London Lives

London Lives
Author: Tim Hitchcock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2015-12-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107025273

This book surveys the lives and experiences of hundreds of thousands of eighteenth-century non-elite Londoners in the evolution of the modern world.

1700

1700
Author: Maureen Waller
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781568582160

Maureen Waller captures the grit and excitement of London in 1700. Combining investigative reporting with popular history, she portrays London's teeming, sprawling urban life and creates a brilliant cultural map of a city poised between medievalism and empire in this Book of the Month Club Selection.

City of Laughter

City of Laughter
Author: Vic Gatrell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 720
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0802716024

Drawing upon the satirical prints of the eighteenth century, the author explores what made Londoners laugh and offers insight into the origins of modern attitudes toward sex, celebrity, and ridicule.

Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London

Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London
Author: Tim Hitchcock
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2004-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826427154

London in the 18th century was the greatest city in the world. It was a magnet that drew men and women from the rest of England in huge numbers. For a few the streets were paved with gold, but for the majority it was a harsh world with little guarantee of money or food. For the poor and destitute, London's streets offered little more than the barest living. Yet men, women and children found a great variety of ways to eke out their existence, sweeping roads, selling matches, singing ballads and performing all sorts of menial labor. Many of these activities, apart from the direct begging of the disabled, depended on an appeal to charity, but one often mixed with threats and promises. Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London provides a remarkable insight into the lives of Londoners, for all of whom the demands of charity and begging were part of their everyday world.

Benjamin Franklin in London

Benjamin Franklin in London
Author: George Goodwin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300220243

An account of Franklin's British years.

The London Hanged

The London Hanged
Author: Peter Linebaugh
Publisher: Cambridge [England] ; New YorkN.Y., USA : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521418423

In eighteenth-century London the gallows at Tyburn was the dramatic focus of a struggle between the rich and the poor. Most of the London hanged were executed for property crimes, and the chief lesson that the gallows had to teach was: 'Respect private property'. The executions took place amid a London populace that knew the same poverty and hunger as the condemned. Indeed, in this stimulating account Peter Linebaugh shows how there was little distinction between a 'criminal' population and the poor population of London as a whole. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the laws of a privileged ruling class. Peter Linebaugh examines how the meaning of 'property' changed substantially during a century of unparalleled growth in trade and commerce, analyses the increasing attempts of the propertied classes to criminalize 'customary rights'--perquisites of employment that the labouring poor depended upon for survival--and suggests that property-owners, by their exploitation of the emergent working class, substantially determined the nature of crime, and that crime, in turn, shaped the development of the economic system. Peter Linebaugh's account not only pinpoints critical themes in the formation of the working class, but also presents the plight of the individuals who made up that class. Contemporary documents of the period are skilfully used to recreate the predicament of men and women who, in the pursuit of a bare subsistence, had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's 'triple tree'.

Black London

Black London
Author: Gretchen Gerzina
Publisher:
Total Pages: 278
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN:

In Black London, Gretchen Gerzina shows how by the eighteenth century the work of all kinds of artists - Hogarth, Reynolds, Gillray, Rowlandson - as well as work by poets, playwrights and novelists, reveals to sharp eyes that not everyone in that elegant, vigorous, earthy world was white. In fact there were black pubs and clubs, balls for blacks only, black churches, and organizations for helping blacks out of work or in trouble. Many blacks were prosperous and respected: George Bridgtower was a concert violinist who knew Beethoven; Ignatius Sancho corresponded with Laurence Sterne; Francis Williams studied at Cambridge. Others, like Jack Beef, were successful stewards or men of business. But many more were servants or beggars, some turning to prostitution or theft. Alongside the free black world was slavery, from which many of these people escaped. In particular, it was the business of kidnapping blacks for export to the West Indies that made Granville Sharp an abolitionist and brought the celebrated Somerset case before Lord Justice Mansfield. Those men are now heroes of human rights, yet Sharp probably did not believe in racial equality; and Mansfield, whose own much-loved great-niece was black, was so worried about property rights that he did all he could to avoid a judgment that would set blacks free. The ties and conflicts of black and white in England, often cruel, often moving, were also complex and surprising. This book presents a fascinating chapter of history and one long in need of exploration.