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poor laws « Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Posts Tagged ‘poor laws’

From cradle to grave

Thursday, February 13th, 2025

Simon Szreter                      

Most people know that this memorable phrase is associated with the modern welfare state created by the first majority Labour government under Prime Minister Clement Attlee, elected in 1945 after victory in World War II. But was it in fact the first time that a universal social security and welfare system had been legislated in British history? 

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Were all workhouses Dickensian? Indoor relief under the Old Poor Law (1601-1834)

Thursday, January 9th, 2025

Jeremy Boulton and Samantha Williams 

Ask most people about workhouses, and they will probably associate them with Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-8); that is, with grim Union Workhouses erected under the New Poor Law (1834) which supposedly produced segregated, oppressive, regimented institutions designed to deter all but the most desperate from applying for poor relief.  

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Why were Hansel and Gretel not English?

Thursday, August 29th, 2024

Romola Davenport

Berhardina Midderigh-Bokhorst and Smith’s Fine Arts Publishing N.V. – The Hague. Hansel and Gretel (1937). Image credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum.

In the story of Hansel and Gretel, a famine drives a father to abandon his children in the woods, where they discover a house made of gingerbread and a cannibal witch. In the Magic Porridge Pot tale, a young girl forced by poverty to search for food in the woods and hedgerows is given a magic pot that produces abundant staple food on command.

These types of stories about hunger and famine abound in the folklore of most European societies, and embody folk memories of food scarcity. However, as the historian John Walter noted, these tropes are curiously absent from English fairy tales. Why? 

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