Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Institution
Asylum and Workhouse
Carol Beardmore(Editor)
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
1st Edition
Published on 19. August 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
312 pages
978-1-0364-5646-7 (ISBN)
Description
This edited volume brings together a range of scholars working on both the New Poor Law and the history of asylums. At its core is the pauper voice and pauper experience which has, until recently, been underestimated. By using a wide variety of sources, this volume focuses on a number of themes, including the circulation of the poor and mad, blurred boundaries between the workhouse and asylum, pauper agency, dissent and defiance, the transfer of welfare ideas beyond the metropole, and personal or collective interpretations of the institution, either individually or by different groups. It locates the pauper voice through a range of lenses such as gender, illness, age, life-cycle, crisis, famine, vagrancy, dealings with local poor law officials, and mental health problems. In using this wide focus, it brings to the forefront of the discussion how the poor negotiated new legislation and a system that was fluid rather than fixed.
More details
Language
English
ISBN-13
978-1-0364-5646-7 (9781036456467)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
11/2024
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
€116.55
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Editor
Dr Carol Beardmore is Lecturer in History at the Open University. She has published widely on a range of subjects including the land-agent in Britain, the history of medicine and more recently the New Poor Law. Beardmore won the 2018 Mansel Pleydell Essay Prize and alongside her co-authors, the North American Victorian Studies Association British History Book of 2022. She also won the Morris A Forkosch prize from the American History Association.