Summary
This edition of over 600 letters written by or for the poor in the early nineteenth-century Cumbrian town of Kirkby Lonsdale provides a unique window onto the experiences, views and conditions of a much-neglected group in English society. At the most human level, these letters are replete with sickness and suffering, the inability of mothers and fathers to fulfil their basic roles, claims that people were starving and naked, writers who were at death's door and those who were homeless and desperate.
The letters also provide a sense of the emotional landscape of those who have largely escaped the attention of historians of emotion. Here we find anger, suffering, gratitude, hopelessness, fear, humiliation and humility, largely in the words and voice of those who experienced such emotions. And above all we find agency - a group of poor people and their advocates who were willing and able, indeed saw it as their right, to challenge those who administered welfare and attempt to shape a system which notionally at least afforded them no power. Here, then, are ordinary lives played out on a canvas that will be appealing to a wide readership.
Peter Jones, Nottingham Trent University,Steven King, Nottingham Trent University
Peter Jones has longstanding research and publication interests in the histories of protest, clothing, class and welfare. Most recently he has worked on the voices of the dependent poor as they engaged with the central authorities overseeing the New Poor Law. Recent publications include P. Jones and S.A. King, Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness (Basingstoke, 2020); P. Jones and N. Carter, 'Writing for Redress: Redrawing the Epistolary Relationship under the New Poor Law', Continuity and Change (2019), 1-25; and P. Jones and S.A. King (eds.), Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws, 1600-1900 (Newcastle, 2015).
Steven King has a long history with the history of welfare. He started his career investigating the historical demography of poor people in West Yorkshire in the period between 168 and 1820. Subsequently he has worked on the theoretical modelling of British and European welfare regimes and most substantially on the experiences and agency of the poor between 1750 and 1910. He also has supplementary interests in the histories of courtship, clothing, death and burial, the medical marketplace and histories of the family. His Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s (McGill-Queens University Press, 2019) won the British Academy Peter Townsend Prize for 2019.
