28 June 2010

Uncovered: the lives of the poor in 18th Century London

Hundreds of thousands of eighteenth-century Londoners will be brought to life by a unique online resource, which will be made available to the public from today (28 June 2010). London Lives (www.londonlives.org)provides access to the largest set of handwritten manuscripts ever posted on the internet.

The 'London Lives' website is a fully searchable edition of 240,000 pages (40 million words) of handwritten documents from criminal justice and local government. It will bring to life the working people who inhabited this first ‘world city’, to facilitate a new kind of history.

Evidence from a murder or a petty theft, petitions to relieve distress,accounts of money distributed to the poor and the records of hospitals, parishes and guilds, are all made newly available on this website. In addition, these manuscripts have been made cross-searchable with the records of trials held at the Old Bailey, and a set of fifteen further databases to make it possible to reconstruct individual lives from the fragments left in the archives. The site also provides comprehensive guides to these records, and to the history of everyday life in eighteenth-century London.

‘London Lives’, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), was created by academics from the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire and published by HRI Online, the electronic publishing arm of the University of Sheffield’s Humanities Research Institute (HRI).

The website features an interactive facility that allows people from all over the world to search for and link together documents relating to a single individual, and to group these individuals into communities of shared experience. In the process hidden life stories and new patterns of behavior will emerge from the mass of documentation.

The site is designed to make it possible to reconstruct how 'ordinary' Londoners interacted with government and charitable institutions in the course of their daily lives. By examining how individual Londoners participated in and manipulated these agencies for their own ends, this project will demonstrate how the end users – criminals, victims and paupers – contributed to the making of modern social policy.

Project researchers have already compiled 75 lives as case studies using material from the site, ranging from casual paupers, foundlings and respectable pensioners to murderers and highway robbers. The lives include Charlotte Dionis, a child named after the parish in which she was abandoned; Sarah Malcolm, an accused triple murderess who mounted an audacious defence; and James Carse, a sailor who served with honour under Horatio Nelson but who ended his life on the gallows.

Professor Robert Shoemaker, from the Department of History at the University of Sheffield and co-director of the project, said: “The ‘London Lives’ website provides unique access to the lives of people normally neglected by historians who played a crucial role in the making of modern London. This incredibly rich collection of sources will provide the basis for innumerable personal and academic research projects. By recording the results of this research, this website will grow over time to become an increasingly revealing digital repository for the lives of past Londoners.”

Co-director Professor Tim Hitchcock, from the University of Hertfordshire, added: “This site is designed to make history different; to make it available to everyone in a new way, and to allow everyone to chart their own narratives through past lives. It brings to an unlimited audience on the internet the privilege of reading and searching tens of millions of words transcribed from the manuscripts of everyday life; a privilege largely restricted to professional historians up until now. To read a pauper’s signature on an examination that determined whether they received a pension, or place in the workhouse,is to learn their life history and to be connected to them in a new
way. London Lives gives new blood and meaning to our connection to the past."

Exemplary Lives:

Sarah Parker, fl. 1748-1769, pauper and parish officer. A woman elected to a lucrative parish office and a recipient of generous poor relief at the same time, Parker was an important actor in parish life.
http://www.londonlives.org/static/ParkerSarahSextoness1754.jsp

George Cock, b. 1720, a thief with an unusual method. At the age of 14 George was apprenticed to a barber and peruke maker, but he did not last the course and was later executed for stealing from the wives and parents of sailors at sea.
http://www.londonlives.org/static/CockGeorge.jsp

Sarah Malcolm, 1710-1733, laundress and infamous murderess. Best remembered for her participation in a horrific crime, Sarah Malcolm mounted an audacious defence, both at her trial and in print.
http://www.londonlives.org/static/MalcolmSarah1710-1733.jsp

Charlotte Walker, c. 1754-1806, recidivist pickpocket and prostitute. Charlotte’s main stomping ground lay in the districts just to the west of the City of London, where she spent decades relieving men of their valuables.
http://www.londonlives.org/static/WalkerCharlotte1806.jsp

James Carse, b. 1758, sailor who served with Nelson and became a murderer. Described by Nelson as the "soberest man that he ever saw", James Carse appears to have lost his sanity when he attacked and killed Sarah Hayes.
http://www.londonlives.org/static/CarseJamesmurderer1787.jsp

Sarah Gale, b. 1767, pauper apprentice and three times mother of bastard children. First admitted to the parish workhouse at the age of eleven, Sarah was apprenticed but she never escaped poverty. She was made pregnant and then abandoned by her master's son, and went on to have two more illegitimate children by different fathers. http://www.londonlives.org/static/GaleSarahc1767.jsp

Charlotte Dionis, b. 1761, handicapped foundling cared for by the parish. Found abandoned on the streets of one of the wealthiest parishes in London, Charlotte Dionis was named after the parish and received remarkably good (or at least expensive) care throughout the first two decades of her life. http://www.londonlives.org/static/ DionisCharlotteborn1761.jsp