George Rose’s surname would later serve as ammunition for political cartoonists wanting to make sure their depictions of him were correctly identified but, before his career as a politician, it linked him to Clan Rose, originating in the Scottish Highlands. Born in 1744, Rose was adopted at the age of four by his maternal uncle after his father was implicated…
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Matthew Gregory Lewis
Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) was described by his friend, Romantic poet Lord Byron, as both ‘an excellent man’ and ‘tedious, as well as contradictory, to everything and everybody’.[1] Lewis’ own journal presents a similarly paradoxical image: an owner of five hundred enslaved people who criticised the slave trade whilst extolling his own virtues as a compassionate ‘master’. That Lewis…
