ogg house.” When Lord John reflects that surely Geneva’s body does not lie “in some hogg house or desolate shed,” he is not considering that her family might have left her in a pig-sty. A “hogg house” was a storage building for dried peat.

Homophobia. I am greatly indebted both to Norton Rictor (Mother Clap’s Molly-House) and to Byrne Fone (Homophobia: A History) for insight into the perception and treatment of homosexuals in the mid-eighteenth century. Quotes in this book regarding the social and legal prosecution of “sodomites” are taken from Homophobia, and are actual quotes from the newspapers and other periodicals of the period.

Horace Walpole was one of the best-known letter-writers of the early-to mid-eighteenth century, and his collected correspondence is as valuable to a student of that period as Samuel Pepys’s diaries are to an earlier one. Fourth son of the formidable Robert Walpole (First Earl of Orford, who more or less invented the office of prime minister, though he himself refused to use that title), Horace was not political himself, but had great insight—expressed with wit and irony—into the social, military, and political processes of his milieu.

Prejudice. Speaking of phobias…historical attitudes in England toward the Irish, Scottish, etc. are rendered as they were (interpreted through writings of the period), rather than as modern political correctness might desire (e.g., descriptions of the Irish gathering “like fleas” and other opprobrious remarks are taken from primary sources of the period, as quoted in M. Dorothy George’s London Life in the Eighteenth Century and Liza Picard’s Dr. Johnson’s London).