Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900 (original) (raw)
Related papers
‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’1: First-Person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900
History Compass, 2011
Historians of the poor and experiences of poverty have long attempted to write 'history from below', in other words from the perspective of the poor themselves. This is problematic when the poor in question were either illiterate, or left few or no first-person sources of the types associated with the elites and middling sorts, such as diaries, letters or commonplace books. In the last 25 years, though, written genres have emerged that can fulfil the function of personal narratives in histories of the poor, in that they contain biographical and coincidental detail about families, occupations, health and political engagement. Working-class autobiographies survive in numbers from the eighteenth century onwards, and were not necessarily produced by the literate (as some were recorded at the author's dictation). Official documents such as settlement examinations and correspondence generated by the workings of the English poor laws offer truncated access to similar information. Histories of the poor may now strive to amplify the voices of their subjects, albeit while observing the muffling effects of each genre.
Book: Pauper Children and Poor Law Childhoods in England and Wales 1834-1910
Poor children in Victorian Britain might be sent to a workhouse, an orphanage, or if they were disabled, a specialist boarding school. Most 'pauper' children however were fostered or remained at home with their families. This is the first full-length book to explore all the options open to Poor Law Unions across England and Wales in their care and treatment of poor children. While we hear regularly about the scandals and abuse that befell vulnerable young people, this book shows how kindness, caring and concern were often shown to these 'Children who belong to the State'. Using autobiographies and memoirs by the children themselves, this book focuses on the child's stories and memories, and by selecting much of the fascinating material from Victorian newspapers, books and records ensures that the reader is kept abreast of the wider historical contexts.
The Wretch of Today, may be Happy Tomorrow: poverty in England, c 1700-1840
2017
But think of this Maxim, and put off your Sorrow,/The Wretch of Today , may be happy To-morrow' … so ended John Gay's hugely-successful Beggar's Opera of 1728 with a satirical display of familiar and slippery morality. Ten years earlier, Gay had supplied verse for Handel's Acis and Galatea, in which 'happy Nymphs and happy Swains' brimmed with pastoral joy on the Arcadian plain. 1 But while he appeared to offer a glimpse of happiness among the wretched and the lowly, his works were more concerned with vulgar cant and aristocratic gambols, than with contemporary landscapes and labourers. 2 Gay's philosopher cousin, a forerunner of utilitarian morality, argued that God had 'no other Design in creating Mankind than their Happiness … I am to do whatever lies in my Power to promote the Happiness of Mankind'. His own happiness may have been dependent 'on others', but in a period when poverty shaped the lives of millions, this talk made little connection with the predicament of the destitute, sick or hungry, in workhouse, hospital or cottage. 3 The poor were everywhere: destitute or dependent on their labour to survive, vulnerable to changing circumstances. Nationally, poverty and its problems attracted social commentators and moral improvers. Poor relief dominated parish business and was a major focus of law and taxation. 4 As fundamental principles of social organisation, poverty and labour were deeply implicated in eighteenth-century developments that drove and responded to material and ideological change: consumer goods, agricultural improvement, sentimental outbursts, popular religion, imperial expansion, novels and poems, the transatlantic slave trade. 5 This chapter connects two eighteenth-century preoccupations: an expansive interest in 1 John Gay, The Beggar's Opera.
'Uncle Tom was there, in crockery': material culture and a Victorian working-class childhood
Childhood in the Past 6 (2): 89-105 , 2013
British archaeologists have long recognised the potential for the archaeology of working-class neighbourhoods to illuminate communities that typically left few direct traces of their own in the written record. They have also emphasised that the 'rich and diverse material culture' from such sites provides alternative perspectives to the textual evidence, which is often moralizing and condemnatory (Giles and Rees Jones 2011, 545-6). Drawing on a case-study from Sheffield (Yorkshire), this paper explores what material culture can reveal about working-class childhoods. It argues that childhood was depicted and experienced at the intersections of the chapel, mine and pub, and that competing conceptions of childhood and family were pivotal to the struggle for working-class identity. Childhood among the British working-classes of the nineteenth century has been extensively researched by historians and literary scholars. Approaches adopted range from broad surveys of social and economic conditions, based on governmental records and other institutional sources, such as those of charitable and educational bodies (e.g. Tuttle 1999; Heathorn 2000; Humphries 2010), to analyses of individual life stories, as recorded in autobiographies (e.g. Vincent 1982) and interviews conducted by social reformers (e.g. Shore 1999). The literature published for children (e.g. Bottigheimer 1996; McGeorge 1998; Shuttleworth 2004) and paintings and photographs of children have been shown to have both reflected and shaped lived experience (e.g. Cunningham 1991; Arscott 2004; Rose 2009). Yet, childhood has largely been overlooked by archaeologists, despite a growing body of work exploring the domestic archaeology of nineteenth-century Britain, which has nuanced the study of industrialisation (e.g. Casella and Croucher 2010; Owens et al. 2010). Childhood did not feature, for instance, in a 2011 volume of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology dedicated to the archaeology of poverty since the eighteenth century, and is similarly neglected in recent reviews of historical archaeology (e.g. Hicks and Beaudry 2006), unlike in studies of earlier periods where the archaeology of childhood is now well established (e.g.
European Journal of Life Writing, 2014
This conference arose out of a joint anglo-german research project, "pauper letters and petitions for poor relief in germany and great Britain, 1770-1914", funded by the uK's arts & humanities research Council, and directed by prof. Steven King (university of leicester) and prof. Dr. andreas gestrich (Director, german historical institute london). These narratives comprise letters and petitions written by paupers seeking some form of relief. in describing the circumstances which led them to appeal for help, the authors construct autobiographical vignettes. The project aims to construct an online, edited corpus of such texts, which survive in considerable numbers in British and german archives. The conference sought to examine how these life writings might contribute to understanding the lives of the poor. Several connected themes emerged. firstly, by investigating a wide range of the vignettes contained in such archival sources, it becomes possible to discern contextual factors which are only implicitly present in the narratives. These include the specific nature of poverty and the family economy, and the norms of aristocratic benevolence or state administrative practice, in a particular locality. Secondly, these texts reveal the knowledge which the poor possessed of both their legal rights, and the informal norms governing the dispensing of charity. Thirdly, they demonstrate the ways in which the poor, addressing those with power, wealth and authority over them, tailored their language to fit the requirements of state, municipality or local nobility as dispensers of assistance. finally, it is apparent that the poor could in some circumstances use such knowledge and command of language to force through their claims.
The study of consumption has expanded considerably over the past thirty years and has grown to become one of the key cornerstones of eighteenth and nineteenth century British history. Yet, very little research has been undertaken to find the extent to which the poor were active consumers, whilst the literature on the middling and upper classes has swiftly grown apace. Most of the literature on the poor's consumption is clouded in Marxist theorem and narrow economic and monetary methodologies, and very little has been conducted beyond East Anglia and clothing. Thus, through the use of pauper inventories which detail household possessions, this paper will address this major historiographical distortion by empirically chronicling the extent to which paupers in Dorset were able to acquire goods, from basic furniture to the new and expanding items of the time, such as timepieces, tea and mirrors. The paper will argue that, whilst the middling and upper classes were able to increasingly consume more and benefit from English commercial expansion, the lives of the poor did not change significantly and that they continued to struggle and live a basic and relatively destitute life. Through these findings the paper will offer fresh perspectives on how marginal counties and groups coped over the Industrial Revolution, and will ultimately get to the very heart of what it meant to be poor, through their material goods.
Journal of British Studies
Histories of the English workhouse and its satellite institutions have concentrated on legal change, institutional administration, and moments of shock or scandal, generally without considering the place of these institutions, established through the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, in the emotional life course of poor inmates. This article uses working-class autobiographies to examine the register of emotional responses to workhouses and associated Poor Law institutions, and the range of narrative voices open to authors who recalled institutional residence. It also gives close attention to two lengthy narratives of workhouse district schools and highlights their significance in comparison to the authors’ family backgrounds and the representation of each writer in the wider historical record. It suggests that a new affective chronology of the workhouse is needed to accommodate room for disparity between the aspiration of systematic poor relief and the reality of individual experience...