A Great and Monstrous Thing

This “magisterial history of London” explores the rapidly changing culture and commerce of the eighteenth century in “a book that hums with vitality” (Times Literary Supplement, UK). London in the eighteenth century was a new city, risen from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666. The century that followed was an era of vigorous expansion and rapid change as waves of people were drawn to its wealth, power, and many diversions. Borrowing a phrase from Daniel Defoe, Jerry White calls London “this great and monstrous thing,” the grandeur of its new buildings and the glitter of its high life shadowed by poverty and squalor. A Great and Monstrous Thing offers a street-level view of eighteenth century London’s public gardens and prisons, its banks, and brothels, its workshops and warehouses. White introduces us to shopkeepers and prostitutes, men and women of fashion and genius, street-robbers and thief-takers, as they play out the astonishing drama of city life. What emerges is a picture of a society fractured by geography, politics, religion, history—and especially by class. Despite the deep and destructive gulf between rich and poor, Jerry White shows us Londoners going about their business as bankers or beggars, reveling in an enlarging world of public pleasures, indulging in crimes both great and small—amidst the tightening sinews of power and regulation, and the hesitant beginnings of London democracy.

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