The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Who were the poor of the world’s first metropolises, and how did they survive? This collection of eight original essays proposes a revisionist perspective on poverty and its relief in the nineteenth-century city, emphasizing the position of women and children and the importance of charity and welfare in their lives.

Historians have tended to focus on the motives and achievements of the benefactors and institutions, in part because donors left behind such rich documentation. These essays, taking their cue from recent trends in the social sciences, address charity from below, as experienced from the point of view of the recipients, and challenge assumptions about the marginality and dependency of the poor.

The authors find that the demand for charity was constant, that the forms in which it was offered rarely matched the forms in which it was needed, that the poor used considerable ingenuity in adapting both the gifts and themselves to meet their needs, and that their attitudes toward charity often were not what either donors or historians have believed.

The Uses of Charity is a valuable resource for students and scholars of history, anthropology, sociology, and women’s studies.