Original Genius

A ploughboy proudly crafts an illuminated manuscript in the fields of rural Somerset. A young London mother turns depression, persecution and loss into a testament of holy suffering. A freed man travels the globe and writes a life story so powerful it will change the fates of thousands of others.

This is not the eighteenth century we're familiar with, one of assembly rooms, powdered wigs, Jane Austen, and the age of reason. Yet history is made by ordinary people. In Original Genius, celebrated scholar Abigail Williams uncovers a hidden past through the words of those who lived it. We encounter a tailor, a preacher's wife, a kitchenmaid and a sailor, and discover, through their writings, how they saw themselves: as a lover, a martyr, a poet and a revolutionary. Their accounts are astonishing, charming, maddening, alive on the page.

Together, they offer us an intimate, immersive and radically innovative portrait of their age. In their time, the gateways into culture were creaking open. Autobiography as we know it was born - and with it, new possibilities for writers of untaught 'original genius' to stake their claim to be heard and to describe their inner lives. They tell vivid stories of civil war, consumerism, abolition, religious radicalism, global trade and empire, feminism and political dissent.

Writing to reinvent themselves, to mourn, to leave a legacy or change their society, they shared one radical conviction: that the ordinary life matters.