In introducing his reminiscences to the public in 1862, their author claimed that he had lived through the larger part of one of the most eventful centuries of England's history and to have known most of the remarkable men of his day. Captain Gronow was not a profound thinker, nor deeply interested in the political or social questions, but he was an observer of the surface of life, of the foibles and eccentricities of the beau monde and of the manners and oddities of Regency England and 19th-century France. Christopher Hibbert, who edited these memoirs, also wrote The English: A Social History, The Encyclopedia of London and Redcoats and Rebels: The War for America 1776 - 1781.