The Century that Wrote Itself

In the first episode, The Written Self, Adam traces our modern sense of self back to the time when ordinary people first took up the quill. From a Quaker woman who used the written word as an instrument of revolution (imprisoned after sparking debates with her pamphlets and leaflets fighting for free speech, a free press and for the rights of women as preachers), to an ambitious shepherd who traded one of his sheep in return for lessons in reading and writing, the programme explores how rising literacy allowed people to re-write the country’s future - and their own.

Adam Nicolson explores the 17th century's contradictory attitudes towards the nature of reality. While a puritan struggled to accept God's will, an early naturalist accepted nothing without testing it first. How did God work? How did the world work? What was our place within it? These questions overflow from the era's diaries and notebooks, famous and unknown alike.

Author Adam Nicolson traces the roots of today's globalised Britain to a 17th-century golden age of writing and communication. He reveals a century on the move, a time when London tripled in size and more than 200,000 people emigrated in search of work or God. And it was writing that made this new mobility possible. Through the very words that kept them afloat in this mobile world, we meet a puritan family split asunder across an ocean, a lowly sailor able to document strange new worlds for those at home and a slave-trader laying the foundations for a new world economy. All these characters remoulded the medieval world into the one we recognise today. Their writings both reveal this turbulent world to us and helped write the change itself.