Publisher's Synopsis
From the Napoleonic Wars to the Devil's Device begins where the first volume of this local history left off, as Weymouth and its neighbours move from the heady days of being the century's favourite sea bathing resort into the 19th century. In the 1800s, these communities experience the highs and lows of the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution. Some will prosper, others will struggle, evidenced by the many workhouses built in Dorset by order of Parliament in the 1830s. Then there were the enormous building projects that changed everything for Weymouth and Portland; the breakwater and all that went with it brought thousands of new people to the area, to include tourists like author Charles Dickens who wrote extensively and with great enthusiasm about the construction of the breakwater and his fascination with the "Mariner Masons." The other newcomers, of course, were those who did not choose to come to Portland, but were the forced labour, the prisoners, shipped in to work on the breakwater, but first to build their own prison! The book closes with the fabulous lexicon peculiar to the West Country and the death of Queen Victoria.
