During this talk/lecture we will focus on the written testimony of the lives of the English and Welsh poor. The delivery of poor relief at this time was a local matter paid for by local ratepayers and decided by local “guardians of the poor”. What then was it like to grow up poor during this period? How did the poor describe their poverty (what rhetoric did they use) and what did they see as the causes of it? How did they see the workings of the welfare system in place at that time – and did they simply accept what it offered?

To begin answering these questions we will use the letters that paupers, the wider the poor and their advocates wrote (often from their own homes, sometimes from workhouses) to the central poor law authorities in London. We will see they not some amorphous mass to be simply chart on a graph, many were determined, articulate and agents in the their own histories.

Speakers

Paul Carter is the Principal Records Specialist for Collaborative Projects in the Collections, Expertise and Engagement Department at The National Archives. His archival and historical interests range across the primarily modern (1780s-1930s) domestic areas of “ordinary people” in labour and popular politics, law and order (and disorder), and poverty and welfare under the New Poor Law. 

Steve King is Professor of Economic and Social History at Nottingham Trent University. His research spans from the early 1600s to the present and encompasses Britain and Europe. He has written widely on histories of industrialisation, disability, medicine,  textile history, and women's suffrage, but the central pillar of his published work has been the past, present and future of the British and European welfare states.

Their recent collaborative work includes; S. King, P. Carter, P. Jones, N. Carter and C. Beardmore, In Their Own Write: A New Poor Law History From Below (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2022), which won the 2022 North American Victorian Studies Association Best Book of 2022 Prize and the American Historical Association Morris D. Forkosch Prize 2023. Paul and Steve also co-produced Voices of the Victorian Poor “an open database of letters from paupers, the wider poor and their advocates written between 1834 – 1900”. They are currently working on a monograph looking at petty tyranny in workhouses.