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As his fortune grew, Louis invested in securities but also in the ‘West India’ and ‘East India’ trades, as well as in shipping cotton from America. Her also accumulated property by lending large sums for which property was mortgaged to him as security. Some of these loans were defaulted and property therefore passed to Louis as a result. Except that because of other claims he or his estate had great difficulty in getting possession of it, resulting in lengthy legal cases.
The book also contains a great deal of information about gentlemens’ tailoring in those times, as well as being a microcosm of Georgian and regency life. As such is should be on the bookshelf of any historical researcher and writer concerned with this fascinating period.
About the Author
Charles Bazalgette was born in a pacifist commune in Ashburton, Devonshire, towards the end of the second world war. His father Deryck Bazalgette was a conscientious objector who devoted his life to horticulture. His mother, Margaret Bonham, was a successful writer of short stories. He went first to Knowles Hill School in Newton Abbot. His parents divorced and his father remarried and moved the family to Surrey, where Charles went to a junior school in Virginia Water and then to the aptly-named Wallop School in Weybridge. For his secondary education he was lucky enough to get a grant to go to Dartington Hall School, back in Devonshire, where he was an indifferent student, preferring to play jazz and fish for trout in the nearby River Dart. On leaving school he worked at an art college and then in several public libraries, even going to library school in London before switching to a more lucrative job in computer programming. He has worked in the IT industry in a variety of roles for over forty years, discovering on the way a talent for intuitive technical problem solving, and still works from home for a major software company. He now lives near Salmo, a village in British Columbia, Canada, with his second wife Trish, who runs a bookstore and frames pictures. His interests are mainly in the past - research into family and social history but also the restoration of old buildings, furniture and clocks. He has always enjoyed writing (except essays at school) but has not done a great deal of it. He is fascinated by biography as a genre, and is currently researching the career of Louis’ son Joseph William Bazalgette, who served as an officer in the British Navy for eighteen years during the Napoleonic Wars.
Blog:
https://prinnystaylor.
https://twitter.com/chasbaz1
Amazon US
http://www.amazon.com/Prinnys-
Amazon UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/
Written content of this post copyright © Charles Bazalgette, 2015.
2 comments:
It's a smashing book and a must have for any serious historian of the period. The accounts themselves are amazing, and provide a lot of information on the cost of both fabrics and services. The chapter on tailoring was particularly fascinating, and my mother, who trained as a tailor, recognised the stitch descriptions but unfortunately her eyesight these days is not good enough to show me what they look like. I shall have to work it out for myself...
Louis' life touched those of so many famous people of the period, and loaned money to a good number of them, it really is a portrait of a man, extraordinary in his own way, but ordinary in terms of his social elevation, in the context of the Regency glitterati. I thoroughly recommend the book.
Many thanks for your comment, Sarah!
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