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]
1976 T.S.Ashton Prize of the Economic History Society, winner for 'Labour Power and the Size of Firms in the Lancashire Cotton Industry', Economic History Review, XXX (1), Feb 1977
1994 The Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society, winner for The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People
1997 Senior Visiting Fellow, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
2002 Visiting Fellow, Australian National University, Canberra
2013 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize shortlist for The First Bohemians[7]
Select bibliography
Robert Owen: A New View of Society and Report to the County of Lanark (Penguin, 1971)
Crime and the Law: the Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (Europa, 1980) (with Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker)
Crime, Authority, and the Policeman-State, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950, vol. iii, pp. 243 - 310.
The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868 (Oxford, 1994)
City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London (Atlantic, 2006)
Thomas Rowlandson: Pleasures and Pursuits in Georgian England (Vassar College, 2010), by Patricia Phagan, Vic Gatrell and Amelia Rauser (exhibition catalogue and texts)
^"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
