posted on 2015-09-22, 09:34authored bySteven A. King
At the core of much of the historiography of disability in so far as it relates to nineteenth
century England is a belief that the support offered to those with physical and mental
impairments was threadbare and that such people could be and were pushed to the social
margins of their communities.
The current article uses poor law records, letters,
newspapers and coronial inquests to suggest that officials in fact had a sophisticated
sense of degrees of mental and physical impairment and relief/support systems were
tailored accordingly. Like many of the pauper families who wrote to them about children
with impairments I argue that officials tended to construct hierarchies of ability rather
than disability and that doing so took them deeply into areas like labour market subsidy
and the avoidance of institutional confinement. On the subject of children with mental
and physical impairments, officials and pauper shared a common rhetorical register and
strategic approach to classification and treatment.
History
Citation
Family and Community History, 2015, 18 (2), pp. 104-121
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Version
AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Published in
Family and Community History
Publisher
Maney Publishing for Family and Community Historical Research Society