Old Times: A Picture of Social Life at the End of the Eighteenth Century

Here is 1788: the year before the world changed forever. John Ashton pulls back the curtain on Georgian Britain to reveal what ordinary people actually thought, read, and talked about. Using newspapers, periodicals, and satirical prints as his time machine, he transports us to a society grappling with a mad king's health, the first fleet sailing to Australia, and the sensational trial of Warren Hastings. But beneath the weight of empire and politics lies something more fascinating still: the daily rhythm of the middling classes, their entertainments, their superstitions, their feuds, their fashions. Ashton captures the gossip columns and coffee-house debates, the theater gossip and street performances, the anxieties and amusements of a world that had no idea it stood at the edge of revolution. This is history from below, written with the vivid texture of lived experience rather than the dry cataloging of kings and treaties. For anyone who has ever wondered what it felt like to be alive in the year before everything exploded.