The Profligate Son: Or, a True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice, and Financial Ruin in Regency England

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OUP Oxford, Oct 24, 2013 - History - 336 pages
In 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
Index
325

Woolwich Hulks 1813
189

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About the author (2013)

Nicola Phillips is an expert in gender history and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Politics at Kingston University. Her first book was on women in business from 1700 to 1850, and her research focuses on eighteenth-century gender, work, family conflict, and criminal and civil law. Nicola is also an advocate of public history. A co-founder of Kingston University's Centre for the Historical Record, she is also a member of the National Archives User Advisory Group and the Historical Association's Public History Committee, and has acted as a historical consultant for the National Trust, the Royal Mail, and Addidi Wealth Ltd. She has also contributed to radio and TV programmes on gender history.

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