Writing on the Wall

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