Guide To British Topographical Prints

The Oxford Companion to Family and Local History is the most authoritative guide available to all things associated with the family and local history of the British Isles. It provides practical and contextual information for anyone enquiring into their English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh origins and for anyone working in genealogical research, or the social history of the British Isles. This fully revised and updated edition contains over 2,000 entries from adoption to World War records. Recommended web links for many entries are accessed and updated via the Family and Local History companion website. This edition provides guidance on how to research your family tree using the internet and details the full range of online resources available. Newly structured for ease of use, thematic articles are followed by the A-Z dictionary and detailed appendices, which includefurther reading. New articles for this edition are: A Guide for Beginners, Links between British and American Families, Black and Asian Family History, and an extended feature on Names. With handy research tips, a full background to the social history of communities and individuals, and an updated appendix listing all national and local record offices with their contact details, this is an essential reference work for anyone wanting advice on how to approach genealogical research, as well as a fascinating read for anyone interested in the past.

Originally published in 1987, this new edition of British Prints is a comprehensive dictionary of British printmakers working between 1650 and 1950. It covers eighteenth century mezzotint portraits, nineteenth century sporting aquatints and topographical views, and original etchings and lithographs in the twentieth century. Since most prints in this period were either signed in the plate or individually signed in ink or pencil by the artist, it provides a convenient and accessible means to identify a printmaker, look up the concise biographical summary and ascertain the printmaker's range of work and relative stature, as well as to obtain some idea of the likely value of the works. British Prints reached the status of bible within the antiques trade in its successful first edition, and this new fully revised edition has been very quick to reprint due to the demand.

This text provides an analysis of 18th-century urban culture and local historical scholarship. The author shows how a sense of the past was crucial not only in instilling civic pride and shaping a sense of community, but also in informing contests for power and influence in the local community.

In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of “approach.” In architecture, the term “approach” changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate “through the most interesting part of the grounds,” as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it. The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the “lesser parts of speech”. The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines—new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.