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 Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii

1 Narratives of poverty and sickness in Europe 1780–1938:

Sources, methods and experiences 1
Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth Hurren and Steven King
2 Grief, sickness and emotions in the narratives
of the shamefaced poor in late eighteenth-century
Copenhagen 35
Peter Wessel Hansen
3 ‘Labouring on a bed of sickness’: The material and
rhetorical deployment of ill-health in male
pauper letters 51
Alannah Tomkins
4 ‘I have once more taken the Leberty to say as
you well know’: The development of rhetoric in the
letters of the English, Welsh and Scottish sick and poor
1780s–1830s 69
Steven King and Alison Stringer
5 Poverty and epidemics: Perceptions of the poor at times
of Cholera in Germany and Spain, 1830s–1860s 93
Beate Althammer
6 Living with insanity: Narratives of poverty, pauperism
and sickness in asylum records 1840–76 117
Cathy Smith
vi Contents

7 Narratives of poverty in Irish suicides between the Great

Famine and the First World War, 1845–1914 143
Georgina Laragy
8 Stories of care and coercion: Narratives of poverty and
suffering among patients with venereal disease in Sweden,
1860–1920 161
Anna Lundberg
9 From unemployment to sickness and poverty: The
narratives and experiences of the unemployed in Trier
and surroundings, 1918–33 181
Tamara Stazic-Wendt
10 Narratives of ill-health in applicant letters from rural
Germany, 1900–30 209
Katrin Marx-Jaskulski
11 Asking for the privilege to work: Applications for a
peddling licence (Austria in the 1920s and 1930s) 225
Sigrid Wadauer
Appendix: Narratives writ large 247
Richard Dyson, Peter Wessel Hansen,
Elizabeth Hurren and Steven King

Select Bibliography 267

Index 273
 LIST OF Figures and
Tables

Figure 5.1 Illustrations from popular pamphlets relating the havoc caused
by cholera in the city of Barcelona in 1854 110
Figure 6.1 Speed of admission for pauper patients 127
Figure 6.2 Speed of admission for private patients 128
Figure 7.1 Numbers of suicides in Ireland, 1833–70 146
Figure 7.2 Rate of suicide in Ireland, 1864–1919 149

Table 1.1 Classifications of narrative documents 18

Table 5.1 Cholera mortality in Cologne, Aachen and Barcelona (absolute
numbers and per 1000 of population) 96
Table 6.1 Provision for persons of ‘unsound mind’ 1845–74 (%) 122
Table 6.2 Carers listed in quarter sessions lunacy returns 125
Table 6.3 Marital status of private and pauper patients (%) 128
Table 6.4 Age distribution of NGLA pauper admissions 1846–75 131
Table 10.1 Distribution (%) of the causes of indigence according to the
national statistics of public poor relief in 1885 211–12
viii
 1
Narratives of poverty
and sickness in
Europe 1780–1938:
Sources, methods and
experiences
Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth Hurren
and Steven King1

Introduction
In the context of a rapidly expanding literature on the histories of European
welfare states, and of wider attempts to discern and spatially locate
differently configured European welfare systems or regimes,2 one of the most
important empirical advances has been a renewed focus on the experiences
of the poor themselves. Historians of poor relief, clothing, medicine,
housing, begging, urbanization, language, nutrition, demography, work,
migration and politics have increasingly sought to balance representations
of the poor in pamphlets, official literature, pictures and popular polemic,
with an understanding of the detailed words, lives, feelings, strategies
and experiences of the dependent poor.3 Such work has involved the
consideration, re-reading and reconstruction of a set of sources that stray
beyond the confines of much earlier welfare history. Some of these sources
– emigrant letters, autobiographies, witness statements in court cases,
newspaper stories, advertisements for runaway fathers, or begging letters –
are familiar even if sometimes read and deployed in unfamiliar ways.4 Other
sources – public petitions, popular ballads, applications for citizenship, the
2 Poverty and Sickness in MOdern Europe

statements of tramping labourers preserved in local guild archives, patient

case notes, suicide letters, pauper letters, or forced narratives arising out of
pan-European attempts to constrain the spread of venereal disease and to
control prostitution – are less well-known.5 Yet it is clear that across Europe
such sources exist in considerable numbers, particularly from the late
eighteenth century as the print marketplace grew and both postal services
and the underlying base of popular literacy improved. Nowhere is this more
apparent than in the proliferation of letters written by paupers themselves
or on their behalf. Once thought to have been largely unique to England and
Wales, generated by the particularities of the statutory national Poor Law
system there, it is increasingly clear that such letters exist in considerable
numbers elsewhere in Europe too.6
Analysis of these types of source has led welfare and other historians to
balance their questions about the administration and organization of welfare,
the supply of resources and the political, religious and philosophical rationale
for particular welfare structures, with wider consideration of issues such as:
the agency and political participation of the poor; the rhetorical and linguistic
register that the poor might use to frame and understand their condition;
everyday experiences of the economy of makeshifts; concepts of the life-
cycle; and the moral and customary spaces within which the European poor
operated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is not the intention
of this introduction to provide an extensive overview of the development of
European welfare historiography.7 Three particular areas might, however,
be taken to exemplify these developments and simultaneously highlight
the importance of narrative sources for the understanding of welfare
histories. Thus, the analysis of posters, speeches, ballads, chapbooks and
formalized petitions have been used to illustrate the fact that the poor (a
vaguely defined ‘labouring poor’ and the more ‘explicitly poor’ identified
by the receipt of different forms of charity or communal relief) had both a
political consciousness and will, and participated in local, regional or even
national politics. This observation might extend from the participation of
poor people in the politics of sixteenth-century Henrician England, through
the semi-political manoeuvrings of the mobile poor to obtain citizenship
status and rights in Switzerland, and to the highly politicized and class-
based resistance of poor people to compulsory smallpox vaccination in
various nineteenth-century European states.8 Periodically at least, the poor,
even the dependent poor, seem to have been politically aware and to have
participated in the political process.
A second example of the new directions in which narrative evidence has
taken us is the increasingly lively debate over the character, execution and
limits of pauper agency. Studies of pauper letters have begun to reveal that the
poor adopted complex rhetorical and strategic devices in their engagement
with officials and welfare donors, garnering power and de facto rights to
relief where there might otherwise be none. For some commentators at least,
pauper letters embody the appropriation and subversion of official language
 Narratives of poverty and sickness in Europe 1780–1938 3

and of the conventional linguistic register – encompassing deference,

humility, gratitude, modest demands and a desire for independence – that
underpinned the structure of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social
relations.9 Historians have also pointed to the adoption by the poor of
powerful customary, rhetorical, religious and philosophical reference points
– dignity, the obligations associated with wealth, yardsticks of human
rights such as the right not to be naked, and the Christian duty of officials
and donors – in their narrative dealings with those controlling access to
resources.10 Others have sought forcefully to assert the limits of pauper
agency.11 A related, and third, strand of the historiography has used narrative
evidence to refine understanding of the process of begging. Tim Hitchcock,
for instance, employed stories from the Old Bailey in London to emphasize
that beggars had an understood and accepted place in the urban fabric,
such that responding to the pleas of beggars on the streets of eighteenth-
century London was crucial to the idea of middling masculinity. He also
highlights the difficulties that both communities and beggars themselves
had in distinguishing begging from work in the eighteenth century.12 Sigrid
Wadauer, both in this volume and elsewhere, observes similar experiences in
early twentieth-century Vienna. More widely, these perspectives have been
explored across Europe in the context of begging letters, with historians
suggesting a widespread culture of writing pleading letters which might
reach the very highest levels of European society.13
These are interesting and important perspectives, symbolic of a wider
change in the focus and tenor of debate about the European poor, whether
they be the disordered and disorderly, or the respectable and respectful. For
the purposes of this volume, however, we shift our attention to narratives
by and about a particular group of the European poor, the sick. There are
several reasons for this focus. First, while other groups of the life-cycle poor
(the aged, widows, children etc.) have attracted increasing historiographical
attention, it has become clear that life-cycle conditions were rarely sufficient
in their own right as a reason for charity or formal relief to be given.
Nowhere is this clearer than in work on the aged poor, where relief in
whatever form was invariably tied into progressive disability and inability to
labour because of physical or mental weakness.14 In short, ill-health broadly
defined (to include conditions such as pregnancy or lunacy for instance) is
a cross-cutting theme in European welfare studies. For England and Wales
at least, sickness was at most times the key reason for relief applications,
and more widely contributors to this volume demonstrate admirably how
even proximate reasons for relief applications such as unemployment often
masked underlying sickness. A corollary of this observation, and a second
reason for the focus of this volume, is that the sick poor author or are the
subject of more narratives than any group of the European poor. Moreover,
the range of narratives, running from letters and petitions on the one hand,
through inquests, suicide notes and newspaper reportage, to ballads and
poems on the other, tends to be rather wider than for any other subset of the
4 Poverty and Sickness in MOdern Europe

poor.15 This should not, perhaps, surprise us, since the sick poor arguably
appeared in the widest (narrative generating) range of institutional and
relational contexts. Thus, we can find narratives emerging from hospitals and
hospital visiting committees, work and almshouses, the inquiries of medical
charities, the activities of individual doctors, the everyday work of poor relief
agencies, the sick poor themselves, regional and central government and in
response to the threat of epidemic and pandemic disease. The situational
context of the sick poor, in other words, makes them a microcosm of the
experiences of paupers more widely.
A final reason for focusing on the sick poor is that this group presented
the most complex legal, economic, organizational, philosophical, moral
and customary dilemmas for those providing welfare resources. This was
true whether we consider the sick poor under the English and Welsh Old
and New Poor Law systems (which afforded quasi-legal and customary
rights to the sick poor) or under the philanthropic and institutionally
based charity that we see in many continental countries. Even in Scotland,
arguably one of the harshest welfare regimes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Europe,16 how to deal with the sick poor posed acute philosophical,
economic, moral and practical dilemmas. Could sickness and an associated
inability to labour be seen as value neutral, a hazard that might be faced by
all and carrying inevitable consequences for the liabilities of communities?
Or was sickness, as Beate Althammer and Sigrid Wadauer both suggest in
this volume, seen as a direct reflection of the moral bankruptcy of the poor?
Should sickness be treated at least cost or should officials seek to avoid
higher long-term bills by paying for more effective treatment? What was the
Christian duty of officials and donors in relation to the sick poor, irrespective
of the law? In the sense that sickness and its consequences compromised
basic human values (the right to clothing and adequate food, the ability to
fulfil the obligations of a parent, the ability to be part of a community and
neighbourhood), how should communities react? How might customary,
legal and moral obligations intersect to provide a moral space in which the
sick poor could negotiate? And if doctors, neighbours, other officials, family,
religious ministers, friends and employers wrote in support of charitable or
communal relief for the poor, how much weight should officials give to
these epistolary advocates? Such questions locate sickness, the sick poor and
narratives by or about the sick poor at the interface of wider attempts to
understand the nature and experience of European poverty and the agency of
the European poor. They also, however, pinpoint the multi-layered (implicit
and explicit) decision-making that officials would have to engage in when
dealing with the sick poor. While the unemployed, single mothers and other
groups of the dependent poor could be ignored or were the focus of practices
coalescing around control and the avoidance of concerted social protest,
the sick poor constituted a rather less soluble problem for the communities
and poor relief systems of Europe. And in the sense that ill-health created,
as Peter Wessel Hansen points out in his chapter for this volume, a large
 Narratives of poverty and sickness in Europe 1780–1938 5

group of the ‘shamefaced’ poor who risked falling down the social scale,
the consequences of sickness for officials largely drawn from the same class
were all too readily apparent.
Against this broad contextual backdrop, the contributions to our volume
deal with the representation and self-representation of the sick poor in
Austria, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Spain and Sweden between
the later eighteenth century (when opportunities for representation and self-
representation began to burgeon) and the 1930s (after which the very nature
of welfare itself began to be transformed). The definition of the ‘sick poor’
employed here is a wide one. In typological terms our chapters focus on a
spectrum that runs from the ‘shamefaced’ poor – the respectable independent
labouring and lower-middle classes for whom sickness amounted to the
threat of permanent downward social mobility, considered by Georgina
Laragy and Peter Wessel Hansen – through to what many contemporaries
thought of as the ‘degraded poor’, such as the syphilitic women analysed
by Anna Lundberg or the wandering poor that are the subject of Sigrid
Wadauer’s chapter. The range of ill-health encompassed by the volume is
equally wide, running from insanity/melancholy (chapters by Cathy Smith,
Georgina Laragy and Peter Wessel Hansen), through infectious diseases (in
chapters by Anna Lundberg and Beate Althammer) and to the chronic but
usually poorly specified sicknesses often associated with old age, grinding
poverty and unemployment (in chapters by Steven King and Alison
Stringer, Katrin Marx-Jaskulski and Tamara Stazic-Wendt). This range in-
and-of itself gives a sense of the centrality of sickness to the experience of
European poverty. By way of further context, the rest of this introduction
focuses on three core issues: a discussion of the disparate European relief
and settlement systems within which narratives were generated, read and
exchanged, and thereby a consideration of potential chronological and
typological variations in the source base between different sorts of welfare
regimes; a detailed discussion of the contexts within which narrative sources
by or about the sick poor were generated (and some of their problems)
and a coeval discussion of the way in which the types of ‘voices’ found in
them might be classified so as to facilitate systematic comparative studies;
and a brief consideration of where, collectively, the work on narratives
explored in our chapters sits within the wider framework of knowledge on
the European sick poor.

European welfare contexts

A literature which once saw the English and Welsh Old and New Poor Laws
and associated settlement legislation as somehow unique has more recently
given way to a sense that most European states had the same welfare
building blocks available but simply sequenced them differently and often
with bewildering rapidity.17 The English and Welsh Old Poor Law rarely
6 Poverty and Sickness in MOdern Europe

provided enough for the dependent poor to subsist with, such that they had
to explore complex makeshift economies which look little different in terms
of range or depth to those on the Continent.18 While England and Wales can
boast the first legally enshrined national settlement system for deciding who
could apply for relief and where, in practice the Swiss and Dutch systems
were equally comprehensive if more ad hoc.19 The level of philanthropic
resources available to combat poverty fell progressively behind the scale
of the national poverty problem in eighteenth-century England. However,
a philanthropic resurgence from the early nineteenth-century meant that,
in many urban areas, private and organized charity came to play a role
in welfare not dissimilar to that in Amsterdam and other major European
urban centres.20 Nor should we forget that for the later nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries at least there is an emerging consensus about a
convergence of European welfare thought, sentiment and range of practice.
Partly informed by the transmission of policy debates and the exchange
of officials and investigators, this convergence was characterized by the
assertion of a greater degree of central control and a corresponding loss of
local autonomy, greater use of institutions, the removal of particular groups
from the ambit of discretion and the cementing of rights to relief into the
sentimental fabric of welfare practice. While welfare structures in countries
such as Switzerland or The Netherlands remained highly fractured even in
the 1930s, other bastions of localism, such as France, increasingly saw the
encoding of a recognizably ‘national’ welfare state.21
How to make sense of these differently sequenced building blocks
within and between states has proved problematic. Distinctions between a
broadly conceived ‘Catholic Europe’ where religiously based philanthropy
underpinned the welfare system, and an equally broadly conceived
Protestant Europe where lay philanthropy entwined with municipal, Royal
or national welfare resources, have many problems. Related mechanisms for
characterizing ‘national’ welfare arrangements – for instance those which
draw broad distinctions between northern and southern Europe, central
and peripheral Europe, or between welfare systems centred on institutional
provision and those not – have also proved problematic.22 Not least, an
increasing number of European studies have drawn attention to the fact
that welfare practices within states might vary more strongly than between
them, as for instance and most markedly between the different Swiss
cantons or between Scotland and England.23 This said, historians have also
drawn attention to persistent regional differences in welfare spending and
organization, such that rather than talking in shorthand about the English
or Prussian welfare system, we might be better advised to assemble and
compare regional typologies that span state boundaries. For this, we need
a set of key indicators of welfare sentiment and practice. Part of the value
of the current volume is that the issue of how differently constituted local
and regional welfare systems treated the sick poor might be one of those key
indicators, a point to which we will return below.
 Narratives of poverty and sickness in Europe 1780–1938 7

In the meantime, historians of poverty and welfare have become

increasingly concerned with issues of intra-regional variation and local
practice. For the purposes of the current volume, six aspects of this literature
are important. First, philanthropic funds were a crucial part of the welfare
resource in Europe. Communities and individuals from Ireland to central
Austria and beyond raised substantial charitable resources in response to
pressing need such as harvest failures, the closure of international markets or
spiralling prices. Often allied with specific municipal responses or (in France
for instance) central initiatives, these resources were usually situationally-
specific and short-lived. In ‘normal’ times, subscriptions, endowed charities
and (crucially for much of Europe outside the temporary reforms of the
Napoleonic period) religiously based charities underpinned much day-to-day
welfare. While the prize of biographies of the welfare avenues explored by
individuals at different stages of their life and family-cycle remains elusive,
the importance of philanthropic resources even for a country such as
England should not, as we have seen, be underplayed. Equally important for
welfare in many European states, was the practice of begging. For England,
Tim Hitchcock has emphasized the importance of informal street begging
or the door-to-door tour in which begging elided seamlessly into individual
charity. Elsewhere, in Austria for instance, begging was more formalized,
not to say officially sanctioned, and inscribed into a framework of Christian
obligation, custom and mutual expectation of behaviour and sentiment.24
A further form of begging has, however, largely escaped historiographical
attention: just as some Belgian citizens felt that it was within their purview
to write begging letters to the Royal Family, so private individuals across
Europe received considerable numbers of such narratives. Many were from
the ‘shamefaced’ poor discussed by Peter Wessel Hansen in his chapter for this
volume, but considerable numbers also came from ordinary working-class
people and paupers who had encountered hard times. In England, Quaker
families in particular seem to have attracted or (more likely) preserved
such begging letters. Beyond the compass of this book, such begging letters
number in the tens of thousands for England alone and provide one future
avenue for research on the narratives of the poor.
A second observation is that all systems of makeshift economy, whether
focused on resources generated by the state, community or church, struggled
with what to do about migration. While it has become increasingly clear that
early modern societies were by no means immobile, there is a clear sense across
Europe that industrialization, urbanization and proletarianization led to a
step-change in the scale if not the distance or type of migration. In England
and Wales the response was a set of enabling national ‘settlement laws’ in
which the precise decision on who ‘belonged’ to a place and could access
its resources was decided in tortuous case law at local and regional level.
In other countries, whether one belonged and could access resources was a
matter of religion, citizenship status, accumulated economic contribution, or
birth. No system was as complex as that in Switzerland, but complexity and
8 Poverty and Sickness in MOdern Europe

contradiction was the key characteristic of European settlement systems,

which had to sensitively balance the needs of local labour markets against
the pockets of local taxpayers, churches and philanthropists. Not until the
later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did European states move
decisively towards place-based settlement systems, in which accumulated
residence in a place generated entitlement to stay and potentially to draw
on local welfare resources. Even then, communities and central authorities
might manipulate the length of time that one had to be resident before
settlement could be claimed so as to protect communal resources.
It is important to be clear, however, and a third observation of the
historiographical literature, that simply belonging to a place did not
guarantee access to communal resources. By the same token, failing to gain
a legal settlement did not necessarily exclude individuals and families from
local resources. In England and Wales, being settled gave individuals a right
to apply for tax-funded local welfare payments under the Old and New
Poor Laws, rather than any right to receive them. In practice many people
were turned down, got less than they asked for or experienced long delays in
consideration of their case. Across Europe, officials and others could and did
bundle up different types of welfare resources (access to religious charities,
other charitable resources, rights of common, begging licenses, food and
fuel doles and tax-funded allowances) for those with different types of
belonging. Much more detailed work is needed on the way that ‘bundles of
rights and rights to access’ were claimed, granted and lost. We also need to
know more about the value of those bundles; without detailed biographies
of the poor across the life-cycle it is difficult to unpick what value access
to common land, charities, begging and tax-funded doles had in total and
relative to each other. In the meantime, if it is clear that in most places
and at most times the sentimental watchword of European welfare systems
was ‘economy’, there are also contrary indicators. Under the English Poor
Law system, for instance, the sick were often treated with extraordinary
generosity whether they had a settlement or not.25 Even the nineteenth-
century workhouse rapidly became a diagnostic and treatment space giving
the very poorest access to health care better than in some hospitals.26
In turn, and a fourth observation, it is clear that European welfare
systems evidence considerable inter-state, inter-regional and intra-regional
differences in the emphasis on institutional provision for the poor. Officials
under the English and Welsh Old Poor Law had a famously fickle relationship
with workhouses, and while most places experimented with them few
workhouses had any longevity. The New Poor Law has been yoked closely
to the institution of the workhouse, but almost all relief for the poor after
1834 continued to be paid to those outside its walls. Unlike their German
counterparts, British officials never got the legal power to forcibly confine
the poor, with the result that workhouses rapidly became receptacles for the
aged, infirm and mothers of illegitimate children.27 This was true of both
urban and rural areas. In urban France, by contrast, institutionally based
 Narratives of poverty and sickness in Europe 1780–1938 9

relief was throughout the period considered in this volume the symbolic
fulcrum of welfare. Of course, much charity was dispensed outside the
institutional context (something reinforced by the chapters in this volume),
particularly in the European provinces, but the distinction between England
and Wales and Continental Europe in these terms is nonetheless marked.
It follows from this, and a fifth observation of the historiographical
literature, that within and between states the role, professionalization and
hierarchy of officials connected to welfare varied widely. In the sense that
such men set the ‘tone’ of local welfare practice, the fact that there is so little
research on them as a group is unfortunate. As Beate Althammer implies
in her chapter comparing responses to Cholera in Germany and Spain, the
‘attitudes’ of officials and the wider class from which they were drawn could
have fundamental – life-and-death – consequences both for how the poor
were represented and treated. In England and Wales the amateur overseer
of the Old Poor Law, appointed for one year and drawn from the general
body of the ratepayers according to a rota, has become an accepted part of
the historical landscape. This despite the fact that urban areas moved quite
quickly to pay more professional people who thus stayed in post for much
longer. Paupers living inside and outside their settlement community made
their case primarily to this official. Although they had a right of appeal
to magistrates, few contested the decisions on their case. Under the New
Poor Law of 1834, local overseers remained in place but many of their
powers were transferred to relieving officers who worked across groups of
parishes. The right of appeal now was either to local guardians (the elected
officials representing the parishes) or to the central state. Broadly, then,
the English and Welsh system was in hierarchical terms ‘flat’. The Scottish
Poor Law, by contrast, contained more, and more central, intermediaries.
These included religious ministers, investigating committees, inspectors of
the poor and magistrates, as well as local officials. The German system,
outlined by Katrin Marx-Jaskulski and Tamara Stazic-Wendt in their
contributions to this volume, was equally hierarchical and multi-layered,
and might involve relief applications to paid or amateur officials, religious
ministers, elected politicians, figureheads such as the mayor, and a range
of regional and national administrations. Unlike England, Switzerland or
Austria, many of these functionaries were paid professionals. In Spain,
the system was even more complex, melding together all of these figures
(though on a largely amateur basis) plus powerful local elites, guilds and
aristocrats determined to have their say in both general welfare policy and
specific decisions.28 While all welfare systems became more professionalized
from the mid-nineteenth century, the differences highlighted here prior to
this date inevitably feed through into differences of sentiment, on which we
need rather more research.
Of course, sentiment was shaped by moral and financial consideration as
well as by the character and power of administrators. Another variable was
the way in which welfare structures were inscribed into the wider legislative
10 Poverty and Sickness in MOdern Europe

and state-building context, and a final observation of the literature is that

this context seems to have varied considerably. The syphilitic patients who
stride through Anna Lundberg’s chapter for this volume were subject to
forced treatment under a repressive national law but this was just one of a
suite of national legislative initiatives (on education, registration of residence
and settlement, for instance) that sought to control the poorest segments of
society. In turn, these laws were based upon one of the most comprehensive,
and certainly the earliest, information states in Europe. Similarly the
chapters on Germany, Austria and Denmark in this volume point explicitly
or implicitly to the treatment of the poor and understanding of their plight
being increasingly intertwined with a wider set of legislative imperatives
and a wider state-building impetus. By contrast, the British state, at least
in so far as it related to England and Wales, adopted largely permissive
legislation and for most of the period considered here maintained little
effective central control over the dispensation of welfare or the lives of the
poor. And while the law of the Poor Laws became intricately connected to
other medical and welfare legislation (for instance on medical training and
the use of the poor for anatomy purposes after 1832) it was not bundled
with wider social legislation on matters like education as was the case in
Sweden or Denmark. In France, too, it was not until the early twentieth
century that the central state could inscribe treatment of the poor into a
wider legislative programme, a project to build a definitive national identity
and into a coherent information state underpinned by national statistics.29
These observations are at best a partial rendering of the rich secondary
literature. Yet they are fundamental to an understanding both of the
treatment of the sick poor (a topic revisited below) and the scale, form and
typologies of narratives by or about the sick poor that emerge in Europe
from the later eighteenth century. Broadly, the nature of the welfare system
faced by the poor, whether ‘shamefaced’ or pauper, shaped how they were
depicted, how many narratives were written, in what form and to whom.
It also shaped the likelihood of survival of the sorts of evidence that our
contributors are interested in. Thus, the balance of philanthropic resources
in the local welfare package matters because applying for and obtaining
charity generated more narrative material about the poor than by them.
Those who administered charitable resources frequently surveyed the poor,
and in places like Scotland or Norway such surveys might involve mediated
testimonies of the poor themselves. Charities often had to report to donors,
and might do so through publications or newspapers. Equally, as Peter
Wessel Hansen shows in his chapter for this volume, stories about the poor
might be published so as to elicit support for charities in the first place.
Published testimony about the poor arising out of the operation of charities
thus tends to be relatively rich, at the same time as original documentation
collected for and by charities tends to be relatively thin given their often
short-term nature. Narratives written by the poor to charities (as opposed
to begging letters to individuals) do exist for some countries, particularly