The lives of hundreds of thousands of eighteenth-century
Londoners have been brought to life by a unique online resource,
which was made available to the public today. London Lives
provides access to the largest set of handwritten manuscripts
ever posted on the Internet. The London Lives website is a fully
searchable edition of 240,000 pages (40 million words) of
handwritten documents from criminal justice and local
government, which will bring to life the working people who
inhabited this first `world city´, making possible a new kind of
history. Newly available records Evidence from a murder or a
petty theft, petitions to relieve distress, accounts of money
distributed to the poor and the records of hospitals, parishes
and guilds, are all made newly available on this website. In
addition, these manuscripts have been made cross-searchable with
the records of trials held at the Old Bailey, and a set of
fifteen further databases to make it possible to reconstruct
individual lives from the fragments left in the