Writing on the Wall

Author: Madeleine Pelling

United Kingdom, Great Britain | c 1700 to c 1800 | Art treatments & subjects | British & Irish history | Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 | Social & cultural history | Material culture

Published on 28^th March 2024 by Profile Books Ltd in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 352 pages, 3-5 integrated images per chapter
236mm x 158mm | 560g

What if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can - if you know where to look. A brilliant new cultural history of the long eighteenth century, Writing on the Wall is told through the marks its citizens left behind, bringing into focus lost voices from the highest to the lowest in society. From the centre of London to the islands of the Caribbean, Pelling goes in search of graffiti, evidence of how ordinary people experienced the world-changing events that defined their lives - from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution. Here are lives, loves, triumphs and failures, scratched into the walls of prisons and latrines, chalked up on doors and etched into windows. The names of their creators may be lost to history, but together they tell the real story of Britain's most rebellious and transformative century.