author
Samuel Rowlands
Best known for lively pamphlets in prose and verse, this early modern English writer captured the jokes, habits, and everyday bustle of London’s middle and lower ranks. His work is still valued for the vivid window it gives into popular life around the turn of the seventeenth century.
2 Audiobooks
The Bride
by Samuel Rowlands
Humors Looking Glasse
by Samuel Rowlands
About the author
Samuel Rowlands was an English writer, usually dated to about 1573–1630, who produced a large number of pamphlets, poems, and satirical pieces. He spent his working life in London, and his writing is often noted less for high literary prestige in its own day than for how sharply it observes ordinary urban life.
His books and pamphlets often mix humor, moral commentary, and social satire. Again and again, he returned to the speech, manners, and follies of shopkeepers, workers, and other everyday Londoners, making his work a useful record of popular culture in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period.
Rowlands also wrote on religious themes, so his output was broader than satire alone. For modern readers, his appeal lies in that combination of energy and detail: he helps bring historical London down from kings and courtiers to the busy streets where most people actually lived.