London London Vagabond

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.

In 2006, Richard Gwyn was given a year to live. He had lost nine years of his life to vagrancy and alcoholism in the Mediterranean, principally in Spain and Crete. This memoir is an account of those years; redemption via friendship, imagination, intellect, love and fatherhood; recovery and a life-saving liver graft. This book has also won the prize for creative Non-fiction, in the Wales Book of the Year 2012 Awards.

First published in 1799, George Walker’s The Vagabond was an immediate popular success. Offering a vitriolic critique of post-Bastille Jacobinism and sansculotte-style mob rule, its true-to-life satirical portraits of many of the radical men and women who fought in the forefront of the "British Revolution" are nonetheless full of playful banter and farce. With swipes at Hume, Rousseau, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Paine; the French Revolution; and the ideas of the noble savage, natural virtue, liberty, equality, and romantic primitivism, The Vagabond offers a unique cross-section of 1790s radicalism. This Broadview edition contains a critical introduction and a wide selection of primary source materials that situate the novel in the context of the revolutionary debate of the 1790s. Appendices include contemporary reviews of the novel and excerpts from the writings of a variety of radicals and reactionaries engaged in the debate, such as Hume, Rousseau, Paine, Thelwall, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Burke, Playfair, Malthus, and Cobbett, among many others.

"One of the finest and most delightful writers in romance." –Mary Jo Putney A charming, traditional Regency romance from New York Times bestselling author, Loretta Chase! “What's gotten into you, dashing about to make a man's poor, tired head spin?... Oh, all right. I'll chase you if you like." He started to get up, changed his mind, and slumped back against the pillow. "Only it's such a bother." Catherine Pelliston has just escaped a forced marriage to an obnoxious friend of her unreliable father; and now she's truly in the soup; kidnapped and helpless in a London brothel! And though she's been rescued by the very inebriated Max Demowery, Viscount Rand, she may be in even greater danger of falling in love with the shockingly outrageous, scandalously improper Viscount Vagabond!

"Vagabond Dreams" is a true story of awakening among a cast of fascinating characters at the farthest margins of the map. At its heart is the uncompromising vision of rising beyond one's self-imposed limitations and truly living. This powerful map to Road Wisdom is for brave travelers determined to embrace personal freedom and create the life of their choice.