Writing on the Wall

Madeleine Pelling is a cultural historian, author and broadcaster. She holds a PhD from the University of York and has held research fellowships at the universities of Yale, Edinburgh, Manchester. Her first book, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Profile Books, 2024), tells the stories of immigrants, prisoners of war, debtors, sex workers and rebels in Georgian Britain through the marks they left behind, and offers a new perspective on this tumultuous period of history. Madeleine is co-host of History Hit's After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, a podcast that shines a light on the shadier corners of the past and which brings a rigorous historical lens to folklore and true crime. She is also a regular contributor for television, most recently for Titanic in Colour (Channel 4, 2025) Mayhem! Secret Lives of the Georgian Kings (2025), Queens That Changed The World (Channel 4, 2023) and Who Do You Think You Are? Australia (Warner Bros, 2023). Her words appear in The Guardian, The Independent, BBC History Magazine and History Today.

You've read the Austen and seen the Gainsboroughs, well this is the real Eighteenth Century in the words of those who walked the streets, worked the coal seems and clung to the topsail yards.
From the ingenious starting point of a humble scratch on glass or daub on brick, Madeleine Pelling crafts a rich and complex portrait of a society in transition
An erudite, dazzling and thought-provoking study of the graffiti of the period - be its creator Romantic poet or Jacobite, King Mob or Caribbean prisoner of war, Pelling teases out lost narratives with humanity and flair
An extraordinary history of ordinary people. In this original and impressive study of eighteenth-century graffiti, Pelling foregrounds the protestors, prisoners, rebels and romantics who all left their unique mark on the past