Here is a book that just came out in August entitled 'Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders' by Don Herzog. It is not for easy readers but it is fascinating for those who wish to get into the social and intellectual heads of Late Georgians. I post it only for those who, like me, find every aspect of this period fascinating.

Here is a piece from the jacket: Conservatism was born as an anguished attack on democracy. So argues Don Herzog on this arrestingly detailed exploration of England's responses to the French Revolution. Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders ushers the reader into the politically lurid world of Regency England.

Here is a piece from the preface: 'I focus on Britain between 1789, the year of the French Revolution, and 1834, the year of the new poor law. I've rounded up the usual suspects: Austen, Bentham, Blake, Keats, Burke, Burney, Byron, Cobbet, Southey, Coleridge, Price, Godwin, Priestly, Hazlitt, Malthus, Paine, Peacock, Price, Ricardo, Scott, Mary Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth and more. I've also drawn on newspapers, pamphlets, cartoons, sermons, letters, diaries, trashy novels, trashier poems, periodicals, parliamentary proceedings, and more. Crucially, I've incorporated social and political hitory. I want to reconstruct and explore a social world, terribly familiar in part, bewitchingly strange in part. I don't simply want to explore 'Texts" or "discourses" though naturally such entities, odd on their own, figure promenently in the social world...'

Patricia