18th century… The Working Man’s Robin Hood: The Writings of Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) 24 Jan 202024 Jan 2020 By Stephen Basdeo In 1832, the publisher Charles Knight had a bright idea: every Saturday he would publish a new magazine which whose aim was to educate working-class readers about…
18th century… Robin Hood the Angry Letter Writer 9 Jun 2019 By Stephen Basdeo Many people have adopted the name of Robin Hood over the years. The most obvious ones which spring to mind are the men who appear in medieval…
18th century… Bandits and Robbers of India 9 Feb 20199 Feb 2019 By Stephen Basdeo During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company established a number of fortified trading settlements—“factories”—in various parts of the Indian subcontinent. The trading company…
14th Century… The Flemish Revolt: Pierce Egan’s “Quintin Matsys” (1838) 28 Dec 2018 By Stephen Basdeo Pierce Egan the Younger (1814–80) is one of my most favourite Victorian authors. The son of the more famous Regency journalist and writer, Pierce Egan (1772–1849), he…
11th Century… The Virgin and the Outlaw 5 Jun 2018 By Stephen Basdeo In modern popular culture, heroes often possess some supernatural powers, or at other times they are so skilled at what they do that their superiority often appears…
17th century… “Robin Hood’s Rescue of the Three Squires” and the Political Economy of Banditry 30 Mar 2018 Many Robin Hood ballads were printed as broadsides during the seventeenth century. The majority of them depict Robin Hood as a rather inept outlaw who, every time he stops somebody,…
