Preliminary Programme

This paper will provide an overview of the core assumptions of the emerging statistical social science movement in the early and mid-nineteenth century and an example of its application to improve lives in one of Manchester’s “Little Irelands.” Records of the Manchester Statistical Society are housed in the Manchester Archives and Local Studies facility in which I will be doing research in summer ’11.

Thomas Carlyle spoke for many concerned British urbanites in 1840, but particularly for Mancunians, when he wrote , “the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish competing with them in all markets . . . [in] which mere strength with little skill will suffice.” Friedrich Engels saw the Manchester Irish as “competitors whose standard of living is the lowest conceivable in a civilized society.” The city was inundated to an unusual degree with new arrivals from Ireland. By the peak of the Famine-driven immigration in 1851, roughly 15 per cent of Manchester’s population were Irish born and represented more than 30 per cent of the city’s poor relief recipients. Ridiculed and ostracized for their supposed lack of skills and work discipline, as well as their Catholicism, hygiene, drinking habits, and promiscuity, they congregated in several squalid “Little Irelands,” among them Chorlton-on-Medlock.

Comfortable workers, middle class and wealthy residents and the City initiated numerous efforts, beyond the reach of the union workhouses, to improve living quarters, sanitation, education, medical care, religion, recreation, and policing in the beleaguered neighborhoods. Perhaps the most unique of the reform discourses in these years emanating from Cambridge and London was statistical social science. Methodologically it moved away from the a priori and deductive inclinations of David Ricardo’s political economy and toward the measuring and counting of the German geographer and natural scientist Alexander von Humbolt. These methods, it was believed, would bring new understandings of, and responses to, the vexing challenges of urban-industrial living. The very model of this undertaking in the provincial cities was The Manchester Statistical Society, founded in 1833. Its first annual report attributed the Society’s origins to “a strong desire felt by its projectors to assist in promoting the progress of social


improvement in the manufacturing population by which they are surrounded.” Moving from the general to the particular, I will analyze “Lecture on the Sanitary Condition of Chorlton upon Medlock,” given by John Hatten on 12 January 1854 and later published. It is a treasure trove of descriptions of living and sanitary conditions in the Irish neighborhood and elaborate statistical summaries of the array of diseases that afflicted its denizens and related mortality figures from 1847 to 1853. Finally, I plan to assess the responses and actions provoked by Hatten’s work. (Show less)

In the course of the 19th century the British state accrued a wide set of investigative and regulatory powers ranging from the introduction of new police forces to public health inspectors. In each case representatives of state authority intruded themselves into the lives and spaces of the poor be it the street, the home or, indeed, institutions such as the workhouse and prison. These intrusions need to be seen in the context of ongoing negotiations between the state and the poor over the rights to control different kinds of plebeian spaces.

This paper explores the nature of those intrusions and the kind of resistances that took place between the poor and authorities. Spaces such as the street, the home and the workhouse became the arenas in which these a day-to-day practices of resistances were played out. This paper draws on ideas from the work of James C Scott relating to what can be termed the ‘hidden transcripts’ of resistance, by which confrontations between the powerful and the powerless are characterised by a theatrical displays of deception and deference.
The research explores how the plebeian spaces of nineteenth-century London became the arena for such confrontations and the places where transcripts of resistance were learned and practiced. In particular it focuses on two kinds of spaces. First, it examines the ways that inmates of workhouses challenged authorities that sought to regulate space within the institution. Through the analysis of court records and disciplinary hearings it reconstructs the different forms of resistance practiced by individuals and social groups both inside and outside the workhouse walls. Secondly, by reconstructing the social networks to which these individuals and groups belonged outside the workhouse, and the other forms of petty crime with which that they were involved, this paper extends discussion of plebeian spaces beyond the institution walls and into the streets and homes of 19th-century London. Repeated and shared encounters with authority and learned transcripts of resistance helped shape the struggles over space both inside institutions and in the wider urban setting. (Show less)

This paper explores the space and material culture of Rowton Houses – new large-scale institutional spaces built in London between 1892 and 1905 that housed thousands of working men up to (and after) 1914. The first Rowton House at Vauxhall was opened in 1892 by its founder, Lord Rowton (Montagu Lowry-Corry), Tory peer and philanthropist, who was formerly Disraeli’s private secretary. A large-scale lodging house for working men, the enterprise was not solely charitable but designed to be self-supporting, and was one of a range of semi-philanthropic initiatives to shelter hundreds of individuals that emerged in response to the 1880s housing crisis in London. The success of the first house was followed by the foundation of an additional five larger houses at King’s Cross (1894), Newington Butts (near the Elephant & Castle, 1897), Hammersmith (1897), Whitechapel (1902) and Camden Town (1905). At each successive ‘working man’s hotel’ the number of beds increased, so that the final Rowton House housed over 1,000 men.
Rowton Houses’ layout and decoration reveal the tension between the intentions of institutional authorities, and the men who lived in and experienced the institution as home. Rowton and his co-directors invested time and money in the houses and paid close attention to minute details of their physical layout and equipment. When opened the buildings were almost universally praised in the contemporary press and compared to clubs for upper-class men in the West End. Indeed, the carefully fitted interiors suggest that the houses were intended to create a shared domesticity that crossed class boundaries. But those who inhabited the buildings on a daily basis could couch their experience in very different terms.
The paper uses a range of written and visual sources including journalism by contemporary observers and lodgers themselves, company memoranda and promotional material, and inmate autobiographies, to explore how ‘home’ was constructed and contested in these new institutions, through duration of residence, decoration and material culture. (Show less)

Pat Thane’s 1978 History Workshop Journal article ‘Women and the poor law in Victorian and Edwardian England’ first drew our attention to the treatment of women under the poor law after the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Whilst we have since gained a deeper understanding of why poor women entered New Poor Law workhouses, and of the impact of national and local policies on the treatment of specific groups of women, we still know remarkably little about the experiences of women within post-1834 workhouses. Furthermore, notwithstanding the acknowledgement that women were sexually assaulted in nineteenth-century institutions, little evidence has been put forward to move our understandings beyond the anecdotal. This paper examines cases of sexual abuse towards women, drawing specific attention to women’s vulnerability within micro-spaces of the New Poor Law institutions. The research for this paper stemmed from a three-month ESRC internship undertaken at The National Archives in 2009, linking the record series MH15 (‘Index of Subjects’) to correspondence between individual Boards of Guardians and the central welfare authorities concerning cases of abuse and neglect in MH12 series of Assistant Poor Law Commissioners’ correspondence. This latter series often contains both details of alleged cases and copies of depositions taken by Guardians or Assistant Poor Law Commissioners (Inspectors after 1847). Whilst being what Steedman calls ‘enforced narratives’, created through the questioning and note taking of an interviewer, these documents nevertheless relate the words of women detailing their own experiences of life inside workhouses. By taking into account both the attacks themselves and how the investigations – and their consequences – unfurled – the documents illuminate the ways in which women ‘got-by’ in the workhouse and how they dealt with abuse. This paper concludes that whilst panoptican-style workhouses contained rooms and passageways which heightened women’s physical vulnerability, they also contained ‘enclosed’ areas which were used by women to confide in their fellow inmates, or to offer consolation and comfort. (Show less)