“I only strive to arouse the grovelling spirit of the industrious millions to a sense of the wrongs under which they labour.”
Pierce Egan’s “Quintin Matsys” is like the Belgian “Les Miserables”; the people of Antwerp rise up and take to the barricades to overthrow the evil aristocrats who oppress them.
Mike Leigh has produced a visually impressive movie, but the characters are a bit flat.
If you were a criminal, what would you choose – a life sentence in prison, the death sentence, or to be surgically blinded?
G. W. M. Reynolds, the “vicious republican” of the Victorian era, attributed the cause of all crime to the the existence of the royal family and the political establishment.
Pierce Egan’s “Robin Hood” was an early Victorian bestseller. In the first edition, Egan also appended a collection of Robin Hood ballads alongside his novel, for which he provided the illustrations.
Robin Hood has always been an awkward socialist figure, but according to William Morris (1834-1896), he prepared the way for the radical preacher, John Ball (d.1381).
Contrary to scholarly opinion, the first Robin Hood novel was not written in 1819 but in 1791.
Did the events of 16 August 1819 influence Walter Scott’s portrayal of Robin Hood?
I have recently been contracted by a commercial publisher to write a popular history book entitled “The Mob Reformer: The Life and Legend of Wat Tyler” which is due for publication in 2018.
