Thinking a lot lately about a new project on 18th-century #graffiti, the lives and voices - often hidden in plain sight - that it can reveal from the past, and its place in histories of subversion and resistance. Here are some ideas I'm working with: THREAD 1/15

How might we approach graffiti made in the 18th c.? Why is graffiti in this period interesting or important? Can we read graffiti carved, inscribed, scrawled and painted across different surfaces - stone, wood, glass - in the same way? 2/

Who made graffiti, and why? How can we ascribe authorship to often ephemeral, damaged or anonymous work? Do we need to? Should we look at public graffiti - messages of protest, advertising - using the same lens through which we view smaller, intimate, secret graffiti? 3/

I'll be building on work on medieval and EM graffiti by Juliet Fleming, Matthew Champion and the @MedievalG project, as well as this fab piece by Charlotte Guichard in @Journal18_ and forthcoming work by the brilliant @carolynaday 4/ http://www.journal18.org/issue1/scratched-surfaces-artists-graffiti-in-eighteenth-century-rome/

For now, I'm interested in two main themes: memorialisation and resistance. In contrast to modern criminalising of public graffiti, inscribing surfaces of buildings + objects to create a record of events, emotions, journeys + relationships was commonplace in the 18th century 5/

Here’s Joshua Reynold’s portrait of Joanna Leigh, Mrs Richard Bennett Lloyd carving her name into a tree, now in the collection at Waddesdon https://waddesdon.org.uk/joanna-leigh-mrs-richard-bennett-lloyd-inscribing-name-tree-joshua-reynolds/ 6/

Tourists travelling in Britain + Europe would often inscribe their names, or initials, and the date of their visit onto the fabric of landmarks, from church doorways to ancient stone circles. Here's the famous Palladian bridge @NTPriorPark, covered in 18th-c visitors’ graffiti 7/

In 1864, the antiquary John Thurman published 'On an Incised Marking on the Impost of the Great Trilithon at Stonehenge' in which he recorded the eye witness account of an elderly man who, as a boy in 1827, had seen two gentlemen graffiti one of the monoliths at Stonehenge 8/

In 1731, an anonymous book 'The Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany' published under the name Hurlo Thrumbo (a nod to the popular farce performed in 1729 at the Haymarket) gathered together lewd graffiti supposedly scratched into the windows of public toilets 9/

Graffiti can reveal otherwise hidden historical lives. At @NThardwick, curators have discovered names etched onto windows poss those of a local inn owner + servant who worked in the hall, raising questions about occupation of otherwise elite space https://tinyurl.com/ycy52hwr  10/

Expanding on ideas of space and agency, 18th c graffiti most commonly survives in prison cells + other sites of incarceration. In plate 8 of Hogarth's The Rake's Progress, inmates at Bedlam draw ships and maps on the walls, imagining a world beyond their own dire experience 11/

The @MuseumofLondon holds an incredible survival - an 18th-c wooden prison cell covered in graffiti rescued from a demolished prison near the Tower of London. Most of the inscriptions from this debtors' cell date from the 1750s + include pleas for charity and support 12/

Graffiti produced during incarceration also took on more obliquely resistant tones. Between 1756-1763, @edinburghcastle held prisoners from the 7 Years War. A door bears the initials of several prisoners and an early depiction of an American flag 13/ https://tinyurl.com/yacjl4m8 

At @EnglishHeritage's Portchester Castle, graffiti by prisoners of war, brought to Britain in 1796 and including 2000+ formerly enslaved and free black men, survives carved into stone and painted on the walls of a makeshift theatre https://tinyurl.com/vs9kwtp  14/

Fascinatingly, as detailed on the EH website, prisoners in the 1790s - 1800s produced this graffiti alongside craft works sold to locals and a theatre (recently recreated), raising questions about such work in a broader artistic context /15
https://tinyurl.com/y7hj33fw 

One of the major challenges of the project will be identifying material across museum collections, heritage properties and private sites. I'd be DELIGHTED to hear from curators and researchers who have material to share!