This chapter considers the event perceived as the culmination of a good religious life – the final days and hours. The analysis considers deathbed prayers and the taking of sacraments, along with the presence of a priest, minister, and other visitors of the same faith or congregation. It argues that the deathbed – as both a site and an occasion – was an important prompt for communal religion within the home. The final days, hours, and moments of an individual’s life were recognised as a significant opportunity for religious expression for those belonging to all confessions. While some scholars have argued that post-Reformation deathbeds were increasingly secular, this chapter analyses numerous descriptions of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant deathbeds which emphasise that an individual’s piety and composure in their final hours were interpreted as a reflection of their piety in life. Dying was a process which required witnesses, participants, and visitors, both to provide spiritual comfort to the dying individual and to observe and learn from their example.

This chapter examines rituals which took place after childbirth, uncovering evidence of baptisms, circumcisions, and even churching ceremonies that were held in domestic spaces. It suggests that a range of ceremonies we would now associate with public places of worship were frequently located in domestic spaces. It moves beyond studies which have argued that domestic baptism primarily took place in the home out of necessity, demonstrating that elective domestic baptism was more commonplace than has previously been acknowledged. Domestic ceremonies could also take place in networks of homes, being accommodated not in the family home, but in the home of a midwife, rabbi, or lay co-religionist. These ceremonies, and associated processions from the home to the place of public worship, marked the symbolic ending of the lying-in period, the departure of the mother from the home, and the welcoming of the child into the religious community. They emphasise the significance of the home as a setting of communal sociability and religious practice, and provide an important opportunity to consider the central place of the individual household within its congregation.

This chapter examines religious practices which took place in the home immediately after death: from the laying out, washing, and watching of the body, and domestic gatherings such as ‘wakes’, to the removal of the body from the home, its transfer to a burial place, and the attendant rituals associated with the disposal of the body and mourning for the deceased. It also identifies evidence of cases where the home itself was used as the location for the funeral rites. While the watching and disposal of the body necessarily catered to social and biological needs, religious aspects were closely intertwined with many seemingly practical decisions. The washing and laying out of the body, for example, would generally be performed by members of the parish or local religious community. This chapter makes use of wills, personal writing, burial records, and congregational records which provide an insight into the relationships between individual households and a wider congregation, including its designated burial ground. It argues that the home facilitated acts of communal religion in the hours and days after death, as it became the setting for gatherings and acts of charity to the body.

This chapter analyses domestic practices associated with childbirth. It considers how urban households approached and framed childbirth as an event of religious significance, by examining prayers that were said before, during, and after the event of childbirth, as well as ritual attempts to demarcate the setting of birth or the lying-in chamber from the rest of the home. Through an examination of the ecclesiastical licensing of London midwives, it explores post-Reformation attempts to regulate the female domestic event of childbirth, amid fears that it could be associated with ‘Popish’ or superstitious practices, and concerns that Catholic midwives, if operating undetected, would attempt to perform clandestine Catholic baptism. By considering personal writing and Quaker and Jewish congregational birth records, it examines the faith of midwives and invited gossips, situating the lying-in room within the broader parish or religious community, and showing how those invited into the home could be representatives of the congregation beyond its walls. It shows that such occasions emphasisied women’s relative authority both within and outside their own households.

This chapter provides a detailed comparative overview of domestic religion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, setting out evidence of a range of domestic devotional activities as performed by households of different faiths, and introducing the legislation which, to varying extents, restricted the open religious expression of these different communities. It considers how larger domestic gatherings involving participants other than members of the household would have been restricted by legislation such as the Conventicle Acts (1664–89), as well as self-regulation within the recently established Jewish communities. This legislation or congregational law drew a distinction between household and family prayer and ‘gathering for worship’ in domestic spaces. The chapter suggests that domestic gatherings for worship were permitted in certain circumstances, and that these circumstances generally coincided with life-cycle events.

While Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion suggests that collective piety, sociability, and visiting were associated with the life-cycle events of childbirth and death, connections between homes were also sustained through daily preparations for death. This chapter argues that news of sickness and death was transmitted easily out of and into urban homes, and that this news had a discernible impact on the religious practices of other households in the neighbourhood, parish, or wider religious community. It is not concerned with the event or process of dying itself, but with how a community beyond the affected household responded to that fact. It argues that death made the walls of the urban home permeable. The awareness of an individual’s death, transmitted through word of mouth, or subsequently through the printing of a funeral sermon, entered the homes of others and had a perceptible influence on their daily religious practices. This chapter seeks to bridge the gap between two important functions of the home: firstly, the home as the site of most natural deaths, and secondly, the home as an important setting for daily religion.

The Conclusion sets out the key findings of the book: that the home was a significant site of communal religious practice for those of all faiths who lived and died in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, and that this was particularly true at occasions of childbirth and death. It suggests that domestic religion should not be equated solely with ‘everyday’ or household religion; the home was the setting of both the daily round of prayer as well as significant life events, and their attendant ceremonies, some of which, such as churching or funeral services, it had been largely assumed had taken place only in sites of public worship. It makes the case for what it terms the cyclical permeability of the urban home, demonstrating that connections between the individual household and the religious community it was part of were strengthened at moments of birth and death. This focus reveals the continued vitality of collective religious life into and throughout the eighteenth century, and the relative authority of women both within and beyond their own households.

The Introduction sets out the rationale for focusing on the home as a neglected setting within histories of London’s religious life, as well as the importance of the book’s comparative approach in bringing together the experiences of households belonging to different faiths. It establishes the parameters of the book’s scope: the focus on London in its unique religious diversity, and as a densely populated political centre, and the period 1600–1780 (roughly bookended by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Gordon Riots of 1780). It sets out the book’s interventions in key areas of scholarship, including its contributions to understandings of London lives and domestic space, complicating understandings of public and private space in the densely populated and diverse City of London. It establishes how it moves beyond existing scholarship on domestic religion, and the relationship between religion and the life cycle, which has tended to focus upon conforming Protestant and almost entirely on Christian experiences. It also surveys the broad range of sources analysed in the book, including letters, diaries, court cases, wills, and material culture.

If one measures O’Casey’s career as a dramatist from 1920, when the Abbey Theatre rejected his first two plays, until his death in 1964, that career was predominantly developed as an expatriate. From The Silver Tassie onwards, his plays were written in England, where a quarter of them were also staged for the first time. The first O’Casey production in England was Juno and the Paycock, which appeared at London’s Royalty Theatre between 16 November 1925 and 6 March 1926, and then transferred to the Fortune Theatre (for 198 performances in total). This chapter traces London productions of O’Casey’s work, examining the way in which particular works by O’Casey proved amenable to audiences in the English capital.

The friendship between Shaw and O’Casey was so personally significant that O’Casey’s widow published an entire book on the subject. This chapter charts the course of that friendship, and examines the influence that Shaw exerted upon O’Casey and vice versa. The chapter begins by examining the way O’Casey knew of Shaw’s work before their first meeting, and traces the contours of their personal relationship after O’Casey moved to London in 1926. The chapter analyses the way that, once the Abbey had rejected The Silver Tassie in 1928, O’Casey turned to Bernard Shaw for friendship and advice, and gives a close reading of the reciprocal influence that can be found in the two men’s playwriting and political viewpoints.

Eileen Carey’s books are rarely read; her acting career was forgotten during her lifetime; and her presence in literary culture has always remained in the shadow of her husband. But she provided important support for Sean O’Casey throughout the second half of his life, and there is also great prescience in her own writing. This chapter presents a new assessment of Eileen Carey’s professional career in the wake of the #MeToo (2006–) and #WakingTheFeminists (2015–16) movements, showing how she experienced and wrote about male abuse in the entertainment industry, and how she inspired her husband to write about some of those themes in his own writing.

This final chapter investigates what Pepys’s famously frank and comprehensive diary does not say – and how readers have dealt, or failed to deal, with those omissions. The focus is on a selection of the people mentioned in Pepys’s papers whose lives are barely mentioned in official documents or who went otherwise unrecorded: his wife Elizabeth, women and girls in whom he had a sexual interest, and certain of the Black people who worked for him or lived near him. Pepys’s diary and his other surviving records contain valuable information on their lives – information which shows Pepys to have been a sexual predator and an enslaver. For a range of reasons, these are aspects of his life missing from his popular reputation. Getting the most from the diary, and using it to explore the lives of others, requires understanding and countering influential traditions about Pepys and how his diary should be read.

This chapter explores broader cultural European trends following the First World War, including the consequences of currency dynamics and market speculation. These postwar changes culminated in a heightened financialisation of the culture of the art market, reflecting broader shifts in capitalist economies towards financial forms of revenue and profit. The saturation of financial language that accompanies financialisation processes was also a characteristic of this period: the aftermath of the war saw debates revolving around themes of profit, money-making, and an inflation of art production. This chapter parallels previous chapters by examining how cultural and artistic changes were linked to socio-economic developments. The war had acted as a catalyst and accelerator, inflaming cultural tensions within the art markets. It continued to shape market discourses, embedding wartime mentalities into post-war cultural landscapes.

This chapter explores the major auction landscapes before 1914 and also describes the defining elements of the fin-de-siècle European market: integration, free trade, and cosmopolitanism. Examining societies’ approaches to artwork acquisition unveils contradictions and frictions within a milieu united by an international collecting class. France contended with an international, yet conservative, nationalist art world, while Germany’s bourgeoisie tried to control the world of luxury and consumption. In contrast, Britain grappled with questions about free trade and the preservation of art that challenged its laissez-faire tradition. It is precisely these tensions, which directly reflect the challenges posed by the commercialisation of art, that provide a framework for analysing the impact of the war. By emphasising the shared features of an integrated trade sphere, this chapter paints a balanced portrayal of a European market, where art mirrored the complex integration of both socioeconomic and cultural frameworks.

While most of Johnson’s paid professional writing was in prose, he wrote accomplished poetry from the age of 15 until the last month of his life, and often poured into it his most personal feelings – especially those poems and verse prayers which he wrote in Latin. Most celebrated are Johnson’s two imitations of satires by Juvenal. In London, the first of these, Johnson adopted the light personification (‘unrewarded science toils in vain’) which became his trademark. The second, The Vanity of Human Wishes, is the quintessential Johnsonian work, a meditation on false hope whose conclusion can be read as either tragic or optimistic. The same theme runs through Johnson’s fictional writing – the shorter tales as well as his longest, Rasselas. This gently comic work, much of it merely episodic, follows the Abyssinian Prince, Rasselas, as he seeks the answer to life – and ends on another ambiguous conclusion.

The introduction starts by recounting the history of this project, from an ignorant first encounter with the traces of expos, through the enthusiastic embrace of the burgeoning academic literature on them, to a puzzling first experience of an expo in real life. It suggests that the existence of expos, and their endurance in Japan, challenges the existing literature, which either mines them to explore other phenomena, or assumes that as exemplars of modern spectacle they can serve as an effective ideological apparatus. Rather, it argues, they might help us refine our understanding of development, spectacle, and their relationship, and of modern Japan. Doing so, however, requires us to be alert to the limits of our sources, however extensive the expo archive, and to craft our accounts to reflect these.

Although a product of his time – the literary traditions of Pope, Addison, and Swift; the Toryism and churchmanship of the eighteenth century – Samuel Johnson also transcended it through his own gifts and forceful character. After a difficult early life, marked by melancholy, a troubled relationship with his family, and an early departure from Oxford University, Johnson began to find his way in the 1730s. He married Elizabeth Porter, moved to London, and began to make his mark through work at the Gentleman’s Magazine and works such as the Life of Savage. He achieved renown as an essayist and fame as the compiler of the Dictionary but also suffered from bereavement and continuing financial insecurity. After the award of a government pension in 1762, Johnson’s works have a more relaxed style, and his final major work, the Lives of the Poets, helped to establish this era as the Age of Johnson.