A Love Letter to Lady Hamilton from Lord Nelson | STORJA101

To Lady Hamilton

My Dearest Emma,

All your letters, my dear letters, are so entertaining, and which point so clearly what you are after that they give me either the greatest pleasure or pain. It is the  next best thing to begin with you.

I only desire, my dearest Emma, that you will always believe that Nelson’s your own; nelson’s Alpha and Omega is Emma! I cannot alter – my affection and love is beyond even this world! Nothing will shake it but yourself; and that I will not allow myself to think for a moment is possible.

I feel that you are the real friend of my bosom, and dearer to me than life; and that I am the same to you. No, not the slice of a single Gloster. But if I was to go on, it would argue that want of confidence which would be…

Source: A Love Letter to Lady Hamilton from Lord Nelson | STORJA101.

Exhibition: Love Bites – Caricatures by James Gillray

The History of Love

To mark 200 years since satirist James Gillray’s death, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is currently holding an exhibition in his honour. During his lifetime he created over 1000 prints, and here on display is a group of 60 examples ostensibly held together by heartstrings – they explore the artist’s often scathing view of love, sex. marriage, friendship and political allegiance in Georgian England, as well as his talent for lampooning his contemporaries.

It offers a refreshing look at Gillray from a perspective coloured more by human intimacy and alliance than the usual political division and grotesquery – we are even treated to William Pitt the Younger as a Poldark-style shirtless Adonis (alright, probably Apollo, technically). Swoon.

William Pitt the hunk (& a few obligatory Frenchmen with no pants on in the background), from Light Expelling Darkness(1795)

Instead of drooling, eyeball-devouring French revolutionaries, or George III defecating on France, or Napoleon merrily wallowing…

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