Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London, 1690-1800

Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Dataset/structured data, Still Image/Graphics, Text

Lucene, jEdit, MELITA, TEI

* The manuscript sessions papers of the courts of Quarter Sessions and Gaol Delivery for the City of London and Middlesex * Ordinary’s Accounts * Coroner’s inquests * Parish records * Bridewell (House of Correction) * Hospital records * Guilds These records will be searchable in conjunction with existing digital sources and catalogues, particularly the following: * Chelsea Settlement Examinations, 1733-1766 (volume 33 of London Record Society) * St Luke’s Chelsea Workhouse Registers, 1738-1784 * Registers of Boys and Landmen Volunteers Recruited into the Marine Society,1756 - 1814 * The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674-1834 * Metropolitan London in the 1690s (tax records) * The Westminster Historical Database (poll books and tax records), 1749-1820 * Contemporary maps of London (with place name indexes), including John Strype (1720), John Rocque (1746), and Richard Horwood (1799) In addition, we will seek to include the following digital records which are currently being created (subject to negotiation): * St Martin’s in the Fields Poor Relief Records, 1724-1867 * Mansion House and Guildhall Justice Room minute books. * British History Online * Access 2 Archives (online catalogue of local government archives) * PROCAT, the electronic catalogue of the National Archives (with particular reference to records concerning petitions and pardons of convicts) * Eighteenth-Century Printed British Parliamentary Papers (JISC-funded project)

* A large, fully searchable, online body of digitized primary source texts on the history of eighteenth-century London - some 189 million characters on 182,745 pages - will be created and made available * A platform for searching across multiple websites, linking the project website to other sites containing relevant digitized sources on eighteenth century London. * A compilation of a series of approximately one hundred individual biographies, of particularly well-documented but heretofore unknown lower-class Londoners. These will be posted on the same website, with an invitation to other scholars who use the site to do the same. * The publication of two journal articles on the interrelationships between crime, poverty, and sickness in eighteenth-century London. * An international conference which will be held on ‘Popular Agency and the Creation of Modern London’, with the key essays published as a book. Contributors will be given early access to the digitized resource created by the project, not only allowing them to use it for their own research, but also giving them the opportunity to provide feedback on the functionality of the resource during the final stages of its preparation.

Extensible Markup Language (XML), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), MySQL

Dublin Core, simple (DC)

Tim Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London, (Hambledon and London, 2005).

Robert Shoemaker London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (Hambledon and London, 2004).

A description of aspects of the methodology developed for this project is embedded in an article on the Old Bailey site: Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, ‘Digitising History From Below: The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674-1834’, History Compass, 4 (2006), 193-202.