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Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker. London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 301–302, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.301a
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The title London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800, was clearly chosen for its connection to the London Lives website. It emerges as part of the Economic and Social Research Council–funded project that enables combined searches of manuscript sources and datasets for millions of people in the metropolis from 1690 to 1800. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker are to be applauded for the way they have harnessed technology to piece together material from disparate sources. The book is exceptionally well researched and goes far beyond the London Lives site, combining quantitative analyses of such things as prosecution rates and the gender and age of relief recipients with more anecdotal evidence of personalities and events.
The title takes on a new significance if “lives” is understood in its connotations of vitality. London really “lives” in this book. The authors present various vignettes that bring the eighteenth-century city to life, from the claustrophobia of the near-naked women pounding on the low ceiling of the St. Martin’s Lane roundhouse cell for water in 1742 (158) to the savvy eleven-year-old girl who drew upon popular sympathies for abused apprentices in the aftermath of the Brownrigg case in 1767 (289–290). Scenes such as these are the colorful backdrop of an overarching narrative that reveals “a new model of pauper and criminal agency … shaping the evolution of policy” in criminal justice and poor relief for the long eighteenth century (16).
