Steven King is professor of economic and social history at the University of Leicester.
"Steven King is one of a number of people who have for many years
done the hard labour of trawling for and transcribing the scrappy -
'fugitive' is the word he uses, with its connotations of
elusiveness, oppression and secrecy - letters from and about the
poor, attempting to recover 'the pauper experience' by charting the
process of requesting relief. King's study of these letters leads
him to conclude that the timing of mass literacy, the
democratisation of writing, has to be pushed back to the 1820s at
least, though that still seems late when you consider that in 1740
Samuel Richardson constructed an entire novel in letters supposedly
written by a 16-year-old servant girl, Pamela, to her impoverished
parents." London Review of Books
"In this wonderfully rich and scholarly book, Steven King provides
a highly original approach to understanding the Old Poor Law from
the bottom up based on an extraordinary excavation of an entirely
new corpus of poor people's letters originating from a wide range
of geographical settings. King maps out an entirely new corpus of
evidence with which to explore a broad range of historical topics,
from the emergence of eloquence and the spread of literacy to the
experience of poverty and the provision of welfare. It is a book
about letter writing as well as letter writers and will appeal to
scholars across a wide disciplinary spectrum from literary studies
to welfare historians. Above all, by using the words of the poor
themselves, King amply demonstrates deep empathy as well as insight
to the experience of poverty in eighteenth and nineteenth-century
England and Wales." David Green, King's College London
"Over the last two decades, Steven King has been a leading figure
in the social history of poverty and poor relief in England during
the industrial revolution. With this book, we enter an entirely new
era of the old master project of writing social history from
below." Thomas Sokoll, FernUniversitat in Hagen
"King has mastered an enormous database, and his analysis of it is
thorough and imaginative. An impressive achievement." Martyn Lyons,
University of New South Wales
"Focusing in detail and through imaginative comparative analyses on
documents that have thus far only been researched in regional case
studies, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s makes
an innovative contribution to the history of poverty a
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