This is a collection of writings from the period between the English "Rebellion" and the French Revolution. The anthology includes the works of many authors, and provides a wide variety of genres, forms, opinions, viewpoints and styles. Extensive coverage is given to literature that concerns issues of gender, sexuality, health, slavery, colonialism, crime and law. Most texts are reprinted in their entirety from first editions, or in the earliest recoverable versions, with original spelling and capitalization. Extracts, not always avoidable, are kept to a minimum, but selections from contemporary documents (such as newspaper and court reports) are used to illuminate important cultural and social issues at particular points of history. A central aim of this anthology is to represent the period in a way that would have been more recognizable to people who lived at the time than the conventional collection of great works of literature. Including the literature of private life and public life - the full range of writing from diary entries and domestic ballads to political pamphlets and mock-epic poetry - the book should revise the reader's sense of 18th-century literature. Instead of a high court presided over by a few great authors, it presents the literary life of the period as a more populous and more diverse concourse of writers. Among the writers represented are: Joseph Addison, Mary Astell, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Aphra Behn, Jeremy Bentham, William Blake, James Boswell, John Bunyan, Edmund Burke, Robert Burns, Elizabeth Carter, Margaret Cavendish, Susan Cenilivre, Thomas Chatterton, George Cheyne, Sarah Churchill, Charlotte Clarke, Jane Collier, Mary Collier, George Crabbe, Daniel Defoe, John Dryden, Sarah Egerton, Equiano, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Anne Finch, John Gay, Thomas Gray, Eliza Haywood, David Hume, Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Jago, Samuel Johnson, Mary Leapor, John Locke, Delariviere Manley, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Mary Monck, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Pepys, Katherine Philips, Laetitia Pilkington, John Pomfret, Alexander Pope, Matthew Prior, Clara Reeve, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Richardson, Richard Savage, Anna Seward, Christopher Smart, Adam Smith, Charlotte Smith, Jonathan Swift, Horace Walpole, Edward Ward, John Wesley, John Wilmot, Mary Wroth, Ann Yearsley and Edward Young.