Sociability and Power in Late Stuart England

Reviews / Votes

Whyman's unravelling of John Verney's lifestyle within the context of polite London society, provides a remarkable insight into the world of visiting and socializing, with its gradually developing priorities and rituals ... the book helps us to understand the divide between the country and the city in new ways. * Parliamentary History02/10/2002 * This is an important book with wide-ranging implications. It deserves a broad readership. * Journal of Modern History * This is an important and stimulating work with a significance reaching far beyond the story of the family it chronicles. * Continuity and Change * This handsome volume should be welcomed by urban historians as a work which transcends the traditional dichotomy of town and countryside ... historians have recognized the interdependence of city and hinterland, but rarely can that relationship have been more sensitively portrayed than in this book. The agency for such insight is the remarkable Verney archive at Claydon House in Buckinghamshire, which Whyman has exhaustively mined to produce a riveting portrait of a family which keenly felt the social, economic and political transformations of the late Stuart Britain. Students of the period will find much to interest them here, but historians of the family and metropolitan culture will yield particular benefit from this work. * Urban History * This is a most impressive piece of research, which is both well written and packed with fascinating insights, and it should appeal to the general reader as well as the specialist. * Records of Buckinghamshire *