Fragments of Fury? Lunacy, Agency and Contestation in the Great Yarmouth Workhouse, 1890s-1900s

At the heart of popular and historiographical understandings of the English and Welsh New Poor Law (1834-1929) stands the workhouse. Driven by a methodological and philosophical focus on scandals, we have come to understand the workhouse as a dark place, one of confinement and harsh treatment which the poor were powerless to resist except through riots and only then in extremis. Yet by bringing together a suite of interdisciplinary methods not often utilised in approaches to the history of welfare and applying them to new sources emerging from large-scale research projects on the New Poor Law, we can offer a very different reading of pauper experiences. Like most welfare historians, in this article we count (numbers of lunatic inmates for instance), undertake record linkage, and use a particular case study. But the nature of our core evidence – pauper letters, stitched “texts”, the language of the mad, surviving material culture – requires something more if we are to contest existing characterisations of the workhouse. [Taken from introduction]