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Women, ale and company in early modern London
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsWomen, ale and company in early modern London Tim Reinke-Williams Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract This article explores attitudes to female ale- and beer-drinkers and the... -
Irish journalists and litterateurs in late Victorian London, c. 1870-1910
Posted on April 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe above thesis is an examination of nineteenth century Irish literary emigration to London, with particular reference to the 1880s and 1890s. It begins with an exploration of the political, social, economic and cultural reasons, both in Ireland and Britain, why Irish writers, Catholic and Protestant, flocked to London, and especially Fleet Street, during this period. -
Excavation set to shed new light on London’s Victorian past
Posted on February 28, 2013 | No CommentsFrom a clay smoking pipe to Neolithic flint, a 19th Century garden has been revealing some of its secrets to an archaeological team from London's Kingston University. -
Paradise Observed: Taxonomic Perspective in Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsIn 1869, the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace—co-founder with Darwin of the evolutionary theory of natural selection—published an account of the eight years he had spent in the Malay Archipelago. For a scientific travel narrative, the account opens in a surprisingly fairy-tale like manner. -
All Shut Up: Carlyle and the Pursuit of Domestic Silence
Posted on February 26, 2013 | No CommentsThese two opposing visions of the home – as a form of super secure refuge, and as a mode of dizzying flux and tumult – were contained, however uncomfortably, within the same four walls. -
Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsIn this article we explore the potential of material evidence to generate new understandings of everyday life in the Victorian metropolis. -
From the Unusual to the Banal: the Archaeology of Everyday Life in Victorian London
Posted on February 3, 2013 | No CommentsWhat do we know about everyday life in Victorian London? At one level, it would seem we know an awful lot. Few cities have generated such lively interest among historians and there is no shortage of contemporary accounts of the 19th-century metropolis. -
Living in Victorian London: The Clay Pipe Evidence
Posted on February 2, 2013 | No CommentsFour small fragments of clay pipe stem were found in context [5]. Despite attempts to date pipes by their stem bore, this remains an inadequate system at best, and fragments of this kind are almost impossible to date at all closely. Given the associated finds, it is highly likely that they are contemporaneous, unless residual or intrusive. -
Preserving Knowledge Through Popular Victorian Periodicals: An Examination of The Penny Magazine and the Illustrated London News, 1842–1843
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThis study is based upon a detailed empirical study of every weekly issue of both of these periodicals for a period of twelve months between May 1842 and May 1843. -
Becoming a London Goldsmith in the Seventeenth Century: Social Capital and Mobility of Apprentices and Masters of the Guild
Posted on January 26, 2013 | No CommentsThe goldsmiths experienced a great change in the second half of the seventeenth century with the development of banking. -
‘By Merit Raised to That Bad Eminence’: Christopher Merrett, Artisanal Knowledge, and Professional Reform in Restoration London
Posted on January 15, 2013 | No CommentsThis article examines the career and reform agenda of Christopher Merrett as a means of evaluating the changing conditions of medical knowledge production in late seventeenth-century London. -
An Introduction to the Coffee-house: a discursive model
Posted on January 4, 2013 | No CommentsThe distinctive features of coffee-house sociability were egalitarianism, congeniality and conversation. Although there were important differences between the coffee-houses of Istanbul and London, there were also some intriguing similarities, including the manifestation of this distinctive sociability. -
Common Woman to Commodity: Changing Perceptions of Prostitution in Early Modern England, C. 1450-1750
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsI began this project under the assumption that the modern definition and conception of the term “prostitute” had materialized by the eighteenth century. This is not a difficult conclusion to draw when examining the existing historiography of illicit sexuality in early modern England. -
Time and Work in Eighteenth-Century London
Posted on December 29, 2012 | No CommentsAccording to conventional wisdom workers during the Industrial Revolution toiled longer in 1850 than they had a century earlier. -
A Look at 18th Century London through the prints of William Hogarth, Gin Lane and Beer Street
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsWhat if you could walk down that same street and cross over to the early 18th Century? -
Book Trade in The Tudor Period
Posted on December 23, 2012 | No CommentsIn London the Stationers' Company and its Register, the old guild which goes as far back as 1404, made amonopoly of the book trade in Tudor England (1485-1603), except those printed by the university presses (1478). -
Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves
Posted on November 27, 2012 | No CommentsThree large questions concern me here: (1) What inspired all this looking at looking? (2) How were Victorians coming to terms with their increasing interest in watching their own watching? (3) What consequences were brought about by the rationales Victorian viewers devised to justify a happy spectatorship and to come to terms with the unreliability of vision? -
Undermining Apprenticeship: City, Law and Growth in early modern London
Posted on November 20, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper describes a very different, and entirely neglected, side of apprenticeship in London: the city’s system of contract dissolution. I suggest easy dissolution played a vital role in sustaining apprenticeship in London, and was apparently echoed in a weaker form elsewhere in England. -
The London Vagrancy Crisis of the 1780s
Posted on November 20, 2012 | No CommentsIn part, this can be seen as simply one more of a broad series of changes in the administration of crime. A whole raft of old and new punishments were being used in new ways, largely as a result of the end of transportation to North America – that had formed so prominent an aspect of penal policy prior to 1776. -
Gold is the strength, the sinnewes of the world’: Continental Gold and Tudor England
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsThis survey will examine finds of foreign gold coins from Tudor England to ascertain their prevalence, use and impact upon the English currency. -
Poor Relief in Edinburgh and the Famine of 1621-24
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough Scottish (and English) historians have not ignored the famine of 1621-24, the crisis still needs to be adequately contextualised within investigations into the development of poor relief in the early seventeenth century. -
English Xenophobia in the 18th Century: the Case of Lord Bute
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsThe covert manipulator, in other words, of the political strings chiefly responsible for the difficulties which marked the opening years of George III’s reign. -
James VI ‘s Ius Suum Conservare: His Intrigues with Spain, 1580-1603
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1580, Scotland was drowning in a sea of instability. James was in a position which, for good or ill, was fraught with momen- tous issues for the future of the kingdom. Yet the task of controlling the forces in Scottish political life might well have been too much even for a skilful and determined statesman. James, aged only fourteen, faced two complex tasks: to govern an intractable realm, and to successfully endure, and if possible take advantage of, the increasingly tense relations between England and Spain. -
LANT STREET, SOUTHWARK, IN THE MID NINETEENTH CENTURY
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn the nineteenth century, the main industries of the Borough included “leather working, printing and bookbinding, hat making, wharves, warehousing, food processing and engineering”.3 Many of the heads of household of Lant Street in 1851 were employed in these industries. -
The Pageant of History: Nostalgia, the Tudors, and the Community Play
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the first half of the twentieth century, although these events have attracted little scholarly attention to date, English cathedral cities, market towns and hamlets put on a large number of historical pageants, habitually preoccupied with what the English think of as the Tudor period. -
CAP MAKERS IN MID NINETEENTH CENTURY WHITECHAPEL
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn the 1851 census, Whitechapel was the London registration district with the largest number of cap makers recorded. Whitechapel registration district included a number of parishes or townships in addition to Whitechapel itself, such as Spitalfields. -
Songs and society in early Tudor London
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsBy comparison, far less attention has been made to recreational music making in the urban communities of early Tudor England, and to musical experiences that lay beyond court, college, cathedral and church. -
Policemen in Mid Nineteenth Century Whitechapel
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIt can be seen that the majority of the policemen came from outside London. This reflects the preference of the authorities for rural recruits, who were considered to be physically and temperamentally better suited to becoming reliable policemen. It can also be seen that 23% of the men came from Ireland, which highlights the fact that recruitment was a matter of supply as well as demand, and that the decision to be a policeman was related to the availability of alternatives. -
Did Slavery make Scotia great?
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsIn the last few years, however, the research agenda has changed dramatically. Studies have now started to be published on the Scottish connection with the West India sugar colonies and the extent of Scottish involvement in slave trading itself or, by proxy, in Bristol, Liverpool and London. A new interest has also developed in the impact of the slave-based economies on Scotland which connects with older work on the relationship between the imperial trades and Scottish economic development -
Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company, c. 1779–c. 1821
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsFor the first century of the Company’s operations, which remained at Hudson’s Bay, the personnel needs of the HBC were small. A recruitment ethos was established in which the directors prioritised the employment of English ‘country lads’ and Scots, largely due to their perceived qualities of subordination, sobriety, obedience and ability to endure deprivation. -
The “Gin Epidemic”: London’s Public Health Crisis
Posted on September 19, 2012 | No CommentsGin was an easy target to blame for what was happening among the working class poor and, once the authorities found their source, they neglected to see the big picture and the other reforms that needed to be made. -
Promises broken: Breach of promise of marriage in England and Wales, 1753-1970
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe primary basis for this study was are 875 breach of promise cases between 1750 and 1970. -
Bureaucratic mercy: The Home Office and the treatment of capital cases in Victorian England
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation is a study in the administration of criminal justice in mid-Victorian England, and in particular of the Prerogative of Mercy. -
London: A History in Maps
Posted on September 11, 2012 | No CommentsTelling the story through a fantastic series of maps, many from the British Library’s collections and seen here for the first time, it charts the development of the capital from the first known image on a coin in 297 AD, right up to the present day and the lasting legacy the Olympic games will have on the cultural and geographical make-up of the city. -
Francis Bacon’s use of ancient myths in Novum Organum
Posted on September 8, 2012 | No CommentsIn this paper, I will show how the ancient myths of Pan, Perseus, Dionysius, and Prometheus have an impact on Book I of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum. -
“A Right Sort of Man”: Gender, Class Identity, and Social Reform in Late-Victorian Britain
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsBecause of a lack of consensus among policymakers on the education issue, school fees were not eliminated until 1891, and compulsory attendance did not become national policy until 1880. -
The Culture of Crime: Representations of the Criminal in Eighteenth-Century England
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsAs the title of this study should suggest, this dissertation aims to account for this increasing representation of criminality in England throughout the eighteenth century. And as the title of this opening chapter indicates, this introduction aims to account for the methods and biases that inform this study and are utilized throughout. -
St. Paul’s Cathedral at 300
Posted on September 1, 2012 | No Comments2011 is the 300th anniversary of the completion of Christopher Wren's Cathedral. This coincides with the completion of an historic £40 million programme of cleaning and repair, in which the building has been comprehensively restored inside and out. -
“Putting to Hazard a Certainty”: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England
Posted on September 1, 2012 | No CommentsI hope to enrich our understanding of the early decades of the Financial Revolution by examining a financial instrument that has received much less attention, at least from literary scholars with interests in financial and economic history: the lottery. I focus on the lottery to show the deep foundations of the Financial Revolution in gambling. -
Reading Silk: England’s Search for a National Identity, 1590-1630
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIn this thesis, I plan to demonstrate that silk becomes a tool for nation building. While at first the English peoples’ insatiable appetite for silk creates an identity crisis of sorts for England, with the conflicting desires to emulate foreign practices and also to remain steadfast to the nation, silk is eventually recognized as a material that has the power to unite the English people. -
Dealer in Magic: James Cox’s Jewelry Museum and the Economics of Luxurious Spectacle in Late-Eighteenth-Century London
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsI suggest that the museum Cox established in the 1770s illuminates an eighteenth- century arts industry located in London, the nature of which needs to be better understood if we are adequately to understand the concept of an alliance between heritage and commerce for the benefit of the nation in which much current economic and cultural discourse is grounded. -
Bonnets, Muffs and Trinkets, Oh My! Conspicuous Consumption of Prostitutes in London
Posted on July 20, 2012 | No CommentsImitation and emulation in fashion gained considerable notice from commentators in England during the eighteenth century. A quote from The British Magazine in 1763 illustrates this well. “The present rage of imitating the manners of high life hath spread itself so far among the gentle folks of lower life, that in a few years we shall probably have no common folk at all. -
The English Civil War in the American Colonies
Posted on July 15, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough Privateers claiming to support the King operated out of Wexford and Waterford in Ireland as well as Dunkirk, it was not until the Royalists took Bristol, Exeter and Dartmouth in 1643 that they had major anchorages in mainland Britain from which to import arms, conduct trade and launch maritime operations. -
Sporting Days in Eighteenth Century England
Posted on July 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe typical view of the sports historian has not disturbed this accepted analysis of the role of play in eighteenth century life. The argument goes that “modern sport” was born of the industrial revolution...While this account has some proximate truth, it is too precise, sweeping and simple. -
Staging Executions: The Theater of Punishment in Early Modern England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1571, the first permanent structure for public hangings was constructed at Tyburn. Attending public hangings at “Tyburn tree,” as well as other forms of public punishment was a popular pastime in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Events we would now call “entertainment” in early modern England were fairly limited. -
The Education and Training of Gentry Sons in Early-Modern England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn this paper, we examine the relationship between birth order and the education and training received by sons in gentry families in early modern England. -
Apprenticeship in Early Modern London: City apprentices in the 16th and 17th centuries
Posted on June 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe prospect of an apprenticeship attracted thousands of youths to the guild masters of early modern London. Where did apprentices come from, what became of them in the city, and how did this system impact shape the development of Europe’s largest city? -
Galley-foists, Lord Mayors’ Shows, and Early Modern English Drama
Posted on June 24, 2012 | No CommentsWhat is a ‘galley-foist’? According to OED, it is ‘a state barge, esp. that of the Lord Mayor of London’. This definition appears to be wrong however, certainly for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or at the very least so misleading as to require serious qualification. -
Criminal trial procedure in eighteenth-century England: the impact of lawyers
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsBut how precisely did this happen? Langbein’s astute detective work has now revealed that this important shift in courtroom practice followed hard on the heels of a series of scandals by which innocent defendants were prosecuted on the initiative of unscrupulous thief-takers and ‘Newgate solicitors’ who invented evidence and coached witnesses with the aim of profiting from rewards for convictions. -
Little Ease: Torture and the Tudors
Posted on May 7, 2012 | No CommentsTorture and the Tower of London have long had an uneasy relationship. The echoes of those screams are part of the walled fortress’s allure, along with the X marks the spot of Queen Anne Boleyn’s and the Lady Jane Grey’s decapitations and tales of the travails of inmates Raleigh, Cranmer, Fisher and More.