ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century London was the first modern city. At the start of the century, it already had a population of more than half a million people; it experienced high levels of immigration; and there were significant possibilities for social mobility, both upward and downward. It had an emerging non official “public sphere” of debate, stimulated by the development of a multifaceted print culture. Encouraged by the end of prepublication censorship in 1695 and growing levels of literacy among both men and women, early 18th-century London witnessed an explosion of printed literature, not just in the traditional forms of the book, pamphlet, broadside, and ballad, but also in new genres such as the newspaper, periodical, and novel, and crime was a recurring theme in almost every form of 18th-century print.
