Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE GEORGIAN
arts
SCENE
The arts flourished during the Georgian
era:
Robinson Crusoe
author Daniel
Defoe visited the east of England and
wrote about
East Anglia
(p. 491) in
Tour
Through the Eastern Counties of England
1722
, noting Colchester's “fair and beau-
tiful” streets. In 1726
Gulliver's Travels
was published by Jonathan Swift, an
Anglo-Irish clergyman, and the artist
William Hogarth created satirical illus-
trations of the country's low morals.
Among his most famous work was
A
Rake's Progress,
a series of eight prints
based on paintings now at
Sir John
Soane's Museum
in London (p. 93).
They track a wealthy young man's
descent from a life of pleasure to debt-
or's prison and madness. His work was
in sharp contrast to the genteel portraits
by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gains-
borough, which are in London's
Ta te
Britain
(p. 102).
William Blake, born in 1757, brought
a vision of heaven and hell with his
illustrations and engravings for topics
and poetry, and his epic Jerusalem. John
Constable, born in the flat Suffolk coun-
tryside in 1776, was starting to make
waves with his landscapes, which he con-
tinued to produce until his death in 1837.
J.M.W. Turner was a landscape painter,
whose work flourished well into the Vic-
torian era. His depictions of light, particu-
larly at the east coast, were remarkable;
the new
Turner Contemporary
museum
opened at Margate in Kent, where he
spent time, in April 2011 (p. 251).
The mid-18th century to the early
19th century was also a time for the
Romantic Poets, generally regarded as
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John
Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Wil-
liam Wordsworth (as well as William
Blake). Wordsworth's
Daffodils
is per-
haps the most oft-quoted for its simple
sentiments, but much of the group's
work combined a romantic view of
England with a social conscience.
2
the core; his retelling of novels and history to bring a gripping new conclusion is one
of British literature's finest forces.
George I overcame a rebellion by supporters of the Catholic descendants of James
II (Jacobites) but left most of the governing of England, Wales (and now Scotland) to
Parliament. He was succeeded by George II in 1727, who overcame a second Jacobite
rebellion—this time led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, last of the Stuart line—in 1745.
George II was the last British king to lead his troops into battle, taking on the
French in 1743. However, it was William Pitt, essentially foreign affairs minister, who
masterminded Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War (1756-63), a series of colonial
conflicts between Britain, France, and Spain that left Britain with control over India
and North America.
Ten years after George III came to the throne in 1760, Captain Cook claimed
Australia for Britain during his HMS
Endeavour
voyage to find the fabled southern
continent. He claimed parts of New Zealand in 1769 before reaching Australia, and
his story is told at the
Captain Cook Memorial Museum
(p. 648), in his home-
town of Whitby in Yorkshire.
The 1801 Act of Union led to the creation of the United Kingdom of Britain and
Ireland, with far-reaching consequences. Irish Catholics were promised equality with
Protestants by Prime Minister William Pitt, but George III was against Catholic
emancipation and appointed another prime minister. Equality did not come until
1829 and by then civil war in Ireland was a constant threat.
