6 - ‘Without the cry of any neighbours’: A Cumbrian family and the poor law authorities, c.1690–1730

Summary

‘Poverty’, argued Lawrence Stone in 1977, ‘is an acid that erodes both physical beauty and affective relations.’ Stone's depiction of family life among the labouring poor of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England was, accordingly, bleak in the extreme. Poor men spent much of their time in the alehouse, their drunkenness inducing temporary forgetfulness of a working life spent in dreary and degrading jobs. Poor women began life in servitude in the parental home, moved in early adolescence to servitude in their employer's home, and ended in servitude to their husbands in the marital home. Amid the drudgery of domestic purification, ‘the whitened doorstep was the only symbol of self-esteem’ to which they could aspire. In the one- or two-roomed cottages, hovels or tenements in which the poor huddled, privacy was neither a practical possibility nor even a theoretical aspiration. The absence of sexual privacy merely compounded problems created by the lack of cleanliness. The indigent were dirty, exhausted and suffered from reduced libido. Relentless hardship of this kind meant that it was ‘simply not conceivable’ that affective individualism, the modernising force that Stone placed at the centre of his account of the emergence of the modern family, had any purchase among the poor.

Notoriously, Stone argued that poverty was corrosive of affective relations not only between adults, but also between parents and children, which were dictated above all by economic circumstances.