“This is London, How d’ye Like it?”: Teaching the Streets in Eighteenth-Century London

Oct 15, 2026

Licensing Act lapse in 1695 is presented as a turning point that reshaped eighteenth-century England’s literary marketplace, accelerating printers, advertising systems, copyright changes, and subscription publication. The essay argues that expanded print culture helped produce the “grub-street” world and a vast, varied reading public with few taboo subjects. It then shifts to pedagogy, confronting the challenge of teaching undergraduates a period flooded with text and helping students connect text to context through courses centered on urbanity and the “rhetoric of loss.”

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages28

Reading Time1 h 11 min

AccessFree to download

Impact of licensing changes on print culture

From printers and advertising to publication shifts

Expansive reading worlds in eighteenth-century texts

Genres, topics, and audience appetite

Teaching challenges and course design

Student cohesion and connections between text and context

Pedagogical research synthesis

Urbanity and the “rhetoric of loss”

“This is London, How d’ye Like it?”: Teaching the Streets in Eighteenth-Century London Ken McGraw Roanoke College It is widely known that the lapse of the licensing act in 1695 had a profound impact on the state of the emerging literary marketplace in eighteenth-century England. Among the many effects of this “lapse” a few of the most well-known were the enormous increase in master printers, the further construction of an advertising system that included the provincial presses, changes in copyright law, and a move to subscription publication.~~1~~ It is also arguable that this parliamentary failure contributed to the formation of the grub-street hack so decried by Alexander Pope and generally allowed for a proliferation of print unlike any seen in England up to this point. If it’s possible to take a cursory glance at Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (which, of course, it isn’t) even the most unacquainted reader will note the sheer amount of text. From the highly touted poetic specimens of Alexander Pope, to the novels of Daniel Defoe, to the criminal biographies of James Dalton and Charles Hitchin, to the sexual frolics of Fanny Hill, to Samuel Butler’s Dildoidies, to the sodomy trials of John Dicks, George Kedger, and Thomas Rodin (to name only three of many), to the “news” stories of women giving birth to rabbits, to, finally (although I could go on), a treatise on women’s “tails” affectionately entitled Bumography it is clear that no subject was off limits and, even more importantly, these subjects were being read by a voracious reading public. The lapse of licensing, in other words, played a tremendous role in constructing eighteenth-century British Literature as we know it today. All of this said, it is not the purpose of this essay to reconstitute a historical narrative of print culture that has been assessed and re-assessed by some the most accomplished scholars in our field (nor would I dare attempt it) . Instead, I ask what appeared to me a few years ago a rather simple question, but has become extremely difficult to attend to: what, as instructors of arguably the most robust period in English Literature, do we do with all ofthis text? In my time as a student and professor, I have had the pleasure of participating in and teaching numerous courses devoted to a study of eighteenth-century Literature. Most courses, except for the sophomore level “Introduction to British Literature” tended towards thematics. From more generalized courses on the culture of print, to specific courses on the family, sex, and marriage, I have been lucky enough to engage a large body of eighteenth-century texts that drew from diverse fields. However, as one would expect, most of this work was done at the graduate level when I and my colleagues were already professional students and scholars in training (a state to which I sometimes long to return) . As a professor at an undergraduate, liberal arts institution, I have been, and will continue to be, tasked with teaching the eighteenth century to undergraduates who have very little experience with the period and who will likely never engage it again after my course. This being the case, my first syllabi appear to me tentative, shy representations ofthe period. These courses were not in themselves deficient in terms of content; I introduced the students to the frolics ofthe restoration stage, the terror of the Great Fire, the joys of amatory fictions, and the “news” of the period. In these courses, they had the chance to read material from Rochester, Defoe, Pope, Haywood, and Richardson. However, these early courses appear to me now to have suffered from problems of cohesion. It wasn’t that the students were disinterested (although one student wryly remarked that “Pamela could have, and should have been, a short story”) but that the students were not able to make the connections I thought readily apparent. In other words, what I saw as fluid shifts between text and context, they s

FAQs

How did the lapse of the licensing act in 1695 affect eighteenth-century literary culture?

It significantly reshaped the emerging literary marketplace by increasing master printers, expanding advertising systems, changing copyright law, and supporting subscription publication.

Why does the author say the problem is not a simple question of canonicity?

The author argues that instructors must contend with how canons are formed and represented, since any canon or anthology can only cover a small fraction of all texts from a period.

What teaching problem does the author highlight when teaching eighteenth-century literature?

Early courses lacked cohesion: students often could not connect text and context as the instructor expected, so the author reworked pedagogy to better merge teaching with research.

Oct 15, 2026

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