Kate Chisholm

Scrawled outpourings of love and defiance

Examples of 18th-century graffiti range from romantic rhymes scratched on windowpanes to the haunting marks of political prisoners incised on dungeon walls

A man draws a gallows on a wall in a hand-coloured version of Hogarth’s ‘First Stage of Cruelty’, published 1812. [Bridgeman Images]

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

    Madeleine Pelling

    Profile Books, pp. 322, £25

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