Writing on the wall

Emma — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘A wonderful, vibrant account’ Susie Dent’A secret history like no other’ BBC History Magazine, Books of the Year 2024What if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can – if you know where to lookAn 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.

Writing on the wall

Emma — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

‘Fascinating … not only a history of graffiti, but also a history of the 18th century through lost voices of the people who lived through it.’ The TimesWhat if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can – if you know where to look. A brilliant new cultural history of the long eighteenth century, Writing on the Wall is told through the marks its citizens left behind, bringing into focus lost voices from the highest to the lowest in society. From the centre of London to the islands of the Caribbean, Pelling goes in search of graffiti, evidence of how ordinary people experienced the world-changing events that defined their lives – from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution. Here are lives, loves, triumphs and failures, scratched into the walls of prisons and latrines, chalked up on doors and etched into windows. The names of their creators may be lost to history, but together they tell the real story of Britain’s most rebellious and transformative century.

Pelling, Madeleine – The Bell Bookshop

Writing on the wall

Writing on the wall