Eighteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of interest in its own past, a past now expanded to include more than classical history and high politics. Antiquaries, men interested in all aspects of the past, added a distinctive new dimension to literature in Georgian Britain in their attempts to reconstruct and recover the past. Corresponding and publishing in an extended network, antiquaries worked at preserving and investigating records and physical remains in England, Scotland and Ireland. In doing so they laid solid foundations for all future study in British prehistory, archaeology and numismatics, and for local and national history as a whole. Naturally, they saw the past partly in their own image. While many antiquaries were better at fieldwork and recording than at synthesis, most were neither crabbed eccentrics nor dilettanti. At their best, as in the works of Richard Gough or William Stukeley, antiquaries set new standards of accuracy and perception in fields ranging from the study of the ancient Britons to that of medieval architecture. Antiquaries is the definitive account of a great historical enterprise.

This is the first book to examine the British discovery of Buddhism during the Victorian period. It was only during the nineteenth century that Buddhism became, in the western mind, a religious tradition separate from Hinduism. As a result, Buddha emerge from a realm of myth and was addressed as a historical figure. Almond's exploration of British interpretations of Buddhism--of its founder, its doctrines, its ethics, its social practices, its truth and value--illuminates more than the various aspects of Buddhist culture: it sheds light on the Victorian society making these judgements.

The investigations undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge by the first overseas Japanese travellers during the 1860s and 70s have left a unique record of life in the then unknown west. Leaving behind a homeland culturally isolated for more than 200 years, these samurai travellers were especially fascinated by the extent of British political and commercial influence they observed during their travels, and therefore paid particularly close attention to the Victorian world and recorded all they saw in minute detail. Their diaries and 'travelogues' comprise the single largest body of material on Victorian society to be recorded in any non-European language. This book examines the nature of these travellers' experiences and their perceptions of Victorian Britain. A deeper understanding of this rich source material is important because, although entirely unknown to British readers, the documents reveal one of the most spectacular culture shocks ever recorded in World History. They are also important because the images of Victorian and other western societies that they portrayed to the Japanese reading public in the late nineteenth century still underpin Japanese understanding of the outside world more than a hundred years later.

Judicial hanging is regarded by many as being the quintessentially British execution. However, many other methods of capital punishment have been used in this country; ranging from burning, beheading and shooting to crushing and boiling to death. Execution: A History of Capital Punishment in Britain explores these types of execution in detail. Readers may be surprised to learn that a means of mechanical decapitation, the Halifax Gibbet, was being used in England five hundred years before the guillotine was invented. Boiling to death was a prescribed means of execution in this country during the Tudor period. From the public death by starvation of those gibbeted alive, to the burning of women for petit treason, this book examines some of the most gruesome passages of British history. This carefully researched, well-illustrated and enthralling text will appeal to those interested in the history of British executions.

First published in 1964, this book examines the Tour of Britain. It focuses, neither on foreign tourists coming to Britain, nor on British tourists travelling abroad, but on British people exploring their native land in the three centuries from 1540 to 1840. During this period, it became a popular pastime amongst gentlemen of leisure to travel for weeks, even months, in discovery of their own country and this book describes both the pleasure taken by tourists of Britain and the hardships they endured. Tracking these journeys over three centuries, the book presents a changing English landscape, a changing economy, and a change in people’s tastes as the interests and concerns of the tourists evolve over the timeframe covered.