England

Philip Collins argues that Dickens' writing reflects not only a marvellous rapport with a cross-section of Victorian society but an integration of populism with a concern for 'the raising up of those that are down.'

'Where's there's muck, there's money'...but there was also culture and patronage of the arts in nineteenth-century Manchester and Leeds. By Janet Wolff And Caroline Arscott.

Penelope Corfield finds that economic progress and new self-awareness in language and gesture disturbed the tranquility of the ‘Age of Elegance'.

'Take but degree away... and hark what discord follows' was a Tudor and Stuart commonplace but the neatness and fixity of what we think of as their social order is a creation of historians.

J A Sharpe looks into the work carried out by social historians.

Peter Biller looks at the restoration of one of England's finest remaining early town halls.

Not just 'the Comet man' - Halley's achievements as a polymath testify to the breadth and vigour of English scientific enquiry and experiment in the years after 1660.

Civil War in England brought destruction and damage in town and country far more akin to continental warfare than has often been supposed.

What was it really like to live in an English village at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign? To what extent was it a close-knit community? How deeply was it divided by wealth and religious belief? Was the village even an important part of the identity of its members? Susan Amussen addresses these questions in one village in East Anglia.