| Synopsis: |
This major anthology spans 500 years of radical protest from the Peasants' Revolt to the First World War. This book provides an alternative political and social history of England. This is history as creative defiance, as communal action, involving the intellectual and imaginative witnesses of those among the privileged - poets, writers, and thinkers - who have had the strength and courage to make themselves passionate spokesmen for the dispossessed. Here are passages from More's "Utopia", Hobbes' "Leviathan", Bunyans' "Pilgrim's Progress", Mary Wolstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Women". Here, too, are extracts from Wyclif, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Winstanley, Marvell, Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, Cobbett, Byron, Shelley, Dickens and Marx - plus a wealth of hitherto inaccessible documents. 'There is something for everybody in Mr Hampton's 600 pages ...A most useful, thought-provoking collection.' - Christopher Hill, "The Guardian". |