A HARLOT'S PROGRESS reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. Dabydeen's novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, redeeming them for their cliched status as predators or victims. The protagonist - in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London's oldest black inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. He refuses however to supply parade of grievances, and to give a simplistic account of beatings, sexual abuses, etc. He will not embark upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader. Instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots as deftly as a harlot her client: he spins a tale of myths, half-truths and fantasies; recreating Africa and eighteenth-century London in startlingly poetic ways. What matters to him is the odyssey into poetry, the rich texture of his narrative, not its truthfulness. In this, his fourth novel, David Dabydeen opens up history to myriad imaginary interpretations, repopulating a vanished world with a strange, defiantly vivid and compassionate humanity.

Working at the intersections of feminist literary criticism, new historicism, and narratology, Chastity and Transgression in Women's Writing revises current understandings of nineteenth-century representations of prostitution, female sexuality and the 'rights of woman' debate. Eberle's project explores the connections and disjunctures between women writing during the Romantic period and those working throughout the Victorian era. She considers a wide range of authors including Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Sarah Grand.

Een oudere zwarte slaaf vertelt in de 18e eeuw zijn levensgeschiedenis aan een van de Engelse voorstanders van afschaffing van de slavernij in ruil voor hun liefdadigheid.

London, 1820: George IV is to be crowned King at last. But will his estranged wife Caroline be allowed to join him as Queen? The city is in turmoil, as her radical supporters rally to her cause and threaten to overturn the government.

Rake's Progress, Harlot's Progress, Illustrations for Hudibras, Before and After, Beer Street, and Gin Lane, 96 more. Commentary by Sean Shesgreen.