Social life in England, 1750-1850

This volume contains a course of Lowell Lectures delivered in Boston in March, 1916; and I take this opportunity of tending my thanks to the Lowell Institute for affording me th...

No wonder, therefore, considering the bigotry of his age, that Wesley was exposed to persecution by the mobs: but his leniency towards Romanism was not the only cause of this. T...

The early struggles of a man who has won literary fame are only of importance in so far as they affect his subsequent work. Crabbe’s intellect was essentially scientific rather...

I believe that in delineation of character Crabbe is an artist indeed, worthy to rank with Jane Austen and the Brontës, and perhaps even more subtle than these ladies. He was no...

She was born at Nacton, a village not far from Ipswich, on what was then a somewhat desolate heath on the north bank of the Orwell. Her father was head ploughman to a farmer nam...

When we turn from the peasant and trader, who in those days had little influence in controlling the country, to the classes which exercised power in the land, we come, as it wer...

Gunning certainly kept good company, and this is how he enjoyed himself. He was a keen sportsman, and Cambridge afforded excellent opportunity for him to indulge his taste. The...

The strength of the party was the new aristocracy created by Henry VIII with the spoils of the monasteries, of which the Cavendishs, Russells, and other houses were the leaders....

The Duke thought that his brother Clarence would marry, but that his price would be too high for the ministers to accept, viz., “a settlement such as is proper for a prince who...

The parish had the right to apprentice the children of poor parents to any trade.... Children under this law might be sent to any part of the Kingdom. “It is a very common pract...

In an election in the “twenties,” which is reputed to have cost the candidates £30,000 ($150,000), I have been told that they chartered ships to bring electors from Holland. Thi...

“Vanity Fair,” however, holds up the mirror to social England in the unrivalled description of Becky’s climb up the rungs of the ladder till she arrived at the very apex of fash...

“Dorothy Wordsworth ... lived first with her maternal grand-parents, and was not happy with them. She loved an open-air life, and was held closely indoors--serving in fact in a...

The state of things we read of in such books as “The Warden” and “Barchester Towers” has almost, but not quite, disappeared, and I confess that, although I think I understand it...