Remembering the Dead Poor in the Midlands, 1750s to 1880s

The deaths of ordinary poor people are, in both the popular imagination and much of the historiography, indelibly linked with pauper funerals, mass graves, anatomization in British medical schools and the striking absence of any of the structures and symbols of remembrance (headstones, death notices, etc.) that we often associate with other classes in 18th and 19th-century England. The dead poor under the Old and New Poor Laws were not remembered except in the sense of leaving behind poor families that might require poor relief, poor children who needed apprenticing or a life story that had to be rehearsed by surviving family members so that their place of settlement could be determined in disputed relief cases. In 2005, Elizabeth Hurren and Steven King talked about the grave and the pauper body but not about the mourners, memorialization and the memory of the dead poor. For this article, a remarkable midland's dataset has been used to argue that remembrance of the dead poor was more systematic, sustained and meaningful than the current literature allows.