This is a study of one particular aspect of English society during a period of the most astonishing transformation. In 1750, a foreign-born king, who had not long before defeated an attempt to unseat him, presided over the affairs of a largely agrarian country. A constitutional settlement had limited his powers, but he still claimed the right to make and unmake administrations at will. Science had progressed, but until as recently as 1736 one could still be condemned for the offence of witchcraft. Travel remained a precarious endeavour limited to the speed of the horse and vulnerable to the predations of the highwaymen who infested the doubtfully maintained turnpikes. Education for most was rudimentary. By 1850, by contrast, men were flying over London in balloons for mere pleasure, hurrying about their affairs upon the paved and lighted streets or else journeying through the kingdom at hitherto unimaginable speeds of locomotion. A thriving middle class had begun to emerge, literate, rationally minded and politically enfranchised. By the time at which this study concludes its examination, Great Britain was on the threshold of the Great Exhibition.

Yet the period in between was often traumatic: abroad the nation spent much time and blood engaged in a deadly struggle with an old rival, while at home domestic conflict seemed scarcely less dramatic. By 1850, the institutions of power had successfully met and defeated challenges to public order, along the way introducing new modes of law enforcement and penalisation. For a long time, though, many supposed that the very existence of the society that they recognised was in doubt as Radicals, Deists, Frame-Breakers, Chartists and others appealed to an increasingly resistive and radicalised population to challenge the legitimacy of existing laws, customs, creeds and practices. The later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of contending spirits and ideals, of new and widespread popular movements and anxious governmental responses.

This being so, some might think that studying duelling, out of the many rich opportunities for research apparent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, represents a somewhat quixotic choice. One might be forgiven for supposing that observing the manner in which some few gentlemen resolved their personal, often petty, differences can tell us little about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. This assumption, however, would be mistaken.