Educating the Romantic Poets: Life and Learning in the Anglo-Classical Academy, 1770-1850 explores how the public and endowed grammar schools and the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge trained some of the most important writers, critics, and public figures of the Romantic period. These institutions are recognized here as intentional partners and are discussed collectively as the “Anglo-classical academy”. The book shows how they not only schooled students in “classics, maths, and divinity” but also in accepted social behaviours, cultural values, political beliefs, and literary tastes. In so doing, this academy gave shape to the literature and spirit of the age. By discussing the schools and the universities together and by focusing upon pedagogies and daily life as well as the texts and topics studied, this book shows as no other has done how writers and readers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries became such fluent linguists, skilled prosodists, and perceptive critics. As each chapter explores and comments upon the relational, intellectual, and cultural aspects of the Anglo-classical educational experience, it directs readers’ attention to the ways in which this information can be used to reread texts, reassess certain Romantics’ literary careers, and launch new lines of research.

The notebooks of bishops of Carlisle reveal a wealth of detail concerning clerical life at the time. The volume presents three nineteenth-century manuscripts originally created for the use of bishops of Carlisle: Walter Fletcher's "Diocesan Book", written between 1814 and 1845, and Bishop Hugh Percy's two parish notebooks, compiled between 1828 and 1855. Based on visitations, and on articles of enquiry now lost, they add to a growing body of knowledge relating to the condition of the Church in the first half of the nineteenth century, providing a unique record of livings in the Carlisle diocese prior to its expansion in 1856. In particular, they illuminate the concerns of two significant clerical figures. In 1814 the newly installed chancellor, Walter Fletcher, set about recordinghis primary visitation, updating his notes frequently until the year before his death in 1846. In 1828 the newly consecrated bishop, Hugh Percy, created his own diocesan record, utilising Fletcher's material while adding matter of his own. The popularity of Anglican ritualism since the advent of Tractarianism has made it commonplace for the Georgian Church to be viewed with a certain amount of disdain. The notebooks allow us a more objective view ofthe period. Fletcher's notes on the 130 churches he visited are particularly valuable in presenting a diligent, hard-working clergyman, loyal to the Tory high-church traditions into which he had been born, with a vision for the diocese which, above all, was one of orderliness and obedience to canon law. The documents are presented here with introduction and notes. Dr Jane Platt is an honorary researcher in history at Lancaster University.