K. D. M. Snell

The apprenticeship system in British history: the fragmentation of a cultural institution

Apprentice training is and always has been a somewhat delicate subject and is often handled in discussion between employers and the trade unions much in the same way as a chemist handles T.N.T. 1 1W.J. Carron, ‘Address of the President of the AEU to the Seventh Annual Conference of the British Association for Commercial and Industrial Education: East Midlands Area’, in British Association for Commercial and Industrial Education (BACIE), The Changing Pattern of Apprentice Training (place of publication not given, 1958), 38.

Lone-parent families and the Welfare State: past and present

This paper was published as Continuity and Change, 1987, 2 (3), pp. 387-422. It is available from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1827480#fn01. Doi: 10.1017/S0268416000000710

Settlement, Poor Law and the Rural Historian: New Approaches and Opportunities

This paper was published as Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, 1992, 3 (2), pp. 145-172. It is available from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2560780. Doi: 10.1017/S0956793300003071

Belonging and Community: Understandings of ‘Home’ and ‘Friends’ Among the English Poor, 1750–1850

This article is based on unique ‘narratives of the poor’, that is, letters from poor people to their parishes of settlement, petitions to the London Refuge of the Destitute, and letters from mothers to the London Foundling Hospital, with supportive evidence from newspapers. These display fundamental concepts among the English poor, who were often poorly literate, and who comprised the majority of the population. Discussion focuses upon their understandings of ‘home’, ‘belonging’, ‘friends’, and ‘community’. These key concepts are related here to modern discussions, to set important concerns into historical perspective. ‘Friends’, valuably studied by sociologists such as Pahl, had a wide meaning in the past. ‘Home’ meant (alongside abode) ones parish of legal settlement, where one was entitled to poor relief under the settlement/poor laws. This was where one ‘belonged’. Ideas of ‘community’ were held and displayed even at a distance, among frequently migrant poor, who wrote to their parishes showing strong ties of attachment, right, and local obligation. This discussion explores these issues in connection with belonging and identity. It elucidates the meaning and working of poor law settlement, and is also an exploration of popular mentalities and the semi-literate ways in which these were expressed.

English rural societies and geographical marital endogamy, 1700-1837

This article studies 69 rural parishes in eight English counties, examining changes in geographical marital endogamy. It discovers a consistent upward trend in the proportions of marriages that were parochially endogamous, coupled with a decline in so –called ‘foreign’ marriages following Hardwickes’s Act (1753), and a striking shift towards marriages taking place in the brides’ parishes. It explores regional variability in parochial endogamy and stresses the role of settlement sizes. The explanation for rising endogamy highlights factors such as population growth, rising poor relief expenditures, and attitudes resistant to ‘outsiders’ during a period of precarious subsistence and associated tensions.

Rural History: The Prospect Before Us

This paper was published as Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, 1990, 1 (1), pp. 1-4. It is available from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=RUH&volumeId=1&issueId=01# Doi: 10.1017/S0956793300003162

The rise of living alone and loneliness in history

Abstract This article connects two current debates: the rise of single-person households or of ‘solitaries’, and the so-called ‘loneliness epidemic’. It raises questions about how these are associated, via social-science literature on loneliness as a social, contextual and subjective experience, and findings in that literature about the relevance of lone-person households. The article is concerned to explore the history of living alone as a form of family structure, via analysis of European, North American and Japanese pre-industrial and industrial listings of inhabitants, and the post-1851 British censuses to 2011. It also does this cartographically via British mapping of lone-person households in 1851, 1881, 1911 and 2011. It documents dramatic rise across many countries in single-person households during the twentieth century, notably since the 1960s. Many pre-industrial settlements had no single-person households, and the average was around 5 percent of households. The current western proportions of such households (e.g. 31 percent in the UK) are wholly unprecedented historically, even reaching to 60 percent or more of households in some modern European and North American cities. The discussion examines this trend – which has very wide ramifications – and raises issues about its relevance for modern problems of loneliness as a social and welfare concern.

Rural History and Popular Culture

This paper was published as Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, 1993, 4 (1), pp. 1-4. It is available from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=5179956&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0956793300003447. Doi: 10.1017/S0956793300003447

In or Out of their Place: The Migrant Poor in English Art, 1740–1900

This article considers how depictions of the migrant poor in English landscape art changed between 1740 and 1900. A painting by Edward Haytley (1744) is used to illustrate some prevailing themes and representations of the rural poor in the early eighteenth century, with the labouring poor being shown ‘in their place’ socially and spatially. This is then contrasted with the signs of a restless and migrant poor which appear in a few of Gainsboroughs paintings, culminating in the poverty-stricken roadside, mobile, vagrant and sometimes gypsy poor who are so salient and sympathetically depicted in George Morlands work between 1790 and 1804. While there were clearly British and European precedents for such imagery long before this period, it is argued here that English landscape art after about 1750, and especially from c. 1790, witnessed a marked upsurge of such restless and migrant imagery, which was related to institutional and demographic transformations in agrarian societies. By George Morlands death in 1804, ‘social realism’ had become firmly established in his imagery of the migrant poor, and this long predated the 1860s and 1870s which are normally associated with such a movement in British painting.

A drop of water from a stagnant pool? Inter-war detective fiction and the rural community

Detective fiction has been little considered by historians of the British inter-war village. This is despite the phenomenal publishing and sales in this literary genre. Agatha Christie is the bestselling writer of books of all time, and millions of people world-wide have learnt about English villages by reading her. This article discusses why inter-war fiction is instructive to social historians. It concentrates on the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of this fiction: notably the authors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and G. K. Chesterton. The subject is approached through a number of themes, which address the genre, county house settings, the nature and morphology of the detected village, representations of villagers and the poor, the literary detectives (notably Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey) and their relation to village life, the local role of gossip, depictions of the clergy, the fictional uses of material culture, senses of the past, the detection of ‘evil’ and issues of inter-war village renewal. A binding strand throughout is how the English village community is handled and interpreted in this fiction. The article argues that the detective genre is important and highly revealing to social and rural historians, and deserves extended analysis.