In Their Own Write was a project (which used letters from paupers and other poor people as well as associated manuscript material such as petitions, sworn statements and advocate letters (those written on behalf of paupers) to investigate the lives of the poor in the nineteenth century.
Between January 2018 and June 2021 it received grant funding from the AHRC for a core project which focused on the many thousands of volumes of poor law correspondence (MH12), ca.1834-1900, held by The National Archives (TNA) at Kew, most of which had previously been little used by historians. The project was run jointly by TNA and the Department of History at Nottingham Trent University. In it’s now, 2022-2023, un-funded stage the project continues to archivally survey, record and transcribe letters from paupers, the wider poor and their advocates, as well as planning further research and engagement outputs.
Aims of the Project
- To systematically sample the MH12 correspondence in order to identify significant numbers of pauper letters within the overall collection of correspondence;
- To identify and sample other sources of correspondence from paupers and poor people from the 18th and 19th centuries;
- To transcribe these letters and identify the ‘voices’ of the poor who wrote to poor law officials;
- To analyse the letters with a view to understanding how the poor understood, experienced and exercised agency under the Old and New Poor Laws using historiographical methodologies, but also employing tools from corpus linguistics.
The project team has extensive experience of working creatively with pauper letters and other poor law sources over many years. It brings together world-leading experts in the fields of British poor law studies and pauper correspondence (see below). In addition the Pauper Letters Research Group of volunteers brings a new dynamic to the team and their role is described in the Pauper Letters Research Group pages.
Outcomes over the three years of the grant-funded project included:
- a ground breaking monograph;
- edited volumes showcasing the work of international scholars working on pauper letters and similar sources;
- a number of scholarly articles;
- many exciting outreach events.
The details of many of these outcomes can be found on the ‘Articles and Outcomes’ page, under the ‘Resources’ tab, above.
Project Members:
* Professor Steven King (Principal Investigator of the grant-funded project) is employed at Nottingham Trent University and has worked extensively on questions of power, agency and practice under the Old Poor Law. In particular he has been concerned with our understandings of and explanations for spatial variation in the intent of the poor law. In this project he moves on, with the rest of the team, to look at the question of how poor people understood and navigated the New Poor Law system to which they were notionally subject. A book of poetry inspired by this accumulated work – On the Poor – is published in April 2018.
* Dr Paul Carter (Co-Investigator of the grant-funded project) is employed at The National Archives as a principal records specialist and works across the modern domestic collections on collaborative projects. He has worked extensively on the records created under the New Poor Law, particularly those created or collected by the central poor law authorities. He has also worked at the universities of Leicester, Northampton and Nottingham, researching or teaching within themes across modern social British history.
Previous Project Members:
Natalie Carter (Research Associate on the grant-funded project) previously worked at The National Archives at Kew, and for the British Association for Local History. Her work has focused on records of the New Poor Law, particularly those held by the central poor law authorities in record series MH 12 from which this project draws its key source material. She has also previously worked on two large scale archival projects overseeing the cataloguing and digitisation of a large number of MH 12 records from across England and Wales.
Dr Peter Jones (Research Associate on the grant-funded project) worked extensively on Old Poor Law pauper letters, as well as other demotic sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has previously been a research associate at the Universities of Southampton, Durham and Birmingham, and was Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University between 2008 and 2011. He is currently employed as a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at the University of Glasgow.
Dr Carol Beardmore (Research Associate on the grant-funded project) worked extensively on the history of rural communities during the nineteenth century, including how landed estates contributed to the relief of the poor (her monograph on Financing the Landed Estate was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019). She holds a Lectureship in History at the Open University and an Associate Lectureship at De Montfort University where she focuses on British history from the 18th century to the present day.
Dr Sue Hawkins (Records Specialist, The National Archives) has many years’ experience working on historical digitisation projects including projects on admission records and case notes relating to several 19th century children’s hospitals and on the membership records of the British Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) during World War 1. Until recently, she was senior lecturer in the history department at Kingston University specialising in 19th century social history.
* Steve King and Paul Carter continue the project in an unfunded stage, surveying, with the Pauper Letters Research Group, recording and transcribing letters from paupers, the wider poor and their advocates. In addition we are still collectively producing and giving online talks and papers as well as preparing other collaborative research grants.
Projects, Poverty and the Poor Under the Poor Laws 