The voice of the poor in 19th-century England and Wales

A blog post In Their Own Write: Three million words! from the UK National Archives describes a 95% complete project, disrupted by the pandemic, to transcribe a collection of correspondence between central Poor Law authorities and local Poor Law Unions, dating from 1834 to 1900 found in series  MH 12.  It documents the thoughts, concerns and battles of the poor in Victorian England and Wales.

To date 6,666 of nearly 7,000 letters found have been transcribed.

At the end of the project, all the transcriptions will be loaded into a free-to-access database.