"Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life: for there is in London all that life can afford".
Imbued with the spirit of Samuel Johnson's famous dictum, this course analyses eighteenth-century London's profound influence as an agent of change across a broad range of themes - social, economic, political, and cultural. As capital city, London has always played a significant role in national developments, but many historians have seen its impact in this era at its most fundamental, ushering in many of the recognizable features of modernity. A variety of vibrant and stimulating texts have been chosen to stimulate student thinking on London's influence on great transformations such as the rise of the public sphere, the dawn of empire and the birth of the financial City, which sources give voice to both the excitement and the concerns resulting from the capital's growth.
The course is structured to enable close study of important developments within the capital. The eight classes will be structured along topographical lines to focus attention on key sites of change, taking a tour through the polite West End 'town', the courtly and parliamentary world of Westminster, the commercial-finance district of Exchange Alley; the burgeoning press of Fleet Street; the East End centres of manufacture and shipping; and the new suburban areas. The six tutorials would complement the classes by studying London's growth in more thematic terms, embracing such topics as social change, political culture, economic organisation, religious pluralism, and the imperial metropole. When combined, these approaches would enable students to gain a comprehensive overview of metropolitan change, and to locate it within broader contexts of urban and national development.
This course will take advantage of an exciting and growing historiography of recent years, but it has been purposely designed to provide plenty of research opportunities for students thinking of any topic concerning eighteenth-century Britain. The texts will enable students to engage with a wide range of sources (maps, literary works, histories, statistical series, diaries, travellers' accounts, cartoons), and it is hoped that it will inspire many undergraduate dissertations in its wake.
