🎙️ 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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