Overview

The Blue Friars is an interestingly layered work that blends antiquarian scholarship with anecdote, satire, and civic memory. Rather than offering a conventional chronological account, the book reconstructs the social, intellectual, and cultural life of Plymouth through the lens of the Blue Friars, a dining and debating society whose members included prominent local professionals, writers, and public figures. Wright presents the group's sayings, rituals, and interpersonal dynamics as a microhistory of life as it was experienced at that time in that social circle and socioeconomic class. In doing so, the book captures the provincial elite culture through its wit, rivalries, and moral assumptions, while also preserving a form of sociability that was already passing into nostalgia by the late nineteenth century. The author, W. H. K. Wright (1844-1915), was a journalist whose career was deeply rooted in the cultural life of Plymouth and the wider southwest of England. Best known as a longtime editor of the Western Morning News, Wright combined professional journalism with an avocational commitment to local history, folklore, and biography. His writing is marked by a strong sense of place and an interest in how informal institutions shaped public life as much as formal politics or economic change. The Blue Friars exemplifies Wright's broader historical method: preserving ephemeral social worlds through narrative, portraiture, and memory, and asserting the historical value of everyday sociability as a lens for understanding the past

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9781637236512

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