By Nicola Phillips
ISBN-10: 0199687536
ISBN-13: 9780199687534
A profligate son used to be each Georgian parent’s worst nightmare. To his father, William Jackson’s imprudent spending, incessant partying, and sexual adventures have been a certain signal he was once at the slippery slope to damage. yet to his neighbors, William used to be a “damned reliable fellow,” a captivating, impeccably dressed younger gentleman with enviable seductive abilities who used to be keen to safeguard his honor in duels. Mr. Jackson and his son seen one another throughout a generational hole that neither might bridge, and their wrong courting had catastrophic effects for his or her family.
In The Profligate Son, historian Nicola Phillips hauntingly reconstructs this kinfolk tragedy from a lately found trove of letters and courtroom files. After Mr. Jackson’s acquisition of a fortune in the course of his provider for the East India corporation in Madras used to be undermined by way of fake accusations that ruined his occupation, he invested all his destiny objectives in his merely son. William grew up in nice convenience and was once despatched to the simplest faculties within the nation. but if the kin moved to London, the teen rebelled opposed to the loneliness and sometimes brutal regimes of public education and escaped to discover the pleasures of the city along with his prosperous pals. His makes an attempt to provoke his friends led him into disastrous degrees of debt that led to his imprisonment and ever extra unlawful efforts to meet his collectors, which appalled his prudent, sternly moralistic father. Mr. Jackson made up our minds that the one option to wrestle his son’s wayward habit used to be to fully reduce him off. In doing so, he condemned William to repeated imprisonment and a deadly voyage to an Australian penal colony. In Sydney William sought to rebuild his lifestyles with a kinfolk of his personal, yet even there his father’s legacy introduced additional tragedy.
A masterpiece of literary nonfiction as dramatic as any Dickens novel, The Profligate Son transports readers from the steamy streets of India and the dependent squares and seedy brothels of London to the sunbaked shorelines of Australia, tracing the arc of a existence lengthy buried in historical past.
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Additional resources for The Profligate Son: Or, a True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice, and Financial Ruin in Regency England
Sample text
Close to the capital’s smartest shops, it was also an address that, William soon discovered, was sufficient to send tradesmen scuttling to the door with goods on credit, eager to do business with such a wealthy, wellconnected family. His equally wealthy and even more influential uncles both had houses nearby. John Evelyn lived just down the road at 28 THE PROFLIGATE SON number 80 with his wife, Jane Jackson’s sister, Anne. Sir George Shee’s London residence was a short walk away in Manchester Square—not that Jane felt it appropriate to visit her brother’s family in anything other than her liveried coach.
In Jackson’s eyes, the Ramnad committee’s investigation into Kattobomma Nayakar’s actions was a flagrant breach of all the principles of British justice—he cited evidence from Warren Hastings’s trial and checked points of law in William Blackstone’s definitive Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) to prove his assertions. He was therefore furious but not surprised that the committee acquitted the poligar of Panjalamkurichi of the charge of murdering the adjutant and declared that the officer had been killed by an unknown pikeman.
Nevertheless, he prided himself on being an honest man, impervious to the financial incentives that had so dramatically enriched his predecessors. The trial of Warren Hastings had made a huge impact on Jackson, whose family ties as well as his personal and political beliefs bound him to Burke’s prosecution case. 10 THE PROFLIGATE SON In his desire to perform his public duty honorably, Jackson worked tirelessly in Ramnad to stamp out the practice of Europeans and Indians loaning money at extortionate rates of interest; such loans had entangled nawabs, poligars, and civil and military servants of the East India Company in a disastrous web of corruption across the whole southern region.
The Profligate Son: Or, a True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice, and Financial Ruin in Regency England by Nicola Phillips
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