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Volume 1: Voices of the Poor: Poor Law Depositions and Letters; Pauperletters and the letters of overseers of the poor are interesting andimportant for students and scholars at several levels. While we have to copewith lack of any fixed orthography, the poor state of some material andpatchy survival of material on a geographical basis, pauper letters allow usto achieve as near a first hand perspective as is possible on the feelings,strategies and sentiments of the poor themselves. They must be usedsensitively - these were after all documents deployed as part of a bargainingprocess - but most people who have used them have suggested that pauperletters were essentially accurate reflections of the state of being poor. Acollection of this sort, then, will allow scholars and students access tomaterial that can genuinely tell them something about the everydayexperiences of the 70 per cent or so of the eighteenth and nineteenth centurypopulation who were at risk of falling into life-long or intermittentpoverty. This volume takes its strength from a thematic approach to thedocuments. It thus draws on the research specialisms of some of the mostprominent historians in the field, and allows a geographically diversepicture to emerge of the experiences of the poor. Volume 2: Voices from theStreet: Poverty in Ballads; For many of the poor at this time, the road toliteracy was paved with chapbooks and ballad sheets as well as the Bible. Thewide availability of popular literature priced at around about a penny eachand their increasing production during the eighteenth century suggests thatmany of the poor could read and that they increasingly learned to do so byreading secular rather than religious literature. Unauthorized and massivelyabridged versions of popular literary texts made their way into the hands ofthe poor. All classes consumed popular literature and enjoyed its vastsubject matter - Biblical tales, Greek myths, folklore, histories, poetry andplays. It encompassed literary greats as well as lows and embodied folkloreas well as high culture. The poor, as a group, was both the subject and theaudience of much of this literature. The ballads and chapbooks recorded inthis volume, drawn from research on archival collections in Cambridge,London, New York and Harvard, represent a wide sample of eighteenth-centurypopular literature that was enjoyed by poorer men and women. Volume 3:Institutional Responses: the London Foundling Hospital; The London FoundlingHospital, one of the most eloquent testimonials to the eighteenth-centurycharitable drive to assist the deserving poor in Britain, received its RoyalCharter in 1739. In the same year, its newly formed General Committeepublished the following preamble to its book of subscribers: 'Whereas HisMajesty in order to prevent the frequent Murders committed on poor miserableinfants by their Parents to hide their Shame, and also to prevent thatinhumane Custom of exposing Newborn Children to perish in the streets, orbeing trained up in Idleness Beggary or Theft Hath after the Example of otherChristian Countries, by his Royal Charter...incorporated the Governors andGuardians of the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of exposed anddeserted Young children...' This extract reflects many of the themes that arefound throughout the extensive archive of this institution: the desire tosave lives and to bring Innocent infants up to productive careers; the roleof shame in abandoning a child; and the sense that the Hospital was assistingpoor parents. This volume will use both transcribed and printed sources tohighlight themes such as this over the life course of the children in thefirst half-century of the Hospital's operation. The introduction willcontextualize the Hospital in terms of contemporary charities (like othereighteenth-century charities, it was founded on a joint-stock basis), both inEngland and in Europe. It will also introduce the themes noted above, anddescribe at what points in the children's lives the voices of the poor areheard. The Hospital, and the phenomenon of child abandonment more generallywere evocative topics in the eighteenth century. The letters and noteswritten by parents and guardians illustrate the spectrum of emotionssurrounding the act of abandonment, from the brief, to the emotional andarticulate, through the business-like accounts of circumstances written byparish officials passing on responsibility for unwanted infants. The firstsection of this volume will focus on the letters left with children when theywere given up (between 1741 and 1760), highlighting the range of backgroundsfrom which they came, and the persistent theme of poverty and familybreakdown. The second section will broaden this focus to take in thechildren's mothers, and the role played by shame and future prospects intheir decision to abandon. This is made possible by a change in admissionsrules after 1760, which required mothers and guardians to send in a petitionand character references stating their position and the circumstances oftheir child's birth. The third section will shift to the hospitaladministration, and the concerns of the governors for the future of thechildren. The documents will illustrate themes such as the proper life coursefor a child with no parents or status; the aims of the governors in terms ofassisting the poor; and the desire to preserve life. Documents in thissection will include William Cadogan's highly influential Essay on thenursing and management of children from their birth to three years of age of1748, published at the order of the Foundling Hospital Committee; newspaperadvertisements in papers such as the Daily Advertiser, taken out by thegovernors to justify policies such as universal inoculation, andapprenticeship to certain trades, and the 1749 Account of the Hospital...inwhich is the Charter, Act of Parliament, By-laws and Regulations. Volume 4:Institutional responses: the London Refuge for the Destitute, 1806-30;Coherent accounts of the lives of the urban poor in eighteenth and earlynineteenth century England are very difficult to find. This volume would adda new dimension to our understanding of the urban poor by exploring ahitherto untouched and virtually unknown source of pauper narratives - thosearising from the petitions, written statements and oral requests addressed tothe board of The London Refuge for The Destitute in the early years of thenineteenth century. These sources can be used to provide information aboutthe extensive range of forces that affected the London poor in the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Almost all these narratives, bydefinition, describe life-journeys that ended in deprivation, despair anddestitution, but they also provide evidence about a considerable number ofother issues such as the demographics of destitution; family and kinshipties; migration patterns; work opportunities for men and women and themakeshift household economies they put together; the role of service andservanthood; sexual relations, child abuse, seduction and prostitution;domestic violence; consumption and clothing patterns etc. The volume willfocus on the records created by the London Refuge for the Destitute duringthe first twenty-five years of its existence (1806-30). The Refuge for theDestitute was opened in 1806 and from 1812 (when it moved to new premises inHackney) the minute books of its committees, which contain a marvellouscollection of pauper narratives, have survived in an almost complete run.This was an important institutional initiative in itself. It began as a placeof last resort for men and women who were completely destitute, and soonbecame a partly state-sponsored juvenile reformatory - one of the earliest ofits kind in Europe. Its records are even more worthy of study, however,because they contain a very rare type of document - the brief life historiesof many hundreds of paupers. The volume will include two main types ofdocument - printed pamphlets published by the Refuge for the Destitute,including a few surviving annual reports which contain a considerable numberof case histories, and transcriptions of a large sample of life histories.Volume 5: Philanthropy and Fiction in the 'Long' Eighteenth Century; Whatmade the eighteenth-century practices of giving different from those commonunder the Tudors and the Stuarts, and thus must have justly struckcontemporaries as particular to their age, was the emergence of organizedphilanthropy. Along with the traditional figure of the individual giver nowappeared the philanthropic association, such as the Hospital - a secularinstitution supported by numerous donors, the majority of whom rarely came indirect contact with the immediate objects of their charity, that is, thespecific illegitimate children of the poor, disabled soldiers and sailors,indigent pregnant women, prostitutes, etc. The number of hospitalsestablishing this new kind of relationship between the giver and therecipient of charity rose from 2 before 1700 to 31 by 1800, a statistic thatreflects deeper transformations in the social fabric of early modern England.To articulate these transformations, this volume features a broad range offictional works that both reflected and shaped eighteenth-century attitudestoward the changing practices of philanthropy as well as a selection ofnon-fictional texts that provide a context for the issues broached by thoseliterary narratives, with an accompanying commentary. The volume opens withan introduction discussing the prominence of the discourse on philanthropy infiction of the period and its role in the formation of what we now think ofas a distinctly modern pattern of institutionalized charity. The key themesaround which the ensuing selection of fictional and non-fictional texts isorganized include the eighteenth-century redefinition of the concept of the'deserving' poor, as well as the changes in the symbolism of poverty; therelationship between private and public giving, as well as between thekinship networks of charity and the networks forging affective ties amongstrangers; gender and race dynamics of charity; English philanthropy andnationalist discourse; and issues in the secularization of philanthropy.