Poverty, Children and the Poor Law in Industrial Belfast, 1880-1918

This book explores the changing role of the Irish poor law in child welfare in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city. Taking as its focus Belfast, a burgeoning industrial and port city at the heart of a global trade network and a city deeply divided along political and confessional lines, it examines the ways in which that city's poorest children and their families engaged with the poor law and used the workhouse as part of their economy of makeshifts. It examines the various spaces of the poor law - whether the workhouse, the foster home, or the far reaches of empire - as sites of encounter and engagement between welfare authorities and the city's poorest families, and explores the development of child welfare practice at a time of increasing state encroachment into the daily lives of poor children.