The Duty to Provide: Fathers, Families and the Workhouse in England, 1880–1914
This chapter explores the ways that the poor laws in England were designed around the norms and ideals of the provider role in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and how in practice the result- ing structures rarely matched the more fluid realities of the lives of the poor. In the decades around 1900, Poor Law provision in England was under intense scrutiny as meanings of poverty and of welfare more generally were being challenged. Growing critiques of the excluding side-effects of the Poor Law accompanied debates about how to bring the male working class into the nation state by reconceptualizing citi- zenship around long-standing social-moral norms of obligation to pro- vide for women, children and the elderly within families. The provider role was thus highly gendered, with husbands and fathers normally required to support their dependents, but the relationship between providing and masculinity was a complex one, particularly amongst the very poorest who availed themselves of Poor Law relief. Those who failed to provide found themselves increasingly vulnerable to pauper- ism, at the same time as its stigma powerfully reinforced the ‘deviant’ position of those claiming relief. However, relationships between wel- fare institutions and families were not totally determined by the state and philanthropic agencies, but were actively used and contested at the individual level by those seeking relief and by collective working-class struggles. The voice of the very poor is notoriously difficult to access, but some fragmentary autobiographical accounts of encounters with pauperism provide opportunities to explore these dynamic relation- ships between the Poor Law and its subjects through the perceptions and reactions of the poor themselves.
Punishing paupers? Control, discipline and mental health in the Southwell workhouse (1836–71)
Abstract This article focuses on the way that staff and guardians in the rural Nottinghamshire workhouse of Southwell sought to exert control and containment over pauper inmates. Fusing together local and central records for the period 1834–71, including locally held punishment books and correspondence at The National Archives, Kew (TNA), we argue that the notional power of the workhouse authorities was heavily shaded. Most paupers most of the time did not find their behaviour heavily and clumsily controlled. Rather, staff focused their attention in terms of detecting and punishing disorderly behaviour on a small group of long-term and often mentally ill paupers whose actions might create enmities or spiral into larger conflicts and dissent in the workhouse setting. Both inmates and those under threat of workhouse admission would have seen or heard about punishment of ‘the usual characters’. This has important implications for how we understand the intent and experience of the New Poor Law up to the formation of the Local Government Board (LGB) in 1871.
The Mound on the Mount: A Possible Solution to the Problem with Jerusalem
Following Knauf's suggestion (2000), the article raises the possibility that in most periods in the second and first millennia BCE the main built-up area of Jerusalem was limited to a mound on the Temple Mount. This mound, which may have covered an area of five hectares and more, was boxed-in under the Herodian platform. At these periods activity in the City of David ridge was restricted to the area near the Gihon spring. In the Iron IIB and late Hellenistic Periods the fortified settlement expanded simultaneously to both the City of David ridge and the southwestern hill. In these two periods there was no need to fortify the western side of the City of David, as this line ran in the middle of the city.