About This Book
The author presents a series of illustrated lectures surveying English social life from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, using lives, writings, and contemporary documents to illuminate rural and urban customs, manners, and institutions. Individual lectures examine religious revival and popular culture through the career of John Wesley, provincial life and anecdote via George Crabbe and Margaret Catchpole, Cambridge reminiscences and the Creevey correspondence for Regency society, Dickens’ exposure of social abuses, Thackeray’s mid-Victorian perspectives, and the role of sport and rural traditions. The approach blends biography, literary criticism, and social history to trace evolving habits, morals, and public life.