Chronicling Poverty : The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640-1840

Over the last twenty years more and more historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have turned their eyes away from the records of central administration, towards local archives, and the lives of the poor. What they have found is a wealth of sources some of which chronicle the lives, and many of which record the words, of working people. This book will bring together some of the best work based on these sources. Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: Chronicling Poverty — The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840....Pages 1-18 Going on the Parish: The Parish Pension and its Meaning in the London Suburbs, 1640–1724....Pages 19-46 London Domestic Servants from Depositional Evidence, 1660–1750: Servant-Employer Sexuality in the Patriarchal Household....Pages 47-69 ‘Unlawfully begotten on her body’: Illegitimacy and the Parish Poor in St Luke’s Chelsea....Pages 70-86 ‘The bowels of compation’: A Labouring Family and the Law, c.1790–1834....Pages 87-108 Voices in the Crowd: The Kirkby Lonsdale Township Letters, 1809–36....Pages 109-126 Old Age in Poverty: The Record of Essex Pauper Letters, 1780–1834....Pages 127-154 Pauper Inventories and the Material Lives of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries....Pages 155-191 ‘An old offender tho’ so young in years’: The Criminal Careers of Juvenile Offenders in Middlesex in the 1830s....Pages 192-210 ‘The poor in blindnes’: Letters from Mildenhall, Wiltshire, 1835–6....Pages 211-238 Back Matter....Pages 239-248 "Over the last twenty years, increasing numbers of historians specialising in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have used primary sources - autobiographies, settlement and bastardy examinations, pauper letters and inventories, and legal records - to chronicle the lives of the poor." "In Chronicling Poverty the editors present some of the very best work in the field, based on original sources, and in doing so create a vivid insight into the culture and society of the English poor."--BOOK JACKET