Stories Told but Seldom Heard

Abstract

Just a few pages into the classic work of sentimental fiction, The Man of Feeling (1771), the hero of the novel, Harley, is confronted with a beggar and his dog: 'He had on a loose sort of coat, mended with different-coloured rags,... he wore no shoes, and his stockings had entirely lost that part of them which should have covered his feet and ankles...'. The man 'asked charity of Harley; the dog began to beg too...' and in response Harley immediately supplied their want with a sixpence. In exchange for this contribution, Harley asked the beggar to tell him his story, and was rewarded with a long tale of gradual decline. The beggar had contracted gaol fever from visiting felons, and his house burned to the ground during his slow recovery. By the end, the beggar explained, T was so weak that I spit blood whenever I attempted to work'. Having neither a parish of settlement nor friends to help, he 'was forced to beg'. But, by his own account, this particular beggar made a very poor fist of it: T told all my misfortunes truly, but they were seldom believed; and the few who gave me a half-penny as they passed, did it with a shake of the head, and an injunction, not to trouble them with a long story'.1 In the five volumes of the Narratives of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Britain edited by Alysa Levene and others it quickly becomes clear that despite this particular beggar's conclusion that most people did not care to hear a long story, they certainly put a great deal of effort into collecting a large variety of short ones. As a part of the administrative systems which grew up with the Old Poor Law and the Act of Settlement of 1662, and as a legacy of the rise of voluntary associational charities from the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the sheer volume of 'narratives of the poor' grew ever larger. Today, county record-offices groan under the weight of large collections of settlement and bastardy examinations, of pauper letters seeking relief from distant parishes, of depositions and trial accounts and of the petitions and narratives used by charities to verify the 'deservedness' of the people who sought relief in misfortune. This mass of documentation represents an extraordinary archive of everyday suffering, covering the lives of perhaps