The Age of Oddities: Reading the Eighteenth Century

Reading the Eighteenth Century

When I was a teenager, I wanted to read.  What made me a little unusual, perhaps, is that I wanted to read books about, and from, the eighteenth century.  The problem was that I didn’t really know where to start.  I’d worked my way through all Jane Austen’s novels, but as any eighteenth-century academic will eagerly tell you, there is ever so much more to this most exciting of time periods than peak-bonnets and balls.  In fact, it was a time of science and superstition, of simmering intrigue and sweeping globalisation.  An age of brutal cruelty and beautiful craftsmenship, tragedy and comedy, class division and social transcendence, it is in this bubbling furnace of humanity that so much that characterises our modern world was formed. It is also when some of the finest literature in English was written.

This blog is for everyone interested in discovering more about eighteenth-century literature, whatever your age or knowledge of the period.  Because books are for everyone.