Dinner & Book Presentation
Tuesday April 15th, 2025 6:00pm-9:00pm
Union Club of Boston
The Society in conjunction with the Union Club and the English Speaking Union invite you to dinner and a presentation by Caroline Stanley, Countess of Derby and Professor Andrew O'Shaughnessy.
Tickets cost $85 and include Hearty hors d’oeuvres, cocktails and 4-course dinner.
Reception: 6:00pm
Dinner: 7:00pm
Dress: Cocktail Attire
The club is a one-block walk from the Green and Red Line stop “Park Street”. Parking is available at evening rates at the nearby Boston Common Garage, entrance at 0 Charles Street.
Please register online here by April 7th, or contact secretary@oxcamne.org with questions.
Caroline Stanley, Countess of Derby is a historian, curator and storyteller. Born a Neville, she married a Stanley and grew up on the Audley End Estate before studying History and History of Art at London University and then working for nearly a decade in all the royal palaces as Exhibitions Assistant to the Surveyor of The Queen’s Paintings of the Royal Collection. Lady Derby married the 19th Earl of Derby in 1995 and they have 3 children. She is convinced that education and knowledge of history have the power to change lives.
Professor Andrew O’Shaughnessy is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and noted scholar on the American Revolution. He was the former Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Visiting International Fellow at the Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull, and is currently Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.
The Countess of Derby has transcribed recently discovered travel journals of the 14th Earl of Derby who as a young man journeyed across Canada and the United States. His innermost thoughts in these diaries will show him to be one of the leading visionaries of the Victorian age and will expose his true legacy shedding new light on how he drew on examples from all aspects of American life to influence British reform.
In July 1824, Edward Geoffrey Stanley arrived in New York City at the end of a nearly five-week voyage from Liverpool. The young Member of the British Parliament and future 14th Earl of Derby was under a cloud before his departure. His political career was off to a rough start and he was in love with a young lady that he was forbidden to marry. A lengthy tour, or as Stanley termed it, a “banishment,” had been imposed upon him. From July 1824 into March 1825, Stanley travelled extensively throughout the eastern half of North America. He crossed mountains and lakes, journeyed up and down rivers, and trekked through pine barrens, swamps, and marshes. He travelled by stage, steamboat, canoe, horseback and sometimes on foot, studying every aspect of the towns and countryside he passed through. Stanley was sometimes surprised, and sometimes shocked, by what he saw. Complicated interactions between the Catholic French and their Protestant British neighbours in Canada, the horrifying lives of those enslaved in the U.S. South, the poverty of Irish immigrants in the North, the degradation of Native Americans everywhere: all of these left deep impressions on Stanley. Everything he learned during this journey shaped his future career as a political reformer and distinguished statesman.