London In The Eighteenth Century

London in the eighteenth century was very much a new city risen from the ashes of the Great Fire. With thousands of homes and many landmark buildings destroyed it had been brought to the brink. But the following century was a period of vigorous expansion of scientific and artistic genius of blossoming reason civility elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion of joy and despair of sentiment and cruelty. Society was fractured by geography politics religion and history. And everything was complicated by class. As Daniel Defoe put it London really was a great and monstrous Thing. Jerry Whites tremendous portrait of this turbulent century explores how and to what extent Londoners negotiated and repaired these open wounds. We see them going
about their business as bankers or beggars revelling in an enlarging world of public pleasures indulging in crimes both great and small - amidst the tightening sinews of power and regulation and the hesitant beginnings of London democracy. In the long-awaited finale to his acclaimed history of London over 300 years Jerry White introduces us to shopkeepers and prostitutes men and women of fashion and genius street-robbers and thief-takers as they play out the astonishing drama of life in eighteenth-century London.