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.
