18th century… Joseph Ritson the Radical 5 Sep 201915 Mar 2020 By Stephen Basdeo Joseph Ritson was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1752 to a poor yeoman family. As a child, he attended the local Unitarian Sunday School where his talents intellectual…
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…
19th Century… Robin Hood of the Anti-Corn Law League 12 May 2019 By Stephen Basdeo While physical archival research remains the “bread and butter” of the work of any historian, the rise of online repositories of primary sources have proved to be…
19th Century… Thomas Cooper’s “Prison Rhyme” (1845) 5 May 20196 May 2019 By Stephen Basdeo I recently came into possession of a book written by Thomas Cooper (1805-92), a famous Chartist activist, which he gave to his friend, the newspaper proprietor and…
19th Century… The Chartist Robin Hood: The Poems of W. J. Linton (1812–97) 7 Apr 20197 Apr 2019 By Stephen Basdeo During the 1830s, in spite of the passage of the ‘great’ Reform Act (1832), most working men could not vote, while women did not enter the equation…
19th Century… The Politics of Victorian England’s “Vicious Republican”: G. W. M. Reynolds (1814–79) 13 Feb 2019 By Stephen Basdeo It’s quite possible that you’ve never heard of George William MacArthur Reynolds (1814–79). His prolific writing career has been overshadowed somewhat by his contemporaries such as Charles…
