Product Description: A book for anyone wanting to immerse themselves in the world of Oliver Twist and 'Great Expectations'. R.E. Pritchard guides the reader through a journey of the different classes, rich and poor, men and women, faith and doubt, education and entertainment, and town and country life...read more

Product Description: Captain John Smith is best remembered for his association with Pocahontas

What was life like in Shakespeare's time - or, what did people then say it was like? This volume provides a picture of the age, with a selection of accounts of Elizabethan and Jacobean life taken from books, plays, poems, letters, diaries and pamphlets by and about Shakespeare's contemporaries. Extracts have been taken from a wide range of writers, including William Harrison and Fynes Moryson (providing descriptions of England), Nicholas Breton (on country life), Isabella Whitney and Thomas Dekker (on London life), Nashe (on struggling writers), Stubbs (with a Puritan's view of Elizabethan enjoyments), Harsnet and Burton (on witches and spirits), John Donne (meditations on prayer and death), King James I (on tobacco) and Shakespeare himself. Also included are accounts of theatre-going, May Day celebrations, Queen Elizabeth at court, the place of women, education, garden books and herbals, clothes, food, drink and religion. The extracts are organized thematically, each section having an introduction reflecting modern historical research. A miscellany of some of the best, wittiest and most unusual of 16th and 17th-century writing, this book aims to bring to life the variety, the energy and the often harsh reality of the society that produced England's greatest writer.

Product Description: Victorian England was, in Tennyson's phrase, an awful moment of transition. A society based largely on agriculture, traditional values, and social hierarchies was transformed into one both stimulated and unsettled by unprecedented growth in science, technology, industry, urbanization and population, and profound questioning of politics, morality, and religion...read more

Product Description: This is the first modernized edition of the poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Born circa 1587 and married in 1604, Lady Mary was part of the Queen's entourage at the court of King James I. The poems reproduced here are from Urania, a chivalric romance published in 1621, and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, a sonnet sequence...read more

Product Description: An indispensable compendium of poems by English women -- both those in the working- and middle- as well as upper classes -- dating from the mid-16th century to the early-20th century.