English Country Life in the Eighteenth Century

(London: John Murray, 1937). 8vo; original green cloth, with lettering to spine, and horse-drawn coach device to upper cover; no dustwrapper; pp. xiii + (i) + 319, incl. index; plates. Cloth irregularly sunned, and slightly worn at extremities; discoloration and dent to lower board; earlier owner's name signed on front free endpaper; moderate foxing throughout. Fair to good condition. English social history at its finest. The author shows how great was the divide between the townsman and the country dweller in eighteenth century England, and how parochial the lives of those living in the country could be. "Village life [Trevelyan tells us] embraced the chief daily concerns of the majority of Englishmen. It was the principal nursery of the national character. The village was not then a moribund society, as in the nineteenth century, nor was it, as in our day, a society hoping to revive by the backwash of life returning to it from the towns. The village and the country town, for the latter was only the village writ larger, were the nucleus and core of national life." .