Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. Map is present in book. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> EDMUND RACK’S Survey of Somerset is a work of special importance. It provides an eyewitness record of the county in the later 18th century and is remarkable both for the breadth of its coverage and the vividness of its detail. Rack undertook his survey in support of Revd John Collinson’s proposed three-volume history of the county and from 1781 until his death six years later he travelled hundreds of miles to visit and describe the parishes of Somerset. Rack speaks to us from a time when Somerset’s towns and villages had not yet been overtaken by the economic crisis that awaited them at the end of the century and when the physical transformations of the Victorian period lay at an even greater distance. He brought to his researches an able and enquiring mind and as Secretary of the Bath and West of England Society was particularly alert to any signs of Somerset’s agricultural improvement and economic condition. Perhaps as he made his way down Somerset’s muddy lanes to yet another remote community he had some understanding as well that his work was pioneering For nothing quite on the scale of Rack’s survey had ever been attempted in Somerset before. (MP)