Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Institution

Asylum and Workhouse

Edited By: Carol Beardmore

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At its core is the pauper voice. This volume explores the New Poor Law and asylums through themes of pauper agency, dissent, and defiance, revealing how the poor negotiated a system that was fluid rather than fixed.

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…

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.

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.

Alistair Robinson, Lewis Darwen, Cara Dobbing, Verone Ayshah Johnston, Megan Yates, Carol Beardmore, Elizabeth Hurren, Steven King, Laura Gray Blair, Paul Carter, Peter Jones