East India Co's sales
East India porcelain
Queen's Royal Cookery
Cabinet of curiosities
Sugar in Britain
Bartholomew Fair
Gulliver's Travels
Executions at Tyburn
Textile production
Cities in chaos
East India textiles
The Harlot’s Progress
Handel's Messiah
Advert for a giant
Surgery
Muffin Seller
JS Bach manuscript
The Art of Cookery
Henry Fielding: Crime
Gin addiction
Ranelagh pleasure gardens
Johnson's Dictionary
'The British Giant'
Jigsaw Puzzle Map
The Spinning Jenny
Pleasure gardens
Factories
London prostitutes
Captain Cook's journal
Declaration of Independence
Map of the Gordon Riots
Storming of the Bastille
Runaway slaves
First curry powder advert
First hot air balloon
Abolitionist meeting notes
Georgian entertainments
Georgian Theatre
Mozart’s notebook
Poverty
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
Mary Wollstonecraft
Execution of Louis XVI
William Blake's Notebook
An acrobat's 'Surprising Performances'
Poverty rates throughout the 1700s were high. Many families struggled to pay for their daily bread, and lived below the ‘breadline’ in abject conditions. Illnesses, accidents and old-age also prevented people from working, again resulting in poverty and often destitution. From the 1720s, workhouses were set up by local parishes to house the poor. Men, women and children lodged in single sex ‘wards’ where the able-bodied were set to menial tasks: breaking stones, spinning thread or sewing clothes, for example. Inmates were ordered to follow strict rules of behaviour and to conform to daily routines. This document is from the rulebook of a London workhouse, and lists the food on offer to inmates. Some workhouses were clean and comfortable havens for the poor. Many provided education, rudimentary health care and clean clothing. Others were hopelessly overcrowded, prison-like institutions in which disease and even death were common as were accidents and exhaustion from strict work regimes.