London Lives

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

Following the sellout success of Another Man's London, Terence Jenkins, London guide and journalist is back with another entertaining collection. London Lives takes you on a tour of some of the capital's secret spots and uncovers its lesserknown stories

London Voices, London Lives addresses a question of great current importance for urban policy: what kind of a place is London in the 21st century, and how does it differ significantly from other parts of urban Britain? It addresses these questions in a unique way: over one hundred ordinary Londoners provide their answers in their own voices.

Jack London (1876-1916), known for his naturalistic and mythic tales, remains among the most popular and influential American writers in the world. Jack London's Racial Lives offers the first full study of the enormously important issue of race in London's life and diverse works, whether set in the Klondike, Hawaii, or the South Seas or during the Russo-Japanese War, the Jack Johnson world heavyweight bouts, or the Mexican Revolution. Jeanne Campbell Reesman explores his choices of genre by analyzing racial content and purpose and judges his literary artistry against a standard of racial tolerance. Although he promoted white superiority in novels and nonfiction, London sharply satirized racism and meaningfully portrayed racial others--most often as protagonists--in his short fiction. Why the disparity? For London, racial and class identity were intertwined: his formation as an artist began with the mixed "heritage" of his family. His mother taught him racism, but he learned something different from his African American foster mother, Virginia Prentiss. Childhood poverty, shifting racial allegiances, and a "psychology of want" helped construct the many "houses" of race and identity he imagined. Reesman also examines London's socialism, his study of Darwin and Jung, and the illnesses he suffered in the South Seas. With new readings of The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden, and many other works, such as the explosive Pacific stories, Reesman reveals that London employed many of the same literary tropes of race used by African American writers of his period: the slave narrative, double-consciousness, the tragic mulatto, and ethnic diaspora. Hawaii seemed to inspire his most memorable visions of a common humanity.

Dickensian London is brought to real and vivid life in this innovative, accessible social history, revealing the true character of this place and time through the stories of its street denizens—shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2023 London, 1857: A pair of teenage girls holding a sign that says “Fugitive Slaves” ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where national newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city’s dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London’s most compelling period (1780–1870). Piecing together contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, letters, and journal entries, historian Oskar Jensen follows the harrowing, hopeful journeys of the city’s poor: children, immigrants, street performers, thieves, and sex workers, all diverse in gender, ethnicity, ability, and origin. For the first time, their own voices give us a radical new perspective on this moment in history, with its deep inequality that bears an astonishing resemblance to our own era’s divides.

A fascinating historical survey of the world’s most infamous outlaws. For as long as human societies have existed there have always been people who have transgressed the laws of their respective societies. It seems that whenever new laws are made, certain people find ways to break them. This book will introduce you to some of the most notorious figures, from all parts of the world, who have committed heinous crimes such as highway robbery, murder, and forgery. Beginning with Bulla Felix, the Roman highwayman, this book traces the careers of medieval outlaws such as Robin Hood and Adam Bell. Early modern murderers also make an appearance, such as Sawney Beane, whose story inspired the cult horror movie The Hills Have Eyes. Learn also about the crimes and daring escapes of Jack Sheppard, an eighteenth-century criminal who escaped from prison on several occasions, and find out if the “gentlemanly” highwayman Dick Turpin was truly a gentleman. This book also includes an appendix of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thieves’ cant, as well as several historical poems, songs, and ballads relating to the subjects discussed, and the work is prefaced with an essay highlighting the significance of crime literature throughout history.

A diary entry, begun by a wife and finished by a husband; a map of London, its streets bearing the names of forgotten lives; biographies of siblings, and of spouses; a poem which gives life to long-dead voices from the archives. All these feature in this volume as examples of ‘writing lives together’: British life writing which has been collaboratively authored and/or joins together the lives of multiple subjects. The contributions to this book range over published and unpublished material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. The book closes with essays by contemporary, practising biographers, Daisy Hay and Laurel Brake, who explain their decisions to move away from the single subject in writing the lives of figures from the Romantic and Victorian periods. We conclude with the reflections and work of a contemporary poet, Kathleen Bell, writing on James Watt (1736–1819) and his family, in a ghostly collaboration with the archives. Taken as a whole, the collection offers distinctive new readings of collaboration in theory and practice, reflecting on the many ways in which lives might be written together: across gender boundaries, across time, across genre. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.