Far and away the most important activity of the Virginia assembly of 1748–9 was a wholesale revision of the colony's laws. The result of two years' hard labour by a special committee of leading members of the Council and House of Burgesses, this revision was the first in more than forty years and many laws were obsolete, inadequate or contradictory. Indeed, there had not been a printed edition of the laws for some sixteen years and the newer and more remote counties lacked copies of them. At the end of the session Lieutenant Governor Sir William Gooch congratulated the assembly on its accomplishment of a laborious but worthwhile task and submitted the revision to the Board of Trade in a routine fashion. The response of the home government was anything but routine, and the resulting series of events was to inaugurate the process by which, over the next quarter century, Virginia's confidence in the home government to deal sympathetically and responsibly with its problems was slowly eroded.

Half a century before Jacob Riis and Jane Addams groped for the conscience of the nation with their exposures of urban misery, a few determined citizens were already fighting the long battle to liberate the huddled wretches of the cities. In Boston some of the techniques of the later social agencies were anticipated as early as the 1830s by Joseph Tuckerman's Association of Delegates from the Benevolent Societies, but it was New York City which really pointed the way to the future. In the twenty years before the Civil War a number of bodies were founded in the city which in time became permanent welfare institutions. They were in large part the products of conditions similar to those which produced the scientific philanthropy, Social Gospel, settlement house and other social movements of the late nineteenth century, and, like those movements, they anticipated many of the attitudes of the social workers of the Progressive era. It would be a mistake to press the parallel between ante-bellum reform and social Progressivism too far, but the two phenomena shared some common characteristics. Like many Progressives, the urban reformers of the ante-bellum years tended to come from pious middle-class backgrounds, and a number of them began life as missionaries before being drawn into social work. They were a fact-finding generation, investigating social problems with an unprecedented thoroughness, energetically uncovering evidence and compiling statistics with which to open the eyes of an indifferent public. They were very conscious of the social chasm between the rich and the poor and they did what they could to bridge it.

The Gilded Age saw the emergence of a number of figures who produced alternative theories to the dominant doctrine of laissez-faire. One such alternative theorist was Henry George (1839–97), a man of pronounced individualist proclivities who invoked the Jeffersonian tradition of sturdy agrarian independence as a corrective to an unbalanced economy which, he believed, was driving a destructive wedge between rich and poor. Today, George is regarded primarily as an economic reformer and his best-selling book with its jingling title, Progress and Poverty (1879), is read for its analysis of post-bellum America and for the panacea that it propounds: a levy on the value of land which, because it was designed to replace all other taxes, came to be called the Single Tax. In contrast, George's religious beliefs have received scant attention from his biographers and historians of the period, who have done little more than note that he was a devout Christian. This oversight has been rectified in a recent article by Fred Nicklason, ‘ Henry George: Social Gospeller ’, which draws attention to the religious orientation of George's writings and discusses his relations with churchmen. Yet although Nicklason stresses the importance of George's religious activity, he asserts that ‘ George himself moved from an initial concern for the single tax as a social reform to a deep-seated regard for its divine sanction ’. I believe that this is a misconception of George, and I shall try to show that his visionary experience led him to regard himself as a religious leader and prompted him to formulate his social theory. I also hope to demonstrate that his messianic pretensions grew with his following and that it was his religious role, rather than the Single Tax, which during his lifetime not only made disciples but also influenced theorists who were otherwise unsympathetic to his economic bolus.

In June 1974, Tim Findley reported the shoot-out between Los Angeles police and the Symbionese Liberation Army for Rolling Stone. Fully covered by TV, police fanaticism and the fantasies of Cinque entered every home:

People sat in their living rooms, watching an epic battle of American insanity, commenting to each other about the cases of ammunition being unloaded from the FBI car, about the small grin on the cop's face as he threw the bolt home on his rifle before firing another round into the blazing little bungalow in south Los Angeles. His base-ball cap and clumsy flak jacket along with his bolt-action rifle made him appear as a boy playing at a game in which all the battles are heroic spectacles – where just the imaginary bad guys fall dead.

The camera pans closer …

Much has been made of Washington Irving's literary debts to Walter Scott. Influence there was, stretching back long before that day late in August 1817 when the laird of Abbotsford came limping up the gravel walk to greet his American visitor. But the relationship cannot be adequately expressed as Irving's discipleship to Scott. There were obligations on both sides.

Although many contemporary American novelists have rejected the straightforward representation of social reality in fiction, this rejection may occur for a number of reasons. In Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs it stems from a fear that the inanimate world is somehow superseding the animate, the sovereignty of the individual is being threatened. John Hawkes refers to the novelists ‘ who hope for more in the novel than trying to build brick walls of brick ’, and suggests that ‘ the true purpose of the novel is to assume a significant shape and to objectify the terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world ’. Norman Mailer also remarks on this relationship in his essay ‘ The White Negro ’:

The second world war presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of superstates founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?

‘ FIVE-AND-TWENTY years ago, at the epoch of this story, there dwelt, in one of the middle states, a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure.’ This is the opening of chapter XXII of The Blithedale Romance which gives us old Moodie's story. We are told how ‘ Fauntleroy ’ led a life of conspicuous expenditure, and finding himself growing poor, ‘ he recoiled from this calamity ’:

To avoid it – wretched man! – or, rather, to defer it, if but for a month, a day, or only to procure himself the life of a few breaths more, amid the false glitter which was now less his own than ever – he made himself guilty of a crime. It was just the sort of crime, growing out of its artificial state, which society (unless it should change its entire constitution for this man's unworthy sake) neither could nor ought to pardon. More safely might it pardon murder.

This bibliographical work has become so important and so standard a tool internationally for scholars working in American history and literature that one recognizes with some surprise the passage of fifteen years since its original publication and an even longer period since its compilation. It was the first large-scale project undertaken by the young British Association for American Studies which was only in the third year of its existence when the work began. With a munificent grant from the United States Information Service and under the general supervision of H. L. Beales, as many as five full-time researchers were engaged on it in its final stages and a great deal of part-time assistance was also available. Two useful by-products to appear before the Guide were ‘ A Survey of Library Resources in the United Kingdom for the Teaching of American History and Literature in the Universities ’ in the Journal of Documentation, 14 (1958), 103–18, and the ‘ Union List of American Newspapers in Great Britain and Ireland ’ edited by B. R. Crick and Ann Daltrop and issued in October 1958. The latter was brought up to date two years ago and reissued as ‘ American Newspaper Holdings in British and American Libraries ’; it was edited by D. K. Adams and produced for the British Association for American Studies by the David Bruce Centre for American Studies in the University of Keele.