Brad Beaven
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From Jolly Jack and Moll to proletarian Jack and Jill
The depictions of sailors and women in a nineteenth-century sailortown
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‘From Jolly Jack and Moll to proletarian Jack and Jill’ explores how Victorians turned to the apparent moral failings of the sailors and women in Ratcliffe Highway to explain the district's perceived slide into depravity and violence. On making contact with the populace of the sailortown district, social explorers searched in vain for Charles Dibdin's ‘Jolly Jack and Lusty Moll', characters who had been celebrated in the age of sail. Social explorers were instead confronted with a modern, urbanised, waterfront people who were at the forefront of the transition from sail to steam in the maritime industry. The chapter interrogates the nostalgic texts from a range of social commentators who recast the sailors and the women they met from benign eighteenth-century caricatures to a dangerous urban proletariat immersed in crime and immorality.

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The devil’s highway

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

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