Benjamin Franklin had an illegitimate son named William in 1730. In 1747, he published the anonymous, satirical pamphlet The Speech of Polly Baker, revealing what he really thought about the matter. The brief pamphlet is the tale of a woman put on trial for having (yet another) illegitimate child. The

Let's tackle five of them. The first three were married when they had an affair with Byron and all were older than him. The aristocracy of the Regency era indulged in frequent love affairs and this was well accepted as long as the players showed discretion in public.

I read Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1862-63) as a kid. Didn't like it - too depressing - but then I didn't much like Alice in Wonderland either and now I love it. But, comfortable Victorian children

Wordsworth's "splendour in the grass" echoes through the years in Andrew Wyeth's evocative Christina's World (1948) and - equally - in the supremely depressing Elia Kazan film Splendor in the Grass (1961). The story of the woman in Wyeth's painting,

The U.S. public education system today does not resemble Rousseau's Émile. It resembles a Shakespearean melodrama, with stabbings, jealousies, crazy old people and alienated young people locked up together in a Gothic castle. Ah, but which play does that remind you of? Hamlet... Like Hamlet’s father,

My grandmother. One of the heroes in this story.

Among the stranger tales of Victorian obsession are those concerning John Ruskin, the most influential art critic of Victorian Britain. But there is less here than meets the eye. Like Lewis Carroll he appears to have remained celibate his entire life, while being drawn to the innocence of young girls,

Jenny von Westphalen was four years older than Karl Marx and she came from the Prussian aristocracy. Marx himself came from a line of rabbis on both his mother's and father's side. They had seven children together although only three made it to adulthood. It always

Romanticism in English art began, many argue, with the painting below, where a Byronic hero is dwarfed by an overwhelming landscape. This is Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, an oil painting by John Martin from 1812. The splendid nonsense of the painting's title and the

The Mt. Peel Station homestead was built between 1865 and 1867, becoming the first of the Canterbury high country sheep stations. It remains privately owned. Nearby is the Church of the Holy Innocents (below), which was completed in 1869. It can be visited but it was badly damaged by the

In 1815, when Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba, Byron wrote in a letter how much he admired Napoleon, the Romantic hero he wanted to be. It is impossible not to be dazzled and overwhelmed by his character and career. Nothing ever so disappointed me as his abdication, and

Onanism is masturbation. It is, we assume, what they do in Onania, or The Land of Onan, referred to in Genesis 38. That is the chapter about not spilling our seed on the ground, so it is not really about masturbation at all but coitus interruptus (and therefore about not

Shakespeare's Ophelia, the poster girl for doomed women, has inspired endless speculation as to whether or not she committed suicide, when she "fell in the weeping brook" and was drowned. I'm with the gravediggers on this one. Shelley's wife, Harriet, chose to

In the years before Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the English aristocracy contemplated its survival and began making concessions. 1832 was the first significant year, with the Reform Act, whereby voting rights were extended to adult males with property worth more than £10. It only passed after

I associate Rousseau with two places. Not Geneva or the towns around the lake associated with Julie, or the New Héloïse (Vevey, Clarens, Meillerie), or Montmorency near Paris where he wrote Émile and Of The Social Contract, or Les Charmettes near Chambéry (in Savoy) from earlier in his life with

When we talk of illegitimate children, we really mean that the relationship between the parents was "illegitimate." But few are as illegitimate as Pygmalion and his wife. In the original Greek myth, as retold in Metamorphoses X by Ovid, Pygmalion makes a statue from ivory and falls in

The revolutionary impact of Rousseau's Émile, or On Education (1762) lay in the implication that if we are all born equal ("In the natural order men are all equal"), then there is no inherent difference between a child born illegitimate and a child of wealthy, even

Erewhon in Samuel Butler’s satiric fantasy of 1872 bears no resemblance to high country New Zealand really, for all the rapt descriptions of thundering rivers, glaciers and rugged peaks on the way there. For one thing, there are many people in Erewhon: "Both the girls and the men

The most compelling explanation for the stork as deliverer of babies may be that in medieval times migratory storks began nesting on high roofs and chimneys across northern Europe, and when parents needed to explain to children how babies arrive, they may have offered a convenient way to do so

The Bone People (1984) by Keri Hulme is the best New Zealand novel I have read and I have read a few. Some reviewers have difficulty with the style (a "shambles"), but they are unwilling or unable to enter the mind of someone so scattered, or shattered, and

Shelley was drowned off Viareggio in 1822 when his boat went down. If I may quote an excellent article in The Guardian: "By 1889 Louis Fournier's celebrated painting "The Cremation of Shelley", showed a miraculously undamaged corpse offered up to Heaven on a martyr'

The Freemasons of the late 18th century were inspired by Rousseau's ideas, but the reverse is hardly true. Rousseau never would have tolerated their secrecy and their rituals, let alone their emphasis on improving oneself through the study of esoteric knowledge. Nonetheless for his contemporaries, joining the Freemasons

The French Revolution as viewed from Britain can be seen in the series of increasingly horrified caricatures of James Gillray, from 1789 through the arrival of Napoleon a decade later. Below is The Blood of the Murdered Crying for Vengeance from 1793, in which Gillray is reacting to the guillotining

Historical writing for most of the 19th century was about sorting out legitimacy and illegitimacy - which races were superior and which species would survive. Lessons were to be drawn from the past (ancient Rome), from the world (empire, colonies, slavery), and from nature (natural selection, evolution). Below is Thomas