The letters of the great eighteenth-century historian of music and man of letters, Dr Charles Burney (1726-1814), friend of Samuel Johnson and Joseph Haydn, are here collected and published in chronological order for the first time. This initial instalment of a projected four-volume edition of the Letters, edited from manuscript and other sources, opens with the earliest surviving letter, written in 1751 when Burney was an obscure country organist. It concludes in December 1784 with the death of Samuel Johnson. These are the letters of the active years which saw Burney's remarkable rise to the head of his chosen profession, music. They chronicle his musical travels in Europe, and his literary activities as a scholar and author of the Continental Tours, the first two volumes of his famous History of Music, and the Commemoration of Handel, written at the behest of George III. They also document Burney's membership in the celebrated literary coterie at Streatham, and the emergence as a novelist of his daughter Fanny, whose Evelina and Cecilia appeared in these years.

These eighteen essays represent a new generation of eighteenth-century scholarship. Written in honour of Professor Roger Lonsdale of the University of Oxford, the contributions to Tradition in Transition focus on the three main areas of scholarship that Lonsdale has made his own: women writers, marginalized authors and texts, and the shape of the eighteenth-century canon of English Literature. Both reflecting the immense influence of Roger Lonsdale's work to date, and taking in many of the most current issues in eighteenth-century studies at present.