Vic Gatrell


Vic Gatrell is a British historian. He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He was born of working-class immigrant Londoners in South Africa, went to state schools in Pietermaritzburg and Port Elizabeth and then to Rhodes University, where he graduated with Honours before winning 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 he was appointed Lecturer in British Economic and Social History, and then Reader in British history and co-editor of 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 Life Fellow of Caius, and now lives there.
His The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868 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.
His City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London is a study of satirical caricature and manners from 1780 to 1830. It was joint winner of the Wolfson Prize for History, 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.
His The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age 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.

Awards and honours