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Wed 23 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 17.30

Fri 25 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 26 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 23 April 2014 11.00 - 13.00
Y-2 SOC06 Economies and Emotion: Kinship, Work, Poverty and Deprivation in Nineteenth Century Britain
UR3 Germanistik second floor
Network: Social Inequality Chair: David Vincent
Organizer: Megan Doolittle Discussant: David Vincent
Megan Doolittle : Work and the Workhouse: Gender, Labour and the Poor Law in Local Context 1880-1914
This paper investigates the relationships between lack of employment, poverty and the Poor Law in Lambeth, South London for men and their families who faced destitution within this dense, highly mobile, and socially diverse inner city population. The two local workhouses in north Lambeth attempted to impose compulsory labour as ... (Show more)
This paper investigates the relationships between lack of employment, poverty and the Poor Law in Lambeth, South London for men and their families who faced destitution within this dense, highly mobile, and socially diverse inner city population. The two local workhouses in north Lambeth attempted to impose compulsory labour as a condition of relief onto the able-bodied within the context of shifting and complex local labour markets. As in many urban areas, a plethora of charitable and political groups also attempted various interventions for poor men, women and children within which the value of work was deeply embedded, shaped around formations of gender and generation. These included collective working-class responses through trade unions and friendly societies as well as kinship and neighbourhood relationships. Wider tensions within Poor Law policies and practices relating to work can be traced within these local dynamics. (Show less)

Donna Loftus : Work and Poverty: Family Strategies and Economic Theories in Late Nineteenth-century England
Throughout the nineteenth century, Victorian culture and politics promoted work as the solution to poverty. However, as the century progressed, writers, thinkers and commentators noted that in some circumstances industrial labour created cycles of deprivation. By the time Toynbee's lectures on the industrial revolution were published in 1884, concerns about ... (Show more)
Throughout the nineteenth century, Victorian culture and politics promoted work as the solution to poverty. However, as the century progressed, writers, thinkers and commentators noted that in some circumstances industrial labour created cycles of deprivation. By the time Toynbee's lectures on the industrial revolution were published in 1884, concerns about the persistence of poverty in a mature industrial economy were growing and a number of inquiries set out to understand the relationship between place, family, work and poverty. These inquiries noted that long hours, low pay, unskilled and unstable employment created a vicious circle that families struggled to escape. However, whilst structural problems with the organisation of industry were acknowledged, more often than not the economic choices of the working poor became the focus for blame. Households that relied on the labour of wives and children at home were seen as particularly problematic; according to commentators they increased competition, reduced wages and prevented the next generation from acquiring the skills needed to lift them out of poverty.
This paper goes back to late-nineteenth century inquiries into work to look again the relationship between work and poverty. Using Paul de Rousiers's 'family monographs' and Charles Booth's interviews with workers in London, it considers the way the working poor described their everyday work routines and their hopes for the future. It argues that the economic choices of the working poor need to be understood as strategies for managing risk that balanced immediate survival and longer-term desires for mobility. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the short-term strategies and long-terms goals of the working poor were dismissed as irrational by liberal observers and trade unionists who assumed that the breadwinner wage and the regulation of labour was the ideal route to long-term economic stability.
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Helen Rogers : Trouble in the Family? Kinship, Work, and Friendship in the Lives of Convict Boys, Transported c. 1836-46
Early nineteenth-century discourse on juvenile delinquency attributed youth offending to family immorality, neglect and breakdown combined with the contaminating influence of peer ‘associations’, especially among boys. Using multiple record linkage, this paper analyses offending histories from the perspective of boys and young men transported from Great Yarmouth, England, to Van ... (Show more)
Early nineteenth-century discourse on juvenile delinquency attributed youth offending to family immorality, neglect and breakdown combined with the contaminating influence of peer ‘associations’, especially among boys. Using multiple record linkage, this paper analyses offending histories from the perspective of boys and young men transported from Great Yarmouth, England, to Van Diemen’s Land, c. 1836-46. It traces their social networks by examining group offending as depicted by the prison’s admission and disciplinary records.

Juvenile offences closely correlated with the place of boys on the peripheries of the port’s casual labour market and opportunities it afforded for unsupervised recreation and petty theft. Most had experienced parental loss, poverty, and/or family conflict. Peer groups formed as supplements and alternatives to kinship ties and were cemented by male camaraderie and rivalries played out in the streets and prison wards.

Convict indents and conduct records of newly arrived transports in Van Diemen’s Land provide alternative evidence for examining the ‘connections’ of young offenders. In stating their trade, many reaffirmed their family identity, giving the occupation they would have entered, had they remained in Yarmouth and followed their father’s employment. In the names, dates and symbols tattooed on their bodies, they left a more personal record of their attachments and identity. Reading this complex ‘body of evidence’ from a multitude of sources enables us, the paper suggests, to interpret the social and subjective experience of boys and young men, cast by contemporary discourse as ‘artful dodgers’ and ‘idle apprentices’.
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Julie-Marie Strange : Love and Want: Fatherhood, Unemployment and Attachment in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian Family
Victorian fathers had a legal and moral obligation to provide for dependents. As the key component of fathering identity, work legitimised men’s paternal status and authority. Men’s fear of failing to provide or to provide ‘enough’ often shaped men’s decisions about their working lives and the (limited) range of employment ... (Show more)
Victorian fathers had a legal and moral obligation to provide for dependents. As the key component of fathering identity, work legitimised men’s paternal status and authority. Men’s fear of failing to provide or to provide ‘enough’ often shaped men’s decisions about their working lives and the (limited) range of employment options available to them. The fulfilment of paternal obligations in a context of expectations and responsibilities meant that’s men’s failure to fulfil ‘breadwinning’ obligations were understood not merely in terms of economy and respectability but attachment too.
As men were overwhelmingly the higher earners, even when their wages were pitifully low, masculine work was often the lynchpin of family life in a pragmatic sense. As recent work suggests, providing could also be appropriated by men and their offspring to signify attachment. This paper examines adult children’s autobiographical narratives of fathers who failed to provide. If providing was the foundation stone of fathering in emotive, economic and legal terms, the paper explores, first, how men and children gave meaning to men’s unemployment experiences and, second, how they navigated attachment in the absence of men’s provision.
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