Introduction: Locating Romantic-Period Sociability

Abstract

A group of modest merchants, lower gentry, and professional men gather in a village tavern to eat, drink, read, and discuss public matters, and also to select the latest publications for their country book club, some of which will make their way back from the club to the households of individual members and circulate further among wives, sons, and daughters. In the aftermath of prohibitions on public meetings imposed by the Two Acts of 1795, members of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) gather over "bread & cheese & porter" in the home of the clerk and aspiring playwright James Powell, unaware that their host is a paid government informer and that their convivial domestic proceedings will find their way back to an alarmed ministry.

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