It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
There seems to be something inherently social about drinking coffee. We ask people to come in for a cup of tea, but we go out for coffee with friends, family and colleagues. This isn't a modern phenomenon; coffee has always been intimately connected with sociability. In North Africa and the Middle East, coffee-houses had been …
Continue reading The rise and fall of the English coffee-house
In my last post, on English and North American death records from 1647 to the present, I briefly mentioned how the development of the industrial city in 19th century Europe and North America changed patterns of disease and mortality. The dreadful overcrowding in the slums, together with a lack of adequate water supply, particularly encouraged contagious …
Continue reading Filth, disease and Dickens: Jacob’s Island, a London slum
A taste for salacious gossip is nothing new. It's a stereotype, but true, that Georgian London was a bawdy place and had no shortage of scandal to go round. The spreading of scandalous stories was helped by the 18th century explosion in the newspaper trade. In 1770, London had 5 daily papers; by the 1780s …
Continue reading Sex, the law and the press in Georgian London