Because 'privilege' seems to be the hot topic right now - a post bolstering my dead white male cred

Read a book while I was back at the parents' which a recently rediscovered relative had passed on to them, a catalogue of the work of the engraver James Heath, my five-times-great grandfather, introduced with a biographical essay. I knew his son Charles had engraved the Penny Black but of James, little. Turns out he was friends with Fuseli and Sheridan, among others, and that he knew and liked Blake though Blake couldn't stand him (or most other contemporary engravers, so it wasn't exactly personal). That he knew Landseer and Zoffany probably only excites me because they have streets named after them near me (the latter also being the last road in the A-Z), but it was through them that he got involved in a running battle with the Royal Academy, who wouldn't allow engravers full membership. The Academy said that engraving was a purely imitative art, like translation; engravers preferred to think of themselves as kin to musicians, interpreting a composer's score. Now, we can even debate whether translation is as menial as all that, of course, and nowadays there are so many more interpretative arts which nobody ever thinks to deny full standing - from comics art to film direction. But at the time, those were the battle lines. It's a hard one to get worked up about now engraving has gone the way of all things, but it does seem a little snobbish given a good engraver was, back then, the only way your picture could ever be seen by more than the people who could actually make it along to see the original. The picture of Johnson on the first edition of Boswell's Life, for instance, was one of James' engravings.
The downside is that he seems to have spent so much of his time engraving, politicking about engraving or having his houses burn down that he only found time for one other noteworthy incident - when the woman he loved was to be married to another, he not only charged into the church Graduate-style to sweep her away with him - he did so on horseback.