In April, BBC Radio 3 offered five eighteenth century-themed episodes of ‘The Essay’ as part of the BBC’s “Georgian Season”, which marked the 300th anniversary of George I’s accession to the British throne. This Hanoverian collection was titled ‘Georgian Portraits’. Each essay was approximately 15 minutes in duration and presented by a different speaker, offering brief sketches of the lives, achievements and the “Georgianness” of five different personalities from the period. The subjects were Dora Jordan, David Garrick, Elizabeth Parker Shackleton, William Hogarth and Robert Adam, explored in turn by Claire Tomalin, Ian Kelly, Amanda Vickery, Martin Rowson, and Dan Cruickshank.

As the list goes to show, this collection offers an eclectic presentation; and the eclecticism of the series owes less to design than perhaps the fact that the choice of subjects for the monologues was directed by the scholarly/personal interests and enthusiasm of the speakers. However, what the series loses in coherence of topic, theme, or historical narrative, it gains in individual focus, representative sample, and an attention to less salient voices and achievements sadly written out of history.

This is best seen in the inaugural episode, in which Claire Tomalin discusses the actress Dora Jordan (1761-1816). Tomalin, in her own words, “has always been interested in women who have been written out of history.” She notes that the surprising thing about Dora Jordan, “the greatest comic actress of her age”, hugely popular to contemporaries, celebrated by figures no less than Byron, Coleridge and Hazlitt, is how someone so popular, celebrated, and famous in her own day could become so invisible to later generations, up to and including our own. From this starting point, Tomalin’s essay is simultaneously devoted to reopening Jordan’s achievements to historical awareness and offering an explanation as to why she has been forgotten.

Jordan was born into a poor family. She wasn’t very attractive, we are told, but had a good singing voice, and was encouraged at the age of 13 by her mother to enter the theatre in Dublin. After an unpleasant association with her pimp stage manager, involving probable rape and a pregnancy, she was moved by her mother to Yorkshire where, in spite of the disadvantage her illegitimate child brought her, she won over audiences through her determination, charm, and talent. Jordan’s first real success came in 1785 at Drury Lane, under Richard Sheridan’s management, where she displayed an independence of spirit and ambition in declining a role in the sentimental play and demanding instead a part in Garrick’s The Country Girl, an adaptation of Wycherley’s Restoration classic The Country Wife.

Tomalin identifies this as a pivotal moment in Jordan’s career: it sealed her success and celebrity, and brought her to the attention of William, Prince of Wales. An affair lasting twenty years ensued, producing several children. But this kind of celebrity proved to be a mixed blessing, a cause of fame and later neglect, especially for a woman of humble origins. The affair came under increased scrutiny when the question of legitimate heirs became pressing for the royal household, and William was ordered to end the relationship in 1811 in order to marry suitably. After briefly quitting the stage at William’s behest in 1808, Jordan returned to support her younger children. The Times attacked her as a “degraded woman” who should not be allowed to perform, but audiences continued to applaud her, testament to her contemporary popularity. Jordan died alone in 1816, but the real cause of her obscurity was the work of later chroniclers. While William was king he commissioned a statue of her to be erected in Westminster Abbey, but it wasn’t allowed; William IV’s 1884 biographer omitted any mention of Dora and her children; no portraits of her were permitted to be displayed until 1953, and none in the National Gallery until 1979. We can only repeat Tomalin’s lament that “it’s hard to imagine a more shameful business than this crushing of a hard-working, self-reliant professional woman, adored and revered by her fellow actors, who had been a perfect consort to William, and a loving and intelligent mother to their children.”

Ian Kelly’s essay on David Garrick – the second episode – proves an interesting counterpoint to Tomalin’s piece on Jordan. Garrick too was an actor, and similarly made his way to celebrity through hard work, being (Kelly notes) born into a family of outsiders: French Huguenots. They were “symbols of that signal story of Georgian England – social ascendancy, narratives of self-invention.” Unlike Jordan, however, Garrick’s achievements have never been absent from the historical record. There are likely gendered reasons for this, and also the fact that Garrick was at no point a cause of embarrassment for the royal family (which in the case of Jordan was itself a gender issue). The posthumous fate of fame and celebrity, its ephemerality that Jordan was undeservedly victim to, is the topic framing Kelly’s engaging discussion of Garrick.

Tomalin’s essay asks and answers why Jordan has been forgotten, and Kelly here focusses on why Garrick is remembered while many other eighteenth-century actors are lost. Part of his answer lies in “the great gift” the Georgians gave to the modern era: the reputation of theatre and Garrick’s contribution to the professionalization of acting. Garrick, Kelly argues, instituted a new style of naturalistic acting which is taken for granted today. It involved an unprecedented degree of psychological realism, manifested in new techniques which saw actors talking to each other rather than to the audience. Kelly neatly adds a depth of context to Garrick’s revolution of the acting profession. He stresses that Garrick was instrumental in linking his developments to the wider novelistic preoccupations of the period, notably in his emphasis on the inner life of the individual and their psychology, for which Kelly cites Laurence Sterne as an influence. Kelly draws a further parallel between Garrick and Sterne by observing the similar ways in which they were able exploiters of their fame, keying into a public fascination with personality through print, merchandise, and various forms of available publicity. Indeed, he begins the essay with a preamble about how celebrity is part and parcel of what it means to be an actor today: but this, Kelly proposes, is just another legacy of Garrick’s.

It is Kelly’s grasping of the interplay between ‘Garrick the man’ and the distinctly Georgian possibilities that made that man possible, and the relevance such possibilities still hold today, that makes this episode the richest and most rewarding of the series. And it is here, in advancing an argument whilst also gesturing to wider contexts that these short essays come to pack a surprisingly powerful punch.

Even on a well-trodden eighteenth-century subject like William Hogarth, the perspective offered by the modern day cartoonist Martin Rowson has much to leave the listener to think about. Rowson’s essay tangles with the definition of the adjective Hogarthian. It conjures up an image of all that is filthy and revolting about the geographical space of Georgian London: “Modern squalor is squalor; but Georgian squalor is Hogarthian”. But for Rowson, ‘Hogarthianness’ is not synonymous with Georgian London; nor is it a matter of technique, or defined by his enterprising business practices. Rather, “Hogarthian” is “that weird yet common formulation: the self-defining adjective.” Rowson elaborates: “As if he were wandering through a tatty Palladian hall of dirty mirrors, Hogarth depicted Georgian London, and it reflected its ‘Hogarthianness’ back to him till the depiction, reflected and re-reflected in the distorting mirrors of satire and time, became the definition.” What is Hogarthian is the result of an accumulation of perspectives in a kind of hall of mirrors, where the original representation is not quite lost but modified into a new and prevailing definition. This process describes any satirical representation, which through use and acceptance becomes common currency (it’s still an effort now to take Pope’s dunces seriously, for instance). And Rowson duly notes the influence of the Augustan satirists on Hogarth’s work, with their established imagery and topography ready to be drawn from. Indeed, Rowson draws to our attention Hogarth’s link to Swift, whom he shamelessly “coat-tail[ed]” early in his career by engraving scenes from Gulliver’s Travels. While Rowson regrets that there was to be no formal collaboration between these two satirists, something approaching a synergy exists in that Hogarth engraved the urban scenes that Swift described.

Dan Cruickshank’s essay on the late-eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam shifts the focus back onto more elegant features of the Georgian world. Adam was the “most fashionable architect” in the latter half of the century, ushering in a “revolution in taste” which became known as “Adam’s style”. Though his architectural style was driven by the period’s neoclassical impulse, it departed from the earlier neo-Palladian aesthetic by incorporating other classical styles such as the Baroque and Rococo. Adam was also famed for his control over all aspects of design, including furniture, fabrics and décor: he “sought an all-pervading harmony”. Cruickshank’s essay doesn’t just dwell on Adam’s architectural works though: it explores what Adam had to do in order to make his name, and in the process reveals what went into an aspiring eighteenth-century architect’s career portfolio.

Adam first exploited the opportunities of Union for a talented and ambitious Scot by moving to London, where the chief big commissions were to be had. But before he could land a commission, Adam had to embark on what Cruickshank explains was a recent staple of an architectural apprenticeship: a Grand Tour to classical ruin sites. Here, British architects sought to establish careers by “making themselves masters of famed ancient sites and buildings, usually through the publication of lavish, large, and well-illustrated volumes.” Cruickshank demonstrates the extent to which the tour was a practical and theoretical education, and how success was clinched through publication by “moulding taste”. With this context established, Cruickshank is able to illuminate for us how Adam followed this same path to forge his own reputation: first by securing the patronage of Charles Hope to make the tour itself, and then gaining access to an ancient and unexplored site in the Port of Split, containing the ruins of Diocletian’s Palace. Adam measured the site, and produced a volume on his discoveries in 1764. The remainder of the essay covers Adam’s position as Architect of the King’s Works, and the urban speculative ventures he undertook with his brother, John Adam, with particular focus on the Adelphi project and its novel financing through a public lottery.

The overall quality of the essays is very good; they are cogently argued, and fill in enough background information and relevant parallel developments to make the case for their subjects’ wider significance. In short, they do what we expect essays to do. However, Amanda Vickery’s episode on Elizabeth Parker Shackleton is weaker and lacks a clear rationale. Vickery attempts a hidden history narrative similar to Tomalin’s, which initial promises much: “the experience of the majority [of eighteenth-century women] is hidden from history. Only the chance survival of private letters and diaries throws light on the life of Elizabeth Parker Shackleton.” However, whilst Jordan presented Tomlin with a fascinating case-study, Vickery struggles to justify why Shackleton deserves the listener’s attention. Shackleton just isn’t very interesting, at least from this telling.

Shackleton’s diaries amount to 39 volumes, beginning in 1762, and double as household manuals, Vickery tells us, which shed light on family management and the consumption behaviour of the lower gentry. This could have been interesting, but is fleetingly mentioned and quickly forgotten. The monologue is filled instead with an extended account of her disastrous and abusive marriage to John Shackleton, who was 18 years her junior. This is not to say that Vickery’s opening thesis is wrong, or that the hidden history of eighteenth-century women is uninteresting or unimportant, but that Shackleton is not substantial enough a figure to support this single personality essay format. The material is therefore not utilized as well as it could be, and may be better served in a different kind of history programme.

Nevertheless, the series as a whole is well worth a listen, and is still available to UK listeners on BBC iPlayer for the foreseeable future.

The Essay: The Georgians was first broadcast between April 28th and May 2nd 2014 on BBC Radio 3.