Poverty in Poetry and Prose: How the Poor figured into early modern personal and life-writing in England

Dr David Hitchcock

David Hitchcock is a Reader in Early Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University. His research focuses on early modern vagrancy, poverty, and the English Atlantic world. He is currently working on his second book, tentatively titled ‘The Wheel of Poverty: The Origins of British Welfare Colonialism”, and on various other projects, including a British Academy grant on perceptions of urban space and the ‘Good City’, and a piece on dying homeless in early modern England. Together with Julia McClure he edited the Routledge History of Poverty, which came out in January 2021. He spent three years annually reviewing the early modern article literature for the Economic History Review.

About the event

In this talk we will explore the remarkable archive of personal thoughts about poverty and the poor resident in the private writings of English subjects between c.1600 and 1800. The seventeenth century has been described as a revolutionary moment for 'self-authorship' in England. Networks of letter-writing, diary-writing practices, and keeping what were called 'commonplace books' all became popular past-times, and these sources record the intimate thoughts of many thousands of people.

For a long while these literary habits excluded the poorest inhabitants, most of whom would have had neither the time nor the training nor the money to write things down. By the end of the eighteenth century this exclusion from letters is slowly starting to change and some poorer people start to tell their story. Some of them become celebrated poets in their own right. Is it any surprise that the Romantic movement begins to take up their cause?

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