Fielding joked about humanity being divided into High People and Low People. In this course we will be diving down among the Low People to look at representations of social bottom-dwellers, servants and whores and crooks, in a selection of material both literary and non-literary: Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, Hogarth’s pictures, the London Sessions Papers (Old Bailey criminal trial proceedings), now accessible online. We will stick mostly to the 18th century, where the representations are at their most vivid and provocative, but will look ahead also to some modern examples and reflect on the theoretical ramifications of this subject. Our historical bearings will come from Tim Hitchcock’s vibrant new archival reconstruction of the world of the real-life poor in Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (2004). The imaginative centerpiece of the course will be Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, followed by Brecht’s version in The Threepenny Opera. Don’t dress up.