Pauper Children and Poor Law Childhoods

As Pauper Children is now available on the virtual bookshelf at kindle, I will no longer be posting on this blog. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pauper-Children-Childhoods-England-1834-1910-ebook/dp/B01FE2A3QY Please follow my main blog Workhouse Tales for, well, workhouse tales. A big thanks for all your support, Lesley. 3 August 2016.

This is a very long list, especially because of the sheer length of time I have taken to revise my PhD thesis into this book. It actually started as my MA thesis, ‘Children who belong to the state’ in 2008, where I began my fascinating journey into the history of children, and in particular the … More Thank you!

In 1838 the London and Westminster Review informed its readers that the New Poor Law had proved to be a very popular theme for ‘grievance’ songs. The lyrics to several broadside ballads were printed including The English Poor Law in Force which railed against the refusal of relief to a destitute family, and the self-explanatory … More Introduction:‘Children who belong to the state’

Originally posted on Workhouse Tales:
Were blind children the ‘preferred figures of disability in the Victorian imagination’ as Martha Holmes argues? Depictions in art such as The Blind Girl by John Millais, 1856 (below) suggests that representations of blindness did generate widespread Victorian sentimentality and pity, which in turn led to the establishment of specialist institutions…

Originally posted on Workhouse Tales:
‘Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent from the histories we write’ observed Douglas Baynton in 2001. Of course, since then historians have begun to fill this lacuna and disability history has burgeoned, especially here at Swansea University. Baynton’s argument that disability is everywhere…

Originally posted on Workhouse Tales:
In 1878, The Cambrian newspaper departed from its usual dry reporting of the meetings of Swansea’s Guardians of the Poor to publish an account of a ‘child adoption’, in which a female child was taken from the workhouse to be ‘adopted’ by a local woman. The only comparable entry in the guardians’…

Originally posted on Workhouse Tales:
The spectacle of the Commonwealth Games has reminded me of how the Coronation of King Edward in 1902 was celebrated by the management and inmates of Swansea Workhouse. A Coronation Celebrations Committee had been established several week prior to the event to plan decorations, food and celebratory events. There was to be a…

Originally posted on Workhouse Tales:
Most middle-class women of the Victorian and Edwardian period were neither ‘Angels in the House’ nor, as described by Lawrence Stone, ‘idle drones’. Civic participation was a class and gender expectation and middle-class women were involved in charitable work from the organisation of charity bazaars to the rescue of ‘fallen’…

Originally posted on Workhouse Tales:
The lives of women have always been one of my primary research interests, so when my friends at Archif Menywod Cymru/Women’s Archive of Wales were asked to devise a Women’s History Walk in Swansea, I started thinking about who should be included. Mrs Corney wooed by Mr Bumble, Charles Dickens,…

Originally posted on Workhouse Tales:
As I wrote last Christmas, workhouse children were often treated to presents and outings over the festive period. This was not the only holiday celebrated by pauper children as the regular outings on Whit Monday (or spring bank holiday) show. Whitsun was traditionally a time for new clothes and trips…