Output details

London Lives, 1690-1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis

The London Lives website is designed to facilitate research into the role plebeian Londoners played in the development of modern social policy. It contains 40 million words of digitised primary sources about the lives of the eighteenth-century London poor, including 240,000 manuscripts from eight archives and fifteen externally created datasets, giving fully searchable access to 3.35 million name instances, with facilities for record linkage. The site contains 93 webpages (229,000 words) providing background information, search instructions, and 77 plebeian biographies ('lives'). London Lives was the winner of the 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Prize for Digital Resources.

As joint project directors, Shoemaker and Tim Hitchcock (Hertfordshire) shared equally in the design of the project; the selection of manuscripts and datasets to be included; the development of the XML markup schema; oversight of the processes of transcription and tagging; the development of the search engine and nominal record linkage methodology; and the website design. They also wrote almost all the background texts.

On the basis of both prior research and detailed research conducted using the website itself, Shoemaker was the principal author of the eleven historical background pages on criminal justice, four pages on guilds and hospitals, eighteen pages introducing related document types and external datasets, and three research guides. In addition, he researched and wrote the 'lives' of Percy Allen, Repentance Hedges, and Richard Hedges, and edited the 74 other 'lives'.

The website brings together Shoemaker and Hitchcock's understanding of the archives of eighteenth-century London built up over thirty years of detailed research, using technical expertise generated in the creation of the Old Bailey Online to create a research environment in which new historical questions can be investigated.