Blog post written by Anne-Christine Gardner (8 January 2021)
All of us from the LALP team wish you a Happy New Year and hope that you had a nice Christmas. For many of you it will surely have been a different holiday from what you had envisaged. Let’s take a moment and have a look at how some of the families represented in our corpus experienced this time of year two centuries ago.
On New Year’s Day 1834 Edward Roads and his family, from Little Sheffield, face bleak prospects: “i have got no work … we are straving”. While Christmas should be a time of giving, they are in danger of having the little they own taken away from them to cover the rent: “i expect to have my thing taken from me every day”. So Edward Roads places his hopes in monetary relief from his parish of legal settlement, as does Jonathan Jackson, writing from Nottingham on 22 December 1771. In his case, rent is “dew at Christmas” itself. Having six mouths to feed, “it is as much as i can do to find them bread for them”. A sumptuous Christmas feast will not have been on their menu.
Many families are grappling with ill health, which incurs significant costs. For one, there is the doctor to pay: as Edward Roads states, “we have had a great deal of illness and i have got a large doctors bill to pay”. Then there is the cost of keeping a fire and candles going day and night: “whe ave burnt fir and candl nit anday all this tim now”, says one pauper from Manchester (either called “A T” or “Danel Mod”) in a letter to their “brother and sester” in Kirkby Lonsdale on 11 January 1824. Finally, there is the loss of wages. If it is children who are afflicted with illness, it often means that the parents have to constantly tend them and consequently cannot earn any wages, if there is any work to be had in the first place. In the same letter we read: “no work can be dun for whe ar not abell to nurs them all as thay shud be”. There are of course also numerous cases where adults apply for relief because they are physically not able to work for a living.
In a striking parallel to the current global situation, there is mention of a highly dangerous and infectious disease in the letter to Kirkby Lonsdale: “nou whe ave got the small pox in the ous and hou whe canot tell”. A very pitiful image is drawn in this letter by a parent bemoaning the struggle and fate of their children who caught smallpox. Their daughter Mary has been blind for nine days and was thought to die, but seems to be on the mend. Iohn and Edey “is very bad”, and the parents don’t believe Edey will survive. The parent writes of “cris that of pain and seknes that rung in my Aers Day and nit”. The spelling is highly idiosyncratic, but there might be mention of a kind of “mass inoculation” at Kirkby Lonsdale (“thay wass all nokled at your plais”). In contrast, at Manchester, without the inoculation, “thay dy 3 or 4 in on famly”. Interestingly, there appears to have been a north-south divide regarding the distribution of smallpox. A study on pre-1800 cases (Davenport et al. 2018) finds that, in the north, adults were less likely to catch it and child mortality was much higher than in the south of England. Smallpox was less virulent in the south, not least since here preventative measures were taken more successfully. For example, infected victims were quarantined, and markets and courts closed, in an attempt to curb the spread of the disease. Once a vaccine became available, developed by Edward Jenner in 1798, it would take a rigorous vaccination programme to reduce the threat of the disease. But this was not a quick process. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
For some the new year also brings new hope. Thomas Lilly from Wolverhampton writes exuberantly and warmly on 3 January 1815 to a parish official from Tamworth, thanking them for finding a boy who could become his apprentice. Putting his faith in the good judgement of this official, he closes with “my wife unite with me in Love to you & Mrs Mead”. Not only does the official’s assistance help Thomas Lilly, but it also means a new beginning, a livelihood even, for the boy who is to be apprenticed.
As we have seen, tragedy and gladness are close neighbours, and that of course still rings true today. We very much hope that, unlike the families we visited through their correspondence, you were able to enjoy some peaceful holidays, with ample and delicious food and no job worries, and that you and yours are in good health. In the words of Thomas Lilly:
“PS I wish you a good new Year”
Reference:
Davenport, Romola Jane, Max Satchell and Leigh Matthew William Shaw-Taylor. 2018. The geography of smallpox in England before vaccination: A conundrum resolved. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 206, 75–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.04.019