Footnotes to History

This book brings a novel focus to social history. It is a study of a "group family" -- an extended family closely structured though marriages that were either internal or with trusted associates. Its members strove cooperatively for their own mutual benefit. This kind of social entity evolved down the centuries, reaching its zenith in the early nineteenth century. The family portrayed, the Pennells, provides a supreme example of such a united body. John Wilson Croker, his two half-nieces and his