The Gentry

Prize-winning author Adam Nicolson tells the story he was born to write – the real story of England. It is the gentry that has made England what it was and, to a degree, still is. In this vivid, lively book, history has never been more readable.

We may well be ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, but for generations England was a country dominated by its middling families, rooted on their land, in their locality, with a healthy interest in turning a profit from their property and a deep distrust of the centralised state. The virtues we may all believe to be part of the English culture – honesty, affability, courtesy, liberality – each of these has their source in gentry life cultivated over five hundred years. These folk were the backbone of England.

Adam Nicolson’s riveting new book concentrates on fourteen families with a time-span from 1400 to the present day. From the medieval gung-ho of the Plumpton family to the high-seas adventures of the Lascelles in the 18th-century, to more modern examples, the book provides a chronological picture of the English, seen through these intimate, passionate, powerful stories of family saga. The families have been selected from all over the country and range from the famous to the unknown. Some families are divided by politics , such as the family that took different sides in the Reformation; others destroy their inheritance through reckless gambling or investments . All of them are vivid depictions of the life and code of the gentry, and have left deep archives of family papers which the author has been able to use, often for the very first time.

THE GENTRY is first and foremost a wonderful sweep of English history. It presents a convincing argument on what has created the distinctive English character but with the sheer readability of an epic novel.

Reviews

‘A masterpiece of rural romanticism, told with shameless lyricism…the narrative of his struggle is charmingly interspersed with tales from Sissinghurst's past…all is warmed by Nicolson's evocation of Sissinghurst's natural history…the vision is one of nature, art and human history in glorious coalition, the essence of the Englishman's sense of place…this uplifting book.' Sunday Times

'Nicolson's book is one of those rare things: a story that seems small, irrelevant to most of us, rarefied in its history, full of detail about land rights and Trust guidelines, and yet which blooms in front of our eyes into a much larger, more important, more universal one…It's a beautiful, fascinating, touching account.' The Scotsman

'This necessarily self-deceptive and often beautiful book plumbs those depths much more deeply than do most of the existing paens to this celebrated place.' Literary Review

'Wonderfully engaging…elegant and lyrical, this is a total delight'. Good Housekeeping

“[Nicolson] paints a fascinating picture of forced marriages, violent deaths, corruption, loyalties, betrayals and, ultimately, a lost way of life… the book has flashes of insight and empathy to remind us that each family had its own individual dramas as well as being symbols of their time.” DAILY MAIL

About the author

Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, travel and the environment. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives at Sissinghust Castle in Kent. This is his sixth book for HarperCollins – his previous five being ‘Earls of Paradise’, ‘Men of Honour’, ‘Sea Room’, ‘Power and Glory’, ‘Seamanship’ and Sissinghurst.