First published in Home Circle in 1849, Agnes Strickland’s Candava; or, The Last Suttee is a dramatic tale of sati, empire, Christian reform, and British intervention in India. This new edition restores the forgotten story with historical context, tracing changing British attitudes from Orientalist fascination to evangelical reform. Strickland’s melodrama culminates in the rescue of an unwilling…
Jealousy, betrayal and Gothic vengeance collide in this short medieval romance from Reynolds’s Miscellany. Set against the age of Robert the Bruce and the Crusades, “The Bloodstained Altar” follows Allan Lockhart’s apparent murder, miraculous survival, and dramatic return to Scotland on the very day his beloved is to marry another.
Victor Hugo’s Bishop of Digne was inspired by François-Melchior-Charles-Bienvenu de Miollis, a real bishop renowned for charity, humility, and devotion to the poor.
Frederick Fox Cooper’s 1869 stage adaptation transforms Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe into a thrilling Victorian spectacle of tournaments, sieges, outlaws, fire, and chivalric conflict. This modern edition restores the complete play, revealing how Astley’s Theatre reshaped Scott’s medieval romance for popular audiences through action, comedy, music, and patriotic drama onstage again.
Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police did not invent law-enforcement violence, but it transformed its meaning. In the 1830s, Henry Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian framed police brutality as a crisis of state legitimacy, exposing how uniformed, centralised authority turned individual blows into political evidence of class oppression and democratic exclusion in Britain.
This essay examines Walter Scott’s portrayal of Robin Hood in Ivanhoe through the lens of eighteenth-century crime writing. It argues that Scott, drawing on criminal biographies as well as Joseph Ritson’s ballad collection, presents Robin as neither hero nor villain, but as a morally ambiguous outlaw shaped by print traditions.
Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” remains unsettlingly relevant. Beneath its colonial setting lies a searching reflection on public humiliation, crowd cruelty, political violence, and the desire to belong. Robin’s laughter at his disgraced kinsman reminds us how easily people join the crowd when pity becomes dangerous.
Explore how working-class, Black, Jewish, and ethnic minority boxers shaped the golden age of prizefighting. This article examines Daniel Mendoza, Bill Richmond, Tom Molineaux, class, race, and Georgian boxing culture, showing how the prize ring offered fame and opportunity while exposing prejudice, exploitation, and exclusion.
The Percy Folio preserved some of the most important medieval and early modern poems in English literary history. This article traces its journey from Thomas Percy’s eighteenth-century recovery of the manuscript to its long-delayed publication by Furnivall, Hales, and Child in 1868.
This article examines Punch’s 1894 poem ‘Bold Robin Hood’, which recast Sir William Harcourt’s Budget as fiscal outlawry. Rather than celebrating Robin Hood’s moral economy, Edwin James Milliken’s satire made redistributive taxation appear as cant, coercion, and highway robbery in defence of property and middle-class respectability.
This article explores how Chartist newspapers, poems, and historical essays transformed Wat Tyler from a vilified medieval rebel into a hero of working-class memory. It argues that the Chartists played a crucial role in making Tyler a lasting symbol of protest, political resistance, and radical historical consciousness.
This new edition of Looke About You (1600) brings back into view a neglected early modern comic history play filled with disguise, court intrigue, and dynastic conflict. Featuring an unusual portrayal of Robin Hood as the Earl of Huntingdon, the play offers a fascinating alternative to the better-known outlaw tradition. Edited by Stephen Basdeo, this edition makes the text accessible to modern…
Zé Maria da Fortaleza’s Adventures of Robin Hood (2007) retells the outlaw legend in Brazilian cordel verse. Robin becomes leader of a woodland brotherhood resisting injustice, defeats the Sheriff through disguise and skill, wins Marian’s love, and is ultimately vindicated by King Richard, blending English folklore with Brazilian popular tradition.
This article examines how the Robin Hood tradition was reshaped in the seventeenth century to express explicit anti-Catholic sentiment. Focusing on Robin Hood’s Golden Prize (1631) by the prolific broadside writer Laurence Price, earlier medieval critiques of corrupt churchmen were transformed after the Reformation into polemic aimed at Catholic priests.
This article recovers Samuel Smithson, a prolific seventeenth-century broadside ballad writer, as the author of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. Moving beyond debates of literary merit, it shows how professional balladists helped sustain and reshape the Robin Hood tradition through early modern print culture in England.
An exploration of Thomas Robins’s seventeenth-century Robin Hood ballads, tracing how street literature survives through accident, collection, and changing cultural values. Using Robins as a case study, this article examines authorship, adaptation of medieval materials, and the role of antiquaries in preserving popular song within Restoration print culture and memory.
Henry Anelay (1816–1883) was a prolific yet now-forgotten Victorian illustrator and painter. Closely linked with G.W.M. Reynolds, he supplied artwork for major serials and contributed to The Illustrated London News and numerous children’s, religious, and popular publications. A versatile draughtsman and later landscape painter, he also exhibited at the Royal Academy. Despite his wide output and…
Álvares de Azevedo’s Macário (1850) transforms the traditional tempter of Christian drama into a philosophical moral arbiter who performs God’s work in sifting the irredeemable from the earth. In Macário, then, the Devil emerges not as corrupter or tempter but as the play’s moral centre: urbane, eloquent, and disgusted by human hypocrisy and irreligiosity. His irony exposes the spiritual decay of…