Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries workhouses were a key provider of medical care to the poor. Workhouse beds in Britain far outnumbered beds provided by charitable hospitals, and a high percentage of inmates wereelderly and infirm, needing not only accommodation and work but also medical relief.Historians of welfare, the English poor laws, and medicine have been aware of the importance of workhouse-based medicine, but the topic hasnot been studied in depth. This vol...

"Emma Griffin gives a new and powerful voice to the men and women whose blood and sweat greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution" (Tim Hitchcock, author of Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London).This "provocative study" looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class ( The New Yorker). The era didn't just bring ...

Charles Stewart Parnell is the most enigmatic figure in Irish history. An Anglo-Irish landlord from a distinguished Wicklow family, he became the most unlikely leader of Irish nationalism imaginable. He hated the colour green. He was not a dynamic speaker. He was cold and aloof and lacked the popular touch. None the less, from the late 1870s until his fall and death in 1891, he held the whole of Ireland spellbound. He established Home Rule for Ireland – previously a taboo subject in Britis...

In Search of a Better Life' challenges the traditional histories of British and Irish migration, the stories of oppression and exile that form an essential part of the existing literature. By no means were all migrants forced to leave their country by circumstances; many looked forward to a better life abroad. They were largely opportunists rather than victims, whether financed by the state or by landlords or philanthropists, or, as was the case for the majority, by themselves or their fam...

This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialisation, 1790–1850,...

The story of the creation of Britain's national game has often been told. According to the accepted wisdom, the refined football games created by English public schools in the 1860s subsequently became the sports of the masses. Football, The First Hundred Years, provides a revisionist history of the game, challenging previously widely-accepted beliefs.Harvey argues that established football history does not correspond with the facts. Football, as played by the 'masses' prio...

"Provides a wealth of information about . . . people who have gone through debt collectives, hospitals, bankruptcy, crime, homelessness—the list is huge." — UK HistorianMany people in the past—perhaps a majority—were poor. Tracing our ancestors amongst them involves consulting a wide range of sources. Stuart Raymond's handbook is the ideal guide to them.He examines the history of the poor and how they survived. Some were supported by charity. A few w...

In the early twenty-first century, juvenile crime has become a matter of widespread social and political concern and debate. Young Offenders examines the way in which attitudes - and the law itself - have evolved in dealing with juvenile wrongdoing from the early eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. By the use of court and prison records, parliamentary papers, newspapers, the writings of reformers and other records, such as those covering transportation and life in the overseas ...

The law had as much influence on our ancestors as it does on us today, and it occupies an extraordinary range of individuals, from eminent judges and barristers to clerks and minor officials. Yet, despite burgeoning interest in all aspects of history and ancestry, lawyers and legal history have rarely been looked at from the point of view of a family historian. And this is main purpose of Stephen Wades accessible and authoritative introduction to the subject. Assuming that the reader has l...

This illuminating broad-based political and cultural study presents the efinitive account of the campaign to abolish capital punishment in the period 1955-69. It comprises a work of contemporary history exploring the theme from a number of angles, both pro and contra, which have not been covered so extensively before.It asks why the campaign succeeded when so many others facing lesser instititional obstacles failede, and it asks why it succeeded when it did and in the way it did, a...

This book provides an overview of the history of policing in the UK. Its primary aim is to investigate the shifting nature of policing over time, and to provide a historical foundation to today's debates. Policing: a short history moves away from a focus on the origins of the 'new police', and concentrates rather on broader (but much neglected) patterns of policing. How was there a shift from communal responsibility to policing? What has been expected of the police by the public and vice v...

London Lives is a fascinating new study which exposes, for the first time, the lesser-known experiences of eighteenth-century thieves, paupers, prostitutes and highwaymen. It charts the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Londoners who found themselves submerged in poverty or prosecuted for crime, and surveys their responses to illustrate the extent to which plebeian Londoners influenced the pace and direction of social policy. Calling upon a new body of evidence, the book illuminates ...