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by Boyd Hilton (Author)
This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the "first industrial revolution." In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty years of "war to the death" against Napoleonic France. But if Britain's external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country's population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and its manufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the
most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England.
Author Biography
Boyd Hilton is Professor of Modern British History in the University of Cambridge and has been a Fellow of Trinity College since 1974. He has served as Senior Tutor, Dean, and Steward of the College. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy.
