The Profligate Son: Or, a True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice, and Financial Ruin in Regency EnglandIn Regency England a profligate son was regarded as every parent's worst nightmare: he symbolized the dangerous temptations of a new consumer society and the failure of parents to instil moral, sexual, and financial self-control in their sons. This book tells the dramatic and moving story of one of those 'profligate sons': William Jackson, a charming teenage boy, whose embattled relationship with his father and frustrated attempts to keep up with his wealthy friends, resulted in personal and family tragedy. From popular public school boy to the pursuit of prostitutes, from duelling to debtors' prison and finally, from fraudster to convicted felon awaiting transportation to Australia, William's father (a wealthy East India Company merchant) chronicled every step of his son's descent into depravity and crime. This remarkable source provides a unique and compelling insight into the relationship between a father and son at a time when the gap between different generations yawned particularly wide. Diving beneath the polished elegance of Britain in Byron's 'age of surfaces', the tragic tale of William Jackson reveals the murky underworld of debt, disease, crime, pornography, and prostitution that lay so close beneath the veneer of 'polite society'. In a last flowering of exuberant eighteenth-century hedonism before the dawning of Victorian respectability, young William became disastrously familiar with them all. The Profligate Son combines a gripping tale with cutting-edge historical research into early nineteenth-century family conflict, attitudes towards sexuality, credit, and debt, and the brutal criminal justice system in Britain and Australia at the time. It also offers challenging analogies to modern concerns by revealing what Georgians believed to be the best way to raise young men, what they considered to be the relative responsibilities of parents and children, and how they dealt with the problems of debt during the first age of mass consumer credit. |
Contents
India and England 17981805 | 1 |
Home School and Sponging House 18051807 | 21 |
London and Reading School 1808 | 45 |
London and Guernsey 18091810 | 71 |
London Debtors Prisons 18101812 | 95 |
London 1812 | 121 |
Newgate and the Old Bailey 1812 | 143 |
Town and Jail 18121813 | 167 |
Transportation 1814 | 213 |
Australia 18141820 | 237 |
Australia and England 18201828 | 259 |
Epilogue | 273 |
Acknowledgments | 279 |
Notes | 281 |
Selected Bibliography | 313 |
325 | |
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The Profligate Son: Or, a True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice ... Nicola Phillips No preview available - 2015 |
Common terms and phrases
Adolphus arrived assizes attorney behavior believed boys British Broxbornebury Chancery Cheltenham claim clothing Colley Smith colony convicts court creditors crime criminal death debt debtors deck Despite East India Edward Eagar elite emancipists England Evelyn Fanny Hill fashionable father felons Fleet Fleet Prison forgery friends gentleman Gloucester Place Guernsey honor hope hulks inmates Jackson to William jail Jane Jackson John John Evelyn jury justice Kattobomma King’s Langley letter London Macquarie magistrates meant military moral mother Newgate º º o’clock officers Old Bailey Oxford parents Pierce Egan poligar prison profligate Ramnad Redfern reform reputation Saumarez September ship social society solicitors son’s South Wales status Stephen Harper Street surgeon Surry Sydney Sydney Gazette tion Tom & Jerry town transportation trial Vicesimus Knox wealthy William and Joseph William to Jackson William to Jane wrote young youth