First Published in 1965. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Eighteenth century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century's novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period's philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This Handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire reflects developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and provides a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period's texts can come together.

This text provides an analysis of 18th-century urban culture and local historical scholarship. The author shows how a sense of the past was crucial not only in instilling civic pride and shaping a sense of community, but also in informing contests for power and influence in the local community.

Although the importance of domestic servants in eighteenth-century England has long been recognized, The Domestic Servant in Eighteenth-Century England (first published in 1956, reviving the 1980 edition here) is the first attempt to investigate comprehensively what was the largest occupational group at that time. A wide variety of source material has been used—the diaries, memoirs, letters, magazines, newspapers and literary works, as well as pamphlets and treatises on social and economic problems of the day. A wealth of data has also been drawn from contemporary works on service, servants, and household management. The study is thus able to reconstruct the principal lineaments of the servant ‘class’ and to demonstrate the significance of the group in relation to the society of which it formed a part. Such aspects of the group as its composition, size and structure, the means by which it was recruited, the hopes and ambitions of its members, the nature of their social status, and the conditions under which they lived and laboured are all fully treated. The result of this thorough examination is a cogent work of sociological history.