No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
‘On Account of their Disreputable Characters’: Parish‐Assisted Emigration from Rural England, 1834–1860
Abstract
Nineteenth-century assisted emigration has long been associated with the phrase ‘shovelling out paupers’. This view is challenged by the actions and attitudes of the sponsors of parish-assisted emigration who invested considerable time and energy in supporting the emigration of their poor. Close investigation of the policy that was applied at the local level for the rural counties of Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Norfolk suggests that assisted emigration was seen as a policy in which rich and poor interacted to secure mutual benefits. Assisted emigration was conceived as a way of helping individual paupers while simultaneously displaying a continued concern for the labouring population. Faced with the challenges of the New Poor Law, the farming class viewed assisted emigration as part of an older tradition of paternalistic help for the ‘deserving poor’. Sponsors were well aware of the ambivalence of the subject and sought to develop a conscious ideology of assisted emigration, which focused on the hope of a better life, for those who left and for those who remained.
Colonising Disability explores the construction and treatment of disability across Britain and its empire from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Esme Cleall explores how disability increasingly became associated with 'difference' and argues that it did so through intersecting with other categories of otherness such as race. Philanthropic, legal, literary, religious, medical, educational, eugenistic and parliamentary texts are examined to unpick representations of disability that, overtime, became pervasive with significant ramifications for disabled people. Cleall also uses multiple examples to show how disabled people navigated a wide range of experiences from 'freak shows' in Britain, to missions in India, to immigration systems in Australia, including exploring how they mobilised to resist discrimination and constitute their own identities. By assessing the intersection between disability and race, Dr Cleall opens up questions about 'normalcy' and the making of the imperial self.
How can we survey more than three centuries of British emigration in terms of the ‘emigrant experience’? Clearly there was change over time, as well as varying experiences according to region of origin and by class, as well as by destination. Emigration played a crucial part in the creation of British identity, and in modern doubts about its validity. It did not reflect British Society, it acted upon it.1 From the perspective of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and from that of Ireland, this is an obvious point to make, but it has been made less often in relation to Britain as a whole. Why? One answer is that the nature of just what Britain represented was problematic over all of its history. Perhaps that is why it is necessary to study emigration in a British context, as Britain was about expansionism, Britain was about imperialism, Britain was about an assumption of civilising mission by those who presented themselves as its representatives. Emigrants from Britain did not always share these ideas, although sometimes they did. By the early twentieth century, as Eric Richards has pointed out, there were British commentators who wanted to distinguish between emigration and colonising, with the latter the province of the true Briton in the British Empire, and the former the resort of the unfortunates who turned their backs on their British birthrights to disappear into the vastness of what was almost always America.2
This article explores an emigration scheme envisioned by Jane Groom, a deaf woman, whereby deaf working-class people from
the East End of London would be relocated to Manitoba. During the 1880s and 1890s about fifty families emigrated under Groom’s
auspices. This article has three aims. Firstly, recovering the life of Jane Groom enables us to think about disabled activism
and agency in a global arena: her activities were widely discussed both in the British Empire and in the US, and she undertook
them as a disabled person because, not in spite, of her disability. Jane Groom’s life is an example of advocacy and activism
in a period when we have few details about disabled figures, female ones still less. It also reveals a thriving deaf community
which merits attention as a distinct social group. Secondly, her life allows us to think about the way in which disability
connected with wider concerns: with, for example, the philanthropic milieu in late Victorian London, nineteenth-century anxieties
about the body, and issues of emigration and settlement. Thirdly, it helps us to think about the relationships between different
kinds of colonizing practice within the British Empire.
This article argues for the importance of religion in mass emigration from Britain in the nineteenth century. It does so by examining the origins and development of the Anglican emigrant chaplaincy developed from the 1840s to nurture the spiritual welfare of British emigrants departing for the British settler colonies over the rest of the nineteenth century. Developed over succeeding decades by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the chaplaincy expanded into a global network. By the 1880s it incorporated chaplains at British ports of embarkation and colonial ones of disembarkation, chaplains travelling on ships with emigrants and matrons supervising parties of single women. Although principally concerned with caring for Anglican emigrants, the chaplains regarded it as their business, as clergy of the national church, to provide ministry to a wide variety of emigrants, including Nonconformists, Germans and Jews. The article argues for the significance of the Anglican emigrant chaplaincy as an international network enabling the expansion of British Christianity and the export of social capital in the form of religious connectivity throughout the settler colonies of the British Empire.
Virtually all previous empirical studies analyzing the characteristics of European immigrants to the United States during the nineteenth century examine a single country. These studies provide a vast array of information on some or all of the following: the immigrants’ ages, their occupations, whether they traveled singly or within a group, the size of the traveling groups, the number of their children, and the gender breakdown, along with other characteristics. As a result of this empirical work, our knowledge concerning who immigrated to the United States during the nineteenth century is much clearer than it was 30 years ago. Since this body of work is specific to individual countries and based on a variety of data sources, however, it is difficult to compare the characteristics of the immigrants from the various source countries.
One of the great themes of modern history is the movement of poor people across the face of the earth. For individuals and families the economic and psychological costs of these transoceanic migrations were severe. But they did not prevent millions of agriculturalists and proletarians from Europe reaching the new worlds in both the Atlantic and the Pacific basins in the nineteenth century. These people, in their myriad voyages, shifted the demographic balance of the continents and created new economies and societies wherever they went. The means by which these emigrations were achieved are little explored.
Most emigrants directed themselves to the cheapest destinations. The Irish, for instance, migrated primarily to England, Scotland, and North America. The general account of British and European emigration in the nineteenth century demonstrates that the poor were not well placed to raise the costs of emigration or to insert themselves into the elaborate arrangements required for intercontinental migration. Usually the poor came last in the sequence of emigration.
The passage to Australasia was the longest and the most expensive of these migrations. From its foundation as a penal colony in 1788, New South Wales depended almost entirely on convict labor during its first four decades. Unambiguous government sanction for free immigration emerged only at the end of the 1820s, when new plans were devised to encourage certain categories of emigrants from the British population. As each of the new Australian colonies was developed so the dependence on convict labor diminished.
Poor people assisted to emigrate by their parish officers have long been associated with Charles Buller's memorable phrase 'shovelling out paupers'. Poor people were depicted as passive victims of the elite's schemes, thoughtlessly dumped into a new world. This paper challenges that view by stressing the resourcefulness of poor people who secured assistance to emigrate by detailing a wide number of strategies which poor emigrants employed to secure assistance. It is argued that poor emigrants often initiated the emigratory process as a consequence of receiving some information about the New World. It is further argued that their motivations and concerns were not far removed from those emigrants who received no assistance, and that the rich details available for assisted emigration can be used to exemplify the process, a notoriously slippery subject. Furthermore, the material generated by assisted emigration presents rare insights into the process of negotiation and interaction between rich and poor in rural England in the aftermath of the introduction of the new Poor Law.
In 1836 under the auspices of section 62 of the New Poor Law, 3,069 poor people from Norfolk were assisted to emigrate to North America. Their passages, and various other requirements including spending money, travel to the port, equipment for the voyage and settling of debts, were paid for out of the poor rates. The rationale for this outflow of people revolved around the issue of surplus labour, which was believed to have a corrosive and unsettling effect upon the state of rural society. Emigration had long been seen as a potential safety valve for surplus labour. Clause 62 can be traced back to the vigorous debate about assisted emigration associated with Robert Wilmot Horton. For one emigration season, it looked as if parochial government were capable of rising to the challenge of solving its surplus labour problems and simultaneously satisfying the needs of the labour-hungry British colonies. This paper examines the Norfolk emigration fever by using a previously unused data set of nineteenth-century emigration (Ministry of Health files held at the Public Record Office). It argues that assisted emigration was the result of a concerted rational policy, applied by the parish officers aimed to benefit emigrants and those left behind. The policy was neither haphazard nor accidental and, though inspired by fear of the consequences of implementing the New Poor Law, was not a panicked response. It argues that the arrangements for assisted emigration resulted in a process of interchange and interaction between rich and poor which makes a mockery of the term ‘shovelling out paupers’. The poor emigrants who were targeted were assisted because they were good labourers, not useless indigents incapable of providing for themselves. The findings shed further light on the nature of emigrating populations, the emigratory process and the mindset of both rich and poor at the time of the introduction of the New Poor Law.
This article examines the recent view that economic distress was not an important cause of English immigration before 1860. Demographic information is used to show that characteristics of males on suspect passenger lists (those that listed only laborers) matched those of laborers on other lists. Based on this result and other information, laborers appear to be the dominant group of immigrants. Support is thus provided for the view that distress was the most important cause of immigration, even though many other immigrants were not fleeing economic distress.
Born after the Revolution, the first generation of Americans inherited a truly new world--and, with it, the task of working out the terms of Independence. Anyone who started a business, marketed a new invention, ran for office, formed an association, or wrote for publication was helping to fashion the world's first liberal society. These are the people we encounter in Inheriting the Revolution , a vibrant tapestry of the lives, callings, decisions, desires, and reflections of those Americans who turned the new abstractions of democracy, the nation, and free enterprise into contested realities.
Through data gathered on thousands of people, as well as hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies, Joyce Appleby tells myriad intersecting stories of how Americans born between 1776 and 1830 reinvented themselves and their society in politics, economics, reform, religion, and culture. They also had to grapple with the new distinction of free and slave labor, with all its divisive social entailments; the rout of Enlightenment rationality by the warm passions of religious awakening; the explosion of small business opportunities for young people eager to break out of their parents' colonial cocoon. Few in the nation escaped the transforming intrusiveness of these changes. Working these experiences into a vivid picture of American cultural renovation, Appleby crafts an extraordinary--and deeply affecting--account of how the first generation established its own culture, its own nation, its own identity.
The passage of social responsibility from one generation to another is always a fascinating interplay of the inherited and the novel; this book shows how, in the early nineteenth century, the very idea of generations resonated with new meaning in the United States.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Responding to a Revolutionary Tradition
3. Enterprise
4. Careers
5. Distinctions
6. Intimate Relations
7. Reform
8. A New National Identity
Notes
Index
Reviews of this book:
Joyce Appleby deals with two themes in this book: the historical experience of the generation after the American Revolution and conflicts within American identity. The result is Whitmanesque, both in its complex but coherent vision and in its elegant expression.
--Edward Countryman, New York Times Book Review
Reviews of this book:
[A] fascinating study of how citizens of the newly constituted form of government seized the opportunities their break with the Old World offered them.
--Ralph Hollenbeck, King Features Syndicate
Reviews of this book:
[Appleby] examines in exhaustive (but not exhausting) detail how "the first generation of Americans" reshaped virtually every aspect of American society. Commerce, religion, domestic life, personal behavior. They left nothing untouched, operating under the assumption that their "Revolutionary heritage" was nothing less than "a call to innovation, enterprise, reform and progress"
--Michael D. Schaffer, Philadelphia Enquirer
Reviews of this book:
[Appleby] gives us an extended meditation on what happened to American society during the generation that grew up in the aftermath of the Revolution...Her fine, well-informed intelligence plays across this vast sea of biographical information and recreates the world her subjects inhabited...Everything is made fresh in these pages. The combination of out-of-the-way stories unearthed from the autobiographies and Appleby's own ingenuity and insight puts the familiar in a new light.
--Richard Lyman Bushman, H-Net Book Reviews
Reviews of this book:
In her rich new book...[Appleby] argues that the first generation of Americans...experienced a degree of political and social change unrivalled before or since...This first generation reached a kind of closure about the meaning of democracy that has made it difficult for succeeding generations to articulate a vision of America other than the one they created: a society devoted to individualism and free enterprise...What emerges is a striking tale, on its face one of the most celebratory accounts of American gumption in recent historiography.
--Marc Arkin, New Criterion
Reviews of this book:
Appleby documents, in precise and persuasive detail, the evolution and elaboration of assumptions about what it is to be an American that we now take completely for granted. What we think of as the "natural phenomenon" of individualism, for example, she describes as first appearing in the "prototype for the self-made man," who eventually evolved into "a new character ideal...the man who developed inner resources, acted independently, lived virtuously, and bent his behavior to his personal goals--not the American Adam, but the American homo faber , the builder."
--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
Reviews of this book:
An esteemed historian of early America, Appleby has written a social history of 'the first generation of Americans"--not those who fought the American Revolution but, as her title indicates, those who inherited it, who had to figure out just what their parents" bold declarations of liberty looked like on the ground...[This is] a wonderful book, which freshly conveys the energy and creativity unleashed in a generation forging a new national identity.
--Publishers Weekly
Reviews of this book:
Joyce Appleby...has created a collective portrait of the generation of men and women born in the United States between 1776 and 1800, and on the basis of their lives and values ventures an answer to Crevecoeur's query that is intriguing, sophisticated and anything but exceptionalist. Anyone curious about how Americans came to understand themselves as a people would do well to read this book. Appleby maintains that Americans first defined their national identity by infusing meaning into the Revolution to which they were heirs... Inheriting the Revolution must also command the respect of all scholars who seek to understand the origins of American culture and identity.
--Fred Anderson, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Reviews of this book:
A treasure-trove of information about the early republic, recreating an era that mixed cultural and emotional chaos with unprecedented opportunities at all levels of society...Although Appleby's purpose is to examine social contexts rather than anomalous individuals, the materials she uses vividly evoke the lived experiences of real people. Drawn from hundreds of diaries, letters, memoirs, and records of the obscure as well as the famous, her panorama.Appleby presents the explosion of possibilities at the beginning of the 19th century in sparkling, jargon-free prose and vibrant detail, producing an indispensable guide to a fascinating, turbulent time.
--Kirkus Reviews
Reviews of this book:
Inheriting the Revolution is a welcome addition to the now-rich literature on the early American republic. Informed by Joyce Appleby's deep knowledge of the period's politics and political ideology, it portrays a society in a fresh stage of development, and a people defining themselves in the context not just of a new nationhood, but of the material and geographical circumstances the American Revolution created. No one concerned with the early United States or the longer trajectory of US development should ignore this book.
--Christopher Clark, History
Joyce Appleby perfectly captures the world created by the sons and daughters of the American Revolution. Enterprising and energetic, mad about money and seemingly constantly on the move, deeply pious and convinced of their own capacity to shape their own destinies, they took their Revolutionary legacy and made it into the world that we still inhabit, if with a little less optimism and a better sense of its contradictions.
--Jan Lewis, author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia
Pungent, vivid narrative, magisterial sweep, and imaginative explorations fuel Appleby's compelling account of the early republic's improbable, extraordinary birth--a masterful achievement by one of our most distinguished historians.
--Jon Butler, author of Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Harvard)
Joyce Appleby's influential argument for the democratic transformation of post-revolutionary America takes on new power and persuasiveness in her engaging biographical portrait of The First Generation. Artfully weaving personal narratives and sophisticated analyses into an evocative account of a new people's coming of age, Appleby sets the agenda for a new generation of scholarship. While never losing sight of the conflicts and contradictions that jeopardized the nation's future prospects, she brilliantly captures the dynamism and energy of her extraordinary cohort.
--Peter S. Onuf, author of Jeffersonian Legacies
Joyce Appleby's dazzling narrative takes us into the lives of the Americans who inherited the Revolution. With Appleby we glimpse the men and women--black and white, immigrant and old stock--who invented the distinctive social and cultural forms that we ourselves have inherited. We see ourselves anew in the originating impulses of participatory politics, in the rise of capitalist culture, in the shifting relation between the personal and the civic, and in the myriad ways in which we struggle to fulfill the promise of America. Reading Inheriting the Revolution we reckon with the America we are still making.
--Mary Kelley, author of Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America
A highly original book, written very engagingly, by an author with a gift for apt phrases. The autobiographies include many fascinating accounts of little known people. Appleby's book will take an important place in the ongoing debates about its period. Inheriting the Revolution reflects the enthusiasm, maturity, common sense, and wisdom of its author.
--Daniel W. Howe, author of Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Harvard)
Making', 137. On the issue of allotments see D. C. Barnett, 'Allotments and the Problem of Rural Poverty
- Mandler
72 Mandler, 'Making', 137. On the issue of allotments see D. C. Barnett, 'Allotments and the Problem of Rural Poverty, 1780 – 1840', Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution, ed. G. E. Mingay and E. L. Jones (1967), 162 – 83.