Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe

Narratives of the Sick Poor, 1780-1938

Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth Hurren, Steven King, Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth Hurren, Steven King

• Verlag: Continuum
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441159717
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire de l'Europe

This book provides a genuinely pan-European analysis of pauper narratives, focusing on the experiences of the sick poor in England, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Wales. The contributions highlight the value of pauper narratives for exploring the agency, rhetoric and experiences of the poor and sick poor, significantly enhancing our understanding of the ways in which national and regional welfare systems operated. By foregrounding the particular experiences and strategies of the sick poor, this volume helps to establish and understand the central sentiments of the relief system and the core experiences of those under its care. What emerges is a demonstration that how a relief system treated its sick poor and how those sick poor were able to navigate the system tells us more about welfare history than analysis of any other group.

1

Narratives of poverty and sickness in Europe 1780–1938: Sources, methods and experiences

Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth Hurren and Steven King¹

Introduction

In the context of a rapidly expanding literature on the histories of European welfare states, and of wider attempts to discern and spatially locate differently configured European welfare systems or regimes,² one of the most important empirical advances has been a renewed focus on the experiences of the poor themselves. Historians of poor relief, clothing, medicine, housing, begging, urbanization, language, nutrition, demography, work, migration and politics have increasingly sought to balance representations of the poor in pamphlets, official literature, pictures and popular polemic, with an understanding of the detailed words, lives, feelings, strategies and experiences of the dependent poor.³ Such work has involved the consideration, re-reading and reconstruction of a set of sources that stray beyond the confines of much earlier welfare history. Some of these sources – emigrant letters, autobiographies, witness statements in court cases, newspaper stories, advertisements for runaway fathers, or begging letters – are familiar even if sometimes read and deployed in unfamiliar ways.⁴ Other sources – public petitions, popular ballads, applications for citizenship, the statements of tramping labourers preserved in local guild archives, patient case notes, suicide letters, pauper letters, or forced narratives arising out of pan-European attempts to constrain the spread of venereal disease and to control prostitution – are less well-known.⁵ Yet it is clear that across Europe such sources exist in considerable numbers, particularly from the late eighteenth century as the print marketplace grew and both postal services and the underlying base of popular literacy improved. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the proliferation of letters written by paupers themselves or on their behalf. Once thought to have been largely unique to England and Wales, generated by the particularities of the statutory national Poor Law system there, it is increasingly clear that such letters exist in considerable numbers elsewhere in Europe too.⁶

Analysis of these types of source has led welfare and other historians to balance their questions about the administration and organization of welfare, the supply of resources and the political, religious and philosophical rationale for particular welfare structures, with wider consideration of issues such as: the agency and political participation of the poor; the rhetorical and linguistic register that the poor might use to frame and understand their condition; everyday experiences of the economy of makeshifts; concepts of the life-cycle; and the moral and customary spaces within which the European poor operated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is not the intention of this introduction to provide an extensive overview of the development of European welfare historiography.⁷ Three particular areas might, however, be taken to exemplify these developments and simultaneously highlight the importance of narrative sources for the understanding of welfare histories. Thus, the analysis of posters, speeches, ballads, chapbooks and formalized petitions have been used to illustrate the fact that the poor (a vaguely defined ‘labouring poor’ and the more ‘explicitly poor’ identified by the receipt of different forms of charity or communal relief) had both a political consciousness and will, and participated in local, regional or even national politics. This observation might extend from the participation of poor people in the politics of sixteenth-century Henrician England, through the semi-political manoeuvrings of the mobile poor to obtain citizenship status and rights in Switzerland, and to the highly politicized and class-based resistance of poor people to compulsory smallpox vaccination in various nineteenth-century European states.⁸ Periodically at least, the poor, even the dependent poor, seem to have been politically aware and to have participated in the political process.

A second example of the new directions in which narrative evidence has taken us is the increasingly lively debate over the character, execution and limits of pauper agency. Studies of pauper letters have begun to reveal that the poor adopted complex rhetorical and strategic devices in their engagement with officials and welfare donors, garnering power and de facto rights to relief where there might otherwise be none. For some commentators at least, pauper letters embody the appropriation and subversion of official language and of the conventional linguistic register – encompassing deference, humility, gratitude, modest demands and a desire for independence – that underpinned the structure of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social relations.⁹ Historians have also pointed to the adoption by the poor of powerful customary, rhetorical, religious and philosophical reference points – dignity, the obligations associated with wealth, yardsticks of human rights such as the right not to be naked, and the Christian duty of officials and donors – in their narrative dealings with those controlling access to resources.¹⁰ Others have sought forcefully to assert the limits of pauper agency.¹¹ A related, and third, strand of the historiography has used narrative evidence to refine understanding of the process of begging. Tim Hitchcock, for instance, employed stories from the Old Bailey in London to emphasize that beggars had an understood and accepted place in the urban fabric, such that responding to the pleas of beggars on the streets of eighteenth-century London was crucial to the idea of middling masculinity. He also highlights the difficulties that both communities and beggars themselves had in distinguishing begging from work in the eighteenth century.¹² Sigrid Wadauer, both in this volume and elsewhere, observes similar experiences in early twentieth-century Vienna. More widely, these perspectives have been explored across Europe in the context of begging letters, with historians suggesting a widespread culture of writing pleading letters which might reach the very highest levels of European society.¹³

These are interesting and important perspectives, symbolic of a wider change in the focus and tenor of debate about the European poor, whether they be the disordered and disorderly, or the respectable and respectful. For the purposes of this volume, however, we shift our attention to narratives by and about a particular group of the European poor, the sick. There are several reasons for this focus. First, while other groups of the life-cycle poor (the aged, widows, children etc.) have attracted increasing historiographical attention, it has become clear that life-cycle conditions were rarely sufficient in their own right as a reason for charity or formal relief to be given. Nowhere is this clearer than in work on the aged poor, where relief in whatever form was invariably tied into progressive disability and inability to labour because of physical or mental weakness.¹⁴ In short, ill-health broadly defined (to include conditions such as pregnancy or lunacy for instance) is a cross-cutting theme in European welfare studies. For England and Wales at least, sickness was at most times the key reason for relief applications, and more widely contributors to this volume demonstrate admirably how even proximate reasons for relief applications such as unemployment often masked underlying sickness. A corollary of this observation, and a second reason for the focus of this volume, is that the sick poor author or are the subject of more narratives than any group of the European poor. Moreover, the range of narratives, running from letters and petitions on the one hand, through inquests, suicide notes and newspaper reportage, to ballads and poems on the other, tends to be rather wider than for any other subset of the poor.¹⁵ This should not, perhaps, surprise us, since the sick poor arguably appeared in the widest (narrative generating) range of institutional and relational contexts. Thus, we can find narratives emerging from hospitals and hospital visiting committees, work and almshouses, the inquiries of medical charities, the activities of individual doctors, the everyday work of poor relief agencies, the sick poor themselves, regional and central government and in response to the threat of epidemic and pandemic disease. The situational context of the sick poor, in other words, makes them a microcosm of the experiences of paupers more widely.

A final reason for focusing on the sick poor is that this group presented the most complex legal, economic, organizational, philosophical, moral and customary dilemmas for those providing welfare resources. This was true whether we consider the sick poor under the English and Welsh Old and New Poor Law systems (which afforded quasi-legal and customary rights to the sick poor) or under the philanthropic and institutionally based charity that we see in many continental countries. Even in Scotland, arguably one of the harshest welfare regimes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe,¹⁶ how to deal with the sick poor posed acute philosophical, economic, moral and practical dilemmas. Could sickness and an associated inability to labour be seen as value neutral, a hazard that might be faced by all and carrying inevitable consequences for the liabilities of communities? Or was sickness, as Beate Althammer and Sigrid Wadauer both suggest in this volume, seen as a direct reflection of the moral bankruptcy of the poor? Should sickness be treated at least cost or should officials seek to avoid higher long-term bills by paying for more effective treatment? What was the Christian duty of officials and donors in relation to the sick poor, irrespective of the law? In the sense that sickness and its consequences compromised basic human values (the right to clothing and adequate food, the ability to fulfil the obligations of a parent, the ability to be part of a community and neighbourhood), how should communities react? How might customary, legal and moral obligations intersect to provide a moral space in which the sick poor could negotiate? And if doctors, neighbours, other officials, family, religious ministers, friends and employers wrote in support of charitable or communal relief for the poor, how much weight should officials give to these epistolary advocates? Such questions locate sickness, the sick poor and narratives by or about the sick poor at the interface of wider attempts to understand the nature and experience of European poverty and the agency of the European poor. They also, however, pinpoint the multi-layered (implicit and explicit) decision-making that officials would have to engage in when dealing with the sick poor. While the unemployed, single mothers and other groups of the dependent poor could be ignored or were the focus of practices coalescing around control and the avoidance of concerted social protest, the sick poor constituted a rather less soluble problem for the communities and poor relief systems of Europe. And in the sense that ill-health created, as Peter Wessel Hansen points out in his chapter for this volume, a large group of the ‘shamefaced’ poor who risked falling down the social scale, the consequences of sickness for officials largely drawn from the same class were all too readily apparent.

Against this broad contextual backdrop, the contributions to our volume deal with the representation and self-representation of the sick poor in Austria, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Spain and Sweden between the later eighteenth century (when opportunities for representation and self-representation began to burgeon) and the 1930s (after which the very nature of welfare itself began to be transformed). The definition of the ‘sick poor’ employed here is a wide one. In typological terms our chapters focus on a spectrum that runs from the ‘shamefaced’ poor – the respectable independent labouring and lower-middle classes for whom sickness amounted to the threat of permanent downward social mobility, considered by Georgina Laragy and Peter Wessel Hansen – through to what many contemporaries thought of as the ‘degraded poor’, such as the syphilitic women analysed by Anna Lundberg or the wandering poor that are the subject of Sigrid Wadauer’s chapter. The range of ill-health encompassed by the volume is equally wide, running from insanity/melancholy (chapters by Cathy Smith, Georgina Laragy and Peter Wessel Hansen), through infectious diseases (in chapters by Anna Lundberg and Beate Althammer) and to the chronic but usually poorly specified sicknesses often associated with old age, grinding poverty and unemployment (in chapters by Steven King and Alison Stringer, Katrin Marx-Jaskulski and Tamara Stazic-Wendt). This range in-and-of itself gives a sense of the centrality of sickness to the experience of European poverty. By way of further context, the rest of this introduction focuses on three core issues: a discussion of the disparate European relief and settlement systems within which narratives were generated, read and exchanged, and thereby a consideration of potential chronological and typological variations in the source base between different sorts of welfare regimes; a detailed discussion of the contexts within which narrative sources by or about the sick poor were generated (and some of their problems) and a coeval discussion of the way in which the types of ‘voices’ found in them might be classified so as to facilitate systematic comparative studies; and a brief consideration of where, collectively, the work on narratives explored in our chapters sits within the wider framework of knowledge on the European sick poor.

European welfare contexts

A literature which once saw the English and Welsh Old and New Poor Laws and associated settlement legislation as somehow unique has more recently given way to a sense that most European states had the same welfare building blocks available but simply sequ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1 Narratives of poverty and sickness in Europe 1780–1938: Sources, methods and experiences
• 2 Grief, sickness and emotions in the narratives of the shamefaced poor in late eighteenth-century Copenhagen
• 3 'Labouring on a bed of sickness': The material and rhetorical deployment of ill-health in male pauper letters
• 4 'I have once more taken the Leberty to say as you well know': The development of rhetoric in the letters of the English, Welsh and Scottish sick and poor 1780s–1830s
• 5 Poverty and epidemics: Perceptions of the poor at times of Cholera in Germany and Spain, 1830s–1860s
• 6 Living with insanity: Narratives of poverty, pauperism and sickness in asylum records 1840–76
• 7 Narratives of poverty in Irish suicides between the Great Famine and the First World War, 1845–1914
• 8 Stories of care and coercion: Narratives of poverty and suffering among patients with venereal disease in Sweden, 1860–1920
• 9 From unemployment to sickness and poverty: The narratives and experiences of the unemployed in Trier and surroundings, 1918–33
• 10 Narratives of ill-health in applicant letters from rural Germany, 1900–30
• 11 Asking for the privilege to work: Applications for a peddling licence (Austria in the 1920s and 1930s)
• Appendix: Narratives writ large
• Select Bibliography
• Index