Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century

Criminal biographies enjoyed enormous popularity in the Eighteenth Century: today they offer us some fascinating perspectives on the period. Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices is the first book to reproduce a number of these biographies in full. Not only do these biographies make fascinating reading, they also raise the problem of how to read them as historical documents. The author argues that instead of trying to uncover simple themes, the most revealing thing about them is the tensions around which they were constructed.Rawlings, Philip is the author of 'Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century', published 1992 under ISBN 9780415050562 and ISBN 0415050561.