“Come to London, to plaguy London”
July 22, 2021
Margarette Lincoln— So wrote John Donne, poet and priest, who described London in the 1600s as “a place full of danger and vanity and vice,” neatly encapsulating its horror and… READ MORE
Tag: london
The Brainiest Club in the World
November 3, 2020
Michael Wheeler— When John Wilson Croker, First Secretary to the Admiralty, wrote to Sir Humphry Davy, the leading British scientist of the day, on March 12, 1823, he continued an… READ MORE
Migration, Disease, and the Making of London Life
April 10, 2020
Panikos Panayi— On March 24, 2020, Luca Di Nicola, a nineteen-year-old Italian-born chef working in London, died at the North Middlesex Hospital, one of the many thousands of people falling… READ MORE
Orphans in Eighteenth-Century London
March 17, 2020
Stella Tillyard— On a bleak spring evening in 1741 a crowd gathered in a dark, narrow London street. At its edge well-to-do City merchants on their way westward through Hatton… READ MORE
Ep. 33 – Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858
July 20, 2017
The summer of 1858 was hot and stinky in London and filled with stories and scandals. YaleUniversity · Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858
Disraeli, de Rothschild, and the Struggle to Admit Jews to Parliament
July 5, 2017
Rosemary Ashton— What was it like to live in London through one of the hottest summers on record, with the River Thames emitting a sickening smell as a result of the… READ MORE
Indigenous Peoples in the Heart of Empire
November 10, 2016
Coll Thrush— London might seem like a strange place to find Indigenous history. When most people think of Indigenous history, they think of traditional homelands, reservations, and perhaps urban communities…. READ MORE
Why Was Victorian London So Dirty?
May 23, 2016
Lee Jackson— In 1899, the Chinese ambassador was asked his opinion of Victorian London at the zenith of its imperial grandeur. He replied, laconically, ‘too dirty’. He was only stating… READ MORE
Dancing on the Dead: George Walker and Dirty Old London
October 31, 2014
Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, wrote a series of posts for the Yale University Press London Blog to explain how the inventors of ‘sanitary… READ MORE
Fashion or Function?