Poor Law Correspondence: In Their Own Write

A three-year, £820,000, UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, running from 2018 to 2021, which uses letters from paupers and other poor people, and associated manuscript material such as petitions, sworn statements and advocate letters (those written on behalf of paupers) to investigate the lives of the poor between 1834 and 1900.

It is run jointly by Paul Carter from The National Archives (TNA) at Kew and Steven King from the Department of History at the University of Leicester.

The majority of work focuses on the many thousands of volumes of poor law correspondence (MH12) held by TNA, much of which has been little used by historians.

Read more about the project at https://www2.le.ac.uk/projects/own-write and on Paul Carter's website at https://intheirownwriteblog.com/