Merrie England in the Olden Time: Festivals, Folklore, and Social Customs of England's Tudor, Stuart, and Victorian Imagination - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Merrie England in the Olden Time is an antiquarian celebration of English popular life, gathering festivals, sports, household customs, street pageantry, tavern wit, and seasonal observances into a richly theatrical portrait of the national past. Written in a genial, allusive prose enlivened by verse, anecdote, and comic quotation, the book belongs to the nineteenth-century revival of interest in folklore, medievalism, and pre-industrial sociability. Its "merrie" England is less a strict chronicle than a learned imaginative reconstruction of communal pleasures and vanished manners. George Daniel, a London writer, collector, and bibliophile, was deeply immersed in drama, jest-books, ballads, and the literature of earlier centuries. His antiquarian tastes and urban literary connections shaped a work that looks backward with affection while displaying the erudition of a man accustomed to handling rare books and theatrical traditions. The volume reflects both his scholarship and his nostalgia for a more festive, socially cohesive England. Readers interested in cultural history, folklore, Victorian medievalism, or the invention of national tradition will find this book especially rewarding. It is recommended not merely as a repository of old customs, but as a revealing document of how nineteenth-century England imagined, embellished, and cherished its past.

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