Description

A new unused book.

About the book >.>.> William Dyer’s diary for 1762 gives us a detailed record of the life of a Bristol businessman of middling rank and of his family and friends. Accountant and clerk to a gunpowder company Dyer lived at a time when Bristol was England’s second city in economic political and religious influence and caught up in the imperial expansion of the Seven Years’ War. His account gives us an unprecedented glimpse into his daily round his constant movement around the city for work sociability and as an amateur medical practitioner. It throws particular light on pietist and evangelical religion of the day as Dyer attended Anglican Quaker and Methodist services. Throughout 1762 Dyer was caught up in the controversy surrounding alleged witchcraft at the Lamb Inn Bristol where two of the innkeeper’s daughters were afflicted by numerous unexplained torments supposedly caused by a Mangotsfield witch hired by a rival to the innkeeper’s carrying trade. The affair divided Bristol with many suspecting fraud but others unable and unwilling (for religious and personal reasons) to rule out that supernatural forces were involved. This edition supplements Dyer’s own diary with all the other surviving manuscript material on this case never previously published. The lengthy introduction detailed notes and biographical index allow the reader to reconstruct a picture of Bristol in 1762 as seen by an ordinary man caught up in extraordinary events. (SP)