Georgian

If anything is guaranteed to get my feminist dander up, it’s the idea of wifely perfection, and this enthralling book had me seething from start to finish. On a summer’s day in 1769, wealthy (but unprepossessing) bachelor Thomas Day visited the orphan hospital in Shrewsbury to choose himself a wife. This was not the way a gentleman usually embarked upon courtship, even in the eighteenth century, but at the grand age of twenty-one, Day had already decided that his womanly ideal did not exist: therefore, he would have to create her. He required someone “completely subservient to his needs and whims and utterly in thrall to his ideas and beliefs”. ...

“Never was a spectacle so much enjoyed,” wrote Letitia Landon of the fire that destroyed the old Palace of Westminster on 16th October 1834. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered to watch open-mouthed, as eight centuries of tradition went up in smoke. There was no need to inform King William IV of this terrible event – the flames were clearly visible from Windsor Castle, some twenty miles away. Queen Adelaide allegedly deemed the fire “divine retribution” for the great Reform Act of 1832, which had egregiously extended the franchise, bringing the country perilously close to democracy. Others saw it differently: an elderly man was arrested for cheering in delight, “This is what we wanted – this ought to have happened years ago.” But there was no agency involved; incompetence had succeeded where Guy Fawkes had failed. ...

There’s not much that surprises me these days, but Lady Worsley’s Whim managed to repeatedly elevate the papal eyebrows. The story centres around an infamous crim-con trial that took place on 21 February 1782 between Sir Richard Worsley, Governor of the Isle of Wight, and George Bisset, an officer (but not a gentleman) and one-time friend of Worsley. Despite having encouraged a close relationship between Bisset and his wife, Worsley thought it outrageous when the pair ran off together, and claimed £20,000 in damages. Already a wealthy man, the astronomical sum was designed to reduce his enemy to penury. ...

I must confess to having been initially sceptical at the title’s claim of “worst” husband. Having spent much of the last few years rummaging through historical divorce papers, I know there are many ghastly contenders for that dubious honour. Andrew Robinson Stoney was described by his own father as “the most wretched man I ever knew”, and he was to showcase his ghastliness on Mary Eleanor Bowes, the eighteenth century’s richest heiress (and great-great-great-grandmother of the late Queen Mother). ...