels, would have given his all to be able to accomplish”.
While children had been busy playing, by the early 20th century adult attitudes to playground design were beginning to change. For the author Annesley Kenealy, writing in 1907, the “pitilessly meagre surroundings” of most children’s gymnasiums did little to protect children from the “unwholesome sights and sounds of a sordid, huckstering, fetid slum street”. Better playgrounds were needed.
Not fit to fight?
Such calls coincided with concern during the First World War about unfit conscripts and juvenile delinquency on the home front. Wartime investigations into the health and wellbeing of mothers and children concluded that a playground close to home was essential for a child’s proper physical and moral development.
Voluntary organisations, philanthropists, municipal parks departments and commercial manufacturers all responded enthusiastically in the interwar period. The National Playing Fields Association became an important advocate and funder of children’s playgrounds across the country. With King George V as its patron, and regular funding appeals on BBC Radio, the NPFA had considerable success in promoting the playground cause.
This cause was given greater urgency by the growing number of children being killed by cars. In fact, such was the death toll that street play was increasingly regarded as unacceptable. One coroner investigating the death of three toddlers observed that it was “not fair to drivers that parents should allow their children to play in the street”. The NPFA even campaigned against the temporary closure of streets to enable safer play, preferring instead to encourage children into playgrounds.
By the 1930s, there were nearly 50 playgrounds managed by the London County Council in the capital, with 26 in Manchester and many more elsewhere. The burgeoning demand for equipment saw manufacturing companies adapt their production lines. The entrepreneur and inventor who had the greatest impact on this development was Charles Wicksteed.
- Read more | “Leisure was built into the whole shopping experience” | Annie Gray on the history of the high street
On the back of earlier commercial success, Wicksteed created a public park in his home town of Kettering in Northamptonshire. Disappointed that so few children visited, he decided to make it a more exciting place to play. And so he designed a raft of products inspired by Edwardian amusement park rides in Great Yarmouth and Blackpool. These included the joy wheel (an early roundabout), the jazz swing (commonly known as a plank swing today), the ocean wave (witch’s hat) and large wooden slides.
A progressive liberal, Wicksteed hoped to create healthy, happy and free childhoods. Girls and boys, children and adults were all welcome to play together in the Wicksteed Park playground. Writing in 1929, he suggested that “the poor little gutter-children with all their hardships, playing with mud in freedom, are far happier than many well-to-do children under the perfect control and sad dullness and weariness of a too-much-ordered life”. His playground equipment was designed to be so robust that children could play with it however they liked.
And we’re not just talking British children. Soon, municipalities from across the globe were placing orders with the Northamptonshire entrepreneur. In fact, by the late 1930s, Wicksteed’s company had equipped more than 4,000 playgrounds – from South Africa to Hong Kong and Venezuela to the tiny South Atlantic island of St Helena.
Wicksteed’s advocacy and wider shifts in social values meant that few playgrounds were segregated by gender by the late 1930s. But playgrounds now looked the same, no matter where they were in the world.
Natural evolution
Back in Britain, swings, slides and roundabouts became an essential feature of efforts to redevelop British towns and cities in the mid-20th century. Slum clearance schemes, including those in Caryl Gardens in Liverpool and Quarry Hill in Leeds, positioned the playground at the centre of new blocks of flats. Sites requisitioned or damaged during the Second World War were also put back into playful use. Paddington Recreation Ground had been repurposed as a municipal piggery during the war, producing more than 300 tonnes of meat. It was reopened in 1948 by Field Marshal Montgomery with manufactured play equipment, a paddling pool and a sandpit. Town planners working on Plymouth’s reconstruction designed a network of more than 100 playgrounds in public parks and on bomb-damaged sites across the city.
The playground explosion may have been a big hit with children but, to many adults, it was a little dull. In fact, in the eyes of some commentators, Britain’s new wave of standardised playgrounds – with their uniform climbing frames and stark tarmac surfaces – were “as bleak as barrack squares and just as boring”. A postwar movement of progressive educationalists, landscape architects and artists, headed by Lady Allen of Hurtwood, envisaged a more fulfilling future for Britain’s outdoor play spaces – and it was one that promoted creativity, self-expression and contact with the natural world.
As an experiment, bombsites were converted into adventure playgrounds so that children could build with scrap materials, dig in the mud, nurse fires and tend small gardens. Sculptures, decommissioned steam rollers and immobilised trucks were meant to inspire make believe. Commando playgrounds incorporated tree trunks, suspended tyres and concrete pipes to provide “not only a free and varied outlet for energy but a spur to imagination and invention”. Landscape playgrounds had undulations, banks, trees and bushes as a more naturalistic setting for creative play. In a handful of cities, traffic playgrounds provided playful amusement and taught children about road safety.
Children’s responses to these play spaces were seldom recorded. Instead, we must look to the work of sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s to get a sense of how playgrounds were used. One study of nearly 6,000 children found that swings and roundabouts primarily acted as a meeting point for friends and play mates, who then went on to play beyond the playground. Another study showed that more children preferred sandpits and paddling pools over manufactured equipment.
Overtaken by the car
These doubts about the value of the playground were reinforced by events in the later 20th century. Funding cuts meant that local authorities increasingly found it difficult to maintain play spaces. In 1973, Colin James, the bishop of Stepney, felt that many councils had got their priorities badly wrong, suggesting that “it is not through malice or evil intent I am sure, but they have been overtaken by the motorcar and other matters so that play provision has been left behind”.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as social housing and state-run industries were privatised, the children’s playground remained a publicly owned and communally funded place for play – although not without its share of problems. Tabloid and broadsheet newspapers reported on the risk of parasitic infection from the snapping pincers of toxocara canis (dog roundworm) and the threat posed by paedophiles. Further funding cuts meant that many playgrounds became derelict, with the journal Play Times even running a monthly award for the worst playground in the country.
National government has rarely been interested in play provision. But in 2008, £235m was allocated to local authorities across England to improve playground provision. Accompanying guidance, called Design for Play, encouraged councils and designers to think more creatively about play provision. However, the implementation of policies of austerity from 2010 saw funding and guidance withdrawn.
Despite periods of neglect, the playground remains an everyday feature of British urban life. This is hardly a surprise given our almost universal – and often nostalgic – experience of using them. Children still enjoy digging in sandpits, the rhythm of the swings, and the trepidation of scaling tall climbing structures.
But we must not let this nostalgia mask problems with the playground concept. As the campaign group Make Space for Girls has shown, there is still much to do to ensure public spaces are welcoming to all children and young people. The obsession with playgrounds, often tucked away in the corner of a park, might even be seen as a distraction from wider efforts to create child-friendly towns and cities in which children rather than cars dominate our streets.
The long history of the playground helps us to understand how we arrived in the present. But it should not stand in the way of efforts to create inclusive and humane urban environments for the future.
Ropes, pulls and a joy wheel
Five fixtures of the British playground. But which was your favourite? 1. Swings Children and adults have long swung from ropes tied to the branch of a tree, while ingenious Victorian children fashioned rope swings from lamp posts. More formal swings were often a feature of travelling fairs and circuses. In the 1890s, bylaws for Victoria Park in London limited the cost to 1d a go. 2. Roundabouts Roundabouts evolved from an Edwardian amusement park ride called the joy wheel, and were found in both Great Yarmouth and Blackpool from around 1913. The ride was a polished mechanical disc that used high speed and centrifugal force to dislodge its adult riders. Charles Wicksteed marketed a joy wheel from the 1920s. Costing £40 and made from metal tubes, it was self-propelled, smaller and included plenty of places to hold on. 3. Sandpits German educator Fredrich Froebel promoted the use of indoor sandpits in the classroom from the 1820s. Sand first appeared in Victoria Park, London in 1893 when the park superintendent reported “a novel mode of enjoyment has been provided for the little children of the East End in the form of a sea-sand pit which is apparently much appreciated”. 4. Climbing frames Victorian gymnasiums for children and adults included wooden frames that supported ladders, ropes and poles for climbing. Climbing frames really took off from the 1960s as manufacturers experimented with new materials, including Playstyle’s ‘playcubes’ which comprised a series of interconnected plastic polyhedrons. 5. Slides Slides became a common playground feature in the early 20th century. Initially made from wood, they were soon constructed from metal with safety railings at the top. In the 1920s, a grand ‘joy slide’ was installed in St James’s Churchyard, Bermondsey, paid for by Arthur Carr, owner of the nearby Peek Freans biscuit factory.
Dr Jon Winder is a historian of modern Britain at the University of Liverpool
This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Historical anniversaries | Junehttps://www.historyextra.com/on-this-day/this-month-in-history-historical-anniversaries-june/2025-06-01T05:00:00.000Z1 June
1670: Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, brokers the Secret Treaty of Dover
Under the terms of the deal that Henrietta arranged at Dover, her rich brother-in-law, Louis XIV, would pay Charles II, her brother, £230,000 a year, while Charles would send 60 ships and 4,000 infantry to help the French in their war against the Dutch.
Then came an even more shocking detail. Charles, who had long been a Catholic sympathiser but had kept it secret so as not to alienate his Protestant subjects, promised to come out as a Catholic convert. In return, France would pay him an extra £160,000 and intervene if his people rebelled against him.
2 June
1962: The ‘battle of Santiago’
Chile beat Italy 2–0 in an ill-tempered World Cup group match, which saw numerous fights, police intervention and two Italian players sent off. The British referee, Ken Aston, is said to have later observed: “I wasn’t reffing a football match. I was acting as an umpire in military manoeuvres.”
- On the podcast | World Cup history: everything you wanted to know
3 June
1937: Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson marry
Six months after Edward VIII had abdicated the British throne in order to marry the woman he loved, he was united, once and for all, with Wallis Simpson. The venue was the Chateau de Candé, near Tours, which was owned by the half-American millionaire Charles Bedaux.
4 June
1989: Hundreds die in Tiananmen Square
In the early hours of 4 June, the army cleared the square by force. Government officials initially claimed the action resulted in no deaths – later revised to about 200; other estimates suggest that as many as 1,000 people lost their lives. Either way, the result was the same: the protesters had been defeated.
5 June
1832: Angry Parisians man the barricades in a two-day uprising against the Orleanist king Louis-Philippe
The June Rebellion was triggered by the food shortages of the late 1820s, a devastating cholera epidemic and the death of the popular general Jean Lamarque, who had become a hero to the working classes of Paris. At his funeral on 5 June, republican demonstrators rallied the crowds, waving red flags and calling for “liberty or death”. The mood turned ugly, and by the evening rioters had taken control of much of central and eastern Paris, throwing up barricades.
6 June
1513: The Swiss defeats the French at the battle of Novara in Northern Italy
This forced Louis XII of France to abandon his attempt to control Milan.
Famous births in June
7 June 1811
James Young Simpson, Scottish doctor who discovered the anaesthetic qualities of chloroform
8 June 1810
Robert Schumann, German Romantic compose
9 June 1812
Johann Gottfried Galle, German astronomer
10 June 1913
Edward Penley Abraham, English biochemist
11 June 1832
Lucy Holcombe Pickens, socialite and archetypal ‘Southern Belle’
13 June 1831
James Clerk Maxwell, physicist and mathematician
13 June 1910
Mary Whitehouse, campaigner against what she saw as declining moral standards on TV and radio and founder of the National Viewers and Listeners Association
14 June 1811
Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and writer
15 June 1330
Edward the Black Prince, the eldest son of King Edward III and Philippa of Hainault
15 June 1843
Edvard Hagerup Grieg, composer and pianist
18 June 1511
Bartolomeo Ammannati, architect and sculptor
19 June 1623
Blaise Pascal, scientist, mathematician and philosopher
20 June 1763
Theobald Wolfe Tone, Irish nationalist and political writer
20 June 1912
Anthony Malcolm Buckeridge, children’s author
23 June 1763
Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte
23 June 1910
Jean Anouilh, French dramatist
24 June 1850
Herbert Kitchener, British soldier
25 June 1799
David Douglas, Scottish traveller and botanist
27 June 1462
Future Louis XII of France
27 June 1880
Helen Keller, author, political activist, lecturer, and the first deaf-blind person to be awarded a bachelor of arts degree
28 June 1712
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher and composer
29 June 1911
Bernard Herrmann, composer and frequent collaborator with film director Alfred Hitchcock
7 June
1512: The Marquess of Dorset lands in Spain with 10,000 men to join Ferdinand of Aragon in an attack on France
In fact, Ferdinand was more interested in securing Navarre, and the expedition achieved nothing.
8 June
1929: Margaret Bondfield becomes Britain’s first female cabinet minister
Former shop worker Margaret Bondfield is appointed minister of labour in Ramsay MacDonald’s new government.
9 June
1865: Charles Dickens survives a deadly train crash
At 3.13pm, as Dickens’ train sped across a viaduct at Staplehurst, it hit a missing section of the track, which had been removed by workmen. The train was thrown into the air, plunging seven carriages into the quagmire below. Dickens’s carriage was dragged partially off the bridge.
- Read more | The history of railways in Britain
Luckily, the author was able to clamber free. He then rushed to the carcass of the crushed train to offer his help. He must have been greeted by a shocking scene: 10 passengers had died in the crash and 40 more were injured.
10 June
1190: One of medieval Europe’s most powerful crusaders, Barbarossa, drowns, leaving his army in disarray
On 10 June, Frederick Barbarossa’s army was just outside Silifke, in southern Turkey, and attempting to cross the river Saleph, when something went terribly wrong. Medieval chroniclers told different stories: some said the emperor had decided to go for a dip to cool off on a sweltering day, but others said that he had been leading his troops across the ford when his horse slipped and threw him into the cold water. Some claimed that Barbarossa drowned, others that he died from a heart attack brought on by the shock.
11 June
323 BC: Alexander the Great dies
Accounts of Alexander’s death differ widely. The most popular, told by the historian Plutarch, holds that he was taken ill after a drinking session with his friend Medius of Larissa. In the next few days, Alexander developed a fever. Although he managed to put in an appearance before his worried troops, his condition worsened until he could no longer speak. At last, some time in the night between 10 and 11 June, he died.
- Read more about the death of Alexander the Great
12 June
1942: Anne Frank is given a diary by her parents
Anne had seen the red-and-white autograph book in a shop a few days earlier and had pointed it out to her father. Like so many teenagers, she loved the thought of having a diary. “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone,” she wrote in her very first entry, “and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”
So it proved. A month later, Anne’s family, who were Jewish, went into hiding. She kept up her diary until August 1944, when the family were arrested by the Nazis and sent to the camps. The following spring, she died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen.
13 June
1917: German bombs smash into a Poplar school
When the German bomber appeared overhead, there was no time to react. The bomb punched through the roof, killing a 13-year-old girl. It ploughed through the floor to the next level, mortally wounding a 12-year-old boy. Finally, it crashed into the infants’ classroom, where it exploded.
Sixteen infants were killed and several dozen injured. The survivors huddled sobbing in the playground, while the teachers went to search the building. It was a horrific scene, breaking the hearts of all who saw it.
14 June
1381: The archbishop of Canterbury loses his head
Rebels discovered Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury (whom they regarded as one of their chief oppressors), cowering in the chapel of the White Tower.
Unfortunately for Sudbury, his captors weren’t in a merciful mood, and he was soon dragged away to Tower Hill to meet his maker. It allegedly took eight clumsy blows to remove his head, which was then paraded through the streets before being impaled on London Bridge.
15 June
1648: Margaret Jones is executed in Massachusetts for witchcraft
“At this court,” begins the 15 June 1648 entry in the journal of John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, “one Margaret Jones, of Charlestown, was indicted and found guilty of witchcraft, and hanged for it.”
Jones’s death marked the beginning of a witch-hunt craze that would claim the lives of around 80 New England colonists over the next century.
- Quiz | Would you have been accused of witchcraft?
16 June
1487: Henry VII decisively wins the last clash in the Wars of the Roses at the battle of Stokes Field
Although Lincoln’s mercenaries carried the latest continental firearms, the king’s archers proved decisive, their arrows raining mercilessly down onto the Yorkist ranks, with one chronicler likening the stricken men to hedgehogs. By the end of the battle, the Yorkists had turned and fled, many of them butchered in a gully known afterwards as the Bloody Gutter. The death toll may have been higher than 4,000. Now the civil wars really were over.
17 June
1462: Vlad the Impaler massacres 15,000
In the early hours of 17 June, Vlad attacked, accompanied by several thousand of his best men. As one Wallachian veteran later recalled: “During the entire night he sped like lightning in every direction and caused great slaughter.” The fighting went on until four in the morning, leaving the Ottoman army in utter consternation. And then, according to the Wallachian veteran, Vlad “returned to the same mountain from which he had come. No one dared pursue him, since he had caused such terror and turmoil”.
In Romania, the Night Attack of Târgoviste is remembered as a national triumph. But it also cemented Vlad’s reputation as one of the most fearsome warriors of the age.
18 June
1178: Monks witness an extraordinary lunar event
Some time after sunset, the monks had noticed something extraordinary in the sky. “Now,” Gervase of Canterbury wrote, “there was a bright new moon... its horns were tilted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake.”
Today, many lunar experts believe the monks had been watching the formation of the moon’s enormous Giordano Bruno crater, named after an Italian philosopher. It was probably created by the impact of an asteroid or comet, which would explain the burst of molten matter seen by the monks – though they, of course, had no way of understanding what it was they had witnessed.
19 June
1829: Establishment of the Metropolitan Police
Parliament passes Home Secretary Robert Peel’s ‘Act for improving the Police in and near the Metropolis’.
Famous deaths in June
4 June 1941
Wilhelm II, former German kaiser
9 June 1870
Charles Dickens, writer
11 June 1183
Henry ‘the Young King’, son and heir of King Henry II
11 June 1970
Alexander Kerensky, leader of the Russian provisional government in 1917
14 June 1883
Edward FitzGerald, poet, student of the battle of Naseby and translator
16 June 1929
Bramwell Booth, eldest son of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army
17 June 1862
Charles, 1st Earl Canning, governor-general of India during the mutiny of the Bengal army in 1857
23 June 1839
Lady Hester Stanhope, society hostess and niece of Pitt the Younger
25 June 1533
Mary Tudor, widow of Louis XII of France and wife of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk
25 June 1912
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Dutch-born classical painter
27 June 1831
Sophie Germain, French mathematician
29 June 1509
Lady Margaret Beaufort, widow of Edmund Tudor and mother of Henry VII
30 June 1660
William Oughtred, English mathematician
20 June
1837: Victoria becomes queen
Victoria recorded in her diary: “The archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to see me. I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room (only in my dressing gown) and alone, and saw them. Lord Conyngham then acquainted me that my poor uncle, the king, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes past two this morning, and consequently that I am queen.”
21 June
1529: Catherine of Aragon causes a courtroom sensation
“Sir,” she implored, “I beseech you for all the loves there hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice. Take of me some pity and compassion.” The spectators sat in silence, listening to the queen pleading on her knees in her deep Spanish accent. “I take God and all the world,” she said, “to witness that I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife, ever comfortable to your will and pleasure.”
22 June
1948: The Windrush arrives at Tilbury
On a grey, misty day in June 1948, a former German passenger liner arrived at Tilbury docks on the Thames Estuary – to a storm of media attention.
23 June
1940: Hitler tours Paris
To Speer, the Nazis’ chief architect, Hitler waxed lyrical about the beauties of the French capital. But he was determined that Germany could do better. “Berlin,” he said later, “must be more beautiful. When we are finished in Berlin, Paris will be only a shadow.”
24 June
1981: The Humber Bridge opens for traffic
Linking Yorkshire and Lincolnshire it was, at the time of its opening, the world’s longest single span suspension bridge.
25 June
1876: General Custer meets his match at Little Bighorn
What exactly happened at Little Bighorn will never be known. Confident that he had found Sitting Bull’s camp, General Custer divided his troops into three, hoping to cut his opponents off. But the initial assault went wrong and after less than an hour, Custer found himself trapped on the hill above the river, at the mercy of a vast force of war-whooping Sioux fighters.
Because there were few survivors, we do not even know exactly how he died. Some say he was cut down by an enemy bullet; others that he was wounded and then shot by his brother to spare him from agonising torture. Either way, the battle brought the end of Custer’s life – and the beginning of his legend.
26 June
AD 363: A Persian spear fells Roman Emperor Julian
On 26 June, Julian had thrown himself into a fray after marching on the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, a historian on the emperor’s military staff, “when suddenly a cavalry spear, grazing the skin of his arm, pierced his side and fixed itself in the bottom of his liver”.
27 June
1954: Brazil and Hungary’s World Cup quarter-final descends into an all-out brawl
“Never in my life have I seen such cruel tackling, the cutting down of opponents as if with a scythe, followed by threatening attitudes and sly jabs when officialdom was engaged elsewhere,” reported The Times correspondent.
At the final whistle, the Brazilians once again invaded the pitch, and the fighting in the dressing room was so intense that Hungary’s manager needed four stitches in his face. For the referee, Arthur Ellis from Halifax, the events that day were a terrible disappointment: “I thought it was going to be the greatest game I’d ever see. I was on top of the world,” he said later. “Whether politics and religion had something to do with it I don’t know, but they behaved like animals.”
28 June
1846: The saxophone is invented
Having devised instruments such as the saxhorn and the saxotromba, Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax hits the jackpot with his patent for a single-reed instrument made of brass. Once again he names it after himself – the saxophone.
29 June
1613: The Globe theatre burns to the ground
The production company clearly wanted the play All Is True – which centres on Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon – to go off with a bang. And so, at a climactic moment in the performance, a cannon was fired towards the theatre’s famous open roof.
The explosion certainly made an impact, but for all the wrong reasons. Sparks set the thick thatched roof smouldering and, before long, smoke was creeping through the rafters. At first, nobody in the crowd seemed to notice – according to one onlooker, “their eyes [were] more attentive to the show” – but soon the fire had become impossible to ignore.
Remarkably, nobody was hurt in the blaze, though one man’s breeches caught alight (his skin was literally saved when someone soaked him in beer).
The Globe itself wasn’t so lucky and the inferno quickly swept through the building. The theatre that had been built by Shakespeare’s playing company in 1599, and had puton some of his most famous plays, was burned to cinders.
30 June
1934: Hitler tightens his grip on power through a spate of ruthless killings
In a brutal purge known as the Night of the Long Knives, dozens, possibly hundreds of people were killed. The victims included not just the SA leadership, but old Nazi comrades who had fallen out with Hitler, senior figures in the Catholic Centre Party and, most famously, Hitler’s predecessor as Germany’s chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher. Röhm himself was shot after refusing to commit suicide. Now Hitler’s power was unchecked. For as he boasted to the Reichstag, the Night of the Long Knives had confirmed his status as “the supreme judge of the German people”.
Find out about anniversaries in previous months...
]]>The dark side of Dickenshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/video-dark-side-of-dickens/2024-05-08T12:37:39.000ZCharles Dickens was a master of managing his personal brand. In fact, almost everything we know about him comes from one biography, written by his friend John Forster. But, if you dig a little deeper, strange biographical inconsistencies begin to emerge. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, Helena Kelly outlines her new theories on the truth behind the stories Dickens told about everything from his family and childhood to his sex life, and how they paint a much darker picture of the author’s life.
View Green Video on the source website]]>The dark side of Dickenshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-dark-side-of-dickens-podcast-helena-kelly/2023-11-24T07:47:03.000ZCharles Dickens was a master of managing his personal brand. In fact, almost everything we know about him comes from one biography, written by his friend John Forster. But, if you dig a little deeper, strange biographical inconsistencies begin to emerge. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, Helena Kelly outlines her new theories on the truth behind the stories Dickens told about everything from his family and childhood to his sex life, and how they paint a much darker picture of the author’s life.
Helena Kelly is the author of The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens (Icon, 2023)
]]>Inside debtors’ prisons: what life was like for people jailed in Georgian Britainhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/debtors-prisons-life-inside-jails/2023-05-09T06:12:06.000ZIn May 1728, the 36-year-old trumpet player John Grano discovered his luck had finally run out. Grano’s debts had been piling up for weeks. Business had not been good of late but his spending on fine clothes and finer wines had not slowed. By Thursday 30th his creditors had finally had enough of Grano’s empty promises and applied to the court for his arrest. He was seized by a bailiff in the street and instructed to pay up or face the consequences of his spending.
Grano was not panicked – this was hardly the first time he had faced his creditors’ threats. However, this time there was no deal to be done, no new extension to be found and, as he wrote in his diary that night, no “brother, relation or friend came nigh me” to bail him out. Unable to pay, Grano was taken to “this Hell between 7&8 at night” – the Marshalsea debtors’ prison.
- Read more | Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain
The debtors’ prison was not a distant threat in 18th-century England but a feature of everyday life. Almost every town had a jail, and some maintained several – when Grano was arrested, at least 15 were operating in London. Prisons stood on bridges, on the edges of marketplaces, and in the middle of fashionable high streets. Many castles in Britain were converted into jails, meaning that in the countryside, debtors’ prisons dominated the landscape for miles around. While some were grim dungeons, others were built in opulent style, looking more like palaces than prisons.
York’s debtors’ prison – the only purpose-built jail still standing today – cost the town more than £8,000 in 1705 and its fabulous baroque styling ensured it quickly joined the medieval walls and cathedral on the city’s burgeoning tourist trail. Visiting shortly after it opened, the spy and travel writer John Macky described it as “by much the finest, as well as the pleasantest [prison] in England”.
What were debtors’ prisons?
Debtors’ prisons were not just an abstract reminder to look after your money, but a functioning system that processed thousands of men and women across the country every year. Many more faced a real possibility of their debts catching up with them, with as many as one in 25 adult men at risk of imprisonment in London by the end of the 18th century. Few people in cities would not have known at least one friend, relative or co-worker who had been arrested.
It is easy to assume debtors’ prisons were a cruel medieval hangover where the poor were sent to die, inevitably brushed aside by enlightened thinking and the rise of a rational capitalist society. However, while imprisonment for debt had been introduced in the 13th century, it remained on a small scale and focused on the merchant class until the commercial explosion from the 1660s.
As the law around arrest liberalised and the costs of obtaining a warrant collapsed, the debtors’ prison entered its heyday. The prison was an integral part of the developing economy. Almost everyone in England was in debt. For most, this was not due to the carefree spending habits of the likes of John Grano, but simply the way people did business.
Money was still based on the weight of the gold or silver it contained but, since the late 16th century, supplies of both had been insufficient to meet inflation or demand. Rampant counterfeiting and coin-clipping – the illicit practice of removing small pieces from the outer edge of a coin to use in forging counterfeits – meant that even circulating currency might not be accepted by traders.
- Read more | Debtors’ prisons: how bad were they?
People regularly had the wealth to buy, but not the cash to do so (storing their money not in gold, but in land, goods or debts owed to them). Most buying was, therefore, done on credit, whether for everyday goods like bread, luxuries like a new watch, business supplies to make watches, or even paying the watch maker’s assistant’s wages. The credit of merchants and the state was beginning to look like that of modern high finance, but most everyday credit was given without interest or even without specified terms of repayment.
These were handshake agreements “to pay” when demanded without a written contract. The value of a buyer’s credit – the amount they could buy on credit and, in some cases, the length of time allowed for repayment – was based on their reputation in the community, for example increased by regular church attendance or decreased by incidents of public drunkenness, rather than their physical wealth. As the person of the buyer determined the value of their credit, it was the person of the buyer that was at stake when they defaulted.
Liberal credit kept the wheels of commerce spinning at the pace of demand rather than the glacial movement of silver. Most people did pay when they had cash, or at least when asked to by creditors. Consumers were reminded of the importance of prompt payment by shopkeepers, in the books they read, and every Sunday from the pulpit. In 1718, the bishop of Ely preached to his flock that God commanded money should always be put “first, to the payment of… debt, and secondly, to the sustenance of [your] children”.
But when polite reminders were not enough, greater pressure was needed to ensure money changed hands. Suing in court was expensive and slow – shopkeepers who had debts of their own could not wait. An arrest, by contrast, required only swearing to the reality of the debt and payment of a shilling. Once a bailiff caught up with the debtor, they could be held indefinitely until creditors were satisfied.
What was life like in a debtors’ prison?
As Grano discovered when he reached the Marshalsea, being imprisoned without limit was far from a death sentence. Prison might even be comfortable. Arriving in the lodge, he was greeted by the Master Turnkey (the prison warden’s second in command) who “made me set down & offer’d to treat me with something to drink”. He was then asked “if I was for the [more comfortable and private] Master’s Side and if so wither I was provided with five shillings advance for a fortnight’s Beding, a shilling for sheets, and sixpence for the bedmaker”.
- On the podcast | Dickensian horrors or economic successes? Alexander Wakelam reveals how debtors’ prisons operated
For debtors, imprisonment was not free. As well as having to pay fees for their own commitment (and their eventual release) they could also choose to pay rent on a room in the Master’s Side. There were free Common Sides – though, as a visitor to one such in London’s Wood Street prison discovered, there were good reasons to pay:
“We entered a sort of dark hall, where we saw some people eating and drinking with little seeming concern. The smell of the place was almost intolerable. I observed, the beds of such as had any, were placed in ranges, as our shelves, over each other; and those who had none, were obliged to lie upon the boards.”
At the Marshalsea, those on the Common Side were kept behind a high wall, out of sight and out of mind of the wealthier debtors. Master’s Side rooms were cleaner, more comfortable, and offered greater privacy, even if you had to share a bed (a not uncommon situation in 18th-century renting), while rent was usually below market rates. One guide book for imprisoned debtors recommended the third-floor rooms at the King’s Bench prison due to the “pleasing view of the Surry and Kentish hills”.
Debt imprisonment did not end the rigid class structures of 18th-century Britain. Grano had no money on him but assured the Turnkey that he would by tomorrow and, given his fashionable status, was provided his first night’s rent on credit.
Were women sent to debtors’ prisons?
Separate wards were also usually provided for female debtors. There were no women’s prisons, and so jails were mixed spaces. Sometimes women in the prison were not actually imprisoned, but the wives of male prisoners. They lived there voluntarily, often with their children, and were thus able to leave each day to work or buy goods. Married women were protected from debt imprisonment, though only because they could not own debt independently of their husbands.
Single women and widows, however, had no legal protections against imprisonment and, if engaged in trade, were just as likely as men to be arrested. In the 1720s, around one in three prisoners in London were female – though by 1800 that figure had plunged to around one in 20, due to higher rates of marriage. Despite women usually sleeping in their own ward within the prison, there was no rigid separation between the sexes and prisoners regularly mingled in communal yards during the day.
- On the podcast | Elaine Farrell shares the stories of women incarcerated in 19th-century Ireland
Invited or not, Grano frequently visited the female ward. On one occasion, having barged into the room of a group of women during dinner, he noted how he was given the cold shoulder: “I had a very cold bow, not so much as how do you do or will you seat yourself.” There was apparently little to prevent Grano from walking in or staying, as he “took my seat on the opposite bed… and as I was not spoken to, said nothing”.
Other debtors interacted more successfully and the comedic actress Mary Wells, during her imprisonment at the Fleet in 1797, actually married a fellow debtor in the prison, treating the other prisoners to a “great feast” reported extensively in the newspapers.
How did people secure their release from debtors’ prisons?
Grano adapted to prison life – though perhaps not always as his creditors intended. He spent much of his time in the prison’s coffeehouse, playing backgammon and flirting unsuccessfully with female prisoners. Not all prisoners were as relaxed about the situation in which they found themselves as Grano.
Unlimited imprisonment was an excellent motivator to find money as soon as possible – and so most inmates directed all of their energies towards achieving that, whatever the personal cost. The result is that more than 90 per cent of inmates managed to secure their release within a year. Many tasted freedom much earlier than that. When the explorer Henry Timberlake was imprisoned in the early 1760s, he actually had the cash on him, and so was released that same day. Paying, however, left him with “but two shillings left” of his planned expedition fund.
Other prisoners sent word to friends and family for help, though not always successfully. Elizabeth Foote, confined in Truro prison from December 1742, wrote to her son in London: “Dear Sam, I am in prison for debt. Come and assist your loving mother”, only to receive a reply from the Fleet prison: “Dear mother, so am I.”
Others began selling property. Some debtors parted with prized luxuries to regain their freedom, but others took more drastic courses of action. In 1738, Michael Dicq, apprentice to a Westminster jeweller, appeared before the city begging for assistance as his master had “sold all his tools and goods” to get out of prison, leaving Michael unable to work and “almost starved”.
What work could prisoners do?
Many prisoners accepted that freedom was not coming immediately and so threw themselves into work. Most debtors were middle-class dealers and craftspeople (few inmates came from the working poor, as they were rarely offered enough credit to be worth imprisoning) and often chose to practise their trade within the confines of the prison.
When a parliamentary inquiry investigated life in the prisons in 1792, it spoke to John Stanley, a silk-weaver at the King’s Bench prison. Stanley was keen to be moved to a different room as “I can’t carry on my trade here”. He had recently been contracted to weave cloth within the prison but “as the trade in which I was employed requires… much length and light”, his current room was unsuitable. Though Stanley was frustrated, the only thing apparently stopping him from moving his loom into the prison was the ceiling.
Grano also eventually got to work, offering music lessons to the children of local craftsmen. Debtors’ prisons offered cheap goods and services for those who would otherwise find them too expensive. Prisoners like Grano had to take what rates they could. At Wood Street the committee found “one attorney, a carver, a taylor, a pattern drawer, and a cabinet maker” plying their trades on the Master’s Side.
This suggests that it wasn’t uncommon for those in need of cheap legal advice, new shirts, or even furniture to pop into the local jail. Prisoners also sold among themselves. The keeper of Newgate prison waged a constant battle against the wives of debtors who smuggled in gin under their skirts for sale in the prison’s black market. Others acted as servants to richer prisoners like Grano, who employed a maid from the Common Side and was shaved by an imprisoned barber.
The Marshalsea’s coffeehouse was run by a prisoner called Mother Bradshaw from her rooms. Upstairs, Grano occasionally dined at “Titty Doll’s”, a restaurant run out of the rooms of Mr and Mrs McDonnell. Such enterprises certainly helped some incarcerated debtors repay their creditors.
What happened to those who could not pay for their release?
Many prisoners had no hope of raising the funds to meet their creditors’ demands – no matter how desperate those demands grew. They would never pay their way out of prison. This presented the authorities with the spectre of overcrowding, with hundreds of debtors potentially languishing in prison for years. To head off this prospect, parliament passed a series of amnesties releasing debtors if they turned over all their remaining assets to their creditors.
Around 10–15 per cent of prisoners took up this option, though it was almost always a last resort: while those who paid their debts returned to society with their credit restored, those freed by parliament were shunned. Grano, whose many money-making schemes (including organising a concert, writing new music and even being allowed to play in the lord mayor’s annual parade) never seemed to bring success, was one of the latter. In September 1729, after more than a year at the Marshalsea, he walked free; we know little of his subsequent life until his death in 1746.
Almost 100 years later, another resident of the Marshalsea walked free. Unlike Grano, John Dickens spent just three months incarcerated in the south London prison. However, as his son Charles would later make clear, even this “short” imprisonment was devastating to the family.
In his novel Little Dorrit, when William Dorrit (an analogy for the author’s father) is told the release he has been dreaming of for 20 years is to be delayed by “but a few hours”, the old man breaks into tears and, “with a sudden passion”, dismisses the insignificance of the delay: “You talk very easily of hours, sir! How long do you suppose, sir, that an hour is to a man who is choking for want of air?” The Dickens family had been ripped apart by John’s imprisonment, Charles having to leave school and enter the boot blacking factory he would later immortalise in David Copperfield to support the family.
Why was debt imprisonment so common?
The answer is that it worked. It meant creditors got paid and it helped commerce continue in an era of pre-modern credit. But while John Grano had a relatively pleasant time at the Marshalsea, the system shattered numerous families. Even those who returned to their lives and enjoyed commercial success were forever haunted, as was the young Charles Dickens, by their humiliating experience of imprisonment.
By the time Dickens wrote Little Dorrit in the 1850s, the economy had changed significantly. Credit had declined as a new reliance on wage labour took many out of the trade world, and the greater availability of coin meant people could actually pay for what they could afford. Most of the prisons closed out of a lack of business long before parliament finally abolished the practice of indefinite imprisonment for debt without trial in 1869.
Few lamented their loss. Charles Dickens certainly didn’t. Writing of the closure of the Marshalsea (but maybe, also, of the system as a whole), he declared: “It is gone now, and the world is none the worse without it.”
Alexander Wakelam is a research associate at the University of Cambridge and author of Credit and Debt in Eighteenth-Century England: An Economic History of Debtors’ Prisons (Routledge, 2020)
This article was first published in the April 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Did Charles Dickens invent Christmas as we know it today?https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/charles-dickens-dickensian-christmas-carol-scrooge/In 1843, with his fifth child on the way, Charles Dickens needed to publish a new bestseller to support his growing family, so he began writing a ghost story – one that would become one of his best-loved tales, the exemplar of the Dickensian Christmas: A Christmas Carol.
Written in just six weeks, Dickens financed the book’s publication himself due to a dispute with his publishers. The price was set at five shillings, so virtually everyone could afford it, and it proved so popular that around 6,000 copies were sold in a matter of days. An immediate smash with the public, it quickly spawned a range of ‘pirated’ copies forcing Dickens into a number of legal actions to protect his creation.
The writer and social critic’s motives were wider than simply telling a good story and the obvious financial benefits. Dickens had recently returned from a tour of northern England, where he had witnessed the struggles of everyday life for Britain’s poor. He had also been moved by his visits to ‘ragged schools’ – free charity schools that educated destitute children. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens found a subtle way of highlighting the plight of the poor.
- Read more | 5 Dickensian recipes – from French plums to beefsteak pudding
It’s the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly moneylender who hates Christmas and cares for nobody except himself. On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, who warns him that if he continues down his path of greed and selfishness, he will spend eternity in torment like Marley. Scrooge is then visited by three spirits of Christmas – past, present and future. He witnesses the hardships suffered by the family of Bob Cratchit (his underpaid clerk) and is shown what the Cratchits’ future might be without Scrooge’s help – poverty and the untimely death of the sickly Tiny Tim.
Horrified at seeing his own, unmourned death, and the fates of those around him due to his carelessness, Scrooge eventually repents. He gives money to charity, spends Christmas with his family, sends a turkey to the Cratchit family and gives Bob a pay rise. The new Scrooge is described as a good man who embodies the true spirit of Christmas. It’s believed that parts of the novel were inspired by Dickens’s own life: as a 12-year-old, around the time that his father was in debtors’ prison, he’d been forced into work, while Tiny Tim is thought to have been based on Dickens’s own nephew – who did not survive childhood.
- Listen: Telling spooky tales at Christmastime is a very old tradition. On this podcast, folklorist and historian Francis Young explains where the idea of the ghost story originates and what it tells us about approaches to the festive period
What is a Dickensian Christmas?
“Dickens, it may truly be said, is Christmas,” said the literature scholar VH Allemandy in 1921. However, important though he undoubtedly was, Dickens did not create Christmas. Rather, he reflected a general early 19th‑century interest in the season and was part of a widespread, particularly middle-class, desire to reinvigorate its ancient customs.
By the time of its publication, Christmas had become a sedate one-day affair – a far cry from the medieval Christmases that involved days of feasting and merriment.
Listen: From brawn to plum pottage, food historian Annie Gray takes us back to the raucous world of festive feasting in the medieval and Tudor eras
Dickens’s festive novel encouraged a reinvigoration of the holiday season. The tale conjures up the image of a perfect and nostalgic Victorian Christmas, full of turkey, mistletoe and goodwill; it remains so ingrained in popular culture that, even today, people who are stingy or miserly are often given the nickname of Scrooge.
At the time Dickens was writing his now world-famous story, he could have consulted an ever-burgeoning number of popular histories of Christmas such as TK Hervey’s Book of Christmas (1836), and his A History of the Christmas Festival, the New Year and their Peculiar Customs (1843), as well as Thomas Wright’s Specimens of Old Carols (1841). Dickens, being perfectly in-tune with Britain, therefore published his story at precisely the right moment. He was a massive player in a revival that was already under way, but he was not the sole instigator of it.
This article was originally published in 2012, written by Mark Connelly, professor of modern British history at the University of Kent, and updated in December 2019 with content that first appeared in BBC History Revealed
]]>Debtors’ prisons: Dickensian horrors or economic successes?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/debtors-prisons-podcast-alexander-wakelam/2022-11-30T09:41:30.000ZDebtors’ prisons were a major feature of Georgian society in England and Wales. But how did the idea of locking up debtors to make them pay their creditors actually work in reality? Dr Alexander Wakelam explains to David Musgrove why, and how, the system worked.
]]>Floating hell: the brutal history of prison hulkshttps://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/prison-hulks-britain-conditions-escapes-transportation-social-reform-charles-dickens/2022-10-27T21:34:07.000ZEarly one misty morning in 1855, Henry Mayhew and John Binny stepped aboard a dilapidated ship moored on the Thames. Its large wooden hull was studded with barred portholes; instead of flags, a rudimentary washing line hung between the ship’s masts. The overall impression was one of oppression and decay.
The Defence struck a curious contrast to the gleaming steamboats and sailboats streaming past: for one thing, rather than carrying passengers, it housed convicts. Formerly a naval man-of-war, it was now a prison ship, also known as a hulk.
Mayhew and Binny, both journalists and social reformers, had previously toured the prisons of London. They had inspected the solitary cells at Millbank, the exercise yards in Pentonville, and the female workrooms in Brixton. But the hulk system was unlike any other prison they had encountered.
The walls of this one were wooden, barely held together by rot. Led by a warder, the journalists descended into the belly of the ship. Here, each deck was divided by two rows of strong iron railings flanking a central passageway. Behind were open cells festooned with dingy hammocks, providing space for 240 men to sleep on each deck. As Mayhew and Binny looked on, a morning bell sounded and sleeping prisoners sprang into action, stowing hammocks, washing in buckets and scrubbing tables ready for breakfast.
If the scene inspired both wonder and despair in these men, their reactions were nothing new. For decades, prison reformers had protested at the use of hulks. And the Defence was not fit to be a prison, being nothing more than “a rotten leaky tub”.
Prison hulks: in numbers
4,280 The highest (average) total of inmates on prison hulks in England in a single year, 1842. Of those, 3,615 were transported to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), Australia. 216 The number of 10- to 15-year-olds incarcerated in hulks in England in 1841. Three of these boys were under 10 years old. 1 in 4 The approximate fatality rate of prisoners on board the hulk Justitia who died between August 1776, when it first received inmates, and March 1778. Out of a total of 632 convicts, 167 perished. 60 The total number of years that a hulk called Justitia operated at Woolwich. The first ship with that name was moored there from 1776 to 1802; its successor of the same name was used for 34 years, from 1814 to 1848. 216 The number of prisoners held on board the Defence in 1854 who were granted a pardon, out of a total of 819.
When and why was the prison hulk system introduced?
Hulks were first introduced in England in 1776 as a temporary measure to ease overcrowding in prisons. The conflict today known as the American Revolutionary War had broken out the previous year, abruptly halting the transportation of felons – men, women and children – to Britain’s North American colonies. Instead, ever-increasing numbers of inmates were crammed into various types of prisons across the country.
In an attempt to address the problem, parliament passed an act allowing the use of prison hulks, initially for two years. In lieu of transportation, male convicts would be sentenced to hard labour and imprisonment on disused ships on the Thames.
The contract for managing the first hulks, moored at Woolwich, was given to Duncan Campbell, a West Indies merchant and transporter of convicts who was appointed the first superintendent of prison hulks in England. He adapted his own ship, the Justitia, which had previously been used to transport convicts from London and Middlesex to Maryland and Virginia. Tearing down internal cabins, he installed bunks that allowed less than 50cm width for each man.
- Read more | Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain
The inmates reacted with horror to their new confinement. “On their first coming on board, the universal depression of spirits was astonishing,” wrote Campbell, “[and] they had a great dread of this punishment.” That depression and dread was well founded. Within months, sickness ripped through the Justitia. Of 632 men incarcerated on that hulk between August 1776 and 26 March 1778, 167 died – more than one in four. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves on shore, unless collected by relatives – or illicitly passed to anatomists for dissection.
In total, about 25 hulks were stationed along the Thames Estuary at Woolwich, Deptford, Chatham and Sheerness. Some operated for months, others for decades. And it wasn’t long before the Justitia and other hulks at Woolwich – including the Tayloe, Censor, Reception and Stanislaus – attracted the attention of prison reformers.
After philanthropist John Howard visited the Justitia in 1776, he reported to parliament that he could see from the sickly looks of prisoners that “some mismanagement was among them”. Many had no shirts, shoes or socks. They either had no bedding or shared a blanket, and they slept on wooden boards, with the healthy lying close to the sick prisoners. One convict told him that “he was ready to sink into the earth”.
Howard discovered that the “good, wholesome brown biscuit” that Campbell claimed to provide prisoners was in fact mere bags of crumbs or was “mouldy and green on both sides”. In 1776, one day’s rations to be shared by a “mess” of six convicts comprised five pounds of dry ship’s biscuit, half an ox cheek and three pints of split pea soup. On two days each week they ate oatmeal, five pounds of bread and two pounds of cheese. They drank weak beer and water filtered from the river.
Campbell initially permitted visiting family members to bring supplementary food but eventually forbade the practice as “they conveyed saws and other instruments for their escape” inside.
In short, living conditions were close to unbearable. In an 1819 memoir, swindler and thief James Hardy Vaux wrote of “the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin naturally produced by such a crowd of miserable inhabitants, the oaths and execrations constantly heard among them”.
Howard reported that convicts spoke to him in soft tones to avoid being overheard – and with good reason. Meanwhile, Vaux recalled how prisoners were beaten brutally by guards and overseers. He also claimed to have witnessed murder, suicide and robbery. “If I were to attempt a full description of the miseries endured in these ships,” he wrote, “I could fill a volume.”
What happened after the initial two years were up?
The system continued in use long after the initial two-year period mandated, proliferating over the following decades. Convicts suffered the same brand of brutality and deprivation on ships at Sheerness, Chatham, Deptford, Plymouth and Portsmouth. This mode of incarceration wasn’t restricted to the waterways of England, either. During the 19th century, the prison hulk system was exported to places such as Cork, Dublin, Gibraltar and even Bermuda.
The system reached a global peak in 1829, when an average of 5,550 prisoners were held on hulks in England and Bermuda. The vast majority of them were incarcerated for theft or related offences – anything from house breaking and highway robbery to stealing animals and picking pockets. Theft on board was, unsurprisingly, widespread: one inspector commented that “It appears to be their whole study to rob and plunder each other.”
Prisoners stole to buy alcohol from dockyard workers and guards who turned a blind eye. Gambling was forbidden but, as men were locked down beneath the hatches each night, they could roam their decks, playing dice and dominoes. Reformers argued that prisoners would never become better citizens if they were locked together in these “Floating Academies” and “Schools of Vice”. Locals complained of riotous noises at night, and guards were said to be afraid of descending to lower decks to settle fights and disturbances.
- On the podcast | Just how bad was life in Victorian prisons? How hard was hard labour, and how revolting was the food? Dr Rosalind Crone answers all the key questions on the history of British prisons
In 1787, when the “First Fleet” set out to transport convicts to Britain’s colony in Australia (replacing the now-lost colonies of North America), many on board had been selected from Campbell’s hulks. In 1794, 22-year old convict Richard Bevis petitioned to be sent to Botany Bay on the next available ship, rather than “wasting the prime of manhood in this receptacle for vice and misery” on the Stanislaus.
His fellow prisoner Edward Moseley asked to be “taken out of this floating hell”, stating he was “stout and robust, and every day go thro’ laborious work. I have three times had the gaol fever.”
- Read more | Your guide to transportation to Australia
Women were still held in prisons on land, but boys younger than 10 were routinely sent to the hulks. This mixing of men and boys was a source of great consternation among reformers, who wanted them kept separately. Chaplains visiting the hulks petitioned for segregation. “Let it be remembered,” one proclaimed, “that they are at present children, and so situated as to claim our sympathetic concern.”
It wasn’t until the 1820s that boys were removed to separate ships, where they learned trades such as carpentry and shoemaking. Until then, those convicts either too young or too old to work on shore during the day were left on board to clean the decks, prepare meals and care for the sick.
What jobs were prisoners made to do, and did they ever rebel?
For the others, daily life meant endless rounds of hard labour. The dockyards of Chatham, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Gibraltar and even Bermuda were built on the backs of men imprisoned on hulks. Convicts worked from morning till night in these places, building wharves and embankments, digging ditches and levelling earth to widen the riverbed and improve navigation for ships.
Dockyards were dangerous places for unskilled labourers. In 1825, convict Thom as Merrick died after being jammed between two timbers in the dockyard at Portsmouth. The following year at Portsmouth, convict Joseph French fractured his skull and died from timber falling from a cart. And in 1831, one prisoner complained that “there is nothing thought of a convict if he is hurt”, and that accidents happened frequently, “such as arms broke and legs; there are a great many amputations, from the falling of stones and timber”.
In the face of such danger and deprivation, it’s hardly surprising that prison hulks were powder kegs of violence and insurrection. In August 1802, The Morning Chronicle reported on a riot at Woolwich during which 14 convicts “armed with large clasp knives” rushed their guard threatening murder, demanding that he open the gate to the dockyard. They knocked him down, took the key and made their escape, pursued by several guards who shot at them.
One convict was shot from a distance of about 10 metres. “The bullet,” so the report revealed, “entered the left side of his head, which drove part of his skull and brains into his hat: he instantly fell lifeless to the ground.” Some of the rioters did escape, but others were rounded up by the Royal Artillery. Such desperadoes faced a flogging of up to 100 lashes, or being thrown into the hulk’s “black hole” – an isolated cell – with reduced rations.
Abandon ship: dramatic stories of escape attempts from prison hulks
A shot at freedom In 1811, The Times reported that 37 convicts had escaped together from a vessel at Woolwich. Using makeshift tools and saws stolen from the dock yards, the men “cut through the ceiling and timbers of the hulk just under her bends [and] made a hole sufficiently large for a man to creep out”. Taking advantage of a low tide leaving the ship beached on mudflats, the men waded through the mire to the shore and headed south of Woolwich in the direction of Shooter’s Hill, a place commonly associated with highway robberies. Fifteen of the men were recaptured. Horror story The testimony of Michael Cashmin highlights the horrors of the floating prisons. In April 1778, Cashmin escaped a hulk at Woolwich but was apprehended near Tottenham Court Road, still sporting part of a fetter on each leg. According to the Newgate Calendar, Cashmin was sent back to the hulks for a further 14 years, despite arguing at the Old Bailey that: “I was almost starved to death when I was there; there is never a man there but would escape from that place if he could: I would rather be hanged than be there.” Spades and axes In 1778, a large uprising erupted in the dockyards at Woolwich during a planned mass escape. Late one after noon, some 150 men (of 250 convicts working on the Thames at the time) abandoned their wheelbarrows and grabbed pikes from a nearby ship. Having armed themselves, the mob took up spades and carpenters’ axes, proceeding to the waterside to attempt escape via the sea wall. There they hurled showers of stones at the 20 armed militiamen who tried to stop them, and who eventually subdued the would-be escapees. Suspicious clothing Newspapers printed detailed descriptions of fugitives to alert the public. After John Mason escaped the Justitia in 1836, the Morning Post labelled him a “notorious and desperate burglar”. Describing him as stoutly built, with “scars on the right side of his head and on the back of his hand”, the newspaper advised civilians to look out for a man in the “grey dress of the hulks, with a piece of iron on one of his legs”. Prison uniforms stood out, so many escapees donned disguises. Michael Brothers, who escaped the Defence in 1856, disguised himself with a stolen hat and long overcoat – but his trousers, hastily sewn together from old bedding, aroused suspicion and he was soon recaptured. A great escape Perhaps the most famous convict to abscond from the hulks was fictional. In Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, serialised from 1860, the protagonist, Pip, helps convict Magwitch to escape. This “fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg… who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled” was recaptured on the Kent marshes and returned to the hulks, which Pip called “wicked Noah’s arks”.
By the 1830s and 1840s, hulk officers feared that influxes of “Swing Rioters” – disaffected agricultural workers – and Chartists demanding political reform would provoke mass mutiny and escape attempts on hulks. Less violent protests took the form of petitions asking for release or better rations. In 1800, a group of convicts on the Lion hulk at Portsmouth spoke of the “barbarity we receive from the officers on board”, and said that they were “starving for the want of provisions”.
Some prisoners asked for early pardons in recognition of injuries sustained in the dockyards; others tried to take up posts in the army and navy. Good behaviour didn’t guarantee success in such efforts, but in some cases it paid off. In 1834, 12-year-old David Brough from Dundee, given a positive character reference from bricklayers and masons in Woolwich dockyard, was pardoned.
Hulks had always had their critics but by the 1840s, with a new nationwide emphasis on reform and rehabilitation, they appeared ever more outmoded. In 1847, the hulks at Woolwich hit the headlines. It was feared that illegal dissections of dead prisoners were taking place on board; inmates felt they were being “allowed to die for the sake of their bodies to go to the school of anatomy”. The system was labelled “a disgrace to any country calling itself… civilised and Christian” by MP Thomas Duncombe.
In 1848, the Daily News singled out the hulk system as corrupt and negligent, observing that the system “continued, not withstanding its disastrous consequences: and it still flourishes – if that which only stagnates, debases, and corrupts, can be said to flourish”. This appraisal argued that hulks had “no redeeming feature”, and that the sole reason the system continued to operate was because convict labour was still of use to the government.
When Mayhew and Binny visited the Defence in 1855, they remarked with wonder that “a state of things so scandalous could last”. Two years later, the Defence burned down; its remaining inmates were moved to nearby prisons.
That same year, 1857, the hulk system ended in Britain, though hulks continued to be used as prisons in overseas colonies for several more years. A system of incarceration that was, Mayhew and Binny pointed out, as rotten as the wooden timbers of the Defence was finally consigned to a watery grave.
Anna McKay is a historian at the University of Liverpool specialising in the lives and journeys of prisoners across the British maritime world
This article was first published in the October 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>6 history articles about the Victorian erahttps://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/recommended-history-articles-victorian-era/2021-02-23T17:19:25.000Z
Queen Victoria and Albert’s relationship
The love story of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert is a tempestuous romance known the world over. But do you know about any of the men in Victoria’s life before Prince Albert? Author Helen Rappaport explores the suitors who attempted to win the hand of one of Europe’s most eligible women.
Read more about Queen Victoria's suitors
The horrors of Victorian medicine
In the modern age, we are fortunate to have such advances in medicine that surgery no longer carries such high risks as it once did. Anaesthetic was only coming into use during the mid 19th-century and before this people underwent amputations, tumour removals and other hideous procedures with no pain relief. Dr Lindsey Fitzharris takes us through the gruesome world of the Victorian hospital.
Read more about Victorian hospitals
Queen Victoria’s Indian confidant
Abdul Karim – whose story is told in the 2017 film Victoria and Abdul – was Queen Victoria’s Indian confidant and their friendship sent shockwaves through the royal household. Historian Shrabani Basu explores the fascinating story of this young man who became teacher and confidant to the ageing queen.
Read more about Abdul Karim
Charles Dickens: champion of the poor
Victorian writer Charles Dickens highlighted the plights and grim reality of the lives of Britain’s in his novels Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. Rosalind Crone uncovers how Dickens fought for social justice through his words.
Read more about Charles Dickens
Victoria, the warrior queen
During Victoria’s reign, the British empire underwent a massive period of expansion. This was achieved by a series of wars and conquests and Saul David explains how the young queen navigated these conflicts.
Read more about Queen Victoria's wars
Queen Victoria’s children
One fact that almost everyone knowns about Queen Victoria is that she had nine children. As monarch, it was her duty to ensure the future of her dynasty and set an example of the ideal family, but this didn’t mean her family life was all plain sailing. On the outside, the royal family exemplified the epitome of a traditional Victorian family but underneath, there were many tensions. Denys Blakeway explores the often-turbulent relationship Victoria had with her children.
Read more about Queen Victoria's children
Emma Slattery Williams is Staff Writer on BBC History Revealed
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