Brad Beaven
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The curse of Ratcliffe Highway
Its reputation and its people in the nineteenth century
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‘The curse of Ratcliffe Highway’ examines how the Victorians ‘imagined’ the Highway by tracing how the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 left an indelible stain on the district’s reputation. By the mid-nineteenth century, the press and social observers had conflated the bloody murders of 1811 with the perceived vice and violence of sailortown. However, this chapter employs the Census material to uncover a rather different picture of Ratcliffe Highway, one that is more socially heterogeneous than contemporaries imagined. By the 1860s, it was a cosmopolitan contact zone where sailors, the local working class, and tradespeople contributed to, and found support from, cultures and sailortown institutions of Ratcliffe Highway. Sailortown, however, was not only a contact zone for those who lodged, worked, and leisured in the district; it was also a site targeted by a legion of religious evangelists, social explorers, and journalists keen to make contact with and observe the urban poor.

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The devil’s highway

Urban anxieties and subaltern cultures in London’s sailortown, c. 1850–1900.

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