Jake Ladlow Final Thesis 2
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‘Unsettled Minds’ in England and Wales, 1800-1834. Jake Ben Ladlow March 2020 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of History | Clare College Declaration This thesis is the result of my own work. It includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any work that has already been submitted before for any degree or other qualification except as declared in the preface and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the History Degree Committee. i Abstract Jake Ben Ladlow ‘Unsettled Minds’ in England and Wales, 1800-1834. This thesis is set to analyse pauper letters to provide a new critical framework to access the emotional lives of what Edward Thompson once called ‘people from below’ under the last years of the Old Poor Law. The concept and spectrum of ‘unsettled mind’ is to be introduced as the central interpretive framework through which the content and emotional dimensions of pauper’s requests for relief will be examined. The hypothesis of unsettledness is that ordinary people in England and Wales experienced a constant state of flux in their mental well-being and moved across an experiential spectrum. This ranged from deeply embedded contentment with the self and their human situation, to confinement, usually in asylums, in mental institutions. The study is based upon close readings and detailed analysis of the corpus linguistics found in pauper letters from 1,499 individual letter sets across eight different typological and topographical regions. Five different typologies of unsettled mind will be presented and analysed, with a view to reconstructing the emotional lives of the poor. The introduction and subsequent use of the spectrum of unsettledness locates this study at the liminal intersection of the historical literatures of madness and emotion. The argument will be made that the accounts from unsettled paupers allow historians to: look beyond the realm of the asylum and notions of madness to consider contemporaries’ experiences of mental distress in the words used by the affected to describe their experiences; present a history of the emotional dimensions of poverty, a wide-scale study of the emotions of the lower classes, and offer a new window into contemporaries’ actualised experience(s) of illness; and to demonstrate how the letters give testimony to the exercise and limits of paupers’ agency in the early nineteenth century. This thesis aims, ultimately, to present an emotional history of poverty in the words of those that endured its effects and provide a privileged space for their accounts of pauperism and unsettledness to be heard. iii Contents List of Tables ....................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... ix Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................ xi Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 1 Reading Pauper Letters ..................................................................................................... 37 2 Laid-low ............................................................................................................................ 65 3 Status-stress ....................................................................................................................... 94 4 Compromised Identity .................................................................................................... 133 5 Cumulative Troubles ....................................................................................................... 162 6 Death ............................................................................................................................... 188 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 208 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 217 v List of Tables Table 0.1 – Unsettled Cases. 23 Table 0.2 – Cases of Male and Female Unsettledness. 24 Table 2.1 – Laid-low Cases. 67 Table 3.1 – Status-stress Cases. 98 Table 4.1 – Compromised Identity Cases. 137 Table 5.1 – Cumulative Troubles Cases. 165 Table 6.1 – Death Cases. 191 vii Acknowledgements My first debt is owed to my supervisor, Dr Elizabeth Foyster. Her support was unfailing throughout my time in Cambridge. I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have received further guidance from an array of academics during my time as a student. Those with significant roles included: Professor Lauren Kassell, Professor Pete King, Dr Malcolm Noble, and Professor Keith Snell. Special mention must go to my mentor, Professor Steven King. Steve’s influence has been unique and transformative throughout my time as a student and it has been a privilege to collaborate and learn from him. I will forever be grateful. I am also grateful to my examiners, Dr Samantha Williams and Professor Alannah Tomkins, for devoting their time and expertise to review my work and for their informative feedback. In financial terms, I am indebted to the funding provided by CHESS to conduct my doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge. The Clare College Mellon Fund enabled me to enjoy a semester of study at Yale University which was productive and fulfilling. While in New Haven, I enjoyed the hospitality of Professor Flora Vaccarino who graciously permitted me to live in her beautiful home, drink her wine, and walk the dogs. My time at Clare was spent in what I now recall as a constant state of giddy delirium and, as such, I forged some memorable ties with the staff. Foremost among them was with the Porters, particularly Kevin Price and Geppetto Price, Pete Evans, and Keith Pearson. Alan Lloyd will expect top billing and he truly deserves it. As do the computer office gang, especially Allison Lewis and Ian Elliot. My uncle Chris Ladlow and his partner, Di, have offered an endless supply of encouragement and often a welcome distraction. My father, David Ladlow, and his wife, Jo, have always been supportive and useful allies in locating the best pubs in the city when they visited. Finally, my mother, Claire Morrisey, has always given me every chance not only to succeed, but to be happy. I hope completing this thesis and the journey it has come to represent ultimately honours her many sacrifices. ix Abbreviations BRO Berkshire Record Office CURO Cumbria Record Office GLRO Gloucestershire Record Office GWRO Gwent Record Office HRO Hampshire Record Office ORO Oxford Record Office SRO Surrey Record Office ESRO East Sussex Record Office WSRO West Sussex Record Office EYRO East Yorkshire Record Office WYRO West Yorkshire Record Office xi Introduction At the core of this thesis resides a deceptively simple hypothesis: that ordinary people in England and Wales, 1800-1834, experienced a constant state of flux in their mental well- being and moved across an experiential spectrum. This ranged from deeply embedded contentment with the self and their human situation, to confinement (usually temporary) in mental institutions. This spectrum of experience and related questions about why people experienced changes in their mental state, how they understood the potential spectrum of experiences, and how they wrote about and rhetoricised it, has been the subject of sporadic and imperfect historical investigation, with a distinct skewing towards the better-off more literate classes. Using the concept of ‘unsettled minds’, the thesis is located at the liminal intersection of two literatures. First, is the madness literature which has indelibly linked pauper lunacy and confinement in mental institutions. Such literature neglects the central fact of madness in historical populations, namely: that most of those who were mad did not end up in asylums and vast numbers of poor people would have experienced successive or periodic bouts of unsettled minds without becoming mad. Second, the literature regarding the history of emotions. This has, either deliberately or because of source and literary constraints, generalised the emotional framework of middle-class actors to the labouring poor of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century England. Through a detailed analysis of the corpus linguistics of pauper letters written between 1800 and 1834, the central aim in what follows is to provide a new critical framework to explore what historians such as Edward Thompson have called ‘people from below’ in their letter writing activities; these were the poorly educated in an oral culture who might appear to have been marginalised but in fact spoke often about their emotional as well as economic well- being in the voluminous correspondence of poor law archives.1 Pauper letters represent a major source that has been used for various purposes while their wider utility is yet to be comprehensively explored through other lenses. Even welfare historians have engaged only passingly with these unique sources, a feature which this study looks to rectify; and in so doing, study the emotional experiences of the poor for the first time through interpretation of 1 Thompson,