This talk was held jointly by the London Record Society in collaboration with the Camden History Society and the Heath and Hampstead Society, at Hampstead Parish Church on Monday 15 September 2025.
Helen Lawrence introduced this remarkable Journal and describe how she discovered it in Camden’s Archives while researching her prize-winning history of Hampstead Heath (CHS, 2019).
Henry Sharpe’s Journal is an early Victorian treasure trove, opening a fascinating window on 1840s London. A successful City merchant, he moved his residence to Hampstead in 1841, where he became a leading and active member of the local community. His great passion was for education at a time when there was no state education. He offers a rare insight into how the existing patchwork of voluntary educational effort, to which he actively contributed, worked.
His Journal covers a period of only nine years, (1830, and then 1840-47), but the text is rich with observations about the key political and social concerns of the time, national and international events, as well as life in London and the campaign to save Hampstead Heath. His accounts of the ups and downs of family life and raising children are both touching and amusing, putting Victorian fatherhood into a new light. He tells his story almost with the art of a novelist, skillfully weaving together the many and varied interests and facets of his life, adding layers of fresh information about missing detail and forgotten bits of Hampstead history.
The journals of Henry Sharpe: City merchant and Hampstead worthy, 1830-1847, is published by Boydell and Brewer (August 2025) on behalf of the London Record Society with the support of the CHS and the Heath & Hampstead Society.
London Record Society 