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Friendship, kinship and belonging in the letters of urban paupers 1800-1840
Freundschaft, Verwandtschaft und Zugehörigkeit in den Briefen städtischer Armer 1800-1940
[journal article]
Abstract 'This article is driven by an attempt to understand how early nineteenth century urban paupers thought about, experienced and described their belonging to their host parishes and what, if anything, made their experiences different from rural counterparts. It uses pauper narratives - letters written ... view more
'This article is driven by an attempt to understand how early nineteenth century urban paupers thought about, experienced and described their belonging to their host parishes and what, if anything, made their experiences different from rural counterparts. It uses pauper narratives - letters written by, for or about paupers - to systematically consider these questions. While such narratives pose problems of orthography, truthfulness and representativeness, the article argues that these potential issues can be overplayed. Using these narratives, the article suggests that urban and rural paupers shared a common language and sentiment of belonging to their parishes of legal settlement. However, the article moves on to suggest that urban paupers also showed distinctive rhetorical strategies and experiential trajectories, talking systematically about the depth of their belonging to a host community, about the occasional fragility of that belonging and about being linked into strong neighbourhood, friendship and kinship networks.' (author's abstract)|... view less
Keywords
urban population; rural population; network; reality; historical analysis; large city; social relations; friendship; everyday life; kinship; poverty; narration; letter; neighborhood; comparison; family; elderly; Great Britain; twentieth century; illness; nineteenth century
Classification
Social History, Historical Social Research
Method
qualitative empirical; empirical; historical
Document language
English
Publication Year
2008
Page/Pages
p. 249-277
Journal
Historical Social Research, 33 (2008) 3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.33.2008.3.249-277
ISSN
0172-6404
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed