In 1866 John Timbs published a two-volume work entitled Club Life of London, subtitled With Anecdotes of the Clubs, Coffee-Houses and Taverns of the Metropolis During the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries.

It is one of those documents which switches between utterly fascinating and amazingly tedious with no discernable pattern. The word Anecdotes gives it away - some fun, some not.

I have done my usual trick of dividing it up into individual entries for each club, coffee-house and tavern. There is an Index and a Database Search

Try searching for someone you are interested in, such as Johnson, or for the name of a venue or club, such as Almack's. You can pick up quite a lot of interesting information.

Don Manoel (see previous post) also had some interesting things to say about the postal service.

He records, as well as postal charges, the days on which you could despatch mail to most of western Europe and to anywhere in Britain and Ireland. It is interesting to cross-reference the frequency of the postal service with the volume of trade.

There is an amazing amount of information in some of the original sources. While browsing through London in 1731 by Don Manoel Gonzales I came across data on imports and exports between Britain and other countries. The lists are remarkably detailed.

For your delectation I have extracted this information into a table and you can find it on the Imports and Exports page. The full text is available from Project Gutenberg.

Technically, there is no such person as Don Manoel Gonzales. There is some debate as to the real author, into which I have no desire to buy, but you can read about it in the introduction to the Gutenberg edition.

I have every intention of mining more data from this fascinating document but in the meantime check out some of the details of British trade in the early Georgian Period.

I recently discovered Kent's London Directories. They were business directories published annually between 1732 and 1828. I have found the years 1740 and 1794 available on the web (references on the directories page) and have done my usual trick of putting them into the database.

I found it extremely interesting to run comparisons between 1740 (when the Industrial Revolution had barely kicked off) and 1794 (when it was in full spate). The 1794 directory is, of course, much bigger.

As always in this period there is little value given to consistency so you need to use a bit of imagination when doing a search but I found it a lot of fun. Enjoy.

By way of an experiment, I am planning to produce several books in electronic format which relate in some way to this site. Amazon.com provides the ability for you to publish your own ebooks on their site so I am taking advantage of it.

The first is an account by Samuel Smith, Chaplain of London's Newgate Prison in the late 17th century of his conversations with fourteen Catholic prisoners before their executions. It is, in effect, the precursor of the Newgate Calendars. The account itself is, of course, in the public domain. I have cleaned up a rather poor OCR version I found on Google Books and made it available here. I have added a commentary and some historical notes which is my 'value add'.

Amazon (quite reasonably) won't let you give books away so I have put the minimum price on it (99c or 75p depending on where you are). Feel free to buy one.

An Account of the the Fourteen Late Popish Malefactors : $0.99/£0.75

I've add a list of occupations, most of which belong to the 18th century or earlier. I'm not completely sure where I got it from (I've had it a long time) but it is similar to a list from the 1891 London census.

I have removed the more obvious anachronisms such as the Daguerreotype Artists but I may have missed one or two.

If you don't know what an Antigropelos Maker is, this is your chance to find out.

I've removed WordPress from my site. I wasn't using it much anyway - just the front page and one or two others. WordPress can be a bit vulnerable to hackers and I was getting tired of removing spurious files. Also, I'm a programmer. I prefer writing raw HTML anyway for the control it gives me.

What does this mean for you? Hopefully the only change you will see is that this page will load a bit faster. You may see one or two odd results initially on a couple of pages - usually because of browser caching. A page reload will generally sort that out.

Let me know if you spot anything odd. I have a script that generates the site so it should be ok but you can never tell.

In 1735 Arthur L. Hayward published Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals. It is in essence his own "Newgate Calendar" covering the decade from 1720 to 1730.

I have therefore added it to my Newgate Calendar collection. As usual, I have divided it up into individual stories (about 160), created an Index to the Stories and added them to the Newgate Calendar Database Search.

Well worth a look and includes such notable criminals as Jonathan Wild, the godfather of the early 18th century, and Jack Shepherd, one of the worlds great escapologists.

While researching Coaching Inns, I realised I didn’t know much about travel times and costs.

I’ve added a page with the information I have got thus far which may be of interest:

Travelling around Britain in the 18th century

As you may or may not know, William Stowe published in 1722 a list of all Coaching Inns in London, together with the available destinations and which days they were available and also the type of transport (Coach, Carrier or Wagon).

I have taken this list and turned it into an easy-to-read table and added the ability to list by Destination or by Coaching Inn. Try looking up your favourite destination to plan your trip, then see what other services leave from the same place.

Here is the link: Coaching Inns in 18th Century London.

I’ve updated my Pharmacopeia database to include three sets of data: Fuller’s Pharmacopeia Extemporanea from 1710; Buchan’s Domestic Medicine from 1769; and a few recipes from the Reverend William Twigg dating to about 1715.

You can see more details on the Pharmacopeia Index page.

I’ve finished adding subject categories to Vaux’s glossary. I thought it worth making a separate page for this one, given that it is not part of the “B.E.” group (see the discussion of sources for more details) and has an Australian connection.

You can find it here.

While I was researching the Barber-Surgeons guild as part of 18th century medicine, I came across the London Livery Companies. I had been vaguely aware of The Worshipful Companies of Mercers/Fishmongers/etc but knew very little about them.

I discovered they were responsible for regulating various trades, having grown out of the medieval guild system. They also acted as lobby groups, periodically petitioning the monarch of the day for special privileges and monopolies.

The 18th century saw most of the Worshipful Companies diminish into social and charitable organisations as the crafts they represented were taken over by machines. At the beginning of the century, however, many of them still had considerable power to regulate their crafts even if by the end of the century they were moribund.

For anyone who is interested, I have made a few notes about the Companies, together with links for anyone interested in following up further.

I’ve been doing a bit of research into 18th century medicine. Like most things in the 18th century it evolves from the end of superstition through to beginnings of science.

I’m still very much working on it but, during the course of things I found the Pharmacopeia Extemporanea, produced in English by a Thomas Fuller from an earlier Latin edition in 1710. A Pharmacopeia, in case you didn’t know, is a recipe book for medicines. As is my wont, I have divided it up and put it in a searchable database.

Have a look at the indexed version and the database search. The latter is very useful if you are interested in what particular ingredients were used for.

I haven’t linked Medicine into the rest of the site yet but help yourself to a sneak preview.

Oh yes, and I’ve done more of the interminable task of putting Thieves Cant into subject categories and have nearly finished Vaux’s glossary.

Thank you to my visitors from now 50 countries. I hadn’t realised interest in the 18th century in general and Thieves Cant in particular was so widespread. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d particularly like me to add to the site.

I’ve added a new source of cant terms from the Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux published in 1819. Vaux was an English criminal transported to New South Wales in the early 19th century. At the end of his memoirs he includes a glossary of some 700 cant terms.

Vaux’s list overlaps with the material I currently have in the database but contains quite a lot that is new. I have added Vaux to the database but not yet added them to any category. However, the terms will appear in database searches with a date of 1819.

I have also added a new page discussing the sources used which might be of interest.

Thank you to everyone who has written in with feedback and suggestions. The Vaux material is a direct outcome of a suggestion of well-known lexicographer who indicated he did not wish to be quoted but whose help has been much appreciated.

A happy new year to all.

The Newgate Calendar Database Search is now available!

I have followed a similar format to the one for Thieves’ Cant. You can search by Names, Tagline (the punchy little one-liner provided with each entry) or by the Body Text.

I’ve had a lot of fun poking around, finding stuff I never even noticed when just reading the text. Try searching for your favourite English town in the Body Text. A surprising number of the larger ones are in there.

As always, please let me know if you find any bugs or if you have any suggestions. I’m keen to make this as useful as possible.