The Amazing Lives of Billy Waters: How to be Famous in the Nineteenth Century

William ‘Billy’ Waters: busker, sailor, immigrant, amputee, father, lover, extraordinary talent, and a forgotten Black celebrity from Regency London. Like so many marginalised people from the past, however, he left no papers, writings, or diaries, and many basic facts about his life are missing. What remains are the nineteenth-century images of him and Victorian tales of his life. This talk explores how visual images can be used to ‘fill in’ the gaps and silences in the records we have of past lives, and asks what it might mean to look with, rather than at, Billy Waters and others.

Dr Mary L. Shannon’s latest book, Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale 2024), tells the story of Regency London’s forgotten Black celebrity. It won a 2025 NYC Big Book Award and has been turned into a graphic novel for school children. Mary is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Roehampton, London. She’s the author of the award-winning Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street (2015) and you can find her at https://marylshannon.com/.

The Centre for Victorian Studies (est. 1966) is the longest-established interdisciplinary research centre for Victorian Studies in Britain. The Centre hosts a range of free research-led events each year, which you can find out more about here: https://le.ac.uk/victorian-studies This year’s Annual Public Lecture is hosted in collaboration with Literary Leicester: https://le.ac.uk/literary-leicester

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