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.

Steven King is professor of economic and social history at Nottingham Trent University and co-author of In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900.

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• Winner, Janette Harley Prize

"Focusing in detail and through imaginative comparative analyses on documents that have thus far only been researched in regional case studies, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s makes an innovative contribution to the history of poverty and the Old Poor Law in England and Wales." Henry French, University of Exeter

“[Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s] is the first comprehensive book-length study of pauper letters and draws upon an extremely impressive body of letters as well as responses from parish officials and other parish records including vestry minutes, and overseers’ accounts, receipts, and vouchers, which form the “epistolary scaffolding” around the corpus of letters. Throughout the book King weaves a modest number of exemplary pauper case histories from the letters to illuminate his themes and the complexity of the task. This book will certainly give historians of welfare and agency, letter writing and literacy, and the pauper self plenty to think about. King has undertaken a mammoth task and has demonstrated the many ways in which pauper letters need to be analyzed.” H-Albion

"King has mastered an enormous database, and his analysis of it is thorough and imaginative. An impressive achievement." Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales

"In this wonderfully rich and scholarly book, Steven King provides a highly original approach to understanding the Old Poor Law from the bottom up based on an extraordinary excavation of an entirely new corpus of poor people's letters originating from a wide range of geographical settings. King maps out an entirely new corpus of evidence with which to explore a broad range of historical topics, from the emergence of eloquence and the spread of literacy to the experience of poverty and the provision of welfare. It is a book about letter writing as well as letter writers and will appeal to scholars across a wide disciplinary spectrum from literary studies to welfare historians. Above all, by using the words of the poor themselves, King amply demonstrates deep empathy as well as insight to the experience of poverty in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England and Wales." David Green, King's College London

"Over the last two decades, Steven King has been a leading figure in the social history of poverty and poor relief in England during the industrial revolution. With this book, we enter an entirely new era of the old master project of writing social history from below." Thomas Sokoll, FernUniversität in Hagen

"Steven King is one of a number of people who have for many years done the hard labour of trawling for and transcribing the scrappy - 'fugitive' is the word he uses, with its connotations of elusiveness, oppression and secrecy - letters from and about the poor, attempting to recover 'the pauper experience' by charting the process of requesting relief. King's study of these letters leads him to conclude that the timing of mass literacy, the democratisation of writing, has to be pushed back to the 1820s at least, though that still seems late when you consider that in 1740 Samuel Richardson constructed an entire novel in letters supposedly written by a 16-year-old servant girl, Pamela, to her impoverished parents." London Review of Books