A Pleasing Prospect: Social Change and Urban Culture in Eighteenth-Century Colchester

Based on extensive primary-source research, A Pleasing Prospect considers the changing historical identity of eighteenth-century Colchester from the perspective of its 'middling sort' - a section of society often attached to cultures of politeness and to the practices of consumption and production that helped shape economic change, and which has recently attracted greater attention from historians. Shani D'Cruze painstakingly reconstructs eighteenth-century social networks along lines of family, kinship, gender, spatiality, religion and politics to examine the relationships between individual and family biographies and broader historical change and to reflect on the historical identity of the middling sort as well as on eighteenth-century provincial urban society and culture.