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Newly available in paperback, this thorough and engaging examination of an institution and its young charges is set in the wider social, cultural, demographic and medical context of the eighteenth century. By examining the often short lives of abandoned babies, Levene illustrates the variety of pathways to health, ill-health and death taken by the young and how it intersected with local epidemiology, institutional life and experiences of abandonment, feeding and child-care. Child fostering, paid nursing and family formation in different parts of England are also examined, showing how this metropolitan institution called on a network of contacts to try to raise its charges to good health.Of significance to scholars working in economic and social history, medical and institutional history and histories of childhood and childcare in the early modern period, the book will also appeal to anthropologists interested in child-rearing and feeding practices, and inter-family relationships

This short article examines what local perspectives have added—and continue to add—to welfare history. The paper begins by summarising the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure on households and the ways they functioned and shows how work on local populations set many of today's research agendas. It then argues that a fruitful way forward might be to use national and regional studies to identify local case studies that would be particularly interesting or informative. This point is illustrated by discussing a range of examples. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of 'big' data and digitisation for local studies of welfare in the past.

This article tests the impact of industrial life, migration, and religious ties on family life. Specifically, it examines Jewish households, asking whether they conformed to traditional patterns of nuclearity, and what this suggests about wider kinship or community networks. It shows that Jews accommodated a range of people in their households, from family members to Jewish lodgers and non-Jewish servants. Jewish lodgers frequently lived with coreligionists who also often shared birthplaces or occupations. In sum, the data suggest a strong degree of intracommunal solidarity despite high levels of migration and also emphasize the diversity of household forms in this period.

ABSTRACTThe consideration of the removals aspect of settlement law – that is, the moving on of paupers or potential paupers to the parish where they 'belonged' – has focused almost exclusively on working-age adults and labour migration. This article focuses on how removal law affected families with children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in two large London parishes. It finds that children were a sizeable presence among the removed population but that there were notable differences in family type between the two parishes. Furthermore, while most young children were kept with their mothers even if they did not share a settlement, others were removed alone, even after a change in settlement law in 1795 that should have assured their common claim in certain cases. The study sheds light on attitudes to poor children and their families, as well as on the exigencies brought about by economic circumstances and employment opportunities in the parish.