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They were destitute, their children were starving, and their short and pitiful lives were often affected by anguish and suffering. But they knew that morally they had rights and understood how to make their voices heard.
Now, unpublished letters from penniless and disabled homeless people living in the early 1800s reveal the sophisticated and powerful rhetoric they used to secure regular welfare payments from parish authorities, even though they could barely read and write.
The letters, which were sent to the Kirkby Lonsdale parish overseer between 1809 and 1836, demonstrate how poor families were “masters” in navigating the complexities of the Old English Poor Law and effectively negotiating long-term financial support. .
“It’s the closest you can get to oral testimony [of these paupers] In the historical record, we believe that almost all of these letters were written by the people who signed them, ”said Steven King, professor of economic and social history at Nottingham Trent University.
In some letters, the homeless write phonetically and in their Cumbrian dialect, exactly as they would say the words they are writing. “Some of these people talk as if writing causes them pain. They have to navigate a medium with which they are not familiar. They are literally writing from sound, ”King said.
The homeless were forced, out of sheer desperation, to write those letters when they became homeless after moving from their home parish. This is because under the Old Poor Law, those in need were only allowed to ask for financial help from taxpayers in their home parish and not simply from the parish in which they lived. supervisor of their original home parish and demonstrating why they morally “deserved” his help so that impoverished families could get some relief.
“The system makes it difficult for them [to get support]Just like the modern welfare system makes it difficult for people, ”King said. “They have to find a way, and that’s what they do.”
For example, the rhetoric of “nudity” and “famine” are deployed with great efficiency by several different correspondents, as when a parishioner writes: “The children are all nearly naked and hungry.” This would have been seen as immoral and “an affront to dignity,” according to King: a supervisor could lose his moral position in the parish if he ignored such a letter. Another wrote: “I hope you become friends with me right now or it happens to me all over the place.”
“These people don’t have legal rights, but they are very adept at enforcing moral obligations, especially if they are disabled,” King said. “They are not powerless. They may use pleading language from time to time: ‘I am your humble servant and I am very sorry I wrote to you,’ but what they mean is, ‘Give me the money.’
The letters will be published by the British Academy on Christmas Eve in a new book, Navigating the Old English Poor Law, by King and Dr. Peter Jones, Research Associate at the University of Leicester. In all, the two scholars analyzed 599 pieces of correspondence relating to just 20 poor Kirkby Lonsdale families. This enabled them to understand not only the rhetorical strategies the homeless employed to convincingly negotiate on their own behalf, but also how they often got friends, advocates, and doctors to defend their case and emphasize the moral legitimacy of their claim of support.
One man, who got splintered in one eye while working in a lime kiln and had a cataract in the other, “pulls all the moral levers to get the best possible comfort,” says King. “You see the way he uses his own words, the official words and the words of the defenders to present a case. And, of course, they give in, pay his rent and give him an allowance, because he has a moral case. What can you do if a man is blind? You can’t let him starve. “
Jones said the letters have led him to consider how moral rights are framed within today’s bureaucratized and nationalized welfare system and to sympathize with benefits evaluators who, unlike parochial supervisors of the past, have no discretion and little power. .
“It has become increasingly difficult for welfare agents – the workers who are on the front lines, dealing with the poor – to treat the people in front of them as moral individuals whose needs must be interpreted and responded to. That is something we have lost. “
