This highly original study looks at rituals of sociability in new and creative ways. Based upon thousands of personal letters, it reconstructs the changing country and London worlds of an English gentry family and reveals intimate details about the social and cultural life of the period. Challenging current views, the book observes strong connections, instead of deep divisions, between country and city, land and trade, sociability and power. Its very different view undermines established stereotypes of omnipotent male patriarchs, powerless wives and kin, autonomous elder sons, and dependent...

Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London will entertain and inform all who are interested in literature, history, and the city of London. This unique book invites the reader to walk along the dirty, crowded, and fascinating streets of eighteenth-century London in an unusual way. Nine leading experts from the fields of literature, history, classics, gender, biography, geography, and costume, offer different interpretations of John Gay's poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of Londoni (1716). The poem--a lively, funny, and thought-provoking statement about...