The Diaries of Charlotte Downes, Volume I, is the third in a four-volume set, covering years 1828, 1829, 1831-1837. The diaries afford the reader a glimpse of a small corner of rural England from the Regency through to the early-mid Victorian periods when life was based on a timeless and often precarious agricultural economy, a rigid, inequitable class system and deference to an authoritative Church. Charlotte, the daughter of an influential Wiltshire...