In short, britain was not a static society, and the towns and the countryside were not entirely separate spheres Men and women moved about to seek pleasure, to do business, to sell goods, to marry, or to find work And their ideas and impressions shifted over time. Descriptions of london in the late eighteenth century are common enough, but it is rare to find impressions conveyed with such immediacy and spontaneity as those of william clift in the letters he wrote to his sister, elizabeth, in the 1790s. This page explores the social structure of britain, its impact on life, both private and public, as well as the new developments that changed the way the people spent their leisure time. How people voted, lived and died
All this and more can be found in these documents This site includes material from eight london archives, supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. As one would expect from the author of before rebecca, its virtues lie in the wealth of local research, in the clarity of the narrative line, and in the way the story is placed in the social and economic context of south wales's rapid industrial development.
OPEN
