Henry Fielding joked about humanity being divided into High People and Low People. In this seminar we will be diving down among the Low People to look at representations of social bottom-dwellers, such as servants, criminals, prostitutes, laborers, and other nobodies, in a selection of material both literary and non-literary: Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, pictures by Hogarth, the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (criminal trial proceedings), and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. We will concentrate first on the English eighteenth century, where the concept and representation of the “low” assumes such vivid modern form, but push forward into later times as well, with readings in E.P. Thompson’s great history The Making of the English Working Class, the nineteenth-century novel, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and contemporary examples such as Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards. We will take up some of the theoretical ramifications of the subject, like the concept of class and the question of why and how the low or socially non-elite become attractive material for artistic or documentary representation. Don’t dress up.