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Samuel Pepys [ Art and Literature / Politics ]

… Pepys (1633-1703) made a remarkable social ascent to become a powerful naval administrator with ear of two successive kings.  His calculated approach to sociability was factor in this success. While mindful of how well-judged sociability could serve his ambitions, Pepys also enjoyed making the most of the leisure opportunities and meeting places of Restoration London. His diary of the 1660s and other … patterns of sociability across his life. People > Art and Literature People > Politics Keywords London Diaries navy kin Royal Society Tavern Coffeehouse Samuel Pepys’s impressive social rise, chronicled in his diary of the 1660s, owed …

John Ramsay (and his Italian diary) [ Travel / Art and Literature / Diaries & Letters ]

… Abstract In 1782, John Ramsay undertook a journey to Italy with his father Allan, King George III’s Painter in Ordinary. Their tour lasted two years and for the entire duration of their stay, John Ramsay … and conversazioni where he met a great number of people including artists, Grand Tourists, ambassadors and even the King of Sweden. People > Travel People > Art and Literature Objects > Diaries & Letters Keywords Diaries Grand Tour … himself as one of the most popular artists in the English capital. In 1767, he was appointed Painter in Ordinary to King George III, who preferred him to his rival Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). His notoriety went beyond the borders of …

Jacques Necker (and public opinion) [ Politics / Publicity ]

… published the compte rendu au roi , an extraordinary document that for the first time in French history laid bare the King’s finances to the reading public. Selling tens of thousands of copies within weeks and being translated into several … As much as the compte rendu elevated Necker’s reputation amongst the enlightened public and like-minded reformers, breaking the secrecy of absolute monarchy also rallied reactionary interests at court against him. Following the compte rendu ’s publication, a series of anonymous pamphlets soon appeared not only attacking Necker’s accounting, but also claiming that he had betrayed the monarchy and should be tried for treason (Hardman, …

London theatres (and their audiences) [ Sports & Leisure ]

… eighteenth century as a complex ecosystem of sociabilities in which socio-economics and gender dynamics converged, making it a prime space of sociability. Places > Sports & Leisure Keywords Theatre Court Places of sociability Spectacle … play being done, we took coach and to Court, and there got good places, and saw “The Wilde Gallant,” performed by the King’s house, but it was ill acted, and the play so poor a thing as I never saw in my life almost, and so little … the name, that from beginning to end, I could not, nor can at this time, tell certainly which was the Wild Gallant. The King did not seem pleased at all, all the whole play, nor any body else, though Mr. Clerke whom we met here did commend …

Frances Burney, Mme d’Arblay (1752-1840) [ Art and Literature ]

… Provinces Best known as a novelist and chronicler of London’s literary circles, Frances Burney was in fact born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, in 1752, and spent the first eight years of her life there. Some eighty years later, when compiling her Memoirs of Dr Burney (1832), she remembered the sociability of King’s Lynn as characterized by ‘inertia’, lambasting the mid-eighteenth century provinces for their ‘love of frippery, … and not there alone, nor alone in any other small town, but in every village, every hamlet, nay every cottage in the kingdom;  and though mental cultivation is as slowly gradual, and as precarious of circulation, as Genius […] still the …