This is a textbook, but it's a very readable one and quite interesting if you are curious about the subject, without the academic pretension or dryness that can drag works down. Chapters cover subjects such as food and drink, clothing, entertainment, politics, religion, education, race and class, family relationships, the economy, the state of science, and more. The second edition reorganizes the chapters and expands a few of them, as well as including more primary documents, but the short, clearly labeled chapters of the first edition are handy if you want to skip around and read it in bite-sized chunks.

A couple of fun facts: clocks with minute hands were a new thing in the 18th century (previously they only had hour hands), and non-poor people were mortally offended by poor people keeping dogs.

I wish I could find such cogent, detailed and accessible studies of other parts of the world during this time period, but if you're interested in England, Olsen has you covered.

Hot on the tails of the rabid success of Alice in Wonderland comes the similar, but somewhat different, sequel. The absurdity of this volume is of the same scope as the original, but in many cases, being a sequel, it seems to lack some of the uniqueness of the original. One thing I noticed with regards to the original is that there simply did not seem to be any plot. Thus, the absurdity of the entire volume was complete. There was no reason for Alice to be there, and no goal that she had to reach, and the end simply comes all of a sudden.

However, come the sequel, we have a plot and a quest. Initially Alice simply wants to see what is on the other side of the looking glass, and sure enough, she enters a world that is similar, but different, to our own. In a way it is a world of opposites, so when she is thirsty she is given a biscuit (when what she really should have asked for is a biscuit, because more likely than not, she would have been given a drink).

The story is based around a game of chess, and there are numerous metaphors in relation to the chess board. For instance the journey across the third square (Alice is a pawn so she starts on the second square) is by train which represents the pawns ability to jump the third square. The queen moves at a rapid pace, which is representative of the queens ability to move as far as she likes, and the knight stumbles, representative if the rather odd way that the knight moves.

As for the quest, well, as soon as Alice meets the queen she decides that she wants to be a queen, so the queen tells Alice that she must move to the other side of the chess board, and in doing so, she will become a queen (which is a rule in the game of chess). Some have said that the story itself was written by Carol when he was teaching Alice Liddle how to play chess, though I must say that I did not learn all that much about the game of chess in this book.

It is interesting how some of the characters from this story make their way into the other story in the more main stream productions (though I am not talking about the Tim Burton movie here). For instance Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum seem to appear in the Alice in Wonderland story in the films when in fact they appear in this book. It is also noticeable (and something that I did not realise until I read this) was that the poem Jabberwock appears in this book. I always believed that Jabberwock was a poem that Carol had written separately from this book. By the way, this is what a Jabberwocky looks like:

I quite like the pictures that Carol put in the book, and some of them seem to be quite absurd in themselves. For instance there is a scene on the train when the ticket inspector comes along and asks Alice for her ticket (and I have found myself on the wrong side of a ticket inspector, as we probably all have, though I will also have an aversion towards the ones on the trains in Italy). However, it was quite bizarre how he seemed to always look at her through a pair binoculars, like this:

The ending was pretty cool as well, because the story ends with her shaking the red queen and suddenly waking up from her dream world and realising that she was doing this:

Oh, and look at who also makes an appearance in the story:

Not that Humpty actually first appears here. He was no an invention by Carol, but actually had been around in his own nursery rhyme a long time before hand (though according to Wikipedia the first appearance was in a book of nursery rhymes published in 1870, two years before Through the Looking Glass).

Whenever I come to this poem the first thing that comes to mind is the song by Iron Maiden (unfortunately I don't think they did a video clip – which would have been awesome in its own right).

I am really tempted to spend the rest of this review talking about how as a teenager I loved Iron Maiden, and about how they were unfairly persecuted by the church because they released one song called 'Number of the Beast' (with an album of the same name), where in reality they just wrote some really cool songs with some really cool music. Okay, this particular song is based heavily on the poem, and probably would be more akin to a ballad as opposed to a song, but I am getting ahead of myself here because I probably shouldn't be talking about Iron Maiden. Still, I should at least display the cover for the single:

As I was looking through Google Images for this particular poster I noticed that a lot of the artwork relating to this particular poem was very dark, and in some cases bordering on the horrific. Take for instance this poster:

There is a very heavy spiritual element to it, but then again the poem itself has some very strong spiritual connotations, with ghost ships, curses, and of course the mariner being forced to live and watch all of his crew die of thirst one by one. In fact, a classic line 'water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink' comes from this poem (and not, as originally thought, from the Iron Maiden song).

I'm sure we all know the story about how a group of sailors travel to the south pole and get stuck in the ice and then along comes an albatross who leads them out of the ice only to have one of the sailors shoot it with a crossbow (to the horror of the rest of the crew considering the Albatross is a good omen to sailors, and killing one brings lots of bad luck). Sure enough, the ship become becalmed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and one by one the crew drop dead until the silly sailor is the only one left alive. However, he ends up getting rescued (after a rain storm passes over to resupply his water) and then returns to England where he grabs some unsuspecting person at a wedding and proceeds to retell his story.

What I think is happening in this poem is that it is a reaction against the 'Age of Reason'. This was a period in Europe where philosophy was shifting from the sacred to the secular. Basically unless something could be proven empirically it is of no worth and of no interest. It was in effect the beginning of the end of the church, and of superstition (though as far as I am concerned the church is still alive and well today). The whole thing about the albatross is that it was superstition, and by shooting it with a crossbow the sailor is in effect thumbing his nose at superstition. As far as he is concerned, the age of superstition has passed and the age of reason has begun.

Coleridge, I suspect, is saying 'no it hasn't'. I don't necessarily think he is suggesting that we avoid black cats and look for four leaf clovers, but he is saying that despite the rise of the scientific method, we simply cannot discard the sacred, because not only is the sacred important to our past and gives us an identity, it also puts limits on morality. In effect, from what I gained from reading this poem, is that we dispense with the sacred code at our peril.

I'm not really sure where I picked up this book, but I must have originally misread the title because for quite a while I thought this book was about the development of the English language. As it turns out this book is not so much about the English language (even though a book on the subject would probably be quite interesting) but the changes in English society during the 18th century. As George points out, this period can be a little deceptive because the industrial revolution did not, in a word, end, but was rather an ongoing event and in many ways is still ongoing up to the present day. So, while we see during the 18th Century England moving from an agrarian society through to an industrial society, the progress did not necessarily have a start point and does not necessarily have an end point.

At the beginning of the 18th Century England's agricultural base was still very much a product of the middle ages. There were still landed gentry and there were still peasants tied to the land. Along with that we also had common ownership of land as well as free holdings. The agricultural revolution at the beginning of the 18th Century saw what was known as the enclosure movement where paddocks and fields were slowly being taken over by large landowners (similar in what is happening today with massive agri-corporations squeezing out the small farmer). We also saw a change in the nature of the peasant, who was originally a small landowner, but with the enclosure movement, would end up becoming a hired labour. In fact this period saw the decline of the peasantry to be replaced by the working class.

There are a number of areas that George touches on in this book, and one of her major focuses seems to be with the poor during this period. It is interesting how she points to evidence that many of these labourers, if they earned more than they needed to sustain themselves, would end up spending that excess money down at the tavern (which still very much happens today). She does indicate that it was possible for the 'poor' (for want of a better word) to earn a decent amount, especially if the wife and children engaged in production within the cottage, which would no doubt bring in extra-income. However when we consider 'the poor' in this context we are generally looking at people who cannot work, for one reason or another, and thus are reliant upon handouts.

It is interesting some of the things that would be done to try to restrict the amount of poor in certain regions (because poor relief was the abode of the local councils as opposed to the central government). For instance there would be property qualifications for entry into some councils, and if children were apprenticed off, they had to be taken out to another council in case the apprenticeship failed and the child would end up becoming one of the poor. Many of these restrictions were in place to prevent the poor moving about and becoming a burden upon particular councils – looking after the poor is expensive business, and it is a business that governments simply do not seem to want to do, and it is not just then, but it is occurring now, with governments going out of their way to cut back poor relief on the grounds that 'it is too expensive'.

The other interesting thing in the book is how George looks at the lot of the child during this period. These days we see childhood as a magical time of fun, games, and innocence (at least that is how Hollywood seem to portray the ideal childhood) however it was not always like that. For most of history the lot of a child was not an easy one. For instance during this period children (particularly those in the lower classes) were considered wild and possessed and that they needed to be tamed, and that would come about through various methods (including regular beatings). While the concept of the family existed it was not uncommon for children to be sent off as apprentices and end up never seeing their parents again.

While this period may have still been fairly harsh, especially for the lot of the working classes (George focuses mostly on the ordinary person rather than kings, queens, and other power brokers, something which I have grown to appreciate because the life of the ordinary person is just as important, or even moreso, than the famous people that we are forever reading about), we are seeing a number of changes, such as better roads and the increase in commerce. As the roads become better, other markets begin to open up allowing people greater scope to sell their products. We also begin to see the development of the consumer culture with a variety of shops appearing in London (and at that time London was still the only city in England – all the other towns and villages wouldn't begin to grow until the industrial revolution went into full swing – which was due in part to the movement of the workers from the country into the city because as work in the country began to decline, new opportunities became available in the city). As such, the 18th Century is a very important period in England as many of the foundations of our modern world seemed to have appeared around then.