Vic Gatrell

Last updated
Vic Gatrell at the IHR London
February 2016 Vic Gatrell.jpeg
Vic Gatrell at the IHR London
February 2016

Vic Gatrell (or V.A.C. Gatrell) is a British historian. He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Contents

Life

Born to working-class immigrant Londoners in South Africa, Gatrell went to state schools in Pietermaritzburg and Port Elizabeth and then to Rhodes University, where he graduated with first-class Honours, and won an Elsie Ballot scholarship to Cambridge. At St John's College he took first-class honours in history and completed his Ph.D. on 'The Commercial Middle Class in Manchester 1820–1857', before becoming a research fellow and then a teaching fellow of Gonville and Caius College.

In the Cambridge History Faculty Gatrell was appointed Lecturer in British Economic and Social History in 1971, and then Reader in British history. He co-edited The Historical Journal , 1976–1986. He is among the pioneer scholars who have worked on the history of crime and punishment, and then on the history of emotions. He became Professor of British History at the University of Essex 2003–2009. He returned to Cambridge in 2009 as a professorial Life Fellow of Caius, and now lives there.[ citation needed ]

His The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868 (Oxford, 1994) won the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize, and was nominated as one of the historical Canon in the Times Higher Education Supplement, 2010. It is a seminal study of changing attitudes to and emotions about capital punishment across a period of profound cultural change, and it is still in print.

Works

His City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London (Atlantic, 2006) is a study of satirical caricature and manners from 1780 to 1830. It was joint winner of Britain's premier history prize, the Wolfson Prize for History. It also won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, was shortlisted for the Authors' Club Banister Fletcher Award for art history, and was listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. [1]

His The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age (Allen Lane and Penguin, 2013) is a history of 'proto-bohemian' Covent Garden and the 'lower' art world in eighteenth-century London. It argues for the significance of the arts that celebrated 'real life' in that era. It was shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman Prize.[ citation needed ]

Each of these books has resulted in extensive television and radio contributions and book festival talks. In 2010 Alastair Lawrence's BBC4 television series 'Rude Britannia' was underpinned by Gatrell's 'City of Laughter'. [2]

Gatrell's Conspiracy on Cato Street: Liberty and Revolution in Regency London was published by Cambridge University Press in April 2022 [3] and was anticipated in his 2020 lecture on the Cato Street Conspiracy for Gresham College. [4]

Awards and honours

Select bibliography

Related Research Articles

The Hessell-Tiltman History Prize is awarded to the best work of non-fiction of historical content covering a period up to and including World War II, and published in the year of the award. The books are to be of high literary merit, but not primarily academic. The prize is organized by the English PEN. Marjorie Hessell-Tiltman was a member of PEN during the 1960s and 1970s; on her death in 1999 she bequeathed £100,000 to the PEN Literary Foundation to found a prize in her name. Each year's winner receives £2,000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Overy</span> British historian (born 1947)

Richard James Overy is a British historian who has published on the history of World War II and Nazi Germany. In 2007, as The Times editor of Complete History of the World, he chose the 50 key dates of world history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ascension Parish Burial Ground</span> Cemetery in Cambridge, England

The Ascension Parish Burial Ground, formerly known as the burial ground for the parish of St Giles and St Peter's, is a cemetery off Huntingdon Road in Cambridge, England. Many notable University of Cambridge academics are buried there, including three Nobel Prize winners.

Richard Peter Treadwell Davenport-Hines is a British historian and literary biographer, and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Mark Mazower is a British historian. His areas of expertise are Greece, the Balkans and, more generally, 20th-century Europe. He is Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Moorhouse</span> British historian (born 1968)

Roger Moorhouse is a British historian and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Scurr</span> British historian and literary critic

Dr Ruth Scurr FRSL, aka Lady Stothard, is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Roel Sterckx FBA is a Flemish-British sinologist and anthropologist. He is the Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at Cambridge University, and a fellow of Clare College.

Jennifer Sheila Uglow is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.

Charlotte Higgins, is a British writer and journalist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Reynolds (historian)</span> British historian

David Reynolds, is a British historian. He is Emeritus Professor of International History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.

Founded in 1921, English PEN is one of the world's first non-governmental organisations and among the first international bodies advocating for human rights. English PEN was the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers' association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries. The President of English PEN is Margaret Busby, succeeding Philippe Sands in April 2023. The Director is Daniel Gorman. The Chair is Ruth Borthwick.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge</span> Constituent college of the University of Cambridge

Gonville and Caius College, often referred to simply as Caius, is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1348 by Edmund Gonville, it is the fourth-oldest of the University of Cambridge's 31 colleges and one of the wealthiest. In 1557, it was refounded by alumnus John Caius. The college has been attended by many students who have gone on to significant accomplishment, including fifteen Nobel Prize winners, the highest of any Oxbridge college.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toby Wilkinson</span> English Egyptologist and academic

Toby Alexander Howard Wilkinson, is an English Egyptologist and academic. After studying Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, he was Lady Wallis Budge Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ's College, Cambridge and then a research fellow at the University of Durham. He became a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge in 2003. He was Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Lincoln from 2017 to 2021, and then Vice Chancellor of Fiji National University from January 2021 to December 2021. Since 2022, he has been Fellow for Development at Clare College, Cambridge.

Cyprian Broodbank, is a British archaeologist and academic. Since October 2014, he has been Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. From 2010 to 2014, he was Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at University College London.

<i>The First Bohemians</i>

The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age is a 2013 book by the British writer and academic Vic Gatrell.

Sarah Howe is a Chinese–British poet, editor and researcher in English literature. Her first full poetry collection, Loop of Jade, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of The Year Award. It is the first time that the T. S. Eliot Prize has been given to a debut collection. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London, as well as a trustee of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.

Edward Wilson-Lee is an English literature academic at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, and a specialist in the literature and the history of the book in the early modern period.

Sujit Sivasundaram is a British Sri Lankan historian and academic. He is currently professor of world history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

Clair Wills,, is a British academic specialising in 20th-century British and Irish cultural history and literature. Since 2019, she has been King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. After studying at the Somerville College, Oxford, she taught at the University of Essex and Queen Mary University of London. She was then Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Chair of Irish Letters at Princeton University from 2015 to 2019, before moving to Cambridge.

References

  1. "BBC - BBC Four - The Samuel Johnson Prize 2007 - Longlist". www.bbc.co.uk. Archived from the original on 23 May 2007.
  2. "Rude Britannia Series 1, Episode 1 - A History Most Satirical, Bawdy, Lewd and Offensive". British Comedy Guide .
  3. "Conspiracy on Cato Street | British history after 1450".
  4. "Vic Gatrell".
  5. "wyvern:extra". Archived from the original on 16 July 2007. Retrieved 24 November 2007.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link) Honour for Essex historian
  6. "The Canon: The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868. By V.A.C. Gatrell". Times Higher Education. 12 August 2010.
  7. Timothy R. Smith (9 April 2014). "David Reynolds wins PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize". Washington Post . Retrieved 7 June 2014.