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1704East India Co's sales
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1704East India porcelain
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1709Queen's Royal Cookery
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1710Cabinet of curiosities
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1715Sugar in Britain
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1720Bartholomew Fair
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1721Gulliver's Travels
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1725Executions at Tyburn
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1730Textile production
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1730Cities in chaos
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1731East India textiles
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1733The Harlot’s Progress
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1741Handel's Messiah
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1742Advert for a giant
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1743Surgery
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1743Muffin Seller
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1744JS Bach manuscript
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1747The Art of Cookery
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1751Henry Fielding: Crime
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1751Gin addiction
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1753Ranelagh pleasure gardens
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1755Johnson's Dictionary
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1761'The British Giant'
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1766Jigsaw Puzzle Map
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1770The Spinning Jenny
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1771Pleasure gardens
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1771Factories
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1773London prostitutes
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1775Captain Cook's journal
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1776Declaration of Independence
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1780Map of the Gordon Riots
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1780Storming of the Bastille
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1781Runaway slaves
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1784First curry powder advert
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1784First hot air balloon
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1787Abolitionist meeting notes
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1787Georgian entertainments
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1790Georgian Theatre
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1791Mozart’s notebook
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1791Poverty
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1791Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
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1792Mary Wollstonecraft
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1793Execution of Louis XVI
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1794William Blake's Notebook
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1795An acrobat's 'Surprising Performances'
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Intro
Poverty rates throughout the 1700s were high. Many families struggled to pay for their daily bread, and lived below the ‘breadline’ in abject conditions. Illnesses, accidents and old-age also prevented people from working, again resulting in poverty and often destitution. From the 1720s, workhouses were set up by local parishes to house the poor. Men, women and children lodged in single sex ‘wards’ where the able-bodied were set to menial tasks: breaking stones, spinning thread or sewing clothes, for example. Inmates were ordered to follow strict rules of behaviour and to conform to daily routines. This document is from the rulebook of a London workhouse, and lists the food on offer to inmates. Some workhouses were clean and comfortable havens for the poor. Many provided education, rudimentary health care and clean clothing. Others were hopelessly overcrowded, prison-like institutions in which disease and even death were common as were accidents and exhaustion from strict work regimes.
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