Life in Georgian Lancaster - Andrew White

A lively, yet authoritative account of social life and conditions, for rich and poor alike, in this important provincial town in the eighteenth century. Written by an excellent and well-known historian. We associate the Georgian period with elegance, fine furniture, confidence, prosperity and humanity. Yet in Lancaster, as elsewhere, it also had its dark side - slavery; prostitution; a savage penal code that included the death penalty for quite minor offences; social inequality; unfair political representation; and appalling conditions in early factories which made the lot of many people anything but secure and elegant. But there were also many redeeming features. The country was thinly populated; economic inequality was less marked than it was to become later in the nineteenth century; the city was less crowded and disease-ridden; society less rigid. The Georgian period in Lancaster has left us a legacy of fine buildings, furniture and art. It has also left a sense of a period more akin to our own than the intervening stuffy and pious Victorian era. It appears to us an age filled with humanity, common sense and enlightenment.;In this survey of social conditions for every rank of Lancaster inhabitant in the eighteenth century, well-known local historian Andrew White examines what it was really like to work and live in the Georgian town.