This is a comparative study of the effects of local, regional and national changes of nine parishes in the Upper Eden Valley in north Westmorland during the Victorian years. The analysis of 65,000 records from these sources has given a rare, if not unique, insight into a series of rural parishes.

Wordsworth's romantic critique of industrial life and society was backward-looking. His 'Golden Age ideal' of pastoral life and rural relationships falls within the scope of English 'populism' as found among the middle ranks of small independent producers and their idealogues. Furthermore his rural education and up-bringing in the remote North of England explain his long-term shift from radical and whig reformer to tory placeman in the years 1789 to 1832 as well as his relative demise as a poet.

The Solway Country – the lands surrounding the inner Solway Firth – constitutes one of the many small regional worlds of the British Isles that are remarkable for the ways in which their landscapes evoke a powerful sense of territorial identity rooted not only in their physical appeal, but also in the richness and distinctiveness of their human history and geography. The Solway Country is an archetypical but hitherto little known exemplar of places like these. This book captures the spirit and substance of the Solway Country’s allure by means of a series of layered narratives dealing with its natural milieu, its past social and political turmoil, its changing forms of rural and agrarian life, and its responses to the industrial and urban forces that were unleashed in Britain after the eighteenth century. The Solway Country has the added charm of being partly in England and partly in Scotland, so that its personality partakes of elements of both. At the same time, the region exhibits a composite geographic unity derived from the central physical feature of the Solway Firth itself and from the many common aspects of local life and livelihood that have left deep imprints on the landscape. This unity is expressed symbolically in the peculiar hybrid culture of ballads and songs that emerged alongside the theft, murder, and mayhem that raged in the Anglo-Scottish marchlands in the days of the border reivers.

In Coal and Tobacco, Dr Beckett has attempted, by analysing the west Cumberland economy, and the Lowther's entrepreneurial role, to reveal the vital importance of the coal industry. Dr Beckett's major study is based on the Lowther papers, and reveals the crucial family involvement in these events.