Eighteenth-Century Women and 'the Weak' - the cultural milieu of Charity and Mother-Child Relationship

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The aim of this research was to examine women's activities and their self-analysis in eighteenth-century Britain, depending on reading of the Althorp manuscript materials and published literature. My focus was on care on the caregiver's part as well as on the side of the cared in the age of 'sensibility' when people paid particular attention to sympathetic reactions to the weak and the unfortunate and felt it was the trend in their everyday life as well as literary.My stay in London during the summer in 2003 was fruitful, enabling reading of the Althorp papers in the Manuscript collection at the British Library and of published Magdalen books. Two of my papers - and another to be submitted - are direct products of this reading. One investigated the relationship between the benefactor and the needy in the site of personal charity. It examined the interesting relationship between life and literature and between a wealthy woman and one of the petitioners, which was established and supported by the reading and writing habits of the two women. A second paper is on the perception of the ‘unfortunate' women in an organized charity. It analyses the changing attitudes to prostitutes and the role of the charity. The charitable organization tried to persuade people to regard prostitutes as a victim, an unfortunate woman. This was helpful in establishing the organization, in inviting sympathetic response, especially from women, and in collecting donation. However, it also helped to define, from a formerly amorphous group of pickpockets, whores, vagabonds and nightwalkers, a helpless prostitute, which easily transmuted into a desperate outcast, a fallen woman in the nineteenth century.I have also finished a paper on the care of a dying husband in the health resort, Bath and a paper on the care network of a literary poor woman in Bath.