Writing The Lives Of The English Poor 1750s 1830s

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Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s

Author : Steven King
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0773556508
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (735 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s by : Steven King

Download or read book Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s written by Steven King and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the English Old Poor Law was waning, soon to be replaced by the New Poor Law and its dreaded workhouses. In Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s Steven King reveals colourful stories of poor people, their advocates, and the officials with whom they engaged during this period in British history, distilled from the largest collection of parochial correspondence ever assembled. Investigating the way that people experienced and shaped the English and Welsh welfare system through the use of almost 26,000 pauper letters and the correspondence of overseers in forty-eight counties, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s reconstructs the process by which the poor claimed, extended, or defended their parochial allowances. Challenging preconceptions about literacy, power, social structure, and the agency of ordinary people, these stories suggest that advocates, officials, and the poor shared a common linguistic register and an understanding of how far welfare decisions could be contested and negotiated. King shifts attention away from traditional approaches to construct an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of poor law administration and popular writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. At a time when the western European welfare model is under sustained threat, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s takes us back to its deepest roots to demonstrate that the signature of a strong welfare system is malleability.

Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s

Author : Steven King
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0773556516
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (735 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s by : Steven King

Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910

Author : Carol Beardmore
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3030048551
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910 by : Carol Beardmore

Download or read book Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910 written by Carol Beardmore and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-03 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways that families were formed and re-formed, and held together and fractured, in Britain from the sixteenth to twentieth century. The chapters build upon the argument, developed in the 1990s and 2000s, that the nuclear family form, the bedrock of understandings of the structure and function of family and kinship units, provides a wholly inadequate lens through which to view the British family. Instead the volume's contributors point to families and households with porous boundaries, an endless capacity to reconstitute themselves, and an essential fluidity to both the form of families, and the family and kinship relationships that stood in the background. This book offers a re-reading, and reconsideration of the existing pillars of family history in Britain. It examines areas such as: Scottish kinship patterns, work patterns of kin in Post Office families, stepfamily relations, the role of family in managing lunatic patients, and the fluidity associated with a range of professional families in the nineteenth century. Chapter 8 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Indentured Servitude

Author : Anna Suranyi
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0228007798
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (28 download)

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Book Synopsis Indentured Servitude by : Anna Suranyi

Download or read book Indentured Servitude written by Anna Suranyi and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hundreds of thousands of British and Irish men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century as indentured servants. Many had agreed to serve for four years, but large numbers had been trafficked or “spirited away” or were sent forcibly by government agencies as criminals, political rebels, or destitute vagrants. In Indentured Servitude Anna Suranyi provides new insight into the lives of these people. The British government, Suranyi argues, profited by supplying labour for the colonies, removing unwanted populations, and reducing incarceration costs within Britain. In addition, it was believed that indigents, especially destitute children, benefited morally from being placed in indenture. Capitalist entrepreneurs who were influential at the highest levels of government made their fortunes from Atlantic trade in goods, indentured servants, and slaves, and their participation in the servant trade contributed to the commercialization of criminal justice. Suranyi breaks new ground in showing how indentured servitude was challenged: once in the colonies, indentured servants adapted resourcefully to their circumstances and rebelled against unfair conditions and abuse by suing their masters, by running away, or through outright revolt. Emerging ideas about race and citizenship led to vehement public debate about the conditions of indentured servants and the ethics of indenture itself, prompting legislation that aimed to curb the worst excesses while slavery continued to expand unchecked.

Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England

Author : Peter Jones
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030478394
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (34 download)

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Book Synopsis Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England by : Peter Jones

Download or read book Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England written by Peter Jones and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-08 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first attempt to identify and describe a workhouse reform ‘movement’ in mid- to late-nineteenth-century England, beyond the obvious candidates of the Workhouse Visiting Society and the voices of popular critics such as Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale. It is a subject on which the existing workhouse literature is largely silent, and this book therefore fills a considerable gap in our understanding of contemporary attitudes towards institutional welfare. Although many scholars have touched on the more obvious strands of workhouse criticism noted above, few have gone beyond these to explore the possibility that a concerted ‘movement’ existed that sought to place pressure on those with responsibility for workhouse administration, and to influence the trajectory of workhouse policy.

Letters and the Body, 1700–1830

Author : Sarah Goldsmith
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000896528
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Letters and the Body, 1700–1830 by : Sarah Goldsmith

Download or read book Letters and the Body, 1700–1830 written by Sarah Goldsmith and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women's and men’s letters written from and to Britain, North America, Europe, India and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite. In eleven chapters, scholars from various disciplines draw on different methodological approaches that include close readings of single letters, social historical analyses of large corpora and a material culture approach to the object of the letter. This research includes personal letters exchanged among family and friends, formal correspondence and letters that were incorporated into published forewords and appendices, journals and memoirs. Part I explores the letter as a substitute for the absent body, the imagined physical encounters and performances envisaged by letter writers and the means through which these imagined sensations were conveyed. Part II examines the letter as a material object that served as a conduit for descriptions of the material body and as an instrument for embodied encounters. Part III focuses on how correspondents purposefully used their bodies in letters as a means to create intimacy, to generate social networks and build a ‘body politic’. This interdisciplinary volume centred around letters will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of fields including eighteenth-century studies, cultural history and literature.

Penal Servitude

Author : Helen Johnston
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0228009650
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (28 download)

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Book Synopsis Penal Servitude by : Helen Johnston

Download or read book Penal Servitude written by Helen Johnston and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Established in 1853, after the end of penal transportation to Australia, the convict prison system and the sentence of penal servitude offered the most severe form of punishment – short of death – in the criminal justice system, and they remained in place for nearly a century. Penal Servitude is the first comprehensive study to examine the convict prison system that housed all those who were sentenced to penal servitude during this time. Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and David Cox detail the administration and evolution of the system, from its creation in the 1850s and the building of the prison estate to the classification of prisoners within it. Exploring life in the convict prison through the experiences of the people who were subjected to it, the authors shed light on various details such as prison diet, education, and labour. What they find reveals the internal regimes; the everyday endurances, conformity, resistance, and rule breaking of convicts; and the interactions with the warders, medical officers, and governors that shaped daily life in the system. Reconstructing the life histories of hundreds of convict prisoners from detailed prison records, criminal registers, census data, and personal correspondence, Penal Servitude illuminates the lives of those who experienced long-term imprisonment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Discourse of Desperation

Author : Ivor Timmis
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429816553
Total Pages : 197 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (298 download)

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Book Synopsis The Discourse of Desperation by : Ivor Timmis

Download or read book The Discourse of Desperation written by Ivor Timmis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-25 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses how the poor and desperate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries mobilised their linguistic resources in pursuit of vital pragmatic goals, drawing on three corpora of letters written by the poor. The main question addressed by the book is, ‘How were the poor, often armed only with low levels of education and literacy, able to meet the challenge of writing letters vital to their interests, even to their survival?’ Timmis argues that the answer lies in the highly strategic approach adopted by the writers, particularly evident in the way formulaic language is used in the pauper and prisoner letters. Formulaic language supports the writers in producing intelligible letters in what they consider an appropriate tone but also allows them to exploit popular cultural motifs of the time. Data is drawn from three sources: pauper letters by the poor applying for parish relief, from around 1795 to 1834; prisoner letters by women awaiting deportation to Australia for defrauding the Bank of England in the early nineteenth century; and anonymous letters by the poor demanding money with menaces. Comparison with the Mayhew Corpus of interviews with the London poor in the 1850s reinforces the idea that part of the writers’ approach was to orient away from the vernacular towards a style they perceived to be more elevated. Showing how resourceful people can be in communicating their needs in crises and in turn surfacing new insights into literacy and demotic language awareness, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in corpus linguistics and social history.

The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940

Author : Joseph Harley
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030892735
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940 by : Joseph Harley

Download or read book The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940 written by Joseph Harley and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines life in the homes inhabited by the working class over the long nineteenth century. These working-class homes are often imagined as distinctly unhomely spaces, which the inhabitants struggled to fill with even the most basic of furniture, let alone acquire the comforts associated with middle-class domestic space. The concerned reformers of industrialising towns and cities painted a picture of severe deprivation, of rooms that were both cramped yet bare at the same time, and disease-ridden spaces from which their subjects required rescue. It is an image which is not only inadequate, but which also robs working-class people of their agency in creating domestic spaces which allowed for the expression of personal and familial feeling. Bringing together emerging scholars who challenge these ideas and using a range of innovative sources and approaches, this edited collection presents a new understanding of working-class homes.

In Their Own Write

Author : Steven King
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0228015367
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (28 download)

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Book Synopsis In Their Own Write by : Steven King

Download or read book In Their Own Write written by Steven King and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its institutions – from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded workhouse – has generally been viewed as a catastrophe for ordinary working people. Until now it has been impossible to know how the poor themselves felt about the New Poor Law and its measures, how they negotiated its terms, and how their interactions with the local and national state shifted and changed across the nineteenth century. In Their Own Write exposes this hidden history. Based on an unparalleled collection of first-hand testimony – pauper letters and witness statements interwoven with letters to newspapers and correspondence from poor law officials and advocates – the book reveals lives marked by hardship, deprivation, bureaucratic intransigence, parsimonious officialdom, and sometimes institutional cruelty, while also challenging the dominant view that the poor were powerless and lacked agency in these interactions. The testimonies collected in these pages clearly demonstrate that both the poor and their advocates were adept at navigating the new bureaucracy, holding local and national officials to account, and influencing the outcomes of relief negotiations for themselves and their communities. Fascinating and compelling, the stories presented in In Their Own Write amount to nothing less than a new history of welfare from below.

The common writer in modern history

Author : Martyn Lyons
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526170744
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis The common writer in modern history by : Martyn Lyons

Download or read book The common writer in modern history written by Martyn Lyons and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book underlines the importance of writing for the subordinate classes, and the variety of uses to which it was put. In eleven new studies by thirteen leading historians of scribal culture, it foregrounds the ‘common writer’ and contributes to a ‘New History from Below’. The book presents pauper letters, ego-documents, life-writing of various kinds, soldiers’ and emigrants’ correspondence, handwritten newspapers and graffiti in streets and prisons, analysing the major genres of ‘ordinary writings’. The studies draw on different disciplines, including cultural history, sociology and ethnography, folklore studies, palaeography and socio-historical linguistics. They range from the early modern Hispanic Empire to twentieth-century Australia, including studies of modern Britain, Iceland, Finland, Italy, Germany, South Africa and the USA. The book demonstrates the importance of studying manuscript culture to give a voice, a presence and dignity to the ordinary protagonists of history.

The Routledge History of Loneliness

Author : Katie Barclay
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000839206
Total Pages : 710 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge History of Loneliness by : Katie Barclay

Download or read book The Routledge History of Loneliness written by Katie Barclay and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of Loneliness takes a multidisciplinary approach to the history of a modern emotion, exploring its form and development across cultures from the seventeenth century to the present. Bringing together thirty scholars from various disciplines, including history, anthropology, philosophy, literature and art history, the volume considers how loneliness was represented in art and literature, conceptualised by philosophers and writers and described by people in their personal narratives. It considers loneliness as a feeling so often defined in contrast to sociability and affective connections, particularly attending to loneliness in relation to the family, household and community. Acknowledging that loneliness is a relatively novel term in English, the book explores its precedents in ideas about solitude, melancholy and nostalgia, as well as how it might be considered in cross-cultural perspectives. With wide appeal to students and researchers in a variety of subjects, including the history of emotions, social sciences and literature, this volume brings a critical historical perspective to an emotion with contemporary significance.

The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450–1800

Author : David Hitchcock
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351370995
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (513 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450–1800 by : David Hitchcock

Download or read book The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450–1800 written by David Hitchcock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450–1800 is a pioneering exploration of both the lives of the very poorest during the early modern period, and of the vast edifices of compassion and coercion erected around them by individuals, institutions, and states. The essays chart critical new directions in poverty scholarship and connect poverty to the environment, debt and downward social mobility, material culture, empires, informal economies, disability, veterancy, and more. The volume contributes to the understanding of societal transformations across the early modern period, and places poverty and the poor at the centre of these transformations. It also argues for a wider definition of poverty in history which accounts for much more than economic and social circumstance and provides both analytically critical overviews and detailed case studies. By exploring poverty and the poor across early modern Europe, this study is essential reading for students and researchers of early modern society, economic history, state formation and empire, cultural representation, and mobility.

Young Subjects

Author : Julia M. Gossard
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0228006902
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (28 download)

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Book Synopsis Young Subjects by : Julia M. Gossard

Download or read book Young Subjects written by Julia M. Gossard and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the metropole, the colonies, and the wider eighteenth-century world, French children and youth participated in a diverse set of state-building initiatives, social reform programs, and imperial expansion efforts. Young Subjects explores the lives and experiences of these youth, revealing their role as active and vital agents in the shaping of early modern France. Through a set of regional case studies, Julia Gossard demonstrates how thousands of children and youth were engaged in the service of the state. In Lyon, charity schools cultivated children as agents of moral and social reform who carried their lessons home to their families. In Paris, orphaned and imprisoned youth trained in skilled trades or prepared for military service, while others were sent to the French colonies in North America as filles du roi and sturdy labourers. Young people from merchant families were recruited to serve as cultural brokers and translators on behalf of French commerical interests in the Ottoman Empire and Siam. In each case, Gossard considers how these youth played, negotiated, and sometimes resisted their roles, and what expressions of individual identity and agency were available to subjects under the legal control of others. As sources of labour, future taxpayers, colonial subjects, cultural mediators, and potential criminals, children and youth were objects of intense interest for civic authorities. Young Subjects refocuses our attention on these often overlooked historical subjects who helped to build France.

Describing Women's Clothing in Eighteenth-Century England

Author : Elizabeth Spencer
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1837650349
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (376 download)

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Book Synopsis Describing Women's Clothing in Eighteenth-Century England by : Elizabeth Spencer

Download or read book Describing Women's Clothing in Eighteenth-Century England written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovers sources from the parish pauper to the gentlewoman to consider relationships with clothing across the social hierarchy in the long eighteenth century.Descriptions of women's clothing increasingly circulated across textual genres and beyond in eighteenth-century England. This book explores the significance of these descriptions across a range of sources including wills, newspapers, accounts, court records, and the records of the old poor law.Attention has rested on women literate and wealthy enough to leave behind textual or material traces, but this book ranges from the parish pauper to the gentlewoman to consider descriptive languages, rhetorical strategies, and relationships with clothing across the social hierarchy. It explores how women described their own clothing, but also looks at how it was described by overseers, family members, retailers, and even strangers. It shows that we must look beyond isolated descriptions to how, why, and who was describing clothing to understand its role. Chapters uncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.ncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.ncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.ncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.

Why the West Rules - For Now

Author : Ian Morris
Publisher : McClelland & Stewart
ISBN 13 : 1551995816
Total Pages : 767 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (519 download)

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Book Synopsis Why the West Rules - For Now by : Ian Morris

Download or read book Why the West Rules - For Now written by Ian Morris and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 767 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does the West rule? In this magnum opus, eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing on 50,000 years of history, archeology, and the methods of social science, to make sense of when, how, and why the paths of development differed in the East and West — and what this portends for the 21st century. There are two broad schools of thought on why the West rules. Proponents of "Long-Term Lock-In" theories such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial, some critical factor — geography, climate, or culture perhaps — made East and West unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead of the East. But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so this development can't have been inevitable; and so proponents of "Short-Term Accident" theories argue that Western rule was a temporary aberration that is now coming to an end, with Japan, China, and India resuming their rightful places on the world stage. However, as the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, it wasn't just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian's focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist's awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist's comparative methods to make sense of the past, present, and future — in a way no one has ever done before.

A Home from Home?

Author : Claudia Soares
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192651889
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis A Home from Home? by : Claudia Soares

Download or read book A Home from Home? written by Claudia Soares and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering study of children's social care in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, A Home From Home? presents new information and develops conceptual thinking about the history of children's care by investigating the centrality of key ideas about home, family, and nurture that shaped welfare provision. Departing from narratives of reform and discipline which have dominated scholarship, and drawing on material culture and social history approaches, as well as the extensive archives of the Waifs and Strays Society, Claudia Soares provides a new type of study of social care by offering a 'bottom-up' study of children's welfare, and studying the significance of specific types of care practices that held particular cultural and ideological meaning. At its core, the book uses unique first-hand accounts, individual case records, and personal correspondence of children in care in Britain to locate the voices and subjectivities of institutionalised children and their families within the voluntary welfare system between 1870 and 1920. In doing so, it uncovers the real lives, experiences, and attitudes of the children and their families, and offers a timely new approach to understanding the history of children's social care.