Susan Whyman is an independent historian, formerly of Princeton University, where she received both MA and PhD degrees. Whyman lectures and publishes widely, both in England and the US, on British culture. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660-1800, winner of the 2010 Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars; Sociability and Power: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys, nominated for the History Today Prize; and Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay's Trivia (1716), co-edited with Clare Brant (all published by Oxford University Press).