DeepDyve eBooks - Accommodating Poverty

Introduction: Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850

Sharpe, Pamela; McEwan, Joanne

Pages: 1 –21

[Francis Place’s ringing words describing the effect that adjustments to his housing circumstances had on his financial status, providing ‘a saving of some importance to us’, resound through this book.1 Our authors aim to trace the symbolic and material value of the housing of the poor in ‘long’...

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‘Turned into the Street with My Children Destitute of Every Thing’; The Payment of Rent and the London Poor, 1600–1850

Boulton, Jeremy

Pages: 25 –49

[There has been a great deal of recent work on the family economy of the urban poor. Economic historians, attempting to calculate standard of living indices, have long used real or estimated working-class budgets to assess expenditure patterns and purchasing power. Many others have been...

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The Lodging Exchange: Space, Authority and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century London

McEwan, Joanne

Pages: 50 –68

[A large proportion of London’s eighteenth-century populace lived in lodgings of some description, ranging from cramped spaces shared with strangers to spacious ‘rooms’ within someone else’s house. The prevalence of lodging in the metropolis has been widely acknowledged by historians, but...

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Heartless and Unhomely? Dwellings of the Poor in East Anglia and North-East England

Green, Adrian

Pages: 69 –101

[‘Home is where the heart is.’ Nineteenth-century ideals of homeliness left a large proportion of society occupying dwellings that, by virtue of their poverty, were seen as heartless and unhomely. Historians’ acceptance, however, that homeliness was the preserve of the middle classes may risk...

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Joys of the Cottage: Labourers’ Houses, Hovels and Huts in Britain and the British Colonies, 1770–1830

Lloyd, Sarah

Pages: 102 –121

[When the Board of Agriculture systematised its enquiries into the state of British farming during the 1790s, it instructed its county surveyors to investigate local housing, specifically cottages.1 Arthur Young, who had decided views on the importance of land management as a means to improve the...

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Vagrant Lives

Hitchcock, Tim

Pages: 125 –144

[Simon Eedy and his dog lived for years ‘under a staircase in an old shattered building called ‘Rats’ Castle’, in Dyot Street’ in St Giles in the Fields. In the next century the building would become a byword for rough living and the model for that Victorian nightmare, the ‘Rookery’. But Eedy...

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The Residential and Familial Arrangements of English Pauper Letter Writers, 1800–40s

King, Steven

Pages: 145 –168

[On 30 November 1841, Thomas Pitt came before the Malmesbury (Wiltshire) Coroner to give evidence about his recently deceased father, Joseph Pitt, aged 82. His testimony is worth quoting at length:1No person lived in the House with him. He was capable of taking care of himself up to the last 10...

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Labour Discipline, Agricultural Service and the Households of the Poor in Rural England, c. 1640–1730

Hindle, Steve

Pages: 169 –190

[In The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d (1724), Daniel Defoe was delighted to report to his (fictional) French correspondent that ‘we have Laws here [in England] for regulating of servants’. In particular, he was pleased to observe that magistrates were empowered not only to force poor...

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‘I was Forced to Leave my Place to Hide my Shame’: The Living Arrangements of Unmarried Mothers in London in the Early Nineteenth Century

Williams, Samantha K.

Pages: 191 –218

[In November 1814, when she was working in a South Lambeth household as a servant of all work, Alice King became acquainted, while walking in the street, with Richard Hains, a sailor on the Trabella of Hull. They decided to meet on their days off, once a month. In March he seduced her in a...

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‘The Comforts of a Private Fireside’? The Workhouse, the Elderly and the Poor Law in Georgian Westminster: St Martin-in-the-Fields, 1725–1824

Boulton, Jeremy; Schwarz, Leonard

Pages: 221 –245

[The history of the elderly has received a good deal of treatment recently. Susannah Ottaway, Margaret Pelling, David Thomson, Richard Smith, Lynn Botelho, Pat Thane and others have explored, often in great detail, the historical experience of growing old.1 Ottaway’s contribution in her book, The...

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