Eighteenth-century London Research Articles

Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London by Richard Coulton, Matthew Mauger, and Christopher Reid

Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London by Richard Coulton, Matthew Mauger, and Christopher Reid

The Painter's Daughter and the Poor Law: Elizabeth Laroon (b. 1689 –fl.1736)

This article reconstructs the hitherto unknown life story of the only surviving daughter of the painter Marcellus Laroon the elder (c. 1648/9–1702). It begins with an updated biography of Elizabeth's father, outlines her probable financial situation at his death, and then goes on to reconstruct her catastrophic career. Elizabeth Laroon ended up as a pauper and was relieved under the Poor Law by the parish of St Martin in the Fields, Westminster for over 20 years. She spent time in the parish workhouse and experienced two stays in the Kingsland annexe of St Bartholomew's Hospital which specialized in venereal patients. Elizabeth Laroon's life history reveals much about the nature of family ties, the fragility of social position, the plight of single women, the impact of venereal disease, the identity — or perhaps more properly ‘identities’ — of ‘the poor’ and the social reach of the parish poor law in eighteenth-century London.

A Satirical News Aggregator in Eighteenth-Century London

A satirical weekly paper called the Grub-Street Journal (GSJ 1730–1737) offered an innovative approach to managing the flow of unverified and contradictory reports that accompanied the growth of newspapers in eighteenth-century London. Using the fictional persona of ‘Quidnunc’ (a contemporary term for news addicts), the editor Richard Russel compiled accounts of the same event from several newspapers and juxtaposed them on the page, thereby revealing their similarities and differences. Russel’s manual version of news ‘aggregation’ exposed errors and contradictions, but it also provided readers with details that would have otherwise required consulting several sources. Meanwhile, Quidnunc interjected ironic remarks, poking fun at the pretensions of news writers, politicians, and others. Anchored in the literary culture of its time, and drawing on learned traditions of textual editing, the GSJ offered readers an eighteenth-century version of media criticism through satire.

For lust or gain: perceptions of prostitutes in eighteenth-century London

This paper examines perceptions of lower-class female prostitutes in eighteenth-century London. This study challenges the prevailing argument that these perceptions fundamentally changed from ‘lusty whores’ to victims of poverty. An examination of Bridewell records, sermons, pamphlets, and the newspaper press, reveals that commentators believed that lust, poverty, and greed collectively explained what drove women to prostitution. Commentators recognized that, unable to make ends meet, many women turned to prostitution to survive, while also suggesting that others turned to prostitution because they believed they could gain considerable wealth by doing so. These same commentators asserted that some women were unusually lustful and that only prostitution would satisfy their insatiable desires. The simultaneous depiction of prostitutes in contradictory ways suggests that prostitution was not offensive to Georgian Britons solely because it involved women exchanging sexual favours for money, but because prostitution transgressed Britons’ deepest sensibilities about morality.

Sedan chairmen in eighteenth-century London

Most household account books of the eighteenth-century London elite contain entries for ‘Sedan chairmen’, albeit they were never servants per se. Little consulted as sources for transport history, these unpublished accounts in various public and private archives in England reveal that Sedan chairmen were independent and worked for themselves. Supplemented by contemporary material, court cases, diaries and correspondence, light is shed on when Sedan chairs first appeared in London, on how the public overcame initial repugnance at the idea of being carried, on the earnings of chairmen, the hours they worked and the diverse tasks asked of them. Examples are given of chairmen’s position in London society, their status and how they regarded themselves. The sources show how chairmen responded to market forces and for over a hundred years played a part in inner London mobility and transport.

Review: The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel's Operatic Stage, by Suzanne Aspden

Book Review| April 01 2016 Review: The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel's Operatic Stage, by Suzanne Aspden The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel's Operatic Stage, by Suzanne Aspden. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xv, 291 pp. Nathan Link Nathan Link NATHAN LINK is NEH Associate Professor of Music at Centre College. His research explores opera's unique methods of storytelling, and his monograph on Handel's operas is nearing completion. He coedited the collection Word, Image, and Song (University of Rochester Press, 2013), and his writings have appeared in Opera Quarterly, the Journal of the American Library Association, and the Göttinger Händel Beiträge. In 2015 he received the Governor's Award for the top arts educator in Kentucky. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2016) 69 (1): 241–247. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2016.69.1.241 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nathan Link; Review: The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel's Operatic Stage, by Suzanne Aspden. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2016; 69 (1): 241–247. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2016.69.1.241 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel's Operatic Stage is an ambitious investigation into the construction of opera singers’ public and private personae in early eighteenth-century London. Suzanne Aspden explores the well-known but often misunderstood rivalry between sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni during their time together at the Royal Academy of Music, investigating the complex mechanism by which performers influenced the processes of operatic composition, production, and reception. In the course of the book's five chapters she offers provocative interpretations of each of Handel's five operas composed for the two singers—Alessandro (1726), Admeto (1727), Riccardo primo (1727), Siroe (1728), and Tolomeo (1728). At the same time, she analyzes the ways in which perceptions of the singers, both on and off the stage, were affected by circumstances ranging from practical exigencies, to the social construction of gender, to emerging philosophies of human subjectivity. At the heart of the... You do not currently have access to this content.

‘A Religious Attention to Minutiae’: César de Missy (1703–1775) Studies the New Testament

“This article offers a portrait of the milieu and scholarly activity of César de Missy, an assiduous and richly connected but hitherto unknown member of the Republic of Letters in eighteenth-century London. De Missy preached at Huguenot churches and collected books, especially bibles: he published little, but left a great deal of scholarship in manuscript, mostly concerned with the readings and codicology of the Greek New Testament. Perhaps his most peculiar and revealing pursuit was the minute study of scribal error in the production of manuscripts, an activity that absorbed his attention far more than its profit might seem to warrant. I argue that De Missy's fixation on the multiple histories of the scriptural text represents a private reaction to loss, turning away from the more conventional public scholarship of the Huguenot diaspora.”

Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall (review)

Reviewed by: Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall Caroline Gonda Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall, eds., Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). Pp. 219. £60.00. “Remember: As far as anyone knows we’re a nice normal family.” Doubtless hilarious to some, the bumper stickers and wall plaques on eBay are not so funny to the queer children excluded, silenced, or sacrificed in order to preserve the so-called normal family’s image of itself. It’s in the nature of ideology that those processes of exclusion, silencing, and sacrifice are so often themselves invisible or denied. The appearance of obviousness, naturalness, this-is-just-how-things-are, is what gives particular forms of being their power to control—or, at their most extreme, to destroy—the lives of others. In a world where, as the Scottish lesbian novelist Iona Macgregor says, “the dominant class never sees its own boundaries,” the work of a collection such as Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture is an important intervention, making critically visible both “the heteronormative legacy of the eighteenth century as a historical period” and the continuing presence of heteronormativity in eighteenth-century studies. As the editors note, the chapters in this volume “set out to reconfigure our sense of how gender and sexuality have become mapped onto space; how public and private have been carved up, and gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and how narrative conventions have been put in the service of affirming or subverting cultural orthodoxies about sex, gender, and sexuality. They also spotlight the literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices that buttress or subvert heteronormativity both in the past and in the present” (15). Whether or not one subscribes to Karma Lochrie’s argument in Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (2005)—that only the emergence of statistics as a science in the late eighteenth century makes it possible to speak meaningfully about norms and the normal (including in sexuality)—this collection makes the case for the eighteenth century as a crucial period in the formation of heteronormativity. By the end of the century, the editors argue, heteronormativity “congeals into a fully fomented hegemony,” although “alternate sex/gender configurations” continue to materialize (14–15). The chapters here explore heteronormativity across a wide range of areas and subjects: for example, the history of shopping and its impact on the sexual geography of the city (O’Driscoll); changes in French wedding-night customs (Roulston); the use of heteroerotic pornography as an element in male homosocial bonding (Kavanagh); moral panic, sexual assault, and protective masculinity in late eighteenth-century London (Braunschneider); Gothic fiction’s resistance to heteronormative closure (Haggerty); and the racial and sexual politics of colonialism (de Freitas Boe). In addition to Coykendall’s chapter on the critical and historical reception of Gray and Walpole, the two chapters that frame the volume address themselves to eighteenth-century studies, examining the workings of heteronormativity in scholarly research (Lanser) and the pedagogic practices and new readings of texts that result from attending to transgender issues in the classroom (Saxton, Mance, and Edwards). As powerful and pervasive a force as heteronormativity becomes, it is not monolithic, but is enmeshed with other structures of power. Ana de Freitas Boe’s [End Page 427] chapter on John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) makes this particularly clear: “Stedman’s depiction of the erotic life of the colony forces us to reconsider how concerns about race and miscegenation shaped emergent heteronormative conceptions of sexuality in the eighteenth century. The monogamous couple—and monogamy as a concept—looks different from the vantage point of the colonial periphery” (165). Questions of class as well as of race are important in this volume, as seen particularly in Sally O’Driscoll’s chapter “Conjugal Capitalism,” which focuses on the figure of the domestic woman as “mulier mercans,” defined no longer by her sexual desires but by the fetishistic transfer of those desires onto material goods and purchasable commodities. The city in which she wanders is transformed, gentrified by the...

The ‘Perpetual Fair’: Gender, Disorder and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth–Century London, by Anne Wohlcke

The ‘Perpetual Fair’: Gender, Disorder and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth–Century London, by Anne Wohlcke

The Royal Sign and Visual Literacy in Eighteenth-Century London

AbstractThis article argues that the commercialization of monarchical culture is more complex than existing scholarship suggests. It explores the aesthetic dimensions of regal culture produced outside of the traditionally defined sphere of art and politics by focusing on the variety of royal images and symbols depicted on hanging signs in eighteenth-century London. Despite the overwhelming presence of kings and queens on signboards, few study these as a form of regal visual culture or seriously question the ways in which these everyday objects affected representations of royalty beyond asserting an unproblematic process of declension. Indeed, even in the Restoration and early eighteenth century, monarchical signs were the subject of criticism and debate. This article explains why this became the case, arguing that signs were criticized not because they were trivial commercial objects that cheapened royal charisma, but because they were overloaded with political meaning. They emblematized the failures of representation in the age of print and party politics by depicting the monarchy—the traditional center of representative stability—in ways that troubled interpretation and defied attempts to control the royal image. Nevertheless, regal images and objects circulating in urban spaces comprised a meaningful political-visual language that challenges largely accepted arguments about the aesthetic inadequacy and cultural unimportance of early eighteenth-century monarchy. Signs were part of an urban, graphic public sphere, used as objects of political debate, historical commemoration, and civic instruction.

Archives, Numbers, Meaning: The Eighteenth-Century Playbill at Scale

As a necessary precondition of large-scale digital humanities projects, texts, archival materials, and historical individuals must become data—a process that involves choices about collection, curation, and preparation. While scholars of media and digital culture make clear the mediated and constructed nature of data, practitioners of “distant reading” and related methods have been less inclined to offer a transparent account of their materials. This essay models a theoretically rigorous approach to a new dataset of the authors’ creation: a set of 1,421 playbills from eighteenth-century London. Tracing how categories operate over time on playbills, it finds that the inclusion of genre is a more powerful mode of categorization for eighteenth-century theatrical publics than the inclusion of a named author. The case study of the generically and authorially indeterminate dramatic adaptations of Oroonoko, and the shifting categories used to advertise them, reveals that eighteenth-century theatrical publics had an idiom, previously unrecognized by scholars, for talking about generic ambiguity and even using it to market performances. Oroonoko and other plays that similarly challenged conventional generic and authorial categorization were often advertised as “a Play,” a seemingly empty label that is revealed to carry significance when these playbills are subjected to quantitative analysis. Throughout, the essay attends to the transformation of the archival artifacts into data objects, insisting that the knowledge claims that can be made based on these playbills are enabled, rather than hampered, by an awareness of the highly mediated nature of the dataset. As such, this study demonstrates how a more reflective approach to humanities data collection opens up new interpretive terrain—terrain that takes advantage of the opportunities available at scale while maintaining the humanities’ commitment to ambiguity, mediation, and situatedness.

Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London by Jennifer Farooq

Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London by Jennifer Farooq

Understanding Emotions in Early Europe eds. by Michael Champion and Lynch Andrew

Reviewed by: Understanding Emotions in Early Europe eds. by Michael Champion and Lynch Andrew Ivan Cañadas Champion, Michael, and Andrew Lynch, eds, Understanding Emotions in Early Europe (Early European Research, 8), Turnhout, Brepols, 2015; hardback; pp. xxxiv, 357; R.R.P. €90.00; ISBN 9782503552644. This volume engages with the challenges of identifying and interpreting human emotional experience from a position of cultural and temporal remoteness. It does so while acknowledging the fluid nature both of language and of [End Page 203] intellectual and cultural conventions, including social customs and rituals, philosophical or theological frameworks, and literary conventions. The book's fourteen wide-ranging chapters and the editors' lucid Introduction, thus, recognise that, even accepting some human constants, understanding emotion in any period remains a matter for historical inquiry. Though subdivided into three parts – 'Intellectual Traditions', 'Literature', and 'Social History and Material Culture' – the collection's strength lies in the connections between essays, even those in different sections, providing remarkable coherence. An early statement regarding culturally embedded social 'narratives or scripts', for instance, resonates among essays dealing with diverse subject matter and different periods. The first section traces intersections between Classical philosophy and early Christianity, where the conception and discourse of emotions are concerned, and, hence, leads into further consideration of the influence and transformation of these in medieval and early modern Europe. David Konstan's essay on the shift from 'regret to remorse' in late Antiquity argues that pre-Christian 'regret … a primarily intellectual phenomenon', took over two centuries after Christ's death to yield ground to 'remorse', internalised, by contrast, and involving empathy, rather than mere consideration of negative external consequences to oneself (pp. 6–7). Konstan attributes this delayed adoption to the fact that Greco-Roman culture did not see 'human beings as essentially sinful and in need of repentance' (p. 12), and, moreover, that emotionality was distrusted or condemned as contrary to the ideal of rational equanimity (p. 14). Consequently, additions 'had to be made' in late Antiquity, 'specific to Christian Latin': the terms compunctio and contritio (p. 22). Like Jennifer Carpenter's essay on the praise of 'positive emotion' and the furthering emotional community, in the hagiographic work of a Cistercian cantor, Goswin of Bossut, Michael Champion's discussion of Byzantine orator, Michael Psellos, who validated both sincere affection and grief regarding one's loved ones, reflects on the legacy of early Christianity outlined in Konstan's opening essay, illustrating connections among essays. Similarly, there is common ground between Juanita Feros Ruys's discussion of the medieval theological debate about the 'emotional capacity' of demons, on the one hand, and Antonina Harbus's reading of 'embodied emotion' in the representation of Grendel's mother's grief in Beowulf. While Ruys outlines the growing range of emotions attributed to demons, imagined as rejoicing and raging, by turns, medieval theologians cautioned against humanising those fallen beings with 'sadness', a risk notably taken only centuries later when Milton attributed 'sadness' to Satan, potentially associating the devil with 'the divine humanity of Jesus' (pp. 52–53). Harbus, in turn, considers the representation of Grendel's mother's grief, as 'a brief humanizing quality', controlled enough not to make the figure sympathetic, but rather, to establish [End Page 204] that her revenge is 'calculated and evil' and not 'merely instinctive and bestial'(p. 143). Also among the literary essays is Andrew Lynch's discussion of Chrétien de Troyes's Guinevere, a figure defined by her gender and by her status as queen, but presented from a different perspective in the Lancelot romance, which reinterprets Guinevere through attention to her 'emotional life … separated from its former community' (p. 167). Part III, 'Social History and Material Culture', includes Dianne Hall's revealing account of the gendered discourse of fear in early modern, Irish anti-Catholic narratives, and Robert Shoemaker's discussion of the orchestration of fear in eighteenth-century London print, and of its limited affective appeal, as indicated by responses in contemporary diaries. This section also includes a divergent piece, Sandra Bowdler and Jane Balme's anthropological consideration of prehistoric burial customs and what they suggest about our species' emotional engagement with our dead, which they bring into dialogue...

The Ambivalent Identity of Eighteenth-Century London Clubs as a Prelude to Victorian Clublife

De la fin du dix-septième siècle à l’époque victorienne, les clubs de gentlemen ont toujours oscillé entre norme et dissidence. Cette ambivalence des clubs londoniens est perceptible à travers un certain nombre de paradoxes propres à leur identité, tels que les tensions entre intégration et exclusion, privé et public, par exemple. Si un esprit de dissidence animait les premières factions politiques qui commencèrent à se réunir dans les tavernes et cafés de la capitale pendant la Restauration, les clubs devinrent, au xviiie siècle, à la fois un contre-pouvoir potentiel et un outil efficace pour renforcer l’organisation partisane. D’autre part, en tant que véritables instruments de socialisation, les clubs londoniens offraient aux jeunes hommes un espace propice à leur intégration sociale dans un réseau d’affiliation masculine très sélectif. Être membre d’un club exigeait donc que l’on se conforme à des normes sociales (politesse, éducation, etc.). En effet, fréquenter un club était alors le meilleur moyen d’acquérir le vernis culturel et les talents sociaux nécessaires pour devenir un parfait gentleman. Cependant, alors que des règles strictes, des rituels savamment orchestrés, ainsi que le caractère exclusif (tant sur le plan social que sexuel) de ces institutions étaient supposés garantir la modération, l’ordre moral et la cohésion sociale, il semble pourtant que les manquements ou excès de certains de leurs membres n’étaient pas rares. Un comportement dissident se déclinait selon différents degrés de transgression, allant du simple mépris des normes sociales à une attitude plus provocatrice, voire criminelle. De manière surprenante, si certains hommes au comportement déviant se voyaient exclus de ces cercles exclusifs et ainsi marginalisés, d’autres demeuraient, paradoxalement, des figures sociales ou politiques de premier plan. Enfin, de par son ambivalence, le club anglais peut être considéré comme un espace de sociabilité distinct. Hésitant constamment entre norme et dissidence, cette institution unique en son genre semble refléter les spécificités du caractère national et, par conséquent, contribuer à redessiner les contours d’un modèle de sociabilité anglaise, selon de nouvelles normes. En outre, sa tradition élitiste et masculine persistante et son évolution pendant l’époque victorienne en font, indéniablement, une forme de résistance à la modernité.

Medicine, metals and empire: the survival of a chymical projector in early eighteenth-century London.

It is well known that Newtonian philosophers such as Johan T. Desaguliers defined their authority in contradistinction to the 'projector', a promoter of allegedly impractical and fraudulent schemes. Partly due to the lack of evidence, however, we know relatively little about these eighteenth-century projectors, especially those operating outside learned networks without claims to gentility, disinterest or theoretical sophistication. This paper begins to remedy this lacuna through the case of a 'chymical' projector, Moses Stringer (fl. 1693-1714). Instead of aspiring to respectability, this London chymist survived by vigorously promoting new projects, thereby accelerating, rather than attenuating, the course of action that rendered him dubious in the first place. The article follows his (often abortive) exploitation of medicine, metals and empire, and thereby illuminates the shady end of the enlightened world of public science.

Shoplifting in eighteenth-century London: a source for female retailing?

The extent to which England's eighteenth-century ‘retail revolution’ brought opportunity to women has been a matter of prolonged debate, but most studies have relied on sources that indicate female business ownership. By contrast, a study of London shoplifting enables us to examine women's role in shopkeeping from a fresh perspective. Trial transcripts provide a wealth of information on the men and women who staffed the thousands of London shops that suffered this type of theft. Taking a sample of these cases between 1743 and 1807, the article explores what they can tell us about the proportion of stores that relied on female staff and reflects on how this finding relates to current understandings of women's retail activity in the period. Using the first-hand accounts given in court testimony, it discusses how the crime of shoplifting affected female shop workers at a personal and more strategic level, and the evidence presented of gender bias in the staffing of larger, more fashionable stores. It concludes that female-staffed shops had a higher relative risk of becoming victims of shoplifting crime and that in consequence this source, while yielding valuable new insights, is liable to over-represent the scale of women's participation in London retailing.

She was “a comon night walker abusing him & being of ill behaviour”: Violence and Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century London

This article examines the representation of violence committed by and against prostitutes in eighteenth-century London. To explore attitudes toward prostitutes’ assaults and victimization, it examines how the Bridewell Court of Governors records and the Proceedings of the Old Bailey portrayed incidents in which prostitutes were involved in violent or aggressive confrontations; it also examines texts written by popular commentators, moralists, and contributors to the newspaper press. Although prostitutes were depicted as both agents and targets of violence, incidents in which prostitutes physically assaulted or verbally insulted potential male clients generated far more discussion than reports about prostitutes who were the victims of violent crimes. The greater emphasis on prostitutes’ proclivity to violence suggests that policing authorities, journalists, and social commentators portrayed prostitutes as a threat to the peace and stability of the nation, rather than as pitiable victims.

Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London, by Jennifer Farooq

After the work of James Downey (1969) and Rolf Lessenich (1972), the study of preaching and the sermon in the eighteenth century was, until recently, badly neglected. Robert Ellison ignited interest in the nineteenth-century sermon in The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1998), but there has been no comparable work on the eighteenth century. Of course, some notable scholars have used sermons in their work—principally Donna Andrew to illuminate charity sermons, David Appleby to explore ‘Black Bartholomew’ preaching and François Deconick-Brossard to exemplify patterns of worship—but there were few studies which considered preaching and sermons as part of the wider culture of eighteenth-century Christianity. In the last decade, however, this omission has been addressed. A group of scholars, including Joris van Eijnatten, Pasi Ihalainen and Rosemary Dixon, has drawn attention to the importance of sermons in the eighteenth century in religious culture, political ideology and print culture respectively. The Sacheverell and Bangorian sermons have also attracted much-needed attention in recent years. In addition, the Brill multi-volume series on the ‘New History of the Sermon’ and the publication of the Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (2011; rev. ante, cxxviii [2013], 141–4) and the Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689–1901 (2013) have brought many scholarly hands and perspectives to the endeavour of recovering the significance of the sermon. The publication of the latter volume was regrettably too late to be included in the study under review, by Jennifer Farooq. It is in this context that Farooq’s doctoral thesis has been revised for publication in the Boydell ‘Studies in Modern British Religious History’ series.

She was ‘‘a comon night walker abusing him & being of ill behaviour’’: Violence and Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century London

She was ‘‘a comon night walker abusing him & being of ill behaviour’’: Violence and Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century London

A Comparative Approach to Identifying the Irish in Long Eighteenth-Century London

Historians seeking to identify the Irish have overwhelmingly relied upon nominal record linkage, thus limiting studies to periods and contexts in which corroborating records exist. Surname analysis provides an alternative: a subset of 283 Irish surnames was able to correctly isolate 40 percent of known Irish individuals across thousands of entries, which is sufficient for sampling the Irish in demographic studies. This conclusion was based on an analysis of 278,949 names from the London area in the 1841 census, and was tested and refined against 42,248 historical records pertaining to the poor in London between 1777 and 1820.