🎙️ London's Printing Revolution & the Birth of Children's Literature | The London History Podcast
Join Hazel Baker for a fascinating journey through 1740s London, a city alive with ink, ambition, and innovation. In this episode of The London History Podcast, we uncover how a tiny chapbook, Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, helped transform childhood reading – and how a widowed woman publisher, Mary Cooper, quietly reshaped literary history from her shop on Paternoster Row.
📚 Discover:
The buzz of London’s book trade around St Paul’s Cathedral
The Statute of Anne and how it revolutionised copyright
Mary Cooper and Thomas Longman – trailblazers of modern publishing
The engraving artistry of George Bickham the Younger
What was inside Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book – and what was lost
Why only two copies of the book are known to survive
How nursery rhymes travelled from street cries to storybooks
The hidden role of women in the eighteenth-century print trade
This episode is packed with rich detail – from political tensions of the Jacobite rising to the changing face of children’s literature, and from the smells of damp paper to the sound of rhymes still sung today.
🎧 Whether you are a book lover, historian, educator, or simply curious about the untold stories behind everyday culture, this episode will leave you seeing nursery rhymes – and London itself – in a whole new light.
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🌐 Find bonus content at: https://londonguidedwalks.co.uk/podcast