The colourful, salacious and sumptuously illustrated story of Covent Garden - the creative heart of Georgian London - from Wolfson Prize-winning author Vic Gatrell SHORT-LISTED FOR THE HESSELL TILTMAN PRIZE 2014 In the teeming, disordered, and sexually charged square half-mile centred on London's Covent Garden something extraordinary evolved in the 18th century. It was the world's first creative 'Bohemia'. The nation's most significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists lived here. From Soho and Leicester Square across Covent Garden's Piazza to Drury Lane, and down from Long Acre to the Strand, they rubbed shoulders with rakes, prostitutes, market people, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. It was an often brutal world full of criminality, poverty and feuds, but also of high spirits, and was as culturally creative as any other in history. Virtually everything that we associate with Georgian culture was produced here. Vic Gatrell's spectacular new book recreates this time and place by drawing on a vast range of sources, showing the deepening fascination with 'real life' that resulted in the work of artists like Hogarth, Blake, and Rowlandson, or in great literary works like The Beggar's Opera and Moll Flanders. The First Bohemians is illustrated by over two hundred extraordinary pictures, many rarely seen, for Gatrell celebrates above all one of the most fertile eras in Britain's artistic history. He writes about Joshua Reynolds and J. M. W. Turner as well as the forgotten figures who contributed to what was a true golden age: the men and women who briefly dazzled their contemporaries before being destroyed - or made - by this magical but also ferocious world. About the author: Vic Gatrell's last book, City of Laughter, won both the Wolfson Prize for History and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize; his The Hanging Tree won the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society. He is a Life Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 2 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

This book looks at the role of preaching culture in eighteenth-century England. Beyond the confines of churches, preaching was heard at political anniversaries and elections, thanksgiving and fast days, and society and charity meetings, all of which were major occasions on the English political and social calendars. Dozens of sermons were published each year, and the popularity of sermons, both from the pulpit and in print, make them crucial for understanding the role of religion in eighteenth-century society. To provide a broad perspective on preaching culture, this book focuses on print and manuscript evidence for preaching in London. London had a unique combination of preaching venues and audiences, including St. Paul's cathedral, parliament, the royal court, the corporation of London, London-based societies, and numerous parish churches and Dissenting meetinghouses. The capital had the greatest range of preaching anywhere in England. However, many of the developments in London reflected trends in preaching culture across the country. This was a period when English society experienced significant social, religious and political changes, and preachers' roles evolved in response to these changes. Early in the century, preachers were heavily engaged in partisan politics. However, as these party heats waned, they increasingly became involved with societies and charities that were part of the blossoming English urban culture. The book also explores the impact of sermons on society by looking at contemporary perceptions of preaching, trends in the publication of sermons, the process of the publication and the distribution of sermons, and the reception of sermons. It demonstrates how preachers of various denominations adapted to an increasingly literate and print-centred culture and the continuing vitality of oral preaching culture. The book will be of interest not only to scholars of religion and sermon literature, but also to those interested in eighteenth-century politics, urban society, oral and print cultures, and publishing. JENNIFER FAROOQ is an independent scholar.