Suchergebnisse

Nineteenth-century Ireland saw the emergence of a campaign to have orphaned and abandoned children 'boarded out' from workhouses to live with families in return for payment. Despite growing anxiety about the unsuitability of workhouses for children, communities could show resistance to having these children, particularly those from urban workhouses, living in their own neighbourhood. Using the case of alleged abuse towards three children boarded out from Belfast workhouse to a family living in a remote rural townland, this paper explores the experience of, and attitudes towards, workhouse children boarded into rural communities. Using testimonies of neighbours and poor law officials at the resultant 1872 Poor Law inquiry, it examines the relationship between the children, their foster family, and the wider community and reveals the extent to which those families who took in workhouse children became subject to surveillance not just from welfare authorities but also from members of their community.

ABSTRACTIn common with many British cities, but unlike the rest of Ireland, late nineteenth-century Belfast experienced rapid industrialization and physical expansion. Women formed a significant proportion of the city's workforce, attracted by the employment opportunities represented in the burgeoning textile industry. Many of them were economically vulnerable, however, and could find themselves destitute for a number of reasons. This article sets Belfast's Poor Law workhouse in the landscape of welfare in the city, exploring how its use reflected the development of the city and the ways in which the female poor engaged with it in order to survive.

The late nineteenth-century city acted as a magnet for the poor of ruralIreland, attracting them with the promise of employment and economicindependence. For many, however, urban life meant economic precarity,marginalisation and destitution, with the workhouse as an all-too-presentreality. Young families were particularly vulnerable, with the result that thousandsof children found themselves confined within the workhouse walls.This book explores the changing role of the Irish poor law in childwelfare in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city. Taking as itsfocus Belfast, a burgeoning industrial and port city at the heart of a globaltrade network and a city deeply divided along political and confessional lines,it examines the ways in which that city s poorest children and their families engagedwith the poor law and used the workhouse as part of their economy ofmakeshifts. It examines the various spaces of the poor law - whether theworkhouse, the foster home, or the far reaches of empire - as sites of encounterand engagement between welfare authorities and the city s poorest families, andexplores the development of child welfare practice at a time of increasingstate encroachment into the daily lives of poor children

After the partition of Ireland and the foundation of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, Belfast and Dublin had become capital cities of two new states. For those struggling on the margins, however, this new-found statehood held little practical value. Through a close reading of 'poverty letters' written to political and religious leaders, this article explores how people articulated their need as they sought assistance and tried to define their understanding of poverty and its impact. By employing a comparative lens, it approaches these letters as social spaces in which people drew on wider cultural and political anxieties and motifs to perform belonging and identity.

Urban spaces in nineteenth-century Ireland offers new insights on the Irish urban experience by exploring the ways in which urban spaces, from individual buildings to streets and districts, were constructed and experienced during the nineteenth century