In August 2016, I will publish my first book. It is not finished, I still have bits and bobs of research to complete; a trip to Liverpool to the Royal Liverpool School for the Blind and to the Nazareth House Archives in Hammersmith. I dare say some other ‘vital’ questions will come up too between … More Pauper Children: Poor Law Childhoods in England and Wales 1834-1910
Christmas is a time when local, national and global charities boost their fundraising campaigns which are often targeted at helping the young, the elderly and the homeless during the festive season. Victorian women who were lucky enough to have leisure time very often filled it with what has been patronisingly referred to as ‘good works’. … More Come to the Rescue, Fair Ladies!
Newspaper headlines moralising about binge-drinking ‘ladette’ culture and alcohol-fuelled crime are hardly a recent phenomenon. I was reminded recently of my own half-forgotten research about Victorian drunkenness by Nell Darby’s excellent blog post concerning the newspaper reporting of the 400 arrests of Annie Parker in mid nineteenth-century London. This empathetic account of a ‘notorious’ woman … More Drunk and Riotous: troubled and troublesome inebriate women
A recent news item on the Nature web site discussed a ‘severe publication bias’ in the Social Sciences: ‘When an experiment fails to produce an interesting effect, researchers often shelve the data and move on to another problem. But withholding null results skews the literature in a field, and is a particular worry for clinical medicine … More Sexual abuse, silences and sources: Did the Victorians better protect their vulnerable children?
The spectacle of the Commonwealth Games has reminded me of how the Coronation of King Edward in 1902 was celebrated by the management and inmates of Swansea Workhouse. A Coronation Celebrations Committee had been established several week prior to the event to plan decorations, food and celebratory events. There was to be a special dinner for the inmates, … More The Workhouse Games – Sport and Celebration
As I wrote last Christmas, workhouse children were often treated to presents and outings over the festive period. This was not the only holiday celebrated by pauper children as the regular outings on Whit Monday (or spring bank holiday) show. Whitsun was traditionally a time for new clothes and trips and Whit Monday saw Swansea’s … More High days and holidays for the workhouse child
Most middle-class women of the Victorian and Edwardian period were neither ‘Angels in the House’ nor, as described by Lawrence Stone, ‘idle drones’. Civic participation was a class and gender expectation and middle-class women were involved in charitable work from the organisation of charity bazaars to the rescue of ‘fallen’ women. Ladies’ committees were standard … More Women of the Workhouse, Part 2: Ladies to the Rescue?
The lives of women have always been one of my primary research interests, so when my friends at Archif Menywod Cymru/Women’s Archive of Wales were asked to devise a Women’s History Walk in Swansea, I started thinking about who should be included. Mrs Corney wooed by Mr Bumble, Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist There is no … More Women of the Workhouse, Part I – A suitable job for a woman?
To celebrate my first Twitter anniversary on 18 December 2013, I thought I’d present a Christmas Compilation of some of the amazing drawings from the Illustrated Police News that I have tweeted over the past week or so. Since October, I have been teaching a third year history module at Swansea University called Digital Detectives. We have … More Victorian Adventures and Terrible Tales: The Illustrated Police News
While it’s true that Charles Dickens and Prince Albert did not invent the Victorian Christmas, they did influence the Victorian imagining of Christmas considerably. Were workhouse inmates and other recipients of poor relief allowed to participate in Dickensian festivity over Christmas or was it more a case of Bah Humbug? In the years following the 1834 Poor … More ‘Altogether a right merrie day’? Christmas in the Workhouse
Workhouse Tales 