"Winchester" Movie Review!

So I saw "Winchester" last night.

Now I wouldn't normally do movie reviews. I am not a movie critic. I have no professional background in film analysis.

But this is "Winchester" for crying out loud. It's a movie based on the House that I still love with all my heart, on the woman who I've long considered one of my heroes. Of course I was going to go see it. I had to. So I went with my friend and fellow former Winchester tour guide, Hannah, who you may remember as one of the former tour guides who visited Mrs. Winchester's grave in New Haven with me.

And sure, artistic liberties were taken - they always are when historical events are put to film - but did it live up to the Winchester name? Was it any good? Was it worth the $17.50 I spent on a movie ticket?

The Forgotten Hamilton

It's pretty common knowledge that Alexander Hamilton, despite all of his numerous accomplishments, considered his large family one of his most important legacies of all. He considered himself a family man and, fittingly, had an absolute army of children. There were 8 biological children in all, though the oldest and the youngest never got to meet one another:

1. Philip (born 1782)
2. Angelica (1784)
3. Alexander Jr. (1786)
4. James Alexander (1788)
5. John Church (1792)
6. William Stephen (1797)
7. Eliza (1799)
8. Philip (1802)

Now, it seems that the further we go down this list of children, the less people know about them. Everyone has heard of the first Philip, of course - he's the one who died in a duel. Angelica got her own entry on this blog, and even Alexander Jr. sometimes gets remembered for the fun piece of trivia that he represented Eliza Jumel as her divorce lawyer when she divorced Aaron Burr.  Some people know the name of child #5, John Church Hamilton (named not after John Laurens, but after Angelica Schuyler Church's husband) as the man who wrote the first biography of Alexander Hamilton, and who commissioned what a friend of mine calls "the weirdly sexy Hamilton statue in Central Park".

But what about child #8, Philip the second? It seems people only remember him as a footnote - even my tours at the Grange only mention him as the baby named after the son who died in a duel. But the guy did lead a life beyond just being a baby. 

This is what he looked like as an adult

So let's learn a little bit about Philip Hamilton number two - or, as his family called him, "Little Phil".