Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Poverty, Children and the Poor Law in Industrial Belfast, 1880-1918

Poverty, Children and the Poor Law in Industrial Belfast, 1880-1918

Purdue, Olwen
Laragy, Georgina

Paperback

Series: Reappraisals in Irish History, Book 17

General World HistoryIrish HistorySocial Movements

ISBN10: 1836244053
ISBN13: 9781836244059
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: May 6 2025
Pages: 320
Weight: 0.98
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

The late nineteenth-century city acted as a magnet for the poor of rural Ireland, attracting them with the promise of employment and economic independence. For many, however, urban life meant economic precarity, marginalisation and destitution, with the workhouse as an all-too-present reality. Young families were particularly vulnerable, with the result that thousands of children found themselves confined within the workhouse walls.

This book explores the changing role of the Irish poor law in child welfare in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city. Taking as its focus Belfast, a burgeoning industrial and port city at the heart of a global trade 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 engaged with the poor law and used the workhouse as part of their economy of makeshifts. It examines the various spaces of the poor law - whether the workhouse, the foster home, or the far reaches of empire - as sites of encounter and engagement between welfare authorities and the city's poorest families, and explores the development of child welfare practice at a time of increasing state encroachment into the daily lives of poor children.

Also from

Purdue, Olwen

View All

Also in

Irish History

View All