Abstract
After the partition of Ireland and the foundation of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, Belfast and Dublin had become capital cities of two new states. For those struggling on the margins, however, this new-found statehood held little practical value. Through a close reading of ‘poverty letters’ written to political and religious leaders, this article explores how people articulated their need as they sought assistance and tried to define their understanding of poverty and its impact. By employing a comparative lens, it approaches these letters as social spaces in which people drew on wider cultural and political anxieties and motifs to perform belonging and identity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 567-585 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Cultural and Social History |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 18 Jun 2022 |
Keywords
- shame
- respectability
- poverty
- poverty letters
- Catholic
- Protestant
- Ireland
Access to Document
- ‘Please pardon me for taking the liberty’: poverty letters as negotiating spaces in 1920s and 1930s Belfast and Dublin
Copyright 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits distribution and reproduction for non-commercial purposes, provided the author and source are cited.