Download or read book Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices written by Philip Rawlings and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-10-24 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criminal biographies enjoyed enormous popularity in the Eighteenth Century: today they offer us some fascinating perspectives on the period. Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices is the first book to reproduce a number of these biographies in full. Not only do these biographies make fascinating reading, they also raise the problem of how to read them as historical documents. The author argues that instead of trying to uncover simple themes, the most revealing thing about them is the tensions around which they were constructed.