Alysa Levene's research has helped to shape our understanding of everyday life among the poor, child health, and welfare in eighteenth-century London since the publication of her doctoral disserttion on the London Foundling Hospital in 2007. This book builds upon this excellent body of scholarship and brings together her focus on the history of welfare and childhood.
Levene draws on a characteristic wealth of sources, including predominately parish records from St. Clement Danes, St. Martin in the Fields, St. Paul Covent Garden, St. Botolph, St. Sepulchre, St. Mary Lambeth, and Marylebone together with the institutional records of Christ's Hospital, the London Foundling Hospital, and the charitable records of the Marine Society and the Stranger's Friend Society. She brings these together with a wealth of contemporary writing on poverty and poor children. Her training as a demographic historian leads her to utilize an innovative demographic and statistical technique to flesh out the complex historical contexts of poor children in eighteenth-century London. She is less interested in individual life stories, though there is much mention of these, than in an aggregated view of young people and the responses to their poverty. This approach reveals directions in policy and practice. For purposes of definition, children under the age of 13 are her focus, and she spends the first part of the book sketching out the variety of family forms within which poor children live. This careful stitching together of diverse sources using new methodological techniques allows her to piece together a patchwork of poor children's lives in chapters on family life, parish nursing, parish childcare, the workhouse, outdoor relief, charity, community, friends, and family. She demonstrates how these contexts were often deprived and desperate and usually a consequence of fragmented family life. Her findings are powerful and evocative, and provide much food for thought and future research.
Children in the eighteenth century became an important focus for writers and campaigners on poverty. While their parents vexed the minds of reformers, who became increasingly suspicious of their motives and held responsible for their deprivation, children escaped blameless. Though they were appearing in ever larger numbers, they could not be held accountable for their circumstances. Eighteenth-century reformers put their hopes in poor children because they were “malleable” and had potential as future workers (4). This shift in understanding occurred within a demographic context of falling child and infant mortality.
Most of the book covers previously unexplored terrain, and the depth and breadth of her research on this subject shines a fresh light on the varied lives and circumstances of poor children in the city. She shows how different parishes practiced different systems of parish nursing. The ages of children sent to nurse varied, and so too did the time they spent in the homes of nurses. Some parishes were systematic in their systems of care; homes and nurses were carefully inspected and supervised, while other nurses were left to get on with the task at hand. Some nurses clearly took pride in their work and professional identity. What is of particular value is that Levene does not provide us with just a snapshot of life at one time, but her methodology allows her to track the long-term experiences of poor children, as they moved from the workhouse in the city to life with a nurse in the country, and back again. Her research reveals that parish officers often viewed poor families with sympathy, and the bonds between parent and child were sometimes valued and nurtured. The plans of parents and the parish did not always diverge, and different models of care were sometimes supported by the Poor Law. Parish officers were also aware that poor children who stayed with their mothers were more likely to survive than those who were separated. As others have also shown, poor mothers were sometimes allowed to nurse their own children with parish support. Other children benefitted from long-term foster care while their parents remained in touch, or at least aware of the location and circumstances of their children. Chapter 5 shows how even the most desperate parents tried to retain control, limited though it may have been, over the lives of their progeny. Levene's chapter on children's experience of the workhouse is particularly valuable. She shows how children often experienced the workhouse in diverse ways. Poor children could use the workhouse to access health care and training not available to them outside of this context. Her final chapter reveals that despite the aid offered by the parish and within institutions like the Foundling Hospital and Christ's Hospital, the majority of poor children were helped most by individuals in their midst— family, friends, and neighbors. Unfortunately, the sources remain largely silent on this process.
By the early nineteenth century, the poor had a far wider range of health and welfare options in times of need than they had before. This was particularly the case in London, if not elsewhere. The Poor Law, however, remained crucial for those hoping to escape the poverty of their birth (177). This is a humane and compassionate work that forces us to acknowledge, once more, the complex and varied routes that poor children traveled in the eighteenth century.
