PAMELA SHARPE is currently Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia in Perth. She was Lecturer in Social and Economic History at the University of Bristol from 1993 to 1999. She received an MA (Hons) in Economic History from the University of Edinburgh and completed a doctorate in demographic history at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge, in 1989. From 1990 to 1993 she was Essex County Council Research Fellow in Local History at the University of Essex.

• List of Tables and Figures List of Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Introduction Going on the Parish: the Parish Pension and Its Meaning in the London Suburbs 1640-1724; J.Boulton London Domestic Servants from Depositional Evidence, 1660-1750: Servant-Employer Sexuality in the Patriarchal Household; T.Meldrum 'Unlawfully Begotten on Her Body': Illegitimacy and the Parish Poor in St Luke's, Chelsea; T.Hitchcock 'The Bowels of Compation': a Labouring Family and the Law c.1790-1834; P.Sharpe Voices in the Crowd: the Kirby Lonsdale Township Letters 1809-36; J.S.Taylor Old Age in Poverty: the Record of Essex Pauper Letters 1780-1834; T.Sokoll Pauper Inventories and the Material Life of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries; P.King 'An Old Offender tho' so Young in Years': the Criminal Careers of Juvenile Offenders in Middlesex in the 1830s; H.Shore 'The Poor in Blindnes': Letters from Mildenhall, Wilts 1835-6; G.C.Smith Index

'...a fine collection, which vividly demonstrates the nature and significance of the politics of parish relief.' - Steve Hindle, The Economic History Review