Alysa Levene

Parish Apprenticeship and the Old Poor Law in London

This article offers an examination of the patterns and motivations behind parish apprenticeship in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. It stresses continuity in outlook from parish officials binding children, which involved placements in both the traditional and industrializing sectors of the economy. Evidence on the ages, employment types, and locations of 3,285 pauper apprentices bound from different parts of London between 1767 and 1833 indicates a variety of local patterns. The analysis reveals a pattern of youthful age at binding, a range of employment experiences, and parish-specific links to particular trades and manufactures.

The estimation of mortality at the London Foundling Hospital, 1741–99

The high mortality of foundlings across Europe has long been established by historical demographers but methods of quantification have not permitted comparison with rates in the populations beyond the foundling hospitals. This study investigates mortality rates at the London Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century in a way that addresses the issue. The study finds that although foundling mortality was extremely high at certain periods in the hospitals history, there is evidence for a decline towards the end of the century, in common with national and local rates. This suggests that the causes of the mortality fall were common even to infants born in disadvantaged circumstances, and brought up away from their mothers. Several possible reasons for the fall in mortality are considered, including improved nutrition among mothers, a shift in the disease environment, and changes in such habits as gin drinking.

‘Honesty, sobriety and diligence’: master-apprentice relations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England

The historical focus on master–apprentice relations has tended to spotlight breakdown and trouble. Apprentices have been classified as part of a conscious sub-society who knew their customary entitlements, and were apt to make their presence felt noisily on holidays and at times of political trouble. Their presence in the mobs marshalled around the campaigns of John Wilkes, the Gordon and Caroline Riots, and the various London trade disputes in the 1760s increased the perception of the threat they posed to order. Instances of apprentices being brought before the courts for bad behaviour, running away, theft and violence have also frequently been highlighted, as have the relatively rare cases where serious physical harm was done to one party by the other. This article, however, argues that this portrayal fails to appreciate the wide variety of experiences of apprenticeship and how this might change over

The Development of Municipal General Hospitals in English County Boroughs in the 1930s

When thinking of spurs to hospital development in the first half of the last century, it would be easy to assume that the greatest watershed was provided by the 1946 National Health Service Act. In this article, however, we focus on an earlier and often overlooked piece of legislation, which had a perhaps equally significant impact on the development of hospitals in England and Wales. This was the 1929 Local Government Act, which changed both the ownership and the focus of many of the largest hospitals in the country. As Robert Pinker has observed, the act “radically altered the percentage distribution of hospital beds in the public sector”. Such observations notwithstanding, municipal medicine in the 1930s has not received the historical attention it deserves, an omission which this article seeks in part to remedy.1 The terms of the act in respect of hospital development were permissive, and the extent to which local authorities acted had a great effect on the way in which their municipal hospital services developed, and hence the beds and facilities available at the time of the nationalization of the health services. The reaction of local authorities to the act, however, depended partly on their own choices, and partly on constraints over which they had less control.

Family breakdown and the ‘Welfare Child’ in 19th and 20th century Britain

This article traces new cycles of interest in past children as distinct from past childhood. Recent work highlighting that a conceptualisation of childhood existed even in periods with few written records closes the chapter begun by Philippe Ariès in 1960. Instead, there has been a new surge of interest in children on the edges of family life, as well as children in similarly liminal positions between the worlds of adults and children: runaways, delinquents and orphans. Several themes in the literature are identified, based on the conflicting ideas of ‘body/mind’, ‘victim/threat’, ‘needs/rights’. It is noted that researchers are using more imaginative ways of reaching the lived experience of children than the family or institutional framework, and that an increasing link is drawn between historical and modern concerns such as child abuse and the care of ‘at risk’ children.

The origins of the children of the London Foundling Hospital, 1741–1760: a reconsideration

The infants left at the London Foundling Hospital in the first twenty years of its operation have generally been classed as illegitimate. This study examines some of the characteristics of the children who entered the hospital between 1741 and 1760, and points to a far larger component of legitimate infants than has previously been suspected, up to a third being born in wedlock. The backgrounds of the children varied considerably, as did the reasons for their abandonment, with a stress on personal and economic misfortune for both married and single parents. The higher level of legitimacy among the foundlings than has been thought has implications for the illegitimacy ratio of London, pointing to relatively low levels, in common with those found for the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Investment choices? County borough health expenditure in inter-war England and Wales

This article examines the level of expenditure on health care provision in English and Welsh county boroughs during the inter-war period. It focuses in particular on key individual services such as maternity and child welfare to show that while there was a general trend to increased municipal health care expenditure, when this is disaggregated significant variations emerge between services, between boroughs and over time. It is argued that such analysis is of itself revealing, previously neglected and necessary for further qualitative analysis of the as yet little understood inter-war municipal medicine sector.

Poor families, removals and ‘nurture’ in late old poor law London

The consideration of the removals aspect of settlement law – that is, the moving on of paupers or potential paupers to the parish where they ‘belonged’ – has focused almost exclusively on working-age adults and labour migration. This article focuses on how removal law affected families with children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in two large London parishes. It finds that children were a sizeable presence among the removed population but that there were notable differences in family type between the two parishes. Furthermore, while most young children were kept with their mothers even if they did not share a settlement, others were removed alone, even after a change in settlement law in 1795 that should have assured their common claim in certain cases. The study sheds light on attitudes to poor children and their families, as well as on the exigencies brought about by economic circumstances and employment opportunities in the parish.

Jewish Households and Religious Identity in Mid-nineteenth-century Britain:

This article tests the impact of industrial life, migration, and religious ties on family life. Specifically, it examines Jewish households, asking whether they conformed to traditional patterns of nuclearity, and what this suggests about wider kinship or community networks. It shows that Jews accommodated a range of people in their households, from family members to Jewish lodgers and non-Jewish servants. Jewish lodgers frequently lived with coreligionists who also often shared birthplaces or occupations. In sum, the data suggest a strong degree of intracommunal solidarity despite high levels of migration and also emphasize the diversity of household forms in this period.

Pauper Children and Poor Law Childhoods in England and Wales, 1834–1910

The history of childhood and child welfare has had a steady simmering of interest for a number of years now, and scholars are slowly starting to construct a more coherent picture of experiences, id...