Stories from the Archives.
In the second year of my MA in Victorian Studies there was the opportunity to bid for your second term’s module to be spent in a local archive, working with the team to understand not just the information they hold but also what life working in an archive was like. Despite being based in an English Literature department, I was always most definitely an historian, and given that I already knew that at some point in the future I would do an historical PhD, I decided that even though there was only place available on the module, I would take a chance and apply. Luckily for me, and for you, reader, I was successful and got to spend eleven weeks visiting the archive of The Salvation Army’s International Heritage Centre.
The Sources
Figure 1: An example Girls Statement Book entry
The primary sources I investigated whilst based in the archives were the first two Girls Statement books for the Salvation Army’s London-based social work. These books, with their first entries dating from 1884 and 1886, detail a single-page record for each woman that was accepted into their London rescue homes. The entries, as you can see above in figure 1, provide biographical details like the woman’s age, name, and place of birth, details on family members, literacy information, and a narrative section titled Further Particulars near the bottom which is a mixture of what the women reported, the interpretation of that narrative by the person filling in the record, observations made by the Army of the women, and the outcome of further investigations.
As historians when dealing with any source material it is crucial to acknowledge the limitations of the material you are deadline with. Working these out was not only my first task, but also an ongoing one with new questions being raised the more I read. A few of the issues I faced with these particular sources were:
Truthfulness: A number of the records explicitly state that, in the opinion of the officer filling in the form, the recorded information was inaccurate, with the woman suspected of lying. Where that is stated you are then faced with two possibilities - was the information a lie, or could the information have been true but just doubted. If it was the second then you also have to question whether or not what was actually recorded represented what the woman said.
Wider cultural assumptions: I was only able to read 172 of the thousands of possible entries, so it’s worth being clear about the extent to which I could draw wider assumptions.
Interpretation: Many of the entries in the records require interpretation to understand them. So trying to remain consistent in interpretation is important when it comes to trying to do wider analysis later.
Handwriting: These documents were handwritten in the 1880s and sometimes that can represent a barrier to understanding the text contained in the records.
The Dashboard
Figure 2: The Dashboard
Faced with this documentation I created a spreadsheet to act as a digital twin to the paper record, however, after a couple of weeks populating the table, I realised I could create something better. Something the wider public could use to interrogate the data in an interactive way. So, I created ‘the dashboard’, the link to which you can find below. Some of the data you can see was a direct reflection of the information held in the records, other bits required me to make interpretations based on the text and to apply my own definitions in order to analyse what was in front of me.
In the humanities we may typically be more comfortable working in a ‘close-reading’ way when analysing texts, however, what the dashboard allows you to do is to apply a ‘distance-reading’ methodology to understand trends in the data that might otherwise be hidden. For example, by using the five custom-built filters at the top you can see that 84% of the women born in London reported being able to read and write, but for all those born outside of the capital these figures drop to a reported 81.4% being able to read, and 78.4% being able to write. Or, of those who had previously engaged with the Salvation Army prior to arriving at the Rescue Home 25.83% of them reported at least one previous pregnancy or child, compared to only 18.52% of those that had not.
Death in the Archives
Once I had analysed the data a little it became clear that the death of one or both parents, or other caregiver, child, or partner contributed to many of the women seeking help from the Army and that a large number of the women reported at least one significant death, or loss, prior to arriving at the Rescue Home, with the dashboard showing that around 60% of reported any death or absence of a parent. When you look at death in the nineteenth-century there are different types of source historians can draw on. For example, abstracted figures that detail national or regional level death rates, material culture or realist literature that, in part, gave its contemporary audience a way to understand and use the high mortality rates for their betterment. However, by using those types of sources it’s very easy to overlook the real people that were fundamentally impacted by the high mortality rates of the time, and that’s what I was so interested in. Specifically in this instance, it was the women whose lives I was holding just a tiny fragment of, a snippet of their story, that could easily have been lost in time but instead had been recorded here often in graphic detail telling us, 140 years on of some of the toughest times in their lives. These women, mostly drawn from the working classes, would be largely overlooked in other archives, existing now only in censuses, wedding certificates, and death records. But here they were, allowing me to recover these fragments in an attempt to try and understand how specific events touched them and altered the course of their lives.
To finish off this piece, as it’s already much longer than I meant it to be, here’s a snippet of just one of those women that allowed me to delve into her life. Ellen Winter (SS/2/1/1 No. 30), who at 24 was received into the Salvation Army’s home on 16th March 1886. Ellen had been ‘engaged to a young man, who in an hour of temptation seduced her and evidently intended marrying her very shortly, but when she was three months pregnant he was thrown from a horse and killed.’ Following his death, Ellen moved jobs, forced to leave her home in Hackney where she did not want ‘anyone to know of her condition’. The removal of her soon-to-be husband, combined with the physical proof of that relationship in the form of her unborn baby, meant that Ellen felt a level of shame that would not have existed had her fiancé survived. This death meant she left her role, and ultimately entered Islington Workhouse. After discharging herself from the workhouse, on 16th March 1886, she sought the Salvation Army’s help the same day.
Conclusion
My time within the archives allowed me the chance to learn something of the lives of women that I otherwise would never have heard of. By engaging with these nineteenth-century documents, and by applying twenty-first century methods of data visualisation I was able to pull out the high-level themes that link these women beyond their presence in the records. I chose to look at death and loss as the astonishing prevalence and intrusion of it into these women’s lives was clear. However, while I chose to focus on death, the dashboard may show other links between these women that open up new ways of understanding these lives and I hope that by interrogating the data yourself, you may be able to find stories that grab your interest.
Since spending time at the archives I’ve developed a talk based on the above that can be delivered in between 15 and 30 minutes depending on the requirements of the session. This talk has been given both within my PhD, but also to a variety of women’s networks, and at women’s history events. Do get in touch if you have a gap in a schedule to fill and you would like to learn more about these sources, and evaluating nineteenth-century data in a twenty-first century way.
Link to the dashboard: https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/36639fc2-698f-42b3-adeb-647b32229b60/page/zAakC
The above is based on the piece I wrote as part of my module, previously published on the Heritage Centre’s blog which is well worth a visit for other great articles.
