Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain

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What if walls could talk For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can - if you know where to look.

A brilliant new cultural history of the long eighteenth century, Writing on the Wall is told through the marks its citizens left behind, bringing into focus lost voices from the highest to the lowest in society. From the centre of London to the islands of the Caribbean, Pelling goes in search of graffiti, evidence of how ordinary people experienced the world-changing events that defined their lives - from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution.

Here are lives, loves, triumphs and failures, scratched into the walls of prisons and latrines, chalked up on doors and etched into windows. The names of their creators may be lost to history, but together they tell the real story of Britain's most rebellious and transformative century.

Reviews

'You've read the Austen and seen the Gainsboroughs, well this is the real Eighteenth Century in the words of those who walked the streets, worked the coal seems and clung to the topsail yards.' - Dan Snow

'From the ingenious starting point of a humble scratch on glass or daub on brick, Madeleine Pelling crafts a rich and complex portrait of a society in transition' - Jacqueline Riding, author

'An erudite, dazzling and thought-provoking study of the graffiti of the period - be its creator Romantic poet or Jacobite, King Mob or Caribbean prisoner of war, Pelling teases out lost narratives with humanity and flair' - Flora Fraser, author

'From the ingenious starting point of a humble scratch on glass or daub on brick, Madeleine Pelling crafts a rich and complex portrait of a society in transition.' - Jacqueline Riding, author of Hogarth: Life in Progress and Jacobites: A New History of the '45 Rebellion

'Although the ephemeral marks left by rioters across London in the hot summer of 1780 have since been lost, washed away in the catastrophic aftermath of the riots, many of the graffiti made by eighteenth-century Britons are still visible today. Sliced into church columns and dank castle cells, scratched in alleyways and carved in the windows of country houses, the pliable wooden tops of illustrious school tables, lead rooftops, tunnels and rocky outcrops, these marks are, for those prepared to look, everywhere.' - From the Introduction

Author Bio

Madeleine Pelling is a cultural historian, author and broadcaster. She holds a PhD from the University of York and has held research fellowships at the universities of Yale, Edinburgh, Manchester. Her first book, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Profile Books, 2024), tells the stories of immigrants, prisoners of war, debtors, sex workers and rebels in Georgian Britain through the marks they left behind, and offers a new perspective on this tumultuous period of history.

Madeleine is co-host of History Hit's After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, a podcast that shines a light on the shadier corners of the past and which brings a rigorous historical lens to folklore and true crime. She is also a regular contributor for television, most recently for Titanic in Colour (Channel 4, 2025) Mayhem! Secret Lives of the Georgian Kings (2025), Queens That Changed The World (Channel 4, 2023) and Who Do You Think You Are Australia (Warner Bros, 2023). Her words appear in The Guardian, The Independent, BBC History Magazine and History Today.