Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700-1920

This book provides a lively consideration of historical illegitimacy from a variety of methodological approaches and geographical standpoints. It subjects commonly-accepted themes to rigorous investigation, and draws out new conclusions on the mobility, strategies, and experiences of parents of illegitimate children. Paternity is given a novel spotlight, as is the survivorship of illegitimate infants. The authors engage with themes from historical demography, and social, cultural, medical, and gender history, giving the book wide appeal.

'...this is a most useful addition to the historiography of illegitimacy, which investigates creatively the prevalence of and responses to illegitimacy in the modern period, subjects some commonly accepted themes to rigorous investigation, and draws out new conclusions on the mobility, strategies, and experiences of parents of illegitimate children.' - Gayle Davis, Medical History

Autorentext
JOHN BLACK Research Fellow, University of Newcastle, UK ANDREW BLAIKIE Professor of Historical Sociology, University of Aberdeen, UK ROS DAVIES Senior Research Associate, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, UK TANYA EVANS Research Fellow, Centre for Contemporary British History, University of London, UK EILIDH GARRETT Senior Research Associate, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, UK PAUL GRAY Researcher LIAM KENNEDY Professor of Economic and Social History, Queen's University, Belfast, UK STEVEN KING Professor in Early Modern History, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Health, Medicine and Society, Oxford Brookes University, UK ALICE REID Research Associate, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, UK

Inhalt
Introduction; A.Levene , T.Nutt & S.Williams 'Blooming Virgins all Beware': Love, Courtship and Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century British Popular Literature; T.Evans The Mortality Penalty of Illegitimate Children: Foundlings and Poor Children in Eighteenth-Century England; A.Levene Who were the Putative Fathers of Illegitimate Children in London, 1740-1810?; J.Black The Bastardy Prone Sub-Society Again: Bastards and their Fathers and Mothers in Lancashire, Wiltshire, and Somerset, 1800-1840; S.King 'A Good Character for Virtue, Sobriety and Honesty': Unmarried Mothers' Petitions to the London Foundling Hospital and the Rhetoric of Need in the Early Nineteenth-Century; S.Williams The Paradox and Problems of Illegitimate Paternity in Old Poor Law Essex; T.Nutt Famine, Illegitimacy and the Workhouse in Western Ireland: Kilrush, County Clare; L.Kennedy & P.Gray Migration, Living Strategies and Illegitimate Childbearing: A Comparison of Two Scottish Settings, 1871-1881; A.Blaikie , E.Garrett & R.Davies The Influences on the Health and Mortality of Illegitimate Children in Derbyshire, 1917-1922; A.Reid Index