Urban Improvement in the Nottinghamshire Market Town, 1770-1840

There is an image of the market town, particularly from the eighteenth century, as a traditional, somnolent community, Like Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge (thought to be Dorchester), these places are portrayed as old fashioned, without the faintest ‘sprinkle of modernism’, intimately linked to the life and fortunes of their surrounding rural hinterland, where, to use Hardy's words, ‘country and town met at a mathematical line’.