Jon Mee is professor in the Department of English and Related Literatures at the University of York, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is the author of five books, including Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty and Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762 to 1830.

“Richly archival and powerful in its conceptions, Mee’s Networks of Improvement boldly goes where few literary historians have been before, into the heartlands of industrializing Britain for a magisterially orchestrated and methodologically groundbreaking study. Mee has given us a picture of British intellectual and social relationships that will stand unmatched for a long time to come.”

• IntroductionPart One: Networks and Institutions1 Power, Knowledge, and Literature2 The Collision of Mind with Mind: Manchester and Newcastle, 1781–18233 Improvement Redux: Liverpool, Leeds, and Sheffield, 1812–32Part Two: Bodies and Machines4 Three Physicians around Manchester5 Hannah Greg’s Domestic Mission6 An Inventive Age7 Lives, Damned Lives, and StatisticsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndex

Jon Mee is professor in the Department of English and Related Literatures at the University of York, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is the author of five books, including Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty and Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762 to 1830.

“Richly archival and powerful in its conceptions, Mee’s Networks of Improvement boldly goes where few literary historians have been before, into the heartlands of industrializing Britain for a magisterially orchestrated and methodologically groundbreaking study. Mee has given us a picture of British intellectual and social relationships that will stand unmatched for a long time to come.”

• IntroductionPart One: Networks and Institutions1 Power, Knowledge, and Literature2 The Collision of Mind with Mind: Manchester and Newcastle, 1781–18233 Improvement Redux: Liverpool, Leeds, and Sheffield, 1812–32Part Two: Bodies and Machines4 Three Physicians around Manchester5 Hannah Greg’s Domestic Mission6 An Inventive Age7 Lives, Damned Lives, and StatisticsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndex

Jon Mee is professor in the Department of English and Related Literatures at the University of York, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is the author of five books, including Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty and Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762 to 1830.

“Richly archival and powerful in its conceptions, Mee’s Networks of Improvement boldly goes where few literary historians have been before, into the heartlands of industrializing Britain for a magisterially orchestrated and methodologically groundbreaking study. Mee has given us a picture of British intellectual and social relationships that will stand unmatched for a long time to come.”

• IntroductionPart One: Networks and Institutions1 Power, Knowledge, and Literature2 The Collision of Mind with Mind: Manchester and Newcastle, 1781–18233 Improvement Redux: Liverpool, Leeds, and Sheffield, 1812–32Part Two: Bodies and Machines4 Three Physicians around Manchester5 Hannah Greg’s Domestic Mission6 An Inventive Age7 Lives, Damned Lives, and StatisticsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndex