Stories Told but Seldom Heard

Just a few pages into the classic work of sentimental fiction, The Man of Feeling (1771), the hero of the novel, Harley, is confronted with a beggar and his dog: ‘He had on a loose sort of coat, mended with different-coloured rags, . . . he wore no shoes, and his stockings had entirely lost that part of them which should have covered his feet and ankles . . .’. The man ‘asked charity of Harley; the dog began to beg too . . .’ and in response Harley immediately supplied their want with a sixpence. In exchange for this contribution, Harley asked the beggar to tell him his story, and was rewarded with a long tale of gradual decline. The beggar had contracted gaol fever from visiting felons, and his house burned to the ground during his slow recovery. By the end, the beggar explained, ‘I was so weak that I spit blood whenever I attempted to work’. Having neither a parish of settlement nor friends to help, he ‘was forced to beg’. But, by his own account, this particular beggar made a very poor fist of it: ‘I told all my misfortunes truly, but they were seldom believed; and the few who gave me a half-penny as they passed, did it with a shake of the head, and an injunction, not to trouble them with a long story’.¹ In the five volumes of the Narratives of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Britain edited by Alysa Levene and others it quickly becomes clear that despite this particular beggar’s conclusion that most people did not care to hear a long story, they certainly put a great deal of effort into collecting a large variety of short ones.

As a part of the administrative systems which grew up with the Old Poor Law and the Act of Settlement of 1662, and as a legacy of the rise of voluntary associational charities from the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the sheer volume of ‘narratives of the poor’ grew ever larger. Today, county record-offices groan under the weight of large collections of settlement and bastardy examinations, of pauper letters seeking relief from distant parishes, of depositions and trial accounts and of the petitions and narratives used by charities to verify the ‘deservedness’ of the people who sought relief in misfortune. This mass of documentation represents an extraordinary archive of everyday suffering, covering the lives of perhaps a majority of all eighteenth-century British men and women. It is remarkable that until recently few historians have bothered to investigate this archival abundance. In the 1970s G. W. Oxley claimed that this repository of individual narratives tells us ‘remarkably little about the poor themselves and the circumstances which brought them into dependence on poor relief’.² In part, the unwillingness of previous generations to engage with this material was the result of its bureaucratic complexity and of the arid and unpromising language of accounting used to express much of the information it contains. At the same time, the heroic tales of working-class radicals challenging the forces of reaction, and of romantic criminals dying ‘game’ to the applause of their fellows and the chagrin of the state, pushed the beggarly and pathetic from centre stage. But in recent years new technical and literary developments have helped to refocus historical interest on to this archive.

From the late 1980s new techniques of nominal-record linkage (pioneered by demographers and political historians in a Namierite tradition) began to hold out the possibility of creating rounded lives from the disparate fragments and single-line entries that filled the ledgers of poverty.³ During the same period, a new drive towards a more narrative form of historical writing that focused on individual communities also began to emerge. In the work of Keith Wrightson and David Levine, of Keith Snell, David Underdown and Barry Reay, the sheer density of information available through the close analysis...