London Lives 1690 to 1800 ~ Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis
London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances. Facilities are provided to allow users to link together records relating to the same individual, and to compile biographies of the best documented individuals.
Open, healthy, scrupulously clean, with a liberal table: the Armfields and their temperance hotel
This year the Library was given a collection relating to the Armfield family who ran Armfield’s South Place Temperance Hotel near Finsbury Circus, London, during the second half of the 19th century…
This thesis explores what happened to the bodies of individuals who were considered marginalised from the mainstream Protestant population of seventeenth and eighteenth-century London. Four groups were analysed. First, two groups of individuals whose manner of death potentially caused marginalisation: suicides and executed criminals. Second, two communities whose religious beliefs resulted in the self-imposed marginalisation of their dead, Quakers and Jews. By investigating public perception of these dead and the variations in burial practices among these subgroups, the degree to which they were distinctive from the wider metropolitan population is made visible. The thesis argues that the degrees of marginalisation have been frequently over estimated and various categories of marginalisation exist. The question of what made these individuals marginalised even in death is examined by following the dead of each group to interment, exploring the treatment of the corpse and how these actions were shaped by the life of the deceased individual. This was achieved by gathering biographical information about thousands of individuals, establishing details related to their standing within their community prior to death and exploring how this translated to their post-mortem treatment. Looking at multiple groups with contrasting histories made this research distinctive from a simple case study and, although it filled a historiographical gap caused by a lack of research on particular minorities, the comparative nature of the analysis also went beyond this by illuminating how ‘normality’ and ‘marginality’ were defined and reinforced by early modern Londoners even after death.
The London Friends' meetings: showing the rise of the Society of Friends in London, its progress and the development of its discipline, with accounts of the various meeting-houses and burial-grounds, their history and general associations
