This volume contains some twenty-six short stories, most of them set in the author's home county of Lincolnshire. The bulk of them were written to wile away his time whilst he served two years in Stafford prison.
An active Chartist he attended the National Chartist Association conference in Manchester in 1842. Its agenda was overtaken by events already under way. As a result it passed a resolution in support of workers involved in a General Strike against swingeing wage cuts imposed by the coal-owners of Staffordshire and the textile manufacturers of North East Cheshire, South East Lancashire and the woolen manufacturers of West Yorkshire. Peel's Tory Government, always on the look-out for a way to halt Chartism and the workers demand for Universal Suffrage arrested the bulk of delegates to the conference.
Despite Thomas Cooper's imprisonment, these stories are far from serious. They depict life in the last decade of the 18th and the early decades of the 19th century in a humorous and light-hearted way.