This collection challenges the dominant understandings of 18th-century sociability by placing dance, and the training and movement of the body, at its core. Rather than thinking of dance and music as peripheral ornaments to the complex business of Enlightenment society, it highlights them as important vehicles for the development and dissemination of the ideas and practices that shaped people's social, emotional and intellectual worlds.Exploring the relationship be...

This book re-examines spa and assembly culture as key venues for sociability in the eighteenth century.Focused chiefly on the eighteenth century, this book looks forward into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many of the chapters concern aspects of the city of Bath, the book stretches beyond Bath’s confines, taking in comparative British towns such as Tunbridge Wells, European spa towns, such as Nice, and the impact Bath had on spa towns in America. The chapters n...

'Excellent... Mortimer's erudition is formidable' The TimesA time of exuberance, thrills, frills and unchecked bad behaviour...Ian Mortimer turns to what is arguably the most-loved period in British history - the Regency, or Georgian England.This is the age of Jane Austen and the Romantic poets; the paintings of John Constable and the gardens of Humphry Repton; Britain's military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo. It was perhaps t...

From the award-winning author of The Gentleman's Daughter,a witty and academic illumination of daily domestic life in Georgian England.In this brilliant work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist ...

The bestselling history of Britain, told through twenty-one women whose lives enthral and beguile, intrigue and inspire‘Celebrates the defiant spirit of Britain’s groundbreaking heroines… Entertaining.’ Daily MailBritain has traditionally been defined by its conflicts, its conquests, its men and its monarchs. It’s high time that it was defined by its women. In this unique history, Jenni Murray tells the stories of twenty-one women ...

Jerry White's London in the Eighteenth Century is an unrivalled, panoramic account of the city's dramatic century of rebirth by its leading expert.London in the eighteenth century had risen from the ashes. The city and its people had been brought to the brink by the Great Fire of 1666. But the century that followed was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age...

A delightful and fascinating social history of Victorians at leisure, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of nineteenth-century men and women, from the author of the bestselling ‘The Victorian House’.Imagine a world where only one in five people owns a book, where just one in ten has a knife or a fork – a world where five people out of every six do not own a cup to hold a hot drink. That was what England was like in the early eighteenth century. Yet by the close ...

With a keen eye for the juicy anecdote, Thévoz tells the fascinating and entertaining story of the rise, decline and resurgence of London's private members' clubs, from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. In doing so he looks at cultural and political developments beyond the clubs, revealing how while the clubs may have been products of their city and country, they also exerted significant influence on London, Britain and places far beyond.This is a chronicle, as inform...

Caricatured for extravagance, vanity, glamorous celebrity and, all too often, embroiled in scandal and gossip, 18th-century London's fashionable society had a well-deserved reputation for frivolity. But to be fashionable in 1700s London meant more than simply being well dressed. Fashion denoted membership of a new type of society - the beau monde, a world where status was no longer determined by coronets and countryseats alone but by the more nebulous qualification of metropolitan 'fashion...

The birth of the modern world as told through the remarkable story of one eighteenth-century familyThey were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. The Inner Life of Empires tells the intimate history of the Johnstones--four sisters and seven brothers who lived in Scotland and around the globe in the fast-changing e...

A BOOK RIOT BEST BOOK OF THE YEARA ground-breaking history delivered in a refreshing new voice, Queer Enlightenments details eleven overlooked stories of eighteenth-century queer people who lived extraordinary lives of resistance and joyQueer people have always existed. In an era when this basic truth faces undue scrutiny, here is a dazzling work of restorative history that reveals the hard-won lives of those who dared to ...

A comprehensive history of the Georgians, comparing past views of these exciting, turbulent, and controversial times with our attitudes todayThe Georgian era is often seen as a time of innovations. It saw the end of monarchical absolutism, global exploration and settlements overseas, the world’s first industrial revolution, deep transformations in religious and cultural life, and Britain’s role in the international trade in enslaved Africans. But how were these cha...