The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1723-82 by Alannah Tomkins

The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1723-82 by Alannah Tomkins

This comparative study of urban poverty is the first to chart the irregular pulse of poverty’s encounters with officialdom. It exploits an unusual methodology to secure new perspectives from familiar sources.

The highly localised characteristics of the welfare economy generated a peculiarly urban environment for the poor. Separate chapters examine the parameters of workhouse life when the preconceptions of contemporaries have been stripped away; the reach of institutional charities such as almshouses, schools and infirmaries; and the surprisingly broad clientele of urban pawnbrokers. Detailed analysis of the poor is achieved via meticulous matching of individuals who fell within the purview of two or more authorities. The result is a unique insight into the survival economics of urban poverty, arising not from a tidy network of welfare but from a loose assembly of options, where the impoverished positioned themselves repeatedly to fit official, philanthropic, or casual templates of the ‘deserving’.

This book will be essential reading for historians of English poverty and welfare, and eighteenth-century social and economic life.

Tomkins presents the conditions under which the poor lived, drawing on life in the workhouse, traditional poor relief such as lodging in poorhouses, health care, and schools for the poorThe section on credit and pawn broking among those in distress is especially significant because this is a field that has hardly been researched so far, and it demonstrates the flexibility of the poor in their struggle against want. -- .

Alannah Tomkins is Lecturer in History at the University of Keele

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780719075049
ISBN 10	0719075041
Title	The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1723-82
Author	Alannah Tomkins
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Manchester University Press
Year published	2006-10-30
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.