ABSTRACT
Scholars looking to capture mid-eighteenth-century concerns over a deteriorating national condition can do little better than to reach for a copy of John Brown's two-volume Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757/8). Few authors rival this minister and political commentator in his protestations of gloom and doom. Brown's survey offered up an ignoble recent history, a parlous present and a bleak future for a once vigorous country. The nation, wrote Brown, had reached ‘a Crisis so important and alarming’ by which we ‘are rolling to the Brink of a Precipice that must destroy us’. 1 Brown's message chimed with a significant proportion of the population who in recent years had experienced rising prices, Jacobite invasion and shocking military setbacks in the opening campaign of the Seven Years War. Within a year of its publication, the first volume of The Estimate had run to seven editions, with sizeable extracts being reprinted in, amongst others, The Gentlemar's Magazine and London Magazine. The book shot its author to fame, earning him the nickname of John ‘Estimate’ Brown; a man popularly associated with an unpalatable story unnervingly told.
