HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:31:53 GMT en hourly 1 I tried on THE dress from Pride and Prejudice. Here's how it felt https://www.historyextra.com/membership/i-tried-on-the-dress-from-pride-and-prejudice-video/ Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:30:05 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/i-tried-on-the-dress-from-pride-and-prejudice-video/ HistoryExtra's Lauren Good visits the costume house Cosprop in London, one of the world’s leading costumiers for the film, television and theatre industries, to try on some very special garments What's it like to wear some of the most iconic dresses from period drama?
HistoryExtra's Lauren Good visits the costume house Cosprop in London, one of the world’s leading costumiers for the film, television and theatre industries, to try on some very special garments.
Dressed by women's specialist costumier Clara Drumez, Lauren hears the techniques and tricks behind your favourite period drama costumes, and how they're used to bring Austen's work and Regency-era history to life on screen.
Cosprop is currently holding an exhibition, Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop, at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, where you can see for yourself the most iconic costumes they've created. It runs until 16 January 2027.
View Green Video on the source website]]> Is Sense and Sensibility a true reflection of life in Georgian Britain? The real history behind the new adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/sense-and-sensibility-real-history-new-adaptation-jane-austen/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:00:10 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/sense-and-sensibility-real-history-new-adaptation-jane-austen/ A dying Henry Dashwood is clear about his wishes. His son and heir, John, should provide for his stepmother and his three half-sisters, Elinor, Marianne and Margaret. But John’s wife, Fanny, sees things differently, which leaves the quartet facing life in greatly reduced circumstances… Published in October 1811 in an edition that credited the text only to “A Lady”, Jane Austen first began working on Sense and Sensibility at the end of the 18th century. The first draft was written in epistolary form, a style popularised by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), a novelist she admired. The revised approach likely gave Austen more flexibility in exploring the world of the Dashwoods, and their struggles to adjust to a life where they are often reliant on the kindness and assistance of family and friends.
The new version is directed by Georgia Oakley. It’s her second feature after her acclaimed Blue Jean (2022), which was set in 1988 and focused on the effects of Section 28 legislation on a lesbian teacher. Sense and Sensibility stars Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Twisters) as Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles (Hanna, The Chronology of Water) as Marianne, two young women with contrasting attitudes to life and love.
Is the new version of Sense and Sensibility faithful to Jane Austen’s novel?
Broadly, yes. Despite, for example, the timeline differing from the novel in key respects, the sweep of the film will be familiar to anyone who has read the novel. It shows the Dashwoods swapping a grand country house existence in Sussex for a modest cottage in Devon, cheaply rented to them by a second cousin, Sir John Middleton (Turlough Convery). The future for the Dashwood girls, including Margaret, who is still a child, is uncertain. Living in genteel semi-poverty, they are unattractive matches for any man looking to increase his family’s fortune, not an easy situation for young women dreaming of finding happiness in marriage.
A few plot points have been tweaked by the film’s scriptwriter, Diana Reid, but the overall trajectory of film and book are similar. Where some Austen purists may quibble is in the extent to which the film draws out the contrasts between Elinor, a pragmatist who represents ‘sense’, and Marianne, a romantic who embodies ‘sensibility’. In particular, this version of Marianne has something of the wildness of a heroine from a Gothic romance. Or perhaps the Victorian-era novels of the Brontës. It doesn’t seem coincidental that, in choosing Devon locations, the filmmakers headed for the windswept uplands of Dartmoor.
Conversely, perhaps this is in its way authentic to Jane Austen. For all she satirised potboilers such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in Northanger Abbey (completed in 1798–99, but published posthumously in 1817), Austen did so from the perspective of an avid reader who devoured all kinds of books.
WATCH | Becoming Jane Austen: the early life of a literary legend
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How difficult were Georgian laws on inheritance for women?
Georgian society was patriarchal and vast estates routinely passed to the eldest son, but that doesn’t mean women couldn’t inherit as is sometimes supposed. Indeed, look beyond the Dashwoods and, while some of these nuances are not as clear in the new screen version as in the novel, women whose circumstances are shaped by financial settlements do much to drive the plot of Sense and Sensibility.
Elinor’s love interest, for example, is Edward Ferrars (George MacKay), whose mother is a widow with control over her own fortune and holds the power to disinherit her children, with which she spitefully threatens them.
Mrs Jennings (Fiona Shaw), the widowed mother-in-law of Sir John Middleton, is also independently wealthy, able to invite Elinor and Marianne to London, where she has a townhouse, and travel around in her own carriage. Contemporary readers would have understood that, because her money came from ‘trade’, she was considered less genteel than those who derived their incomes from land. Expansive, big-hearted and having used her money to guide her own daughters towards socially advantageous marriages, Jennings herself doesn’t give a hoot about what the world thinks. This helps to make her an immensely attractive character in both novel and film.
Is Sense and Sensibility autobiographical?
Not directly, but you don’t have to look far to find parallels with Austen’s life. Austen’s father, George, a Church of England cleric, died suddenly in 1805. This left his widow, Cassandra, and the couple’s unmarried daughters, Cassandra and Jane, in a difficult financial situation. Family members helped financially, but the trio spent a lot of time visiting relatives. They didn’t really settle in a new home until 1809, when Jane’s wealthy brother, Edward, offered them the use of a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire.
Further financial issues lay ahead for the wider family. In 1816, a bank where Jane’s brother, Henry, was a partner, Austen, Maunde & Tilson, failed amidst the economic slump that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Other members of the family, including Edward, who had acted as a financial guarantor for his brother, lost out too.
Where did Jane Austen herself stand on sense versus sensibility?
Watching Sense and Sensibility, Elinor has many of the attributes we associate with her creator, notably a dry wit and a high degree of emotional control. And yet it would be a mistake to think of Austen as someone utterly unlike Marianne. Like Marianne, for instance, she loved the arts.
And perhaps this is anyway a false binary. In 1802, Austen accepted and then almost immediately turned down a marriage proposal from the improbably named Harris Bigg-Wither. Had she married, she would have gained financial security. You can as easily frame this as a decision born of sense (why share your life with someone when you are not certain it’s the right thing to do?) or sensibility (it seems likely she didn’t love him and, anyway, her most enduring passion was writing).
Did Austen base her characters on real-life people?
Looking beyond the Dashwoods, it has been speculated that Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum), who is attracted to Marianne and has spent time out east, was partly based on Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India. Well-connected contemporary readers might have noticed, for example, how Brandon’s ward shared a first name with someone rumoured to have been Hastings’ daughter, Austen’s cousin (and later sister-in-law) Eliza de Feuillide. Hastings was noted for having taken up his pistol on a matter of honour and, without giving away spoilers, a duel is a key moment in the film.
A precise antecedent for Marianne’s other suitor, rakish and self-serving John Willoughby (Frank Dillane), is less easy to discern.
What was the attitude of Georgian society to proposals of marriage?
Marriage was a serious business in Georgian society. Break an engagement and, whether you were a man or a woman, you risked being sued for breach of promise because you had gone back on a binding contract. This is why it is so important for Elinor and Marianne that the men to whom they are attracted actually say the words and propose.
Sense and Sensibility is in UK cinemas now
]]> From Nell Gwyn to Meghan Markle: 9 romances between actors and royals https://www.historyextra.com/membership/nell-gwyn-meghan-markle-harry-relationships-actors-royals/ Mon, 07 Sep 2026 11:52:56 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/nell-gwyn-meghan-markle-harry-relationships-actors-royals/ For centuries, romances between actors and royals have captivated the public. With rumours that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is exploring a return to her former career, Catherine Curzon explores nine other notable relationships between performers and members of royal families On 19 May 2018, Meghan Markle married into the British royal family when she tied the knot with Prince Harry at Windsor Castle.
The couple – now the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – have rarely been out of the headlines in the intervening years, and recently found themselves at the centre of a tabloid storm when it was revealed that they would be returning to the UK with their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, having set up home in the United States in 2020.
Meanwhile, rumours are also circulating that the Duchess of Sussex is exploring a return to acting – a career that, to some, seemed incompatible with the traditional expectations of a royal bride. Yet Harry and Meghan’s relationship is merely the latest in a long line of romances between royals and members of the acting profession.
Below, historian Catherine Curzon examines nine other relationships, spanning the 17th century to the present day…
1. Margaret ‘Peg’ Hughes and Prince Rupert of the Rhine
Better known as Peg, Margaret Hughes (c1630–1719) holds the distinction of being one of the first recorded female actors to grace the London stage, appearing as Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello on 8 December 1660 at the Vere Street Theatre.
Up until this point, women had been forbidden to act on stage at all, and it wasn’t until King Charles II issued a royal warrant declaring that female roles must be played by women in 1662 that female actors became a common sight, as opposed to young men dressed up to look like them.
Peg was no young man, though, and she not only bewitched her audience but managed to steal the heart of Rupert of the Rhine, cousin to Charles II.
After Rupert’s death in 1682, Peg gambled away much of his bequest to her and sold off many valuables, including a necklace that was bought by the infamous Nell Gwyn (see below). Peg died in 1719, having never regained the lifestyle she once enjoyed.
2. Nell Gwyn and King Charles II
Perhaps the most famous of all England’s royal mistresses, Nell Gwyn (1650–87) began her career selling oranges to the patrons of a theatre on London’s Brydges Street, Charles II’s royal playhouse. By the time she was 14 years old, Nell was treading the boards as an actor and she found her niche as a leading light of Restoration comedy, soon becoming one of London’s most celebrated comedians.
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham was unofficially appointed to arrange suitably impressive lovers for Nell. Seeing a chance to increase his own influence as well as her cachet, he attempted to install her as the king’s mistress. Though Charles was married to Catherine of Braganza, the queen had long since learned to put up with his many mistresses, recognising them as a fact of royal life.
- Read more | Was Charles II too randy to rule?
Nell was amenable to the duke’s scheme, but informed him that she expected a retainer of £500 a year for the privilege. However, the role of king’s mistress was a privileged one, filled with luxury and opulence, and Charles had plenty of willing candidates to choose from – even without paying them £500. When he heard the figure Nell was demanding, Charles rejected the idea, but when he met her in 1668, he was smitten.
Despite plenty of rivals and other mistresses snapping at her heels, Nell bore two children by the king. The actor and the monarch were a couple until his death in 1685, often sharing Nell’s silver bed, upon which the couple’s images were engraved. On his deathbed, the king begged “let not poor Nelly starve”, and she certainly didn’t. Awarded a substantial payment, she lived on for two more years before she succumbed to a stroke, possibly the result of syphilis.
3. Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and King George IV
Mary Robinson (1757–1800) knew all about reinvention. When her father abandoned his family in 1764, Mary’s privileged childhood ended with a bump. Married in her teens, she survived a spell in debtor’s prison thanks to her dissolute husband and took to the stage in need of cash.
Mary became known for her so-called ‘breeches roles’, in which she played men and flashed her famed legs, a part of the female anatomy that wasn’t often on display in the Georgian era. It was as Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale that she caught the eye of the young and capricious George, Prince of Wales, the future King George IV.
- Read more | 16 of the worst monarchs in history
The prince offered Mary a huge payment if she gave up the stage to become his official mistress and she accepted. However, the money was not forthcoming, and soon he had moved on to new lovers, leaving Mary high and dry. With her reputation in tatters, Mary took up her pen and began a new career as a poet and novelist, earning herself the nickname ‘the English Sappho’.
Partially paralysed by a later illness, Mary died in 1800 aged just 43.
4. Dorothea Jordan and King William IV
While Prince George was romancing Mary, his younger brother William (the future William IV) made a play for Dorothea ‘Dora’ Jordan (1761–1816), a celebrated Anglo-Irish comedian with a long list of lovers in her past. William and Dora lived together as man and wife for 20 years and had 10 children.
However, the couple never married and – with Princess Charlotte of Wales likely to remain the only child of his elder brother and his bitterly estranged wife – William found himself closer to the throne than he had ever expected to be. Perhaps more importantly, William was desperately in need of money to settle his debts and knew that an official marriage might do wonders for his allowance.
He dropped Dora with a bump and promised her an annuity and custody of their daughters on the understanding that she wouldn’t go back to the stage. Unfortunately, when her financial situation led Dora to return to the theatre, William kept his word. He took the girls from her care and slashed her allowance accordingly.
Dora died in poverty in 1816 and left a heartbroken William to rue his decision. Ironically, even when he later made an official marriage, he and his wife, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, failed to produce any surviving heirs.
5. Marguerite Bellanger and Emperor Napoleon III
Marguerite Bellanger (1838–86) was born into abject poverty but thanks to a modicum of acting talent and a whole lot of charm, she wouldn’t stay there. She started her performance career as an acrobat and equestrienne and soon progressed to acting, while establishing herself as one of the most popular courtesans in Paris.
Marguerite’s most famous patron was undoubtedly Napoleon III (the nephew of Napoleon I), whom she met while sheltering from the rain in Paris’s Parc de Saint-Cloud in 1863. From that romantic beginning, the couple were together for a decade until his death and they had a son. Though Marguerite still had other lovers, Napoleon awarded her a generous pension and even a castle in which she and his son could live.
After Napoleon’s death in 1873, Marguerite moved to England and married an army officer. The couple eventually settled in France and it was there, in 1886, that she died.
6. Lillie Langtry and King Edward VII
Anglo-American music hall star Lillie Langtry (1853–1929) was a bona fide megastar of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and she had a love life that would keep any modern tabloid in material for years. As one of many mistresses of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), Lillie was even presented to his mother Queen Victoria. During their three-year relationship, Lillie was happy to share her lover with both his wife and his other mistresses, seeming to enjoy not being tied exclusively to the prince.
- Read more | A timeline of Britain in the reign of Edward VII
Though the couple separated amicably, Edward wasn’t Lillie’s last royal fling. While still in a relationship with the Prince of Wales, she fell pregnant by Prince Louis of Battenberg (1854–1921). He was the son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and had been naturalised as a Briton, eventually changing his name to Mountbatten.
Louis was a member of the Royal Navy, so when news of the pregnancy came out, the horrified Prince Alexander had his son sent to sea aboard HMS Inconstant. The Prince of Wales, meanwhile, paid for Lillie to spend her pregnancy in Paris, where she gave birth to a daughter.
Lillie died in 1929 and to this day her name remains synonymous with the glory days of the British music hall.
7. Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan
In 1949, Rita Hayworth (1918–87), one of Hollywood’s most popular and celebrated actors, gave up the silver screen for life as the wife of Prince Aly Khan. The prince was the son of Sultan Mahommed Shah, Aga Khan III, the hereditary imam of the Nizari Ismailis, one of the largest Shia Muslim communities in the world.
Sadly for Rita, her new husband had a weakness for actors and two years later he was back in the very club where he and his princess first met, this time romancing Hollywood star Joan Fontaine. Rita took their daughter, Yasmin, and filed for divorce, convinced that Aly Khan would abduct the little girl if she wasn’t kept under guard.
The couple’s divorce was a tabloid favourite: as lawyers argued over whether Yasmin should be raised as a Christian or a Muslim, she played in the courtroom and even settled on the judge’s lap. Ultimately the court found in Rita’s favour, and she was awarded custody of her daughter.
8. Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco
As Hollywood royalty, Grace Kelly (1929–82) was beloved by cinemagoers across the world. Having earned an Academy Award for her performance in The Country Girl (1954) and starred in hits from High Noon (1952) to Rear Window (1954), it seemed the perfect fairy-tale ending when she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956.
- Read more | Historians at the movies: Grace of Monaco reviewed
In fact, Princess Grace’s life was anything but a fairy tale. Her marriage at the age of 26 marked the end of her Hollywood career. She was forced to turn down the title role in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Marnie (1964) when the people of Monaco reacted with outrage to the idea of their princess playing a criminal. Further rumoured returns to the screen were similarly rejected as a result of Rainier’s wish for his wife to remain in professional retirement.
Instead, Grace dedicated herself to philanthropy and her three children. She also struck up a friendship with Diana, Princess of Wales. Sadly, Grace died at the age of 52 as a result of a car accident in 1982.
9. Clotilde Courau and Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Prince of Venice
In 2003, Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, reportedly had to swallow his pride when his son, Emanuele Filiberto, married the politically outspoken left-wing French actor Clotilde Courau (born 1969).
Courau had once been described by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica as “a militant anarcho-Communist” – making her an unconventional choice of bride for the grandson of Italy’s last reigning king, Umberto II.
Unlike many of the other stars on this list, Clotilde refused to give up her career after marrying into royalty and continued to act, while also pursuing charitable activities under her official title, Clotilde of Savoy.
The couple had two daughters together before announcing that they had begun formal divorce proceedings in April 2026.
An older version of this article was first published by HistoryExtra in May 2018
]]> What did the American Revolution really achieve? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/american-revolutionary-war-podcast-series-episode-four/ Wed, 02 Sep 2026 08:00:20 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/american-revolutionary-war-podcast-series-episode-four/ How did a fledgling revolutionary movement survive war with the might of the British empire? Elinor Evans speaks to Professor Adam IP Smith about strategy in the Revolutionary War, the attritional hardship of the campaigns, and the global impact of the conflict How revolutionary was the American Revolution, and how far do 18th-century arguments about liberty and property still shape US politics today? In the final episode of HistoryExtra’s four-part series, Elinor Evans is joined by Adam IP Smith to explore the end of the American Revolutionary War and the complicated legacy that followed.
Beginning with Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, they discuss Britain’s decision to cut its losses, the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the global consequences of the conflict, and the winners and losers of independence.
Watch now, or listen ad-free below:
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Go beyond the podcast
For all the further reading mentioned in this series, which includes archive podcast episodes and video clips on battles, key figures and more.
]]> "Sodomy was a very widespread phenomenon": the secret sex lives of China's most infamous pirates https://www.historyextra.com/membership/sodomy-was-a-very-widespread-phenomenon-the-secret-sex-lives-of-chinas-most-infamous-pirates/ Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:30:58 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/sodomy-was-a-very-widespread-phenomenon-the-secret-sex-lives-of-chinas-most-infamous-pirates/ Official records suggest same-sex relations were notably common among the pirates who terrorised the South China Sea in the early 19th-century. But what those relationships meant is hard for history to establish The busy, tropical sea off southern Imperial China in the 19th-century was the maritime home of one of the most dominant pirate organisations in world history. At its height, Guangdong Pirate Confederation operated with hundreds of vessels, and tens of thousands of people.
This pirate fleet made its name as China's Qing dynasty was at the height of its pre-Opium War power. The Qing state ruled an enormous empire, but policing the long and fragmented coastline of Guangdong and neighbouring provinces was persistently difficult, leaving space for the fleets of the Guangdong Pirate Confederation to organise a highly complex and ordered system of piracy.
But for all that the world of the Guangdong Pirate Confederation is that of typical pirate violence and aggression – terrorising coastal communities and plundering their loot – there seems to have been one facet of life within these criminal fleets that might be more unexpected.
Historian Dian Murray, author of Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810, was studying official records relating to captured pirates. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, she recalled examining around 89 cases concerning pirates apprehended in the South China Sea.
"In around 54 of them, sodomy or homosexual relations were mentioned. I found that to have been a very widespread phenomenon when I did my research," she says. In other words, in most cases where pirates from the Guangdong Pirate Confederation were captured and charged, homosexuality was mentioned among the pirates’ transgressions.
Were romantic and sexual relationships between men genuinely commonplace aboard Chinese pirate vessels? Were these encounters consensual? Did they reflect the overwhelmingly male environment of ships that often spent long periods at sea? Or could sex instead have been used to express hierarchy, domination or initiation within pirate crews?
The records studied by Murray don’t give a straightforward answer. Indeed, Murray stresses that "we don't know". But these records do undoubtedly open an intriguing window onto sex and intimacy in a maritime society very different from our own – and raise a broader problem for historians attempting to understand homosexuality in the past.
What was life like aboard the pirate ships of the South China Sea?
Piracy had long existed along China's southern coastline, but around the turn of the 19th century it expanded dramatically. One of the most important figures in this transformation was Zheng Yi, a pirate leader who helped bring previously competing pirate fleets into a much larger confederation in the first years of the 1800s. He helped forge agreements between major pirate fleets, which were often distinguished by coloured flags. The resulting loose coalition allowed previously rival commanders to cooperate and coordinate operations without surrendering all their independence.
His wife, Zheng Yi Sao, would become even more famous. After Zheng Yi's death in 1807, she played a central role in maintaining the confederation, working closely with another pirate commander, Zhang Bao. So, life within this world was overwhelmingly male, but not exclusively so.
"There were provisions about families on board ships, and certain women were allowed," explains Murray. "If females were captured and held for ransom, some of them could be purchased by the pirates, or they could live with them on board ship," she says.
Precisely how such arrangements operated in practice is much harder to establish. Pirate codes and official accounts can tell historians what was supposed to happen, or what authorities claimed had happened, without necessarily revealing the realities of individual lives. Nevertheless, what is clear is that women were present aboard at least some pirate vessels, and in Zheng Yi Sao’s case, held significant power. That makes the evidence of frequent homosexuality more complicated than a story in which men formed sexual relationships when no women were available.
One particularly important same-sex relationship took place within the complex family at the heart of the pirate confederation.
Zheng Yi’s relationship with Zhang Bao
Zhang Bao became one of the most powerful figures in the South China Sea pirate world. He had originally been captured by pirates as a young man and was eventually incorporated into the family of Zheng Yi and Zheng Yi Sao.
"When Zhang Bao was taken into the family and adopted, he also had a homosexual relationship with Zheng Yi," says Murray.
Following Zheng Yi's death, Zheng Yi Sao formed a partnership with Zhang Bao. Partly, this was politically expedient: Zheng Yi Sao possessed authority, experience and connections within the confederation, while Zhang Bao commanded the loyalty of a large body of fighting men. Their partnership helped prevent the organisation from fragmenting after Zheng Yi's death. But it was also personal. They had a child together and ultimately married, while Zhang Bao assumed an increasingly prominent position in the pirate confederation.
As Murray describes, this is an incredible transition. “Zheng Yi Sao ultimately, upon the death of her husband, took over the relationship and had a child and was associated with Zhang Bao for the rest of his life."
The resulting family structure might seem unusual to modern eyes. But retrospectively applying modern categories too rigidly can obscure rather than clarify what was happening. A pirate in early 19th-century China having sexual relationships with both men and women does not necessarily tell us how he understood his own sexuality.
What did sex between male pirates mean?
So, homosexual relationship appears to have been sufficiently common to leave a striking footprint in the surviving legal evidence, but "what did all this mean?" Murray asks.
"Did it mean a love relationship at sea, which was not an uncommon thing? Or, did it mean some kind of power drive on the part of a superior vis-à-vis an inferior? Did it mean a kind of initiation?"
"We don't know," Murray says.
A reference to "sodomy" in a legal document tells us that an act was alleged or recorded. It doesn’t automatically tell us what the participants felt about one another, how consensual their encounter was, or what identity – if any – they attached to their sexual behaviour.
This same challenge with understanding the sexualities of the past presents itself elsewhere in history.
In parts of the Classical Greek world, sexual relationships between men could exist within recognised social frameworks, often shaped heavily by age and status. The categories governing those relationships were not equivalent to modern ideas of homosexuality.
Pre-modern Japan likewise had well-documented traditions of male-male sexuality in particular social settings, including among samurai and within Buddhist institutions. Again, such relationships existed within their own cultural systems rather than mapping neatly onto the identities used in the 21st century.
Neither of these examples clarifies the complicated sexual world operating within the overwhelmingly male world of South China Sea piracy. Like a ship drifting through mist and fog, these relationships are obscured by distance, and remain just out of sight.
Dian Murray was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Sweaty farters and violent vomiting: why riding in a Georgian-era carriage wasn't as glamorous as you think https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-riding-in-a-georgian-carriage-wasnt-glamorous/ Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:33:09 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-riding-in-a-georgian-carriage-wasnt-glamorous/ Far from the glitz and glamour of popular period dramas, new research shows travelling by horse-drawn carriage was often a thoroughly uncomfortable affair Imagine gliding across the English countryside in the plush comfort of a horse-drawn carriage. Snugly seated, your mind wanders as you gaze over rolling hills and meandering streams from its velvet-lined interior, perhaps on your way to a seaside holiday retreat or a lavish ball. It’s an enviable thought for the modern traveller, more accustomed to traffic jams, potholed roads, late buses and crowded train rides.
On our TV screens, the elegant coaches of Bridgerton and Pride and Prejudice, ornately decorated and finely upholstered, whisk the socialites of Georgian Britain to and fro in style. Usually drawn by four horses and fully enclosed to protect passengers from the elements, dazzling coaches boomed in popularity among London’s wealthy elite between the 17th and early 19th centuries.
The introduction of stagecoaches in the 1640s meant that coach travel, although still prohibitively expensive for the working class, soon became a highly sought-after service. Public routes connected England’s towns and cities via a network of coaching inns. A typical stagecoach held six passengers inside, with up to eight on its roof – and it is less picturesque to imagine the aftermath of a carriage tipping over or an unfortunate passenger falling beneath its wheels (neither was an uncommon occurrence). There were highwaymen too, always eager to part travellers from their possessions.
Among the perils of coach travel, however, new research argues that some less dramatic threats predominated: motion sickness, invasions of your personal space and the dreaded stench of flatulent passengers.
Why the Georgian coach was a “miserable vehicle”
In a new study, published in Social History of Medicine, historian Alun Withey challenges the romanticised view of coaches in popular culture, using letters, diaries and medical texts to uncover what those journeys really felt like.
It was often, we learn, a bumpy ride. “For many this was no gentle waft through the Georgian countryside,” writes Withey, senior lecturer in history at the University of Exeter. “It was a rattling, lurching plunge down tracks and roads that were rough and knotty in good weather, and perilous in bad.”
The diarist Anne Lister complained in 1822 of being “exceedingly jolted” while travelling along bad roads. Some years earlier, another woman grumbled that she was “heartily tired with the jumbling and jolting of our miserable vehicle”.
Not only might travellers arrive at their destination bruised and battered by these careening coaches, but women risked breaching standards of propriety if they were thrown towards male passengers.
Worse yet was the vomiting this motion sickness could induce – a danger well known to England’s sailors but not to coach riders who, cruelly confined within the carriage, had no means of escape. By 1700, the term “coach-sick” was being used to describe this new type of nausea.
Karen Harvey, professor of cultural history at the University of Birmingham, believes this research is further proof that coaches were a “usually uncomfortable, perhaps scary” method of travel.
“Withey wants to get to the way that people are experiencing travel and those really visceral bodily sensations of just feeling sick and being bashed and thrown about on bumpy surfaces,” she tells HistoryExtra.
John Locke feared his philosophical career might be cut short in 1656 as he journeyed beside an overweight woman. “Had the coach (as it might) overturned and she fell upon me,” he later wrote to his father, “I should have been dead and buried.”
Sweaty farters, stale smoke and strong perfume – why coach travel was an olfactory “arms race”
And then there was the stench. On a sweltering summer’s day, long before the invention of deodorant, travellers packed into a stagecoach could do little more than stink.
“18th-century coaches are one example of many places – pleasure gardens, coffee houses, balls, public theatres – where people are jumbled together and forced to experience the smells of other people’s bodies or consumption habits,” William Tullett, senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of York, tells HistoryExtra.
In 1777, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham moaned about the reek of tobacco in a carriage he shared with a soldier, a judge and a Welsh drover. He later decried those “stewing boxes they call coaches”.
Riders seeking to protect themselves from the stench of their sweating, coughing or farting companions sometimes carried scent bottles containing strong perfumes. These odours could themselves be pungent, prompting fellow passengers to try to block them out. The result, Tullett observes, was “an arms race of comfort and discomfort”.
This new research shows that coach travel was not quite as quaint as popular culture might have you believe – although Withey notes that the unfortunate passengers were useful guinea pigs for contemporary physicians studying the effects of motion on the body and mind.
How coach travel was like modern commuting – and why historians have taken so long to prove it
Historians have studied 18th-century coach travel before but this new research, Harvey explains, more concerned with the experience of “a person squished in a carriage that might be smelly, wet [and] packed” than with the economic, technological or social implications of the adoption of coach travel.
“For me, history is all about people, and if you’re interested in people then you really need to understand how the past felt,” she adds.
On the originality of Withey’s work, Tullett notes: “There’s a sense in which the idea that 18th-century and early 19th-century travel – coach travel in particular – was uncomfortable is something that no one had really done the research to prove definitively.” Withey’s study is part of a relatively new academic focus on “embodiment” in history, where people in the past are understood as occupying physical bodies subject to discomfort, injury and other sensations, which greatly influenced how they understood the world around them.
- Read more | She held wealth, power and prestige: so why did this Georgian aristocrat fake her daughter’s death?
“It’s a really interesting article that probably couldn’t have happened 20 or 30 years ago,” Harvey concludes. “And I think it’s a wonderful illustration of the cutting-edge way that we can combine these different historiographies in order to try and reconstruct what life really felt like.”
There are modern parallels to be drawn, too. This new research, explains Tullett, “speaks to a lot of modern-day concerns about how we behave on public transport”.
Georgian travellers frequently grumbled about disorderly children, incessant chatterboxes, inconsiderate smokers and creepy men gawking at female passengers, complaints you still hear from commuters today.
]]> Forget the Colosseum: here’s why Georgian Britons preferred to holiday at home https://www.historyextra.com/membership/forget-the-colosseum-heres-why-georgian-britons-preferred-to-holiday-at-home/ Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:00:46 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/forget-the-colosseum-heres-why-georgian-britons-preferred-to-holiday-at-home/ Forget Paris and Rome. Across the 18th century, Bath, Stonehenge and the Peak District became must-visit destinations for British tourists. James Watt and Alison O’Byrne reveal why, for the Georgians, there was no place like home In her journal of her travels around England on horseback between 1685 and c1712, Celia Fiennes complained that too many of her contemporaries had succumbed to “the evil itch of over-valuing foreign parts”.
The “foreign parts” that Fiennes had in mind were the destinations favoured by those on the so-called Grand Tour, a label probably first used by Richard Lassels in his 1670 guidebook The Voyage of Italy. Until it was drastically curtailed by the French Revolution of 1789, the Grand Tour was an established rite of passage for predominantly young elite men who travelled to France, Italy and elsewhere on the continent to complete their education. These fashionable tourists – in theory at least – sought to improve themselves through their encounter with the legacy of Classical antiquity and their experience of cosmopolitan European cities.
As an antidote to the pull of Paris and Rome, Celia Fiennes talked up the attractions of home – such as Bath, Stonehenge and the various “wonders” of the Peak District – and she claimed that “Journeys to visit their native land” would give people a more patriotic appreciation of their own country. Yet not everyone was convinced.
In his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26), Daniel Defoe dismissed the “Wonderless Wonders” of Derbyshire and the “barren and frightful” appearance of the Lake District. And, while James Brome in 1700 claimed that Stonehenge rivalled the pyramids, it was still for others difficult to conceive of the British landscape without thinking of it in relation to idealised foreign models derived from prestigious works of painting and poetry.
Inferiority complex
Thomas Gainsborough declared in 1764 that where the painting of “real views from nature in this country” was concerned, he had “never seen any place that affords a subject equal to the poorest imitation of Gaspard or Claude”. Gainsborough here demonstrates the ‘cultural cringe’ by which many British artists deferred to continental Europeans – in this case the French artists Gaspard Dughet and Claude Lorrain – and regarded the subject matter of native scenes as of comparatively low status.
This reflex extended beyond landscape painting and sometimes generated a sense that Britain was deficient across the arts more generally. The architect John Gwynn in 1766 lamented the “confused… irregular, [and] slovenly appearance” of the cityscape of London, which was “thought by some… in many respects inferior in point of grandeur and affect” to Paris and Rome, and not “answerable to the character of the richest and most powerful people in the world”.
Mid-18th-century Britons were confident in their nation’s commercial and military strength, but conscious of the gap between their achievements in trade and war and their cultural prowess. By the end of the century, however, this ‘cultural cringe’ had begun to evaporate – to be replaced by pride in what British art, landscapes and urban spaces had to offer. The question is: why?
Middle on the move
One byproduct of the nation’s prosperity was that middle-class Britons increasingly gained the opportunity to travel for leisure, an experience that afforded them a better understanding of Britain’s distinctiveness.
While the natural wonders of Derbyshire were already enumerated by the mid-17th century, improvements in tourist infrastructure – most notably the development of turnpike roads – helped to establish new itineraries in other parts of the nation.
Thomas West published A Guide to the Lakes in 1778, presenting as a relatively recent phenomenon that “persons of genius, taste and observation [now] … make the tour of their own country”. The Welshman Thomas Pennant knowingly introduced his 1769 Tour in Scotland as a “petit tour”, as if to contrast his expedition with the larger-scale Grand Tour, but he likewise presented the “matchless” spectacle of the river Tay as favourably comparing with sights that might be encountered beyond Britain’s shores. Tobias Smollett’s otherwise irascible fictional traveller Matt Bramble did something similar, stating in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) that “I have seen the Lago di Garda, Albano, De Vico, Bolsena, and Geneva, and, upon my honour, I prefer Lough-Lomond to them all.”
Tourism in Scotland was made possible by the military roads constructed under the direction of General Wade after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, and then by the brutal ‘pacification’ of the Highlands following the Hanoverian defeat of Jacobite forces at Culloden in 1746.
If travel within Britain in the 18th century may for many have helped to instil a forward-looking sense of a Unionist British identity, it also meant confronting reminders of the violence of the past, whether this was the product of civil conflict or – beginning with the Romans – foreign invasion.
The experience of the tourist in this period could also be more straightforwardly pleasurable, however. The modern seaside holiday may be traced back to the second half of the 18th century, as coastal spas such as Margate and Scarborough increasingly attracted the middle classes as well as the aristocracy, lured by the health benefits of sea-bathing and the resort facilities that developed around this activity.
Southampton was hailed by one boosterish guidebook as “the Montpelier of England”, and when Thomas Gray visited in 1764, he noted that it was “full of bathers”. George III was a keen sea-bather, and Weymouth, which he first visited in 1789 as he recovered from mental illness, was reputedly his favourite holiday destination.
A metropolis of empire
By the final third of the 18th century, London was increasingly emerging from Paris’s shadow. As the metropolis of a growing empire, London, as so many said, was a world by itself, beyond comparison. The nature of London’s growth – driven by commerce – generated forms of culture that attracted visitors from overseas, through new urban institutions such as coffee houses, art galleries, museums, theatres and pleasure gardens.
Britain’s position relative to France or Italy could now be understood in terms of the distinctiveness, and no longer the inferiority, of its cultural production. The ‘Shakespeare Jubilee’ at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769 confirmed Shakespeare’s status as a national poet whose strength resided partly in his rejection of neoclassical taste. Later, the visiting of sites associated with celebrated authors such as Burns, Scott and Austen would develop into an important strand of home tourism.
The Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu described Shakespeare as “our Gothic Bard”, and the revaluing of the Gothic in the final third of the century provides another index of how Britons reimagined themselves in relation to others in this period. ‘Gothic’ could still be synonymous with barbarism (because the Goths had brought down the Roman empire) and Catholic superstition. Yet it was increasingly regarded as a native heritage that had to be understood on its own idiosyncratic terms rather than as a deviation from the Classical rules. Castles and abbeys, whether intact or in ruin, were exemplary of this heritage, gaining renewed attention through the convergence of home tourism with the archaeological discovery of the distant past and the currency of ideas of the sublime and the picturesque.
Fortress Britain
Victory over France in the global Seven Years’ War (1756–63) at once broadened Britons’ horizons and prompted some to claim that this success owed to the unique character of a self-styled ‘island race’. Defeat in America two decades later then generated a defensive introspection, where the consolation of a deep-rooted Gothic inheritance – powerful because it exceeded any straightforward definition – enabled Britons to think of themselves as unaffected by the humiliating loss of their former colonies.
During the war with revolutionary France, “the proud Keep of Windsor”, long established as a sight for day-trippers from London, was for Edmund Burke an emblem of a defiant Fortress Britain.
The Gothic tourism that flourished in Britain from the second half of the 18th century onwards was open to anyone with access to historic monuments, and experiences of it were diverse. Visiting a castle or abbey could generate serious reflection on its history and symbolism but also involve nothing more elevated than taking a picnic in a pleasant spot. Writing of Netley Abbey, a former Cistercian monastery near Southampton, John Bullar in 1799 disparagingly referred to the numbers of those “who never think seriously on any subject; and who visit this place, as they do another, merely to ‘stare about them, and to eat’”.
The idea of Gothic architecture as part of everyday life is captured by Paul Sandby’s watercolour West Gate at Canterbury from c1780. The medieval gate sits next to residential and commercial buildings, and the figures depicted include polite tourists, but also others who appear just to be going about their daily business.
As well as situating monuments of the past in a wider context, Sandby composed new kinds of urban and rural scenes that offered ‘views’ of a stable, prosperous and modernising nation. He depicted the landscapes of Scotland, Wales and Ireland in such a way as to create a four-nations picturesque, which generated an inclusive sense of British landscape identity and further underscored the scenic possibilities of home ground.
In his compendium of travel-writing The British Tourists; or Traveller’s Pocket Companion (1798–1800), William Mavor celebrated how “some of our most enlightened countrymen” had in recent decades been “as eager to explore the remotest parts of Britain, as they formerly were to cross the Channel”. Mavor stated that these travellers had shown how “we shall find no equal extent of territory, on the face of the globe, of more importance, or containing more attractions” than Britain and Ireland.
If home tours had come to supersede the Grand Tour by the time that Mavor wrote, however, this was partly out of necessity, because continental Europe was off-limits to travellers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Mavor’s remarks here may, again, articulate a Unionist ideal rather than reflect a reality of travellers strengthening connections through tourist activity. Ireland was formally incorporated into the union in 1801, but this was only after the brutal suppression of the United Irish rebellion against British authority.
As is true today, Britain could be elided with England, with a green and pleasant ‘country’, offering an appealing detachment from the slavery and empire that underpinned its unevenly distributed wealth and power. However, as is the case with the Welsh-speaking Edward Pugh – whose Cambria Depicta (1816) offers an illustrated record of his tour of north Wales – non-metropolitan artists and writers could demonstrate a confident sense of a cultural identity that was not subordinated to an overarching Britishness.
Tourism for the masses
These are all important caveats that qualify any account of the unifying impact of home tourism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is still fair to say, nonetheless, that the once elite pursuit of leisure travel was substantially democratised in the decades before the coming of the railways, heralded by the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, which in turn helped to give rise to a new age of mass tourism. The travel agent Thomas Cook organised the first rail excursion in 1841, a trip from Leicester to Loughborough, on behalf of the Leicester Temperance Society.
Decades earlier, the “curious traveller” Thomas Pennant could play up the adventurousness of his journey – accompanied by an expert in Gaelic to translate for him – to “the remotest part of north Britain”, claiming that northern Scotland was to those from elsewhere “almost as little known…as Kamtschatka” in farthest east Asia.
By the 19th century such claims about a foreignness within Britain became less common. Where they were made, they often related to the urban working classes and their environs, sensationally presented as ‘Darkest London’, a label deriving from the racist idea of ‘Darkest Africa’. To Victorian social reformers, such nests of degeneracy and squalor were all but off the map, approachable only by the most intrepid of explorers. And certainly not by tourists.
Sun, sea and trusty knick-knacks
A beginner’s guide to holidaying in Georgian Britain
Where should I go? That, of course, is a question of taste. But if you love the great outdoors, then you’ll be delighted to learn that some tourist circuits such as the Peak District are now well established. The Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth House is part of the itinerary – and rightly so: it’s impossibly grand and set in Derbyshire’s stunning dales. You could also follow the crowds to spa towns such as Bath, Buxton and Tunbridge Wells, and seaside resorts such as Scarborough.
How do I get there?
The question of where you go is inextricably connected to the state of the road system. For detailed information on routes from London to various destinations across Britain, check out Paterson’s Roads books (published regularly from 1771). However, you can increasingly pack your bags safe in the knowledge that recent improvements to Britain’s highways have made it far easier to access picturesque landscapes such as the Wye Valley and the Lake District, and to savour Thomas Pennant’s ‘petit tour’ of Scotland.
How long will the journey take?
It’s not just the road system that has improved in recent decades. Thanks to new, speedier vehicles – like the enclosed horse-drawn carriage – journey times have dropped substantially. Just a few years ago, it would have taken you four-and-a-half days to get from London to Manchester. Soon you’ll be doing it in little more than 24 hours.
How much will it cost me?
Want detailed information on where you can travel to from London, which carriers will take you – and, just as importantly, how much it will set you back? Then check out The Town and Country Directory. This has all the latest fares and timetables. According to one recent edition (1773), the daily post coach from London to York left the Rose and Crown on St John Street at 3am and cost 2 pounds and 10 shillings.
What do I need to pack?
No traveller worth his or her salt should dare leave home without a range of pocket accessories. This might include the ‘Claude glass’ (below), a convex shaded mirror that produces “picturesque” views of natural beauty. Or you can take the advice of Reverend James Plumptre, who recently wrote of the various “knick-knacks” that he took with him on his pedestrian tour of Scotland. These included a telescope, a pedometer, a drinking horn and a pistol.
Where can I rest-up en route?
Coaching inns are spread out at intervals across major roads. There you can top up on food and drink. And, if they have their own stables, you can even ask them to replace your horses
– for a fee of course.
Am I taking my life into my hands?
Highway robbers continue to menace travellers – not only on remote roads. However, they’re less of a threat than they were at the beginning of the century – so much so that carriage accidents, as opposed to hold-ups, have become plot devices in a string of recent novels. You’d be advised not to read one of these novels while you’re on your travels!
James Watt and Alison O’Byrne teach English at the University of York. They are co-editors of Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours (Cambridge, 2025)
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> No, Britain was never going to defeat the US in 1776 https://www.historyextra.com/membership/american-revolutionary-war-podcast-series-episode-three/ Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:00:14 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/american-revolutionary-war-podcast-series-episode-three/ How did a fledgling revolutionary movement survive war with the might of the British empire? Elinor Evans speaks to Professor Adam IP Smith about strategy in the Revolutionary War, the attritional hardship of the campaigns, and the global impact of the conflict After declaring independence, the United States still had to survive a brutal conflict.
In the third episode of HistoryExtra's four-part series on the American Revolutionary War, Elinor Evans and Adam IP Smith explore the military realities of the American Revolution: George Washington’s leadership, the importance of France, and the turning points that changed the conflict.
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For all the further reading mentioned in this series, which includes archive podcast episodes and video clips on battles, key figures and more.
]]> Hot sex and cold jelly: how a wobbly dessert ignited Georgian bedrooms https://www.historyextra.com/membership/scandalous-after-dark-secrets-of-jelly-shops/ Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:20:57 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/scandalous-after-dark-secrets-of-jelly-shops/ By day, London's Georgian jelly shops served elegant desserts to respectable customers. By night, some became notorious meeting places for prostitutes, pimps and clients In the light of day, a Georgian-era jelly shop would look perfectly respectable. A shopper might step in from the crowded London street, sit down with a glass of delicately flavoured jelly, and enjoy one of the capital’s fashionable new treats. The jelly might be clear and jewel-like, scented with fruit, wine or flowers, and served in a long, elegant glass. It was refined, modern and entirely suitable for polite company.
After dark, however, the same shop could become something entirely different. In the streets around Covent Garden, some jelly shops became intimately associated with illicit sex: places where sex workers met clients, pimps displayed women, and men took a restorative jelly before or after visiting a brothel.
Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Peter Ross explains he was initially surprised by just how fashionable jelly became in the 18th century.
“I was very amused by this; by the idea of jellies, because when I was growing up, jelly was something you had at a children’s party in a little paper bowl – a fruit jelly.”
The Georgian version was far more sophisticated, part of a culture of elaborate dining intended to display wealth, taste and refinement. Aristocratic and affluent households competed to produce impressive tables filled with substantial and decorative dishes designed to delight the tastebuds and catch the eye, including jellies.
“If you went to a Georgian-era grand banquet or a big meal at a rich person’s house, you might be served jelly. It might be dramatically moulded.”
Unlike modern packet jelly, these dishes required time, skill and expensive ingredients. Cooks had to make the setting agent themselves through a slow and labour-intensive process.
- Read more | The power of the Georgian underclass
“Gelatine could be used, which comes from boiling down various bones or from the swim bladders of certain fish,” Ross says. “It could also be made by boiling down a calf’s foot.” This extracted collagen from animal tissue, producing a clear gelatine that could be set into elaborate moulds.
“What you end up with is a flavourless jelly, so don’t imagine these things tasted savoury.”
Instead, cooks added fashionable flavourings.
“Today it’s often flavoured with fruit. The Georgians mostly flavoured it with fruit too, but you could make jelly with almost any flavour – wine-flavoured jelly, for example.”
Wine jellies, citrus jellies and jellies scented with spices or flowers all appeared on fashionable Georgian tables. They could be beautiful, delicate and expensive indicators of status – and, perhaps secondarily, a dessert.
From banquets to the high street
As 18th-century Britain became wealthier, luxuries once confined to elite households increasingly filtered into urban consumer culture.
London was central to this transformation. Its growing population supported specialist retailers of every kind: coffee houses, pastry cooks, confectioners, print sellers, toy shops and pleasure gardens. Shopping and eating out became part of the experience of city life. Jelly followed this same path.
“Gradually, during the Georgian period, jelly became so popular that jelly houses and jelly shops appeared,” Ross explains.
These shops didn’t usually serve the monumental moulded jellies of aristocratic banquets. Instead, they offered individual portions to customers who wanted a fashionable refreshment.
“During the day, you could go and have a little jelly in a jelly glass. You can still track down Georgian jelly glasses,” Ross notes. “If you imagine a long, bell-shaped sherry glass, that’s the sort of thing it was.”
For respectable customers, a jelly shop was therefore a place to enjoy an increasingly trendy sweet while shopping, socialising or strolling through London.
But many of these shops were located in and around Covent Garden, one of the most vibrant – and notorious – districts in the capital.
Covent Garden after dark
Today, Covent Garden is associated with theatres, cafés, street performers and tourists. In the 18th century, it was already a major entertainment district, but one with a much rougher edge.
The nearby Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden Theatre drew large evening crowds. Taverns, gambling venues and pleasure gardens kept the area busy late into the night, traversed by a diverse catalogue of actors, aristocrats, labourers, pickpockets, servants, tourists and sex workers.
Indeed, Covent Garden was London’s most famous red-light district.
Prostitution was highly visible there, and publications such as Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies turned the area’s sexual economy into print, offering descriptions of women, their appearances, personalities and prices for prospective clients.
Against that backdrop, some jelly shops acquired a distinct, nocturnal identity.
As Ross explains, “at night, they became places where sex workers would take their clients, pimps would parade their prostitutes, and people would go for a jelly before visiting a brothel.”
“They’re very different things to different people. During the day they’re one kind of place, and in the evening they become something completely different.”
“Therefore, many people who considered themselves respectable would never be seen dead in a jelly shop at night in Covent Garden,” Ross explains. “If they were a woman, they’d be thought of as a sex worker. If they were a man, they’d be thought of as a pimp or a client.”
“During the day, though, people didn’t think anything of it. Women could go with their husbands to a respectable jelly shop quite safely, but in the evening it had a completely different reputation.”
Jelly as Georgian Viagra?
The obvious question is why jelly became associated with sex in the first place. Part of the answer lies in 18th-century medical thinking.
“There were reasons why Georgians thought jelly was an aphrodisiac,” Ross explains. “They even thought of it as a prototype Viagra. There’s a diarist who writes that he had a jelly before going off with a prostitute – or after he’d been with one.”
18th century medicine was still strongly influenced by ideas inherited from antiquity, especially from the Greek physician Galen.
Although anatomy and observation had advanced significantly, many physicians continued to understand health through the body’s humours and qualities. Illness could be explained through imbalances: hot and cold, wet and dry, smooth and sharp.
“Their medicine was still based on the humours,” Ross says. “They thought, for instance, that sexual diseases were caused by an excess of sharpness within the body.”
If illness came from sharpness, the cure required its opposite.
“To counteract that sharpness, you needed something smooth, like a soup or a jelly.”
Jelly’s slippery texture seemed to suggest soothing, softening and healing properties. Some even thought it might protect against venereal disease.
“There was also the idea of signatures,” Ross explains, “that God had created things in the world that indicated what they could be used to treat.”
Known as the doctrine of signatures, this theory held that God had placed clues in nature to reveal the medicinal uses of plants, minerals and animal products.
- Read more | You probably eat these foods every day, so why did the ancient Romans think they were disgusting poison?
“If a flower was shaped like a liver, then if you boiled it down into a medicine, it would help your liver.”
Similar reasoning could be applied to jelly. Some jellies were made from hartshorn – the antlers of male deer – or even from elephant ivory.
Because antlers and tusks were hard, strong and associated with masculine power, they were believed capable of transferring those qualities to the human body.
“So if you were making something from something hard, then it might help make something else hard. That's why it was associated with the effects of something like Viagra.”
“It seems bizarre to us today, but they genuinely believed it.”
Peter Ross was speaking to Lauren Good on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Royal rivalry: 10 monarchs whose fate was determined by their siblings https://www.historyextra.com/membership/royal-sibling-rivalries/ Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:01:54 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/royal-sibling-rivalries/ Through history, the role of the second or third royal sibling has not always been easy. Here, historian Sarah Gristwood explores 10 of the most famous – and dysfunctional – royal sibling relationships... In the bad old days of high infant mortality, any royal family needed an heir and several ‘spares’ – north of the border, James V and his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, are just two of the many British monarchs with elder brothers who died in infancy. William the Conqueror left England to his second son, another William, while the eldest son, Robert, inherited Normandy.
Since then, the history of these islands has been littered with famous second – or third, or fourth – royal siblings (or, more specifically, royal sons, since gender continued to trump age right into the 21st century), who for better or for worse have done much to shape the monarchy that we know today. Here are 10 of the most famous...
Richard I (1157–99)
It wasn’t Richard the Lionheart, but his elder brother, Henry, who was crowned ‘the Young King’ of England, unusually during their father’s lifetime. In the event Henry predeceased his father, but perhaps the fact Richard hadn’t been raised for the job explains why the crusader showed so little real enthusiasm for hands-on rule of England, spending only a few months in the country during his 10-year reign.
Richard was himself succeeded by his younger brother, John. Fairly or unfairly, King John has gone down in popular history as a disastrous monarch whose reign was epitomised by his losing the crown jewels in the Wash – but he did inadvertently help to give us Magna Carta.
- Read more | When and how did Richard the Lionheart die?
John of Gaunt (1340–99)
By contrast to John I, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster – fourth son of the prolific Edward III – has traditionally been accorded a good measure of respect for the steering hand he kept on the country during the minority of his nephew, Richard II.
His harsh fiscal policies, however, made him a particular target of the Peasants’ Revolt – while almost as soon as John himself died, Richard II was deposed by John’s exiled son, the Bolingbroke of Shakespeare’s plays, who took the throne as Henry IV. These were the family divisions that, half a century later, would produce the Wars of the Roses.
Richard III (1452–85)
The best-known casualty of those wars was of course Richard III, whose death at Bosworth ushered in the Tudor dynasty. Richard was only the fourth son of the York family, but by the time he seized the throne the first, second and third sons were all dead – Edmund killed by the Lancastrians, and George, Duke of Clarence (after plotting against Edward) drowned in the famous butt of malmsey.
The grounds upon which Richard took the throne in 1483 – chiefly the supposed invalidity of Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville – are still debated today. So too, of course, is the fate of Edward IV’s sons, the princes in the Tower, and Richard’s role in their possible murder. Either way, Richard – his brother Edward’s most loyal supporter during his lifetime – provides the most dramatic prism through which to examine both the royal sibling bond, and the question of sibling rivalry.
Henry VIII (1491–1547)
It wasn’t Henry but his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, who was expected to lead the Tudor dynasty through the 16th century. But Arthur died in 1502 – and if anyone ever forgot that in the glorious early days of Henry VIII’s reign, they had ample cause to remember two decades later, when Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon was endlessly debated, and ultimately declared invalid, on the grounds that she had been his brother Arthur’s widow.
Indeed, there has been speculation that Henry’s position as a mere second son – reared with his mother and sisters, while Arthur was sent away to Ludlow – affected his later attitudes, and his infamous marital history.
Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
Elizabeth was Henry’s second surviving legitimate child; her sister, ‘Bloody’ Mary, Henry’s eldest. But both women accepted that first place in the succession went to their younger brother, Edward VI.
After Edward’s premature death in 1553, however, differences between the sisters led to Elizabeth being imprisoned in the Tower, in danger of her life. This was no simple case of sibling rivalry, of course, since religious differences led to real dispute as to whether the Catholic Mary or the Protestant Elizabeth had best claim to the throne. All the same, no one looking for the model of a happy family is ever going to pick the Tudors!
Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Elizabeth I
Charles I (1600–49)
When James VI and I’s eldest son, Prince Henry, died in 1612 of what was probably typhoid, shock waves went through the country. At 18, the vibrant Henry was already the great hope of the Stuart dynasty. His brother Charles, by contrast, was a sickly 11-year-old considered unlikely to survive. Perhaps early insecurities left the adult Charles, as a monarch, particularly susceptible both to the influence of his favourite Buckingham [George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham] and his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, and to an inflated conception of the monarchy.
Elizabeth of Bohemia (1596–1662)
It may seem like cheating to list two siblings as separately important, but it’s the descendants of Elizabeth of Bohemia, not of her brother, Charles I, who sit on the British throne today. When Charles I’s eldest surviving son, Charles II, was succeeded by his own younger brother James, the latter’s unpopularity and Catholicism led to his deposition in 1688.
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of that year brought in, instead, James’s Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, while the Catholic descendants of James’s second marriage dwindled to the status of pretenders.
Anne (1665–1714)
When William and Mary died without children, the crown passed to another younger sibling. Mary’s sister, Anne, came to the throne under the Act of Settlement of 1701, which effectively secured the throne to the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty, since it was already apparent that Anne too was unlikely to bear a surviving child, despite 18 pregnancies.
Upon Queen Anne’s death the throne was offered to the Elector of Hanover, a grandson of Elizabeth of Bohemia, who became Britain’s George I. He and his Hanoverian descendants would reign, however, on very different terms from those earlier rulers had enjoyed. The stage was set for a modern, ‘constitutional’, monarchy (a position confirmed more than a century later when George’s great-great grandson William IV – succeeding his elder brother George IV – ceded yet further royal powers).
George V (1865–1936)
You might think that in the modern age the importance of the royal second sibling is outdated – we are, after all, past the days of high infant mortality.
King George V was born the second son of the future Edward VII, but his elder brother, Albert Victor, known as Prince Eddy, died of pneumonia in his twenties, while his grandmother, Queen Victoria, was still on the throne. By that time Eddy had been linked to the Cleveland Street scandal, which involved a homosexual brothel, amid wider concerns over his character and abilities. (He has, however unconvincingly, even been identified as Jack the Ripper). His brother George, by contrast, was a formidable figure who, besides taking on Eddy’s engagement to Princess Mary of Teck in 1917, changed the name of the royal family from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor.
George VI (1895–1952)
The first half of the 20th century saw two second sons accede to the throne – both important in shaping the form of the present monarchy. George V was of course succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII, the future Duke of Windsor, but Edward’s reign lasted less than a year, and he was never crowned. When he abdicated in order to marry the divorced Wallis Simpson, his younger brother was forced to step up to the plate.
Diffident and reluctant – we’d come a long way from the power-hungry days of the medieval monarchy – George VI nonetheless saw the country through the dark days of Second World War. That example of dutiful service would model an ideal for his daughter, Elizabeth II.
A version of this article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2018
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