Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, Taken from Original Sources

Ashton, John, 1834-1911Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
1.4M words
Chapters
142

Tags

English Originals World HistoryCulture Historical ReappraisalEveryday LifeSocial LandscapePrimary DocumentsPopular NarrativeQueen Anne EraCultural ChangeSocial ObservationFolk CustomsFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, Taken from Original Sources by John AshtonAuthor: Ashton, John, 1834-1911,Language: English, Class: DA: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Great Britain, Ireland, Central Europe, Release Date: Aug 26, 2017

Editor's review

This book is a social history compiled by the British historian John Ashton from original documents, focusing on everyday life in England during the reign of Queen Anne (1702–1714). Unlike political histories, it attends to ordinary people's food, clothing, housing, customs, etiquette, amusements, and social mores, using contemporary letters, newspapers, account books, advertisements, and other primary materials to reconstruct period detail; it has high value as a historical source and is highly readable. Ashton's approach favors wide erudition and anecdote, and his text quotes extensively from original sources, letting readers directly touch the tone and temperature of early eighteenth-century English society. The book suits as supplementary reading for the study of modern British social history and the history of everyday life, and for readers interested in eighteenth-century British culture and literary background to browse and consult. Because it was written long ago and is dense with quotations, it is best read selectively by topic rather than straight through.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the contents first and select chapters by topic—dress, food, amusements—rather than reading straight through.
  2. When quotations are dense, skim ahead to grasp the argument, then return to the source material.
  3. Use it as a background reference alongside eighteenth-century British literature or biography.
  4. Note the sources of primary documents that interest you for later follow-up searches.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this a complete narrative history? No. It is closer to a topically arranged compilation of historical materials; the author extracts and connects sources, focusing on concrete details of social life rather than building a continuous political narrative. Read it by topic rather than expecting a general history.
What English level does the book require? The original is in English and quotes extensively from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources, with spelling and syntax different from modern English, so good reading ability is needed. Readers with basic English can first use relevant background material in Chinese and then read selected chapters.
What period does "the reign of Queen Anne" refer to? It refers to Queen Anne's reign from 1702 to 1714. This was a period of notable change in British social customs, newspaper publishing, and urban life, and the book takes this as its time frame, compiling aspects of social life from original materials.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Ashton, John, 1834-1911 Author

John Ashton (1834–1911) was a British researcher of social history and popular culture. Public information about the details of his life is limited, and he is known to later generations mainly through his works. The library holds 17 of his works, focused on English social life from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, with some extending back to the reign of Queen Anne. Drawing on original documents and contemporary materials, he sketched everyday life, customs, and social attitudes, as in the two-volume Social England under the Regency and The Dawn of the XIXth Century in England. He also attended to caricature and satire, writing on English caricature and satire of the Napoleonic era, as well as the distinctive cultural history The Devil in Britain and America. His writing is notable for its presentation of historical sources in a plain and readable style, offering accessible reference for the study of English social customs.