Search

This article explores an overlooked archive of papers of a 1742 committee of 81 men from the five largest parishes in the City of Westminster formed to petition Parliament for the reform of their oligarchic select vestries. It argues that, despite the limiting impact of patronage described by Nicholas Rogers, an adversarial, masculine, middling-sort political identity was emerging in the mid-eighteenth century. This identity was based on the publicly engaged, rate-paying male householder. The vestry campaign deployed national anti-Walpole, anti-corruption political language. Close analysis of committee participation in St George Hanover Square also reveals how it developed from experience of parish politics, especially conflict with their social superiors of the political elite. It was an oppositional identity that is recognizable later in the century in the controversies around John Wilkes and in the American colonies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Caroline Playne (1857–1948) was a committed and influential pacifist and internationalist who published four idiosyncratic histories of the First World War in which she diagnosed the bellicosity of the peoples of Europe as a shared mental illness. Espousing many deeply conservative opinions, she frequently responded to modern society with heightened moral outrage. However, Playne was privately wholly absorbed in the charitable support of London's enemy aliens, including unmarried mothers and illegitimate children. Archival evidence of this work, along with much of the rest of her campaigning life, survives in fragments, but is suppressed from her published works and her papers. This article seeks to explore the motivations of what emerges as a sustained act of biographical erasure. The image ultimately presented is of a woman who secured a voice through the suppression not only of her sex, but also her limitless human compassion, and so arguably her very self. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1908, London hosted the fourth Olympic Games. A centrepiece of the Olympics, still in a nascent form after their creation in 1896, was the marathon, a foot-race of approximately 40 km. The race was run from Windsor Castle to the Olympic Stadium at Shepherd's Bush in July 1908, and quickly became famous for its controversies, such as the judges' assistance that helped Dorando Pietri over the line, and the questionable amateur status of Canadian runner Tom Longboat. This paper will concentrate on the route of the race: on how it was planned by the Polytechnic Harriers, how it was managed on the day, how it contributed to the development of 'marathon fever' after the Olympics, and what it tells us about the growing suburban landscape of Edwardian London and its hinterlands. The paper will end with a survey of the route today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the transmission of technology in the London Dyers' Company from 1649 to 1829. Dyeing is a skilled occupation, requiring extensive technical and business knowledge. This paper discusses the role of formal apprenticeship as a major channel through which knowledge is transmitted over generations. Using a range of Company, probate and parish data, I chart the practice of apprenticeship in the Company and the connection between Company and craft. Apprenticeship and dyeing skills remained tied to the Company until the mid-eighteenth century, although training was dominated by more prosperous dyers. By following generations of masters and apprentices, chains of knowledge transmission are described, and are shown to be longer in the profitable speciality of silk dyeing. The explanation of longer chains for silk dyers may relate to both increased economic opportunity and secrets in the craft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of road freight transport operations to, from, and within London, from medieval times to the present. Until the twentieth century, road transport was the dominant mode within London but was less important for goods moved between the rest of the country and the capital. However, since the mid-twentieth century, road transport has also dominated goods movements to and from London, mainly through technological developments in goods vehicle speed and size. Since the introduction of a Mayor of London in 2000, there has been much interest in the efficiency and sustainability of road freight transport measures at a London level. Analysis suggests that present day journeys from London generate approximately four times fewer vehicle miles per tonne lifted than in the 1830s and nine times fewer than in the 1690s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how the London Underground Diagram can be characterized as both palimpsest and canon, contributing to the collective memory and identity of London as a representational component of the cultural landscape of the London Underground. It explicitly considers the processes that have determined the increasing canonization of the diagram and the normative past that it embodies since its inception in 1931 by: investigating its design history and context of success; reviewing its popular iconization and the official acknowledgement of its origins; highlighting the history of its copyright and commercialization; charting the creative phenomenon of map-mashing and its copyright consequences; and questioning the diagram's status in a continuing digital world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rosemary Lane in London's East End had a reputation in the eighteenth century for being a disorderly neighbourhood. This reputation was in large part due to the Rag Fair that occurred there and its penchant for attracting disorderly women, pickpockets, thieves, and receivers of stolen goods. This paper will discuss the complicated relationship that existed between some of these streetwise disorderly women and the local thief-takers, who were major participants in the network of criminality that existed in this neighbourhood. In doing so, it will show that some plebeian women in London could be decision-makers and decision-takers; able to navigate the margins of society, and to make a livelihood for themselves that was not dependent on a husband or a partner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent, causes and nature of juvenile delinquency in Metropolitan London during and immediately after World War II. In response to a rising number of children and young persons being sentenced in the Metropolitan Juvenile Courts, magistrates and experts at the London Country Council favoured the continuation of a welfarist approach to delinquency that had operated before the war. War conditions reinforced the view that delinquency was the result of familial and social deprivation that eschewed retributive punishment. An increasing number of children and teenagers, mainly girls and often in need of care and protection, appeared before the Metropolitan Juvenile Courts. These delinquents were increasingly regarded in terms of welfare rather than as juridical subjects. However, this penal-welfarist practice, which embraced the rehabilitation of delinquents, was periodically challenged, as psychological treatment was regarded with suspicion, and the corporal punishment of boys gained in popularity in wartime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first work to explore the cases of the small number of identifiable Jewish women tried for infanticide at the Central Criminal Court between 1890 and 1918. Although the Jewish population of London (and indeed Britain) was facing increasing anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cases discussed here were treated with equivalent leniency to those of other women charged with newborn child murder and concealment of birth in this period. Despite the very different circumstances of each case, the defendants were able to fit the story of their crime into a highly recognizable script that dovetailed neatly with the dominant discourse of 'the infanticidal' shared by both popular and elite British society. In examining these trials, a forgotten aspect of Jewish metropolitan life is revealed, and new light is thrown on the complicated way in which ethnicity might - or might not - play out in criminal justice proceedings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If women in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought the perfect crime in which to participate, selecting receiving stolen goods provided excellent opportunities for profit and little chance of punishment. Low conviction rates, combined with the fact that no behaviour outside of gendered expectations was required in its commission, made dealing in stolen goods relatively easy for women in the metropolis. Although this particular offence has not been deeply analysed by historians of crime, its commission did alarm contemporaries, including members of the legal community and social commentators. This paper explores accusations against females in London for receiving, as well as the important roles that familial relationships and work played in their indictments for the crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses judicial records of the Sheriffs' Court of London and the royal Court of Common Pleas at Westminster to investigate whether the concept of a later medieval 'Golden Age' of female opportunity, as Caroline Barron has posited, is indicated by London's legal customs, as reflected in quantitative evidence of London women's court appearances and the types of cases in which they were litigants. It offers an introduction to economic and legal aspects of the 'Golden Age debate' and other quantitative investigations of women in later medieval courts; presents a comparative pre-plague to post-plague analysis of London women in the London Sheriffs' Court and royal Court of Common Pleas; and places trends regarding London women within a national context. It is concluded that women in London, as elsewhere in England, were less likely to act as litigants in the post-plague era, suggesting a general tightening up of patriarchal control over women's public activities that is inconsistent with a socially expressed 'Golden Age' of women in later medieval London. But, some evidence is presented that London women may nevertheless have enjoyed slightly enhanced economic opportunities in the fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with 17 firework loanwords that were advertised in the London newspapers in the eighteenth century. In the preceding century, fireworks were largely restricted to warfare. In the early eighteenth century, they were fired locally for entertainment, but the practice of the public firework display really took off after the Green Park display of 1749. Firework displays then became a staple attraction in certain pleasure-gardens. The predominant expertise at the time was Italian, and Italian vocabulary filtered down to local fireworkers and into their advertisements. It is suggested that this technical vocabulary is unlikely to have been understood by many readers. It could easily have been translated, but the display-promoters chose to keep the foreign terms, presumably in order to align fireworks with other fashionable, non-essential commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]