Language Change - 18th Century - The poor

An account of the four persons found starved to death at the

poor house in Datchworth, 1769

The Poor

Genre

• Genre – a report (showing poor house conditions and to investigate the deaths of four paupers) may also be written to inspire change in the running of poor houses.

Audience

• Audience –overseers of England (the people who decided upon and implemented the running of poor houses)

Purpose

• Purpose – to show poor house conditions at Datchworth and possibly to try to inspire change.

Pragmatics – what this text tells us about the poor in C18

A very obvious difference between the poor now and the poor in the eighteenth century is that that there were poor houses built to accommodate the paupers who couldn’t afford to survive on their own.

This text shows us that not all poor houses were good or necessarily safe places to be. This account from Datchworth shows how a whole family were left to starve and freeze to death without relief.

These poorhouses were supposed to be monitored by overseers – providing the right help (e.g. food, money) to at the very least keep the poor alive.

The fact that there is such a graphic report into the deaths, meant for the overseers, shows that there may be some problems with the system and that it needed to be altered.

We can also see that the poor were very poor, as they couldn’t even afford clothing or bedding (things we consider to be essentials) and that even though they were given a place to live in the poorhouse in some places that was the limit of the help they got except in dire circumstances.

Orthography• This text shows that the long s was still in use in

1769. was used instead of an s or a double s and was yet to be got rid of by the progression of print.

• The spelling of smoke and clothes are different to the spellings we have now. Interestingly though, the ‘oh’ sound in both words is spelled ‘oa’ which could indicate standardisation starting to occur from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary.

Semantics

• Faggot – in the 18th century faggot meant a pile of sticks – it still has the same meaning now – however, it is more widely known to mean a homosexual male.

• The word faggot has therefore taken on a pejorative meaning.

Grammar

• Words such as thatch’d and discover’d are contractions. An apostrophe is used where we would now have an e.

• This is not the case of other verbs showing past tense such as purchased which may show that grammar was not particularly standardised by this point.

Grammar

• The text, particularly in the bottom half, shows a lack of full stops. Sentences were very long and complex .

• In this text a capital letter always follows a : which may mean that a colon was used to end the sentence much like a full stop.

Grammar

• Irregular word order such aswhereas we would say ‘a fortnight ago’. Irregular because the 1769 order seems to mean in the future – it is only by looking at the context that you can work out it means in the past.

Lexis

• Peas – “on a very small quantity of peas straw”

Pea was a word used to describe any related plants of the family Fabaceae. So the family was laid on straw made from this. The word pea is still used today but we would not associate it with straw.

Lexis

• Overseers – people who oversaw the running of the poorhouses

• Parish officer – people who checked on the poor of the parish and collected poor rates (money from the rich to pay for the upkeep of the poor)

(both of these terms are jargon relating to the poor law – which would be understood by the overseer it was intended for as well as most people in 1769)

• Half crown – an amount of money withdrawn from use in 1969

• 1834 the new poor law comes into practice – about 60 years after this account was written.

• This shows that the current poor law (taking place during this account) was not working as the parish officers weren’t doing their jobs properly.

• This could therefore show that accounts such as these were integral in the creation of the new poor law.