The 'Perpetual Fair' : Gender, Disorder, and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth-Century London Paperback / softback

by Anne Wohlcke

Part of the Gender in History series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Each summer, a 'perpetual fair' plagued eighteenth-century London, a city in transition overrun by a burgeoning population.

City officials attempted to control disorderly urban amusement according to their own gendered understandings of order and morality.

Frequently derided as locations of dangerous femininity disrupting masculine commerce, fairs withstood regulation attempts.

Fairs were important in the lives of ordinary Londoners as sites of womenâ€™s work, sociability, and local and national identity formation.

Rarely studied as vital to Londonâ€™s modernisation, urban fairs are a microcosm of Londonâ€™s transforming society, demonstrating how metropolitan changes were popularly contested.

Now available in paperback, this study contributes to our understanding of popular culture and modernisation in Britain during the formative years of its global empire.

Fascinating examples drawn from literary and visual culture make this an engaging study for scholars and students of late Stuart and early Georgian Britain, urban and gender history, Worldâ€™s Fairs and cultural studies. -- .