The perpetual fair : gender, disorder, and urban amusement in eighteenth-century London / Anne Wohlcke.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-236) and index.

Introduction: Making a mannered metroplis and taming the 'perpetual fair' -- 'London's Mart': The crowds and culture of eighteenth-century London fairs -- 'Heroick Informers' and London spies: Religion, politeness, and reforming impulses in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth -century London -- Regulation and resistance: Wayward apprentices and other 'evil disposed persons' at London's fairs -- 'Dirty Molly' and 'The Greasier Kate': The feminine threat to urban order -- Locating the fair sex at work -- Clocks, monsters, and drolls: Gender, race, nation, and the amusements of London fairs.

Print version record.

Rarely studied as vital to London's modernisation, urban fairs are a microcosm of London's transforming society demonstrating how metropolitan changes were popularly contested. This study contributes to our understanding of popular culture and modernisation in Britain during the formative years of its global empire. Drawing on legal records, popular literature, visual representations, and newspapers, it places official discourse regarding urban amusement into the context of broader cultural understandings of gender and social hierarchies, commerce, public morality, and the urban environment.

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