John Ashton

John Ashton (1834–1911) was an English writer on social history and popular culture. Working largely from old newspapers, broadsides, advertisements and chapbooks in the British Museum, he produced books that let past centuries speak for themselves, among them Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (1882), Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century, Old Times, The Dawn of the Nineteenth Century in England and Social England under the Regency. His Curious Creatures in Zoology gathered the strange beasts of old natural histories, and he also wrote on romances of chivalry, gambling and the history of lotteries.