Magdalen life course: the lives of the inmates of the Clewer and Salisbury Houses of Mercy, 1830-1900

Abstract

This thesis investigates the life course trajectories of women admitted to the Clewer (Berkshire) and Salisbury (Wiltshire) Houses of Mercy between 1848 and 1881. The Clewer and Salisbury Houses of Mercy were Magdalen asylums, residential institutions which sought to reform and rehabilitate “fallen” women through a two-year course of religious instruction and laundry- and needlework.

Centrally, the thesis reconstructs the life courses of the Magdalen inmates through an innovative methodology that links the admission and other institutional records to the censuses, welfare and criminal justice records, and vital documents. Using detailed institutional records, the linking method goes beyond using name, age, and birthplace, systematically enriching individual identifying information to make full use of the admission records. A further methodological contribution is that the resultant dataset and core quantitative backbone is complemented with detailed qualitative source material drawn from annual reports, committee minutes, and, most notably, inmate testimonies. Thus, the sum of knowledge from the different forms of evidence is far greater (and more robust) than are the individual parts.

Chapter 2 sets out the lives of women prior to their admission to the Clewer and Salisbury charities, broadly covering the ages from birth to their late teens. The women grew up in regional proximity to the Magdalen asylums, in areas where the rural economy had undergone significant convulsions, and employment prospects for women diminished. Inmates were both disproportionately eldest daughters and faced higher than average rates of parental mortality, with maternal mortality being particularly pronounced. This is most notable for those from rural settings. Inmates’ rates of institutionalisation began to deviate from population trends considerably in early adolescence, concomitant to entry to the labour market, which for the women who entered the Houses of Mercy meant domestic service. Domestic service exposed welfare vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities were principally related to the occupations’ precarity caused by tied housing and moral stringency of employers, which rendered courtship, sex, and service effectively incompatible.

Chapter 3 explores the admission process to the Clewer and Salisbury House of Mercy, their institutional development, and thus the effect on the experiences of the inmates. Charitable welfare users’ access to the Houses of Mercy was largely serendipitous with personal knowledge networks important, especially in the early years of the institutions. Channels through which women arrived at the gates of the institutions varied. The balance between religious instruction and labour carried out at the charities was contingent on their capacity to raise funds from their donors, and Clewer was particularly adept at this. As a consequence, the Clewer House of Mercy relied to a much smaller extent on inmate generated labour to raise funds than the Salisbury House of Mercy, where concerns about the disproportionate time allocation to laundry work surfaced. Available dietaries suggest clear nutritional benefits to entering the Houses of Mercy compared to Poor Law workhouses. Central to inmate retention was the offer of an institutionally-arranged domestic service placement after completion of the two-year penitential regime, but two-thirds of women left prior to completing the penitential course.

Chapter 4 sets out the lives of women following their departure from the Clewer and Salisbury Houses of Mercy. The charities sought to provide a structured framework within which women were to be reintegrated into society; what this should look like was still under discussion in the early 1850s. Plans for an emigration scheme to Australia were abandoned and instead women were to be reintegrated into society domestically in Britain. For between 10 to 20 per cent of inmates leaving the Houses of Mercy this meant transferring to another residential institution. Approximately, a further third departed for arranged domestic service positions, which typically were either based in wealthy private households or other charitable, medical, carceral, or statutory institutions. Rates of domestic service and institutionalisation moved in tandem; only when women left service did the risk of their institutionalisation decrease. However, around half of women simply left with around 20 per cent being enumerated with their parents one year after leaving the Houses of Mercy, indicative of high rates of community reintegration.

Existing literature on Magdalen asylums has been principally concerned with questions of institutional administration, sexuality, prostitution, and its regulation. This thesis approaches the topic from a welfare perspective, situating the charities and their inmates in a wider social, demographic, and economic context, thereby contributing to an emerging branch of historical social policy research. Overall, this thesis argues that Magdalen asylums responded to an existing welfare need that arose from gender-specific life-cycle welfare vulnerability. However, the welfare on offer, which essentially individualized welfare needs, failed to provide meaningful avenues for women to escape impoverishment.