Browse Hierarchy HST5225: The Georgians: Society and Culture, Sex and Crime

The Georgian period was an era of startling contrasts: elegance and squalor, politeness and prostitution, `patricians¿ and `plebs¿, landed privilege and a booming economy, sensibility and slavery. This was an epoch of striking change in trade and industry, town and countryside, culture and manners. We examine bloody criminal justice and the criminal underworld; Britishness and race; the interlinked worlds of rich, poor and striving middling sort; the growth of trade and in particular the slave trade; the `birth of a consumer society¿ and polite culture; religious conformity and nonconformity; the sexual double standard, homosexuality and lesbianism. Were the British a polite and commercial people, or an ungovernable rabble? Was this an 'Ancien Régime', or the first modern, industrial society? This course introduces students to the cultural and social history of one of the most vibrant centuries in British history and reveals the Georgians in all their colour and contradictions, struggles and hypocrisies.