This article examines households containing lodgers in the Carpathian Basin during the eighteenth century, using the status animarum, lists of inhabitants made by the Roman Catholic Church. The author argues that lodgers had special demographic and household characteristics. Evidence is provided to show that the majority of lodger households consisted of both families fragmented by family catastrophe and young couples at the beginning of their life-career. It is further argued that it would be worthwhile to extend the work on lodgers with comparative analyses, particularly because such work would shed light on this stratum of society, which is so often missing from micro-level demographic histories.

The popular image, if any, related to lodging in industrial and urban society is one of young male lodgers and female landladies. The aim of this article is to discuss the identity of lodgers and landlords/ladies in gender, age and social perspective. Can we find evidence for proximity in origin, gender and social class between those who looked for and those who provided lodgings? While the middle classes saw lodging as a social evil, were their fears of moral and hygienic degradation realistic? Was keeping lodgers a way of fleecing vulnerable migrants and forcing them into a life of squalor? Or is it possible that the people who acquired an extra room, for a bit of income, or squeezed in an extra bed, were at the mercy of builders and slum landlords with multiple houses? We should perhaps remind ourselves that the ultimate power of control of building quality and flat size lay in the hands of the social class that was pointing its finger at those at the bottom of the social ladder. Through the combination of surveys and census data with oral history collections from early twentieth-century Finland a narrative is constructed of the life as a lodger or landlord/landlady of the working class, demonstrating networks of friendship and mutual support, as well as systems of lodging that were simple economic arrangements for the survival of both parties.

The social and economic position of lodgers in Europe and North America has attracted considerable scholarship, yet the financial and interpersonal relationships between lodgers and boarders and their hosts in working-class homes is somewhat underdeveloped. This article examines patterns of lodging and boarding in working-class homes in Scotland between 1861 and 1911, focusing upon multiple layers of connection between paying guests and householders. This article demonstrates that connections had national and ethnic roots, and that taking in lodgers and boarders was of prime cultural and economic importance for many. The ability to offer space played a crucial role in the social and economic status of single, separated and widowed women, and this article offers an insight into the sometimes troubled relationships between landladies and their tenants.

Over half of all victims of the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) were children. Many of these deaths took place in the union workhouses: institutions of government poor relief which for many were the last resort in a desperate struggle to survive famine-induced conditions such as starvation and infectious disease. Archaeological excavations of a mass burial ground dating to 1847–1851 at the former workhouse in Kilkenny City have provided the opportunity to undertake a detailed interdisciplinary exploration of non-adult mortality in an Irish workhouse during the height of the Famine.

This article analyses the social profile of Geneva's philanthropists around 1900. It shows that, contrary to what the literature on philanthropy argues, philanthropists belonged to varied social groups defined by diverse forms of capital (economic, social and cultural) and were involved in philanthropic activities related to their social status. Together, those philanthropists formed a social field. They were connected to each other and even needed to collaborate on specific issues. The article argues that interconnections between actors reinforced their social position. By examining this field through both quantitative and qualitative methods, the article highlights relationships and ties between actors and shows how they collaborated on the basis of commonly held principles.