Imagining the King's Death
Imagining the King's Death

Author: John Barrell

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 860

ISBN-13: 9780198112921

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It is high treason in British law to imagine the king's death. But after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, everyone in Britain must have found themselves imagining that the same fate might befall George III. How easy was it to distinguish between fantasising about the death of George and imagining it, in the legal sense of intending or designing? John Barrell examines this question in the context of the political trials of the mid-1790s and the controversies they generated. He shows how the law of treason was adapted in the years following Louis's death to punish what was acknowledged to be a "modern" form of treason unheard of when the law had been framed. The result, he argues, was the invention of a new and imaginary reading, a "figurative" treason, by which the question of who was imagining the king's death, the supposed traitors or those who charged them with treason, became inseparable.

The Second Coming
The Second Coming

Author: J. F. C. Harrison

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1136298762

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published in 1979, The Second Coming is an experiment in the writing of popular history – a contribution to the history of the people who have no history and an exploration of some of the ideas, beliefs and ways of thinking of ordinary men and women in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Millenarianism is a conceptual tool with which to explore some aspects of popular thought and culture. It is also seen as an ideology of social change and as a continuing tradition, traced from the end of the seventeenth century to the 1790s, and is shown to be embedded in folk culture. Abundant in rich and lively descriptions of such colourful characters as Richard Brothers, Joanna Southcott, John Wroe, Zion Ward and Sir William Courtenay, as well as studies of the Shakers, early Mormons and Millerites, the result is a window into the world of ordinary people in the Age of Romanticism.