This highly original study looks at rituals of sociability in new and creative ways.
Based upon thousands of personal letters, it reconstructs the changing country and London worlds of an English gentry family, and reveals intimate details about the social and cultural life of the period.
Challenging current influential views, the book observes strong connections, instead of deep divisions, between country and city, land and trade, sociability and power.
Its verydifferent view undermines established stereotypes of omnipotent male patriarchs, powerless wives and kin, autonomous elder sons, and dependent younger brothers.
Gifts of venison and visits in a coach reveal unexpected findings about the subtle power of women over the social code, the importance ofyounger sons, and the overwhelming impact of London. Successfully combining storytelling and historical analysis, the book recreates everyday lives in a period of overseas expansion, financial revolution, and political turmoil.
Whyman's unravelling of John Verney's lifestyle within the context of polite London society, provides a remarkable insight into the world of visiting and socializing, with its gradually developing priorities and rituals ... the book helps us to understand the divide between the country and the city in new ways.
Parliamentary History
This is an important book with wide-ranging implications. It deserves a broad readership.
Journal of Modern History
This is an important and stimulating work with a significance reaching far beyond the story of the family it chronicles.
Continuity and Change
This handsome volume should be welcomed by urban historians as a work which transcends the traditional dichotomy of town and countryside ... historians have recognized the interdependence of city and hinterland, but rarely can that relationship have been more sensitively portrayed than in this book.
The agency for such insight is the remarkable Verney archive at Claydon House in Buckinghamshire, which Whyman has exhaustively mined to produce a riveting portrait of afamily which keenly felt the social, economic and political transformations of the late Stuart Britain. Students of the period will find much to interest them here, but historians of the family and metropolitan culture will yield particular benefit from this work.
Urban History
This is a most impressive piece of research, which is both well written and packed with fascinating insights, and it should appeal to the general reader as well as the specialist.
Records of Buckinghamshire