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In ‘The World of William Hickey’ Jan Morris (for the first time writing under this name in Horizon, having previously been James Morris), tells the story of ‘an adventurer and a scribbler [who had a] boisterous rise to nabobdom’:

She describes Hickey’s arrival in Calcutta in 1769:

So on the first day of May he climbed the companion ladder and put his head above deck to see the Coromandel Coast. The moment he emerged, something terrible happened to him. ‘I felt an indescribably unpleasant sensation, suddenly, as it were, losing the power of breathing, which alarmed me much…I would compare it only to standing within the oppressive influence of the steam of a furnace.’

So dreadfully did it strike the young Londoner, so inconceivable did it seem that tolerable human life could be conducted in such an inferno, that almost as soon as he landed young Mr Hickey was looking around for passage home again; but it was, in fact, only the ordinary morning heat of India, blowing out to sea from the sweltering flatlands of the Carnatic, and in it Hickey was to spend the best and most profitable years of his life. ‘Cut off half a dozen rich fellows’ heads,’ that old family friend had said, ‘and so return a nabob yourself’; and indeed, getting rich was the classic first step in that classic process of eighteenth-century social history, the making of a nabob.

 

Morris describes his early life in England:

The son of a well-respected London lawyer, educated at Westminster, he was one of those young men of the upper-middle classes whose fate it is to gravitate to grander circumstances, getting themselves as a result constantly into debts and deceit. Mr. Hickey senior was not at all a severe father, and in his way Mr. Hickey junior loved him; but time and again the son let the father down, escaping his tutor to sleep with a whore in Drury Lane, running up debts, spending other people’s money. He worked for a time in his father’s office and thus gained – more by useful connections than by diligence – legal qualifications; but all his energies went into pleasure, the pleasures of the tavern, the recreation garden, the river (for he loved rowing and sailing), and, predictably, the brothel. His stamina was tremendous, his high spirits were marvelously infectious. Women loved him, as he loved them all his life, and his friends were mostly picaresques of his own kind: spendthrift younger sons, wild Guards officers, rakes and roués of every background.

In ‘America’s First City’, John Pfeiffer writes about the pre-Columbian Cahokia Mounds, the largest settlement of the Mississippian culture:

In the heart of the Midwest, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, is the site of a great prehistoric city. It lies in a perfectly ordinary suburb that has little use for times past: commuters have been passing through it day after day for years, never realizing what happened there, just six miles east of St. Louis. Known as Cahokia, the city has vanished without a trace, except for a number of mounds that still remain and could easily be mistaken for natural hills.

Things were different some eight centuries or so ago. Imagine that all the marks of what passes for civilization have faded away – the four-lane highways and gas stations and hamburger joints and drive-in theaters and smog – and you stand in another age, another America. You are at Cahokia as it appeared in its prime, at about the time of the signing of the Magna Carta.

 

You stand in the midst of a bustling scene in the center of a wide plaza. An earthen skyscraper looms before you, a terraced mound about ten stories high, with a platform overlooking the plaza, and ramps and stairways leading to a large, decorated building at the top. Surrounding you are other buildings, a dozen smaller mounds, and two smaller plazas, all enclosed in a stockade of heavy logs a smile and a half long.

In ‘The End of Optimism’, Neil McKendrick describes the Lisbon earthquake, tsunami and fire of 1755 and its effect on the European Age of Enlightenment:

There were some startling anomalies to explain away. The entire street of brothels called the Rua Suja had remained, for instance, completely undamaged: why should convents, churches, and monasteries be destroyed and brothels spared? The explanation that God had spared the brothels out of pity for their wretched inhabitants, but could not pardon those who profaned the houses of worship, was plainly inadequate. Another question frequently asked was, Why Lisbon? It was a city of countless churches and ample miracles: it had a Virgin who regularly shed tears, a statue of the infant Jesus that wept real blood, and another statue whose toenails grew so fast that they were said to need a weekly trim. Didn’t the Lisboans constantly put on religious processions and faithfully attend the burning of heretics at day-long autos-da-fé? Why should Lisbon, of all places, be struck down?

Horizon caption: ‘Panic-stricken survivors of the earthquake flee or watch in horror as towers topple and Lisbon burns. The detail opposite comes from a contemporary engraving.’

 

In 1710 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz had published his Essais de théodicée sur la bontée de Dieu, la libertée de l’homme, et l’origine du mal. In it he tackled and apparently solved for all time the puzzle as to how God, though all-wise and all-good, could tolerate evil. Leibnitz hypothesized that if a lesser evil could bring about a greater good, it would clearly be a necessary element of God’s creation. Supreme wisdom, united with infinite goodness, could not exclude any lesser evil, that would lead to a greater good…

This tout est bien school of thought, labelled Optimism in 1737, won almost unanimous approval of governments…Voltaire, always something of a natural radical, never regarded Leibnitz with much respect…[He] wrote Candide in 1759 with the express intention of polishing off the Optimistic school. This time he succeeded – so triumphantly that after Candide people spoke of Optimism, if at all, with irony and condescension.