Writing on the Wall Synopsis
'A wonderful, vibrant account' Susie Dent
'A secret history like no other' BBC History Magazine, Books of the Year 2024
What if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can - if you know where to look
An aristocrat carves obscenities into a tavern window with his diamond ring. A shopkeeper's daughter sketches customers with a piece of coal. A desperate highwayman, condemned to death, scratches his initials into his prison cell door.
Writing on the Wall goes in search of the hidden voices of Britain's most rebellious and transformative era - a time when anyone in possession of a sharp point and ready surface could find their voice and immortalise their message. Through the marks made by ordinary people, scratched into walls, doors, windows and more, Madeleine Pelling brings the lost stories of the past to life in all their unguarded glory.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781800812000 |
| Publication date: |
3rd April 2025 |
| Author: |
Madeleine Pelling |
| Publisher: |
Profile Books an imprint of Profile |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
352 pages |
| Primary Genre |
History
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| Other Genres: |
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Madeleine Pelling Press Reviews
You've read the Austen and seen the Gainsboroughs, well this is the real Eighteenth Century in the words of those who walked the streets, worked the coal seems and clung to the topsail yards. -- Dan Snow From the ingenious starting point of a humble scratch on glass or daub on brick, Madeleine Pelling crafts a rich and complex portrait of a society in transition -- Jacqueline Riding, author - Hogarth: A Life in Progress
An erudite, dazzling and thought-provoking study of the graffiti of the period - be its creator Romantic poet or Jacobite, King Mob or Caribbean prisoner of war, Pelling teases out lost narratives with humanity and flair -- Flora Fraser, author - Pretty Young Rebel
From the ingenious starting point of a humble scratch on glass or daub on brick, Madeleine Pelling crafts a rich and complex portrait of a society in transition. -- Jacqueline Riding, author of Hogarth: Life in Progress and Jacobites: A New History of the '45 Rebellion
Although the ephemeral marks left by rioters across London in the hot summer of 1780 have since been lost, washed away in the catastrophic aftermath of the riots, many of the graffiti made by eighteenth-century Britons are still visible today. Sliced into church columns and dank castle cells, scratched in alleyways and carved in the windows of country houses, the pliable wooden tops of illustrious school tables, lead rooftops, tunnels and rocky outcrops, these marks are, for those prepared to look, everywhere. - From the Introduction
