One Fine Day

A time-travelling, genealogical adventure, One Fine Day brings pre-industrial, rural, eighteenth-century England vividly to life on the page. It follows the life of Thom Marchant, a life-loving diarist from 1714 to 1728, and his family, who are descended from immigrants and are struggling with illness, political instability, and cash crises. The book reveals how their England became the England of the 2020s.

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 06 April 2023
Publisher: September Publishing

A time-travelling, genealogical adventure, vividly bringing pre-industrial, rural, eighteenth-century England to life on the page. One day, acclaimed author of books on music, railways, and pubs, Ian Marchant, decided, as all men of a certain age must, to have a dig around his family history. Surprisingly quickly, a web search informed him that his seven-times-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Marchant, had left a detailed diary from 1714 to 1728. So far, so jolly ...

Life-loving diarist Thom, who liked a drink and a game of cards, feels recognisably Marchant to Ian. With fascinating, immersive detail, we learn about Thom's family farm and fishponds; about dung, horses, and mud; about beer, the wife's nights out, his own job troubles, and their shared worries for their children. But as Ian digs deeper beyond the Sussex diary's bucolic portrait, he discovers a subtext—a family descended from immigrants, with anti-establishment politics, who are struggling with illness, political instability, and cash crises—just as their country does three centuries on. When I was reflecting late one January evening on the differences between Thom and me, I realized the unbridgeable thing that comes between us is industrialization. He lived right at its beginning, while I am living somewhere towards its end.

Old Thom Marchant was one of the last people before industrialization to understand how his world worked—and how to be largely self-sufficient in it. He knew where his food came from, his fuel, his water, his clothes. He knew how the welfare system worked, and was part of its administration; he knew who looked after the roads, too. He collected taxes. He was not separate from the system, but part of it.

Rich with immersive detail, One Fine Day draws a living portrait of Marchant family life in the 1720s.

Weight: 572g
Dimension: 149 x 224 x 39 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781912836994