‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-Person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900

Abstract

Historians of the poor and experiences of poverty have long attempted to write ‘history from below’, in other words from the perspective of the poor themselves. This is problematic when the poor in question were either illiterate, or left few or no first-person sources of the types associated with the elites and middling sorts, such as diaries, letters or commonplace books. In the last 25 years, though, written genres have emerged that can fulfil the function of personal narratives in histories of the poor, in that they contain biographical and coincidental detail about families, occupations, health and political engagement. Working-class autobiographies survive in numbers from the eighteenth century onwards, and were not necessarily produced by the literate (as some were recorded at the author’s dictation). Official documents such as settlement examinations and correspondence generated by the workings of the English poor laws offer truncated access to similar information. Histories of the poor may now strive to amplify the voices of their subjects, albeit while observing the muffling effects of each genre.