These pages provide introductions to the different Document Types included in London Lives. You should review this background material in order to make sense of these documents and find out how to locate the information you are looking for. For a more general introduction to interpreting these documents, see How to Interpret an Eighteenth-Century Manuscript, and the associated Research Guides. For information about the institutions which created these documents, see the historical background pages.

For more general introductions to London life in the eighteenth century you may find the background pages of the Old Bailey Online helpful, particularly London and its Hinterlands and Community Histories.