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London Lives is a fascinating new study which exposes, for the first time, the lesser-known experiences of eighteenth-century thieves, paupers, prostitutes and highwaymen. It charts the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Londoners who found themselves submerged in poverty or prosecuted for crime, and surveys their responses to illustrate the extent to which plebeian Londoners influenced the pace and direction of social policy. Calling upon a new body of evidence, the book illuminates the lives of prison escapees, expert manipulators of the poor relief system, celebrity highwaymen, lone mothers and vagrants, revealing how they each played the system to the best of their ability in order to survive in their various circumstances of misfortune. In their acts of desperation, the authors argue that the poor and criminal exercised a profound and effective form of agency that changed the system itself, and shaped the evolution of the modern state.

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The duel had a long history, but it was a malleable custom, and has been variously described as fundamentally feudal, early modern, and modern." Although traceable back to medieval tournaments, feuds, and judicial combat, the single combat to resolve questions of honour developed in the sixteenth century in several European countries, arriving in England in the s. Over the next two and a half centuries in England, and a further half a century on the continent, the forms and meanings of this custom changed significantly. Recent scholarship has concentrated primarily on the nineteenth century, focusing on the decline of duelling in England and its increased popularity on the continent, and little attention has been paid to the earlier transition from the early modern to the modern (nineteenth-century) duel.# During the * I would like to thank Wendy Bracewell, Philip Carter, Miche ' le Cohen, Malcolm Fare, David Hayton, Tim Hitchcock, Lawrence Klein, and the participants in the International Conference on the History of Violence (Liverpool, July ) for valuable comments and suggestions.    .  eighteenth century the nature of the combat, the weapons, and the role of seconds were transformed, and fatality rates declined considerably. At the same time, the role of the duel within the honour culture of elite men was transformed. As such, the history of the duel in this period is emblematic of broader changes in English society : the decline of public violence, the changing ways in which reputations were established, the development of reformed norms of masculine conduct, and the growing role of print culture in conducting disputes. The dramatic changes that occurred in English duelling in the ' long ' eighteenth century highlight important aspects of these broader transitions.As a crucible of these social and cultural changes, London is an appropriate place to study the transformation of the duel. From the late sixteenth century with the establishment of the ' London season ', English gentlemen and noblemen spent increasing amounts of time in the metropolis. With the ' urban renaissance ' of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such men enjoyed an expanded range of cultural opportunities, and their conduct came to be judged by new standards of behaviour, centred around the notion of ' politeness '. Although these changes affected both men and women, they demanded particularly dramatic changes in male behaviour. The hunting, drinking, gaming, and womanizing gentleman of the Restoration period was expected to reform his manners.$ Concurrently, new architecture and urban planning, cleaner and better paved streets, and more regular policing transformed London's public spaces, and Londoners of all classes became less willing to conduct their disputes in public.% In this context, the pressures on elite men to reform, if not eliminate, the duel were considerable.Yet this is not a simple story of the decline of duelling and the triumph of the civilizing process. The pressures in fav...