The Real World of Poldark: Cornwall: 1783-1820

What was life really like in the Cornwall of the Poldark saga? This book, written by a Cornish historian, examines the period from 1783 to 1820. The fictional characters of Winston Graham’s very readable books will be temporarily relegated to a place in the background. Instead, the nature of Cornwall in this period and the lives of its people move to the foreground. How did they live, work, play, worship? What did they eat? How did they travel? This was a time of staggering wealth and appalling squalor, of high days and hardship, ingenuity and invention, great power and grasping greed, righteous indignation and riotous outbursts, religious fervour and ferocious feuds, and all to a constant background noise of war and social change. It was a time when the world began to turn on its axis and Cornwall for a brief spell found itself at the forefront of new ideas and a new world.