Abstract
In the agrarian societies of the early modern period it was possible to persuade oneself that the ‘ideal’ of the family preached in the pulpit and enforced in the courts bore some semblance to reality. If there were lapses, even serious ones, then it was still conceivable that the fallen might rise again. The tensions caused by political and social change, growing urbanisation and the drift of labourers away to the towns could at first be submerged by the overall dominance of the ‘household system’ in which both those of the middling sort and their dependants were housed and controlled. But there came a point when the traditional household became not the rule but the exception. In an urban environment it happened even earlier than in a rural. In Britain it was not so much industrialisation as proletarianisation that was the vital ingredient in this mix. In France it was not so much industrialisation as the replacement of a pre-market by a market economy based on competition and conflict. In the United States, to these ingredients were added the disrupted lives of myriad immigrants.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For the opposing view, see Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959) pp. 193–205.
See, for example, L. Davidoff, ‘The Separation of Home and Work? Landladies and Lodgers in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century England’, in S. Burman (ed.), Fit Work for Women (London, 1979) pp. 64–5.
Barbara Tucker, ‘The Family and Industrial Discipline in Ante-Bellum New England’, Labor History, 21 (1979–80) p. 56.
Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (London, 1980) pp. 134–55.
William Ashworth, The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning (1968) pp. 118–46.
See Rosemary O’Day and David Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in London Reconsidered (London, 1993) pp. 141–2.
AICP, First Report of a Committee on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes in the City of New York, with Remedial Suggestions (New York, 1853) p. 24.
The Times, quoted in R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement, (1952) p. 221.
Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London (1852 edition), p. 244.
Gareth Stedman Tones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971) p. 169.
Eugène Buret, De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France, 1840 cited in A. L. Shapiro, ‘Paris’, in M.J. Daunton (ed.), Housing the Workers (Leicester, 1990) p. 33, and
Louis Chevalier, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes (London, 1973) pp. 140–1.
O. Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants (New York, 1970 pbk edition) p. 106.
Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums, Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh, 1962) pp. 2–3.
Lubove, Progressives, p. 18; for tenement life, see Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York, 1957).
Ibid., pp. 122–4; Irving Howe, The Immigrant Jews of New York (London, 1976) p. 89.
Lynn H. Lees, ‘Patterns of Lower-Class Life: Irish Slum Communities in Nineteenth-Century London’, in Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett (eds), Nineteenth-Century Cities, Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven, 1969) pbk, p. 363.
F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, (London, 1952) p. 36;
D. Wardle, Education and Society in Nineteenth-Century Nottingham (Cambridge, 1971) p. 20.
I. C. Taylor, ‘The Insanitary Housing Question and Tenement Dwellings in Nineteenth-Century Liverpool’, in A. Sutcliffe (ed.), Multi-Storey Living, The British Working-Class Experience (London, 1974) pp. 48, 51;
J. H. Treble, ‘Liverpool Working-Class Housing, 1801–1851’, in S. D. Chapman (ed.), History of Working Class Housing, A Symposium (Newton Abbott, 1971) p. 199; Privy Council, Eighth Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, 1865, App. no. 2, Report on Housing of the Poor in Towns, p. 79.
Roger Wells (ed.), Victorian Village. The Diaries of the Reverend John Coker Egerton of Burwash 1857–1888 (Stroud, 1992) p. 59.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861–1862 (New York, 1968), vol. 1, p. 44.
See David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community in Paris, 1740–1790 (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 56–62.
See Park Honm, Jane Austen, Her Life (New York, 1987) p. 43; H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (London, 1934) pp. 112–15, 119, 125–31;
S. Hardy, The Diary of a Suffolk Farmer’s Wife, 1854–69, (London, 1992) pp. 11–19; 168.
J. W. Scott and L. A. Tilly, ‘Women’s Work and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17 (1975) pp. 36–64.
Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Family in Britain’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 1990) p. 122.
O. Hufton, ‘Women and the Family Economy in Eighteenth-Century France’, French Historical Studies, 9 (1975) pp. 1–22.
See Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life (London, 1988) p. 325, for detailed references.
Michael Katz, Michael Doucet and Mark Stern, The Social Organisation of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1982) pp. 336, 343.
Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880, (New York, 1970) pp. 51–3.
John Buchanan, ‘How to Assimilate the Foreign Element in our Population’, Forum, XXXII (1901–2) p. 689;
Robert E. Park and Herbert A. Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York, 1921) pp. 40–1; New York Times, 6 March 1892, p. 4.
Hamilton Holt (ed.), The Life Stories of [undistinguished] Americans as Told by Themselves (New York and London, 1990) esp. pp. 61–92 in the stories of a French dressmaker, a German nurse girl and an Irish cook.
Robert Bieder, ‘Kinship as a Factor in Migration’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 35 (1973); Lawrence Glasco, ‘Migration and Adjustment in the Nineteenth-Century City’, Tamara Hareven and M. Vinovskis (eds.), Family and Population;Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, 1977); Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 109.
John Cumbler, Working-Class Community in Industrial America: Work, Leisure and Struggle in Two Industrial Cities, 1880–1930 (Westport, 1979) p. 118.
Francis Early, ‘The French-Canadian Family Economy and Standard-of-Living in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1870’, Journal of Family History, 16 (1982) pp. 184–8.
See Jerry Wilcox and Hilda Golden, ‘Prolific Immigrants and Dwindling Natives?: Fertility Patterns in Western Massachusetts, 1850 and 1880’, Journal of Family History, 16 (1982) p. 277;
Michael Katz and Mark Stern, ‘Fertility, Class, and Industrial Capitalism: Erie County, New York, 1855–1915,’ American Quarterly, 33 (1981) pp. 75–6;
Susan Bloomberg et al., ‘A Census Probe into Nineteenth-Century Family History: Southern Michigan, 1850–1880’, Journal of Family History, 5 (1971) pp. 26–45.
See R. H. Bremner, ‘The Big Flat: History of a New York Tenement House’, American Historical Review, LXIV (1958) pp. 54–62; R. Lubove, Progressives, p. 9.
See Rosemary O’Day, ‘Katharine Buildings’ in R. Finnegan and M. Drake (eds), Studying Family and Community History: From Family Tree to Family History, vol. I (Cambridge, 1994) pp. 129–66.
R. Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872–90 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) see also, B. Laslett, ‘The Family as a Public and Private Institution: an Historical Perspective’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 35 (1973) and
C. E. Clark Jr. ‘Domestic Architecture as an Index to Social History: the Romantic Revival and the Cult of Domesticity in America, 1840–1870’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9 (1976). 122.
E. R. L. Gould, ‘Homewood — A Model Suburban Development’, Review of Reviews, XVI (1897) pp. 43, 47; New York Times, 18 February 1900, p. 23 cited in R. Lubove, Progressives, p. 110.
M. Daunton, ‘Rows and Tenements: American Cities, 1880–1914’ in Daunton (ed.), Housing the Workers, p. 255; R. W. DeForest and L. Veiller (eds), The Tenement House Problem (New York, 1903) vol. I, pp. 7–10.
C. E. Clark, Jr, The American Family Home, 1800–1960 (Chapel Hill, 1986).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1994 Rosemary O’Day
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Day, R. (1994). A Day’s Work for a Day’s Victuals: The Families of the Very Poor. In: The Family and Family Relationships, 1500–1900. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23654-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23654-1_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-37294-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-23654-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)