Download or read book Childcare health and mortality in the London Foundling Hospital 1741 1800 written by Alysa Levene and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a thorough and engaging examination of an institution and its young charges, set in the wider social, cultural, demographic and medical context of the eighteenth century. By examining the often short lives of abandoned babies, the book illustrates the variety of pathways to health, ill-health and death taken by the young and how it intersected with local epidemiology, institutional life and experiences of abandonment, feeding and child-care. For the first time, the characteristics of the babies abandoned to the London Foundling Hospital have been examined, highlighting the reasons parents and guardians had for giving up their charges. Clearly presented statistical analysis shows how these characteristics interacted with poverty and welfare to influence heath and survivorship across infancy and early childhood. The book builds up sources from Foundling Hospital records, medical tracts and parish registers to illustrate how the hospital managed the care of its children, and how it reflected wider medical ideas on feeding and child health. Child fostering, paid nursing and family formation in different parts of England are also examined, showing how this metropolitan institution called on a network of contacts to try to raise its charges to good health. This book will be of considerable significance to scholars working in economic and social history, medical and institutional history and histories of childhood and childcare in the early modern period. It will also be of interest to anthropologists interested in child-rearing and feeding practices, and inter-family relationships

Download or read book Childcare Health and Mortality in the London Foundling Hospital 1741 1800 written by Alysa Levene and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly available in paperback, this thorough and engaging examination of an institution and its young charges is set in the wider social, cultural, demographic and medical context of the eighteenth century. By examining the often short lives of abandoned babies, Levene illustrates the variety of pathways to health, ill-health and death taken by the young and how it intersected with local epidemiology, institutional life and experiences of abandonment, feeding and child-care. Child fostering, paid nursing and family formation in different parts of England are also examined, showing how this metropolitan institution called on a network of contacts to try to raise its charges to good health. Of significance to scholars working in economic and social history, medical and institutional history and histories of childhood and childcare in the early modern period, the book will also appeal to anthropologists interested in child-rearing and feeding practices, and inter-family relationships.

Download or read book The Childhood of the Poor written by A. Levene and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was there a notion of childhood for the labouring classes, and was it distinctive from that of the elite? Examining pauper childhood, family life and societal reform, Levene asks whether new models of childhood in the eighteenth century affected the treatment of the young poor, and reveals how they and their families were helped through hard times.

Download or read book Infant Mortality and Working Class Child Care 1850 1899 written by Melanie Reynolds and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-21 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899 unlocks the hidden history of working-class child care during the second half of the nineteenth century, seeking to challenge those historians who have cast working-class women as feckless and maternally ignorant. By plotting the lives of northern women whilst they grappled with industrial waged work in the factory, in agriculture, in nail making, and in brick and salt works, this book reveals a different picture of northern childcare, one which points to innovative and enterprising child care models. Attention is also given to day-carers as they acted in loco parentis and the workhouse nurse who worked in conjunction with medical paediatrics to provide nineteenth-century welfare to pauper infants. Through the use of a new and wide range of source material, which includes medical and poor law history, Melanie Reynolds allows a fresh and new perspective of working-class child care to arise.

Download or read book Orphans of Empire written by Helen Berry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century London was teeming with humanity, and poverty was never far from politeness. Legend has it that, on his daily commute through this thronging metropolis, Captain Thomas Coram witnessed one of the city's most shocking sights-the widespread abandonment of infant corpses by the roadside. He could have just passed by. Instead, he devised a plan to create a charity that would care for these infants; one that was to have enormous consequences for children born into poverty in Britain over the next two hundred years. Orphans of Empire tells the story of what happened to the thousands of children who were raised at the London Foundling Hospital, Coram's brainchild, which opened in 1741 and grew to become the most famous charity in Georgian England. It provides vivid insights into the lives and fortunes of London's poorest children, from the earliest days of the Foundling Hospital to the mid-Victorian era, when Charles Dickens was moved by his observations of the charity's work to campaign on behalf of orphans. Through the lives of London's foundlings, this book provides readers with a street-level insight into the wider global history of a period of monumental change in British history as the nation grew into the world's leading superpower. Some foundling children were destined for Britain's 'outer Empire' overseas, but many more toiled in the 'inner Empire', labouring in the cotton mills and factories of northern England at the dawn of the new industrial age. Through extensive archival research, Helen Berry uncovers previously untold stories of what happened to former foundlings, including the suffering and small triumphs they experienced as child workers during the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes, using many different fragments of evidence, the voices of the children themselves emerge. Extracts from George King's autobiography, the only surviving first-hand account written by a Foundling Hospital child born in the eighteenth century, published here for the first time, provide touching insights into how he came to terms with his upbringing. Remarkably he played a part in Trafalgar, one of the most iconic battles in British Naval history. His personal courage and resilience in overcoming the disadvantages of his birth form a lasting testimony to the strength of the human spirit.

Download or read book A Caring County written by Steven King and published by Univ of Hertfordshire Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative study gathers together new research by local historians into aspects of welfare in Hertfordshire spanning four centuries and focusing on towns and villages across the county, including Ashwell, Cheshunt, Hertford, Pirton, and Royston, amongst many others. In so doing it makes a valuable contribution to the current debate about the spatial and chronological variation in the character of welfare regimes within single counties, let alone more widely. As well as viewing poor relief geographically and chronologically, the book also considers the treatment of particular groups such as the aged, the mad, children, and the unemployed, and shows how, within the constraints of the relevant welfare laws, each group was dealt with differently, giving a more nuanced picture than has perhaps been the case before. The overarching question that the book attempts to answer is how effectively Hertfordshire cared for those in need. With chapters on madhouses, workhouses, certified industrial schools, the Foundling Hospital, pensions, and medical care, the book covers a very broad range of topics through which a complex picture emerges. While some officials seem to have been driven by a relatively narrow sense of their obligations to the poor and vulnerable, others appear to have tailored welfare packages to their precise needs. Naturally, self-interest played a part: if the weakest citizens were well managed, vagrancy might be lessened, the spread of disease contained, and control maintained over the cost of looking after the poor and sick. It seems that Hertfordshire was relatively nimble and sensitive in discovering and treating its people's needs. Evidence is beginning to emerge, in other words, that Hertfordshire was in essence a caring county.

Download or read book Childhood in Modern Europe written by Colin Heywood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This invaluable introduction to the history of childhood in both Western and Eastern Europe c.1700-2000 seeks to give a voice to children as well as adults, wherever possible. It addresses a number of key topics, including conceptions of childhood, ideas about family life, culture, welfare, schooling, and work.

Download or read book Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England written by Katrina Honeyman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this collection is to bring together representative examples of the most recent work that is taking an understanding of children and childhood in new directions. The two key overarching themes are diversity: social, economic, geographical, and cultural; and agency: the need to see children in industrial England as participants - even protagonists - in the process of historical change, not simply as passive recipients or victims. Contributors address such crucial subjects as the varied experience of work; poverty and apprenticeship; institutional care; the political voice of children; child sexual abuse; and children and education. This volume, therefore, includes some of the best, innovative work on the history of children and childhood currently being written by both younger and established scholars.

Download or read book The Georgians written by Penelope J. Corfield and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of the Georgians, comparing past views of these exciting, turbulent, and controversial times with our attitudes today The Georgian era is often seen as a time of innovations. It saw the end of monarchical absolutism, global exploration and settlements overseas, the world's first industrial revolution, deep transformations in religious and cultural life, and Britain's role in the international trade in enslaved Africans. But how were these changes perceived by people at the time? And how do their viewpoints compare with attitudes today? In this wide-ranging history, Penelope J. Corfield explores every aspect of Georgian life--politics and empire, culture and society, love and violence, religion and science, industry and towns. People's responses at the time were often divided. Pessimists saw loss and decline, while optimists saw improvements and light. Out of such tensions came the Georgian culture of both experiment and resistance. Corfield emphasizes those elements of deep continuity that persisted even within major changes, and shows how new developments were challenged if their human consequences proved dire.

Download or read book Sickness medical welfare and the English poor 1750 1834 written by Steven King and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the core of this book are three central contentions: That medical welfare became the totemic function of the Old Poor Law in its last few decades; that the poor themselves were able to negotiate this medical welfare rather than simply being subject to it; and that being doctored and institutionalised became part of the norm for the sick poor by the 1820s, in a way that had not been the case in the 1750s. Exploring the lives and medical experiences of the poor largely in their own words, Sickness, medical welfare and the English poor offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the so-called crisis of the Old Poor Law from the later eighteenth century. The sick poor became an insistent presence in the lives of officials and parishes and the (largely positive) way that communities responded to their dire needs must cause us to rethink the role and character of the poor law.

Download or read book Nurture and Neglect Childhood in Sixteenth Century Northern England written by Loretta Dolan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nurture and Neglect: Childhood in Sixteenth-Century Northern England addresses a number of anomalies in the existing historiography surrounding the experience of children in urban and rural communities in sixteenth-century northern England. In contrast to much recent scholarship that has focused on affective parent-child relationships, this study directly engages with the question of what sixteenth-century society actually constituted as nurture and neglect. Whilst many modern historians consider affection and love essential for nurture, contemporary ideas of good nurture were consistently framed in terms designed to instil obedience and deference to authority in the child, with the best environment in which to do this being the authoritative, patriarchal household. Using ecclesiastical and secular legal records to form its basis, hitherto an untapped resource for children’s voices, this book tackles important omissions in the historiography, including the regional imbalance, which has largely ignored the north of England and generalised about the experiences of the whole of the country using only sources from the south, and the adult-centred nature of the debate in which historians have typically portrayed the child as having little or no say in their own care and upbringing. Nurture and Neglect will be of particular interest to scholars studying the history of childhood and the social history of England in the sixteenth-century.

Download or read book Illegitimacy Family and Stigma in England 1660 1834 written by Kate Gibson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-21 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illegitimacy, Family, and Stigma is the first full-length exploration of what it was like to be illegitimate in eighteenth-century England, a period of 'sexual revolution', unprecedented increase in illegitimate births, and intense debate over children's rights to state support. Using the words of illegitimate individuals and their families preserved in letters, diaries, poor relief, and court documents, this study reveals the impact of illegitimacy across the life cycle. How did illegitimacy affect children's early years, and their relationships with parents, siblings, and wider family as they grew up? Did illegitimacy limit education, occupation, or marriage chances? What were individuals' experiences of shame and stigma, and how did being illegitimate affect their sense of identity? Historian Kate Gibson investigates the circumstances that governed families' responses, from love and pragmatic acceptance, to secrecy and exclusion. In a major reframing of assumptions that illegitimacy was experienced only among the poor, this volume tells the stories of individuals from across the socio-economic scale, including children of royalty, physicians and lawyers, servants and agricultural labourers. It demonstrates that the stigma of illegitimacy operated along a spectrum, varying according to the type of parental relationship, the child's race, gender, and socio-economic status. Financial resources and the class-based ideals of parenthood or family life had a significant impact on how families reacted to illegitimacy. Class became more important over the eighteenth century, under the influence of Enlightenment ideals of tolerance, sensibility, and redemption. The child of sin was now recast as a pitiable object of charity, but this applied only to those who could fit narrow parameters of genteel tragedy. This vivid investigation of the meaning of illegitimacy gets to the heart of powerful inequalities in families, communities, and the state.

Download or read book Children at the Birth of Empire written by Kristen McCabe Lashua and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first study to focus specifically on destitute children who became part of the early British Empire, uniting separate historiographies on poverty, childhood, global expansion, forced migration, bound labor, and law. Britons used their nascent empire to employ thousands of destitute children, launching an experiment in using plantations and ships as a solution for strains on London’s inadequate poor relief schemes. Starting with the settlement of Jamestown (1607) and ending with Britain’s participation in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), British children were sent all around the world. Authorities, parents, and the public fought against the men and women they called "spirits" and "kidnappers," who were reviled because they employed children in the same empire but without respecting the complexities surrounding children’s legal status when it came to questions of authority, consent, and self-determination. Children mattered to Britons: protecting their liberty became emblematic of protecting the liberty of Britons as a whole. Therefore, contests over the legal means of sending children abroad helped define what it meant to be British. This work is written for a wide audience, including scholars of early modern history, childhood, law, poverty, and empire.

Download or read book British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Teresa Barnard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting the remarkable women who found ways around the constraints placed on their intellectual growth, this collection of essays shows how their persistence opened up attributes of potent female imagination, radical endeavour, literary vigour, and self-education that compares well with male intellectual achievement in the long eighteenth century. Disseminating their knowledge through literary and documentary prose with unapologetic self-confidence, women such as Anna Barbauld, Anna Seward, Elizabeth Inchbald and Joanna Baillie usurped subjects perceived as masculine to contribute to scientific, political, philosophical and theological debate and progress. This multifaceted exploration goes beyond traditional readings of women’s creativity to add fresh, at times controversial, insights into the female view of the intellectual world. Bringing together leading experts on British women’s lives, work and writings, the volume seeks to rediscover women’s appropriations of masculine disciplines and to examine their interventions into the intellectual world. Through their engagement with a unique perspective on women’s lives and achievements, the essays make important contributions to the existing body of knowledge in this important area that will inform future scholarship.

Download or read book The Family in Past Perspective written by Ellen J. Kendall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume takes a more comprehensive view of past familial dynamics than has been previously attempted. By applying interdisciplinary perspectives to periods ranging from the Prehistoric to the Modern, it informs a wider understanding of the term family, and the implications of family dynamics for children and their social networks in the past. Contributors drawn from across the humanities and social sciences present research addressing three primary themes: modes of kinship and familial structure, the convergence and divergence between the idealised image and realities of family life, and the provision of care within families. These themes are interconnected, as the idea and image of family shapes familial structure, which in turn defines the type of care and protection that families provide to their members. The papers in this volume provide new research to challenge assumptions and provoke new ways of thinking about past families as functionally adaptive, socially connected, and ideologically powerful units of society, just as they are in the present. A broad focus on the networks created by familial units also allows the experiences of historically underrepresented women and children to be highlighted in a way that underlines their interconnectedness with all members of past societies. The Family in Past Perspective builds a much-needed bridge across disciplinary boundaries. The wide scope of the book hmakes important contributions, and informs fields ranging from bioarchaeology to women's history and childhood studies.

Download or read book A History of the Roles and Responsibilities of Social Workers written by Mike Burt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-22 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the origin of work with the ‘impotent poor’ under the Poor Laws, to social workers’ current responsibilities towards vulnerable people, this book introduces the reader to the way in which the identification of particular social problems at the end of the nineteenth century led to the emergence of a wide range of separate occupational groups and voluntary workers, which were sometimes, but increasingly, referred to as social workers. Using an extended single chronological historical narrative and analysis, which draws heavily on original archival sources and contemporary literature, it addresses the changes which took place as part of the welfare state and the identification of common roles and responsibilities by social workers, which led to the formation of the British Association of Social Workers in 1970. The expansion of roles and responsibilities in social services departments and voluntary societies is analysed, and their significance for the development of social work is evaluated. By highlighting the changes and continuities in these roles and responsibilities, this book will be of interest to all academics, students, and practitioners working within social work, who wish to know more about the origins of their discipline and the current state of the profession today.

Download or read book Ladies of Honor and Merit written by Elena Serrano and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late eighteenth century, enlightened politicians and upper-class women in Spain debated the right of women to join one of the country’s most prominent scientific institutions: the Madrid Economic Society of Friends of the Country. Societies such as these, as Elena Serrano describes in her book, were founded on the idea that laypeople could contribute to the advancement of their country by providing “useful knowledge,” and their fellows often referred to themselves as improvers, or friends of the country. After intense debates, the duchess of Benavente, along with nine distinguished ladies, claimed, won, and exercised the right of women to participate in shaping the future of their nation by inaugurating the Junta de Damas de Honor y Mérito, or the Committee of Ladies of Honor and Merit. Ten years later, the Junta established a network of over sixty correspondents extending from Tenerife to Asturias and Austria to Cuba. With this book, Serrano tells the unknown story of how the duchess and her peers—who succeeded in creating the only known female branch among some five hundred patriotic societies in the eighteenth century—shaped Spanish scientific culture. Her study reveals how the Junta, by stressing the value of their feminine nature in their efforts to reform education, rural economy, and the poor, produced and circulated useful knowledge and ultimately crystallized the European improvement movement in Spain within an otherwise all-male context.