Victor Hugo’s Bishop of Digne was inspired by François-Melchior-Charles-Bienvenu de Miollis, a real bishop renowned for charity, humility, and devotion to the poor.
Frederick Fox Cooper’s 1869 stage adaptation transforms Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe into a thrilling Victorian spectacle of tournaments, sieges, outlaws, fire, and chivalric conflict. This modern edition restores the complete play, revealing how Astley’s Theatre reshaped Scott’s medieval romance for popular audiences through action, comedy, music, and patriotic drama onstage again.
This essay examines Walter Scott’s portrayal of Robin Hood in Ivanhoe through the lens of eighteenth-century crime writing. It argues that Scott, drawing on criminal biographies as well as Joseph Ritson’s ballad collection, presents Robin as neither hero nor villain, but as a morally ambiguous outlaw shaped by print traditions.
Explore how working-class, Black, Jewish, and ethnic minority boxers shaped the golden age of prizefighting. This article examines Daniel Mendoza, Bill Richmond, Tom Molineaux, class, race, and Georgian boxing culture, showing how the prize ring offered fame and opportunity while exposing prejudice, exploitation, and exclusion.
The Percy Folio preserved some of the most important medieval and early modern poems in English literary history. This article traces its journey from Thomas Percy’s eighteenth-century recovery of the manuscript to its long-delayed publication by Furnivall, Hales, and Child in 1868.
This article examines Punch’s 1894 poem ‘Bold Robin Hood’, which recast Sir William Harcourt’s Budget as fiscal outlawry. Rather than celebrating Robin Hood’s moral economy, Edwin James Milliken’s satire made redistributive taxation appear as cant, coercion, and highway robbery in defence of property and middle-class respectability.
This article explores how Chartist newspapers, poems, and historical essays transformed Wat Tyler from a vilified medieval rebel into a hero of working-class memory. It argues that the Chartists played a crucial role in making Tyler a lasting symbol of protest, political resistance, and radical historical consciousness.
An open access version of the Robin Hood pageant Metropolis Coronata (1615), linking the outlaw myth to London’s Lord Mayor’s triumph.
This article examines how the Robin Hood tradition was reshaped in the seventeenth century to express explicit anti-Catholic sentiment. Focusing on Robin Hood’s Golden Prize (1631) by the prolific broadside writer Laurence Price, earlier medieval critiques of corrupt churchmen were transformed after the Reformation into polemic aimed at Catholic priests.
An exploration of Thomas Robins’s seventeenth-century Robin Hood ballads, tracing how street literature survives through accident, collection, and changing cultural values. Using Robins as a case study, this article examines authorship, adaptation of medieval materials, and the role of antiquaries in preserving popular song within Restoration print culture and memory.
Henry Anelay (1816–1883) was a prolific yet now-forgotten Victorian illustrator and painter. Closely linked with G.W.M. Reynolds, he supplied artwork for major serials and contributed to The Illustrated London News and numerous children’s, religious, and popular publications. A versatile draughtsman and later landscape painter, he also exhibited at the Royal Academy. Despite his wide output and public presence, Anelay has slipped almost entirely from modern scholarship.
Álvares de Azevedo’s Macário (1850) transforms the traditional tempter of Christian drama into a philosophical moral arbiter who performs God’s work in sifting the irredeemable from the earth. In Macário, then, the Devil emerges not as corrupter or tempter but as the play’s moral centre: urbane, eloquent, and disgusted by human hypocrisy and irreligiosity. His irony exposes the spiritual decay of a society already more corrupt than Hell itself.
While editing Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood (1795), I stumbled upon an unexpected reference to “the sweet science” of boxing. This small detail opens a window into Georgian England, where Ritson’s antiquarian scholarship met the vibrant popular culture of his age. His nod to “the boasted worthies of the knuckle” reminds us that Robin Hood was never just a medieval study—it was also a reflection of eighteenth-century London life, where learning, liberty, and pugilism could coexist.
In Harleian MS 367, which dates from the time of Henry VIII’s Reformation, in which the name of Robin Hood is used to satirise the Catholic Church and the Reformers.
Joseph Ritson (1752-1803), a conveyancer and passionate literary critic, significantly impacted the study of the Robin Hood legend with his 1795 work, “Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems.” His nephew, Joseph Frank, later edited Ritson’s works, updating and adapting them for contemporary audiences while preserving their scholarly essence.
The name of the Pinder to Wakefield locals is, as Shakespeare might say, ‘familiar in [their] mouths as household words’. The Pinders Fields, however, reveal an exciting history of rebellion, outlawry, and patriotism; so expressed in Robert Greene’s play in 1599 titled “The Pinner of Wakefield.”
“Vengeance! Vengeance! I will yet be avenged! In the meantime, let me seek an hour’s repose!”
“To arms, Citizens! To Arms!” was the cry of many of the now forgotten common people who fought for Brazilian independence, and whose writings are revealed by José Carvalho, Lucia Bastos, and Marcello Basile.
‘The streets of the towns [will be] bathed in light; green branches on the thresholds; all nations sisters; men just old men blessing children; the past loving the present; perfect liberty of thought; believers enjoying perfect equality … no more bloodshed, no more wars; happy mothers!’
‘In Buenos Aires, everyone wears Rosas’ symbol on their hatbands or buttonholes, the ladies as a ribbon in their hair. This symbol is a folded ribbon, bearing a portrait of the tyrant and the words “Federation or Death! Long Live the Restorer of Laws! Death to the Unitarian Savages!”
Thus rises one more Christmas … A new sadness…For those who suffer. New delicacies; from the harp new vibrating melodies around the banquets of the rich.
My soul was covered in a veil of perpetual sadness in the moment in which I read my mother’s letter. Yet I will not, as Job did, date the hour of the commencement of my misfortunes since the time of my birth.
One day, however, according to the will of Tupã, the warrior chief became sick and passed away. It was a moment of much pain for all but, after some time, the village elders met to choose, from among the greatest warriors, the new chief. And what luck—the new chief was Obirici’s crush: Itiberê!
A man of frightful figure looked at us with a choleric eye. The priest looked directly at him for a moment without moving so much as a muscle, simulating the best feigned indifference I ever saw. He did not forbid me to look at that man—perhaps he thought we would be less suspicious.