CHARITIES AND EDUCATION

£350 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Reports of the Commissioners, First edition of this survey of Westmorland at the time of Wordsworth, recording land prices, rents, and returns.In 1818, following widespread concern over the potential misuse of charitable assets, Henry Brougham (1778-1868) appointed a Parliamentary commission to investigate every charity in England and Wales. The Brougham Commission worked for almost two decades, surveying nearly 30,000 charities and producing 40 volumes of reports, published between 1819 and 1840 in Commons Papers.The present copy appears to have been disbound from one such volume: the opening leaves are signed with signature "L", with further jumps in the collation, and a continuous pagination has been added in a contemporary hand.Copies like this have been identified for several other counties. The commissioners were required to submit material for presentation and publication every six months. This requirement conflicted with the unpredictable nature of their investigations, and the result was that the reports for some counties were split across multiple different volumes of the official publications.Wordsworth lived near Ambleside from 1813 to 1850.

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