Staff Profiles

To understand the decision-making and experiences of individuals we must appreciate the wider contexts they lived in. Alysa's teaching is all concerned with experiences of everyday life, from the huge social and economic changes brought about by the industrial revolution, to long-term processes of development and cultural change surrounding marriage, childhood, demography and family life.  Students are encouraged to explore these wider contexts and through them, analyse and challenge common perceptions of how individuals at all levels of society related to those around them.

Modules taught

Undergraduate

• A People's History of Britain [Year 1]
  • Brings to life the changing social and cultural worlds of the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries and how modern Britons were formed.
• The Making of Modern Britain: Culture, Community and Family in Britain 1660-1918 [Year 2]
  
  • Explores how individuals, families and communities experienced gender, class, age and sexuality between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
• The History of Food, Politics and Society [Year 3]
  
  • Is it true that you are what you eat? We’ll explore diet, food habits and the politics of food control to uncover what this tells us about society.

Supervision

Alysa has supervised PhD students in a range of areas in economic, social and medical history, including child labour, the history of smallpox, religion and the workhouse in eighteenth-century Westminster, the implementation of the New Poor Law in Hertfordshire, and the history of hospitals. Ongoing projects include the history of loneliness, and nineteenth-century religious communities. She is happy to hear from prospective students working on the history of childhood and the family, poverty, health, food and related issues.

Alysa's research focuses on experiences of daily life in Britain, especially within the context of communities and families. Her particular specialism is the health and welfare of poor families in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Her PhD thesis was an examination of foundlings in London and Florence, and this led to a monograph Childcare, health and mortality at the London Foundling Hospital, 1741-1800: Left to the mercy of the world which was published by Manchester University Press in 2007. A subsequent monograph, The childhood of the poor: welfare in eighteenth-century London came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. Her latest book, Jews in Nineteenth-century Britain: charity, community and welfare was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2020.

Meanwhile, her book Cake: the short, surprising history of our favourite bakes came out with Headline in 2016 and led to features on Women's Hour and various magazines and food podcasts.

She is currently working on a new and exciting project on women and the home in C20th Britain.

Books

• Levene A, Jews in 19th-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830-1880, Bloomsbury Academic (2020)
  ISBN: 9781350102187 eISBN: 9781350102217
  Abstract

  This book examines Jewish communities in Britain in an era of immense social, economic and religious change: from the acceleration of industrialisation to the end of the first phase of large-scale Jewish immigration from Europe.

  Using the 1851 census alongside extensive charity and community records, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain tests the impact of migration, new types of working and changes in patterns of worship on the family and community life of seven of the fastest-growing industrial towns in Britain. Communal life for the Jews living there (over a third of whom had been born overseas) was a constantly shifting balance between the generation of wealth and respectability, and the risks of inundation by poor newcomers. But while earlier studies have used this balance as a backdrop for the story of individual Jewish communities, this book highlights the interactions between the people who made them up. At the core of the book is the question of what membership of the 'imagined community' of global Jewry meant: how it helped those who belonged to it, how it affected where they lived and who they lived with, the jobs that they did and the wealth or charity that they had access to.

  By stitching together patterns of residence, charity and worship, Alysa Levene is here able to reveal that religious and cultural bonds had vital functions both for making ends meet and for the formation of identity in a period of rapid demographic, religious and cultural change. -- Supplied by publisher.

  Website 
• Levene AS, Cake: A Slice of History, Headline (2016)
  ISBN: 9781472226846
  
• Levene A, Childcare, health and mortality at the London Foundling Hospital, 1741-1800: 'left to the mercy of the world', Manchester University Press (2007)
  ISBN: 978-0-7190-7354-0
  
• Levene A, Narratives of the poor in eighteenth century Britain, and Volume 3, Institutional responses: the London Foundling Hospital, Pickering and Chatto (2006)
  ISBN: 9781851968091
  

Journal articles

• Levene, A, 'Nineteenth-century provincial Jewry: a view from the Jewish press'
  Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 53 (2022) pp.33-56
  eISSN: 2397-1290
  Abstract

  This article argues that the character of the provincial Jewish communities of the mid nineteenth century have been overlooked in the historiography to date. In particular, community studies have rarely placed their subjects in a wider framework either of provincial Jewry as a whole, or of broader trends in political participation and civic engagement. By utilising articles, letters and reports in the Jewish press, the article reveals the vibrancy of independence and character in communities in a range of locations, large and small, in both ‘traditional’ and industrialising towns. It also shows the ways that local communities were envisaged as a vital part of British Jewry as a whole; that although they were vastly under-represented at the centre compared with the metropolitan congregations, they were increasingly stirred to take up and value opportunities to influence the way that they were governed and represented, and that this was often consciously linked to the wider struggle for full emancipation as British Jews. This in turn can be tied to a growing confidence among the more educated and comfortably-off classes in their place in British society in a period of relative stability and growing opportunities in civic governance, and before the huge and destabilising rise in immigration of the 1880s which has tended to focus attention on the industrial and immigrant-heavy towns. Fractious and fissiparous though they might have been at times; the mid-century provincial congregations deserve their place in the history of Jewish engagement and emancipation.

  Website 
• Levene A, Webb J, 'Depictions of the “ideal child” in nineteenth-century British literature and legislature'
  Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 12 (1) (2019) pp.26-44
  ISSN: 1939-6724 eISSN: 1941-3599
  Abstract

  This interdisciplinary paper examines representations of poor children in two contrasting sets of sources from the nineteenth century: parliamentary papers on children’s work, and literature written for children. Both had wide readerships and were influential in setting the agenda for reformers and also in shaping the depictions of poor childhood that were internalized by the educated public. However, while the parliamentarians were primarily concerned with excessive labor and the physical insults that it brought to children’s bodies in the 1830s and 1840s, children’s authors focused on poverty as a vehicle for moral reform, foregrounding their writing in the more general social surveys of living conditions and child neglect of the 1850s to 1880s. Nonetheless, by studying the two sets of sources alongside one another we are able to broaden our understanding of a nascent sense of a childhood in poverty in this period, as well as to unravel ideas about what child readers should be allowed to “know” about social ills. Children’s authors wrote predominately to reveal, but with a view to encouraging moral growth and compassion rather than action. Child labor was not critiqued in novels for children in a more sustained way until the modern era.
  

  Website 
• Levene A, 'Jewish households and religious identity in mid nineteenth-century Britain'
  Journal of Family History 43 (3) (2018) pp.281-301
  ISSN: 0363-1990 eISSN: 1552-5473
  Abstract This article tests the impact of industrial life, migration and religious ties on family life. Specifically, it examines Jewish households, asking whether they conformed to traditional patterns of nuclearity, and what this suggests about wider kinship or community networks. It shows that Jews accommodated a range of people in their households, from family members to Jewish lodgers, and non-Jewish servants. Jewish lodgers frequently lived with co-religionists, who also often shared birthplaces or occupations. In sum, the data suggest a strong degree of intra-communal solidarity despite high levels of migration, and also emphasise the diversity of household forms in this period. Website 
• Levene A, '‘The future of welfare history’: the local perspective'
  Local Population Studies 100 (1) (2018) pp.33-42
  ISSN: 0143-2974
  Abstract

  This short article examines what local perspectives have added—and continue to add—to welfare history. The paper begins by summarising the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure on households and the ways they functioned and shows how work on local populations set many of today's research agendas. It then argues that a fruitful way forward might be to use national and regional studies to identify local case studies that would be particularly interesting or informative. This point is illustrated by discussing a range of examples. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of 'big' data and digitisation for local studies of welfare in the past.
  

• Gowland R, Caffell A, Newman S, Levene A, Holst M, 'Broken childhoods: rural and urban non-adult health during the industrial revolution in Northern England'
  Bioarchaeology International 2 (1) (2018)
  ISSN: 2472-8357
  Abstract During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries England underwent a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization. The detrimental effects of urban living conditions and child factory labor on the health of children during this time has been the subject of considerable debate and investigation by historians. It is generally understood that growing up in a rural environment was more conducive to healthy growth and development than within an industrial town. This study presents the first direct comparison of the bioarchaeological evidence for non-adult health from contemporaneous urban and rural sites from the north of England. Rural skeletal assemblages from this period are rare and most published studies are biased towards urban sites in the south of the country. Contrary to expectations, results revealed equal prevalence rates of metabolic and dental disease at both sites, but skeletons from the rural site had greater evidence of growth disruption and respiratory disease. Evidence for specific infectious disease and medical care in response to trauma were also identified. Our interpretations of rural/urban health during this period must take into account the dire consequences of social inequalities and economic migration. There is a tendency for the latter to be characterized as uni-directional ‒ from country to town ‒ without due consideration of rural industry and child migrant workers. Website 
• Levene A, 'Poor families, removals and 'nurture' in late Old Poor Law London'
  Continuity and Change 25 (2) (2010) pp.233-262
  ISSN: 0268-4160
  Abstract The consideration of the removals aspect of settlement law - that is, the moving on of paupers or potential paupers to the parish where they"belonged" - has focused almost exclusively on working-age adults and labour migration. This article focuses on how removal law affected families with children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in two large London parishes. It finds that children were a sizeable presence among the removed population but that there were notable differences in family type between the two parishes. Furthermore, while most young children were kept with their mothers even if they did not share a settlement, others were removed alone, even after a change in settlement law in 1795 that should have assured their common claim in certain cases. The study sheds light on attitudes to poor children and their families, as well as on the exigencies brought about by economic circumstances and employment opportunities in the parish.Website 
• Levene A, 'Parish apprenticeship and the old poor law in London'
  Economic History Review 63 (4) (2010) pp.915-941
  ISSN: 0013-0117 eISSN: 1468-0289
  Abstract This article offers an examination of the patterns and motivations behind parish apprenticeship in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. It stresses continuity in outlook from parish officials binding children, which involved placements in both the traditional and industrializing sectors of the economy. Evidence on the ages, employment types, and locations of 3,285 pauper apprentices bound from different parts of London between 1767 and 1833 indicates a variety of local patterns. The analysis reveals a pattern of youthful age at binding, a range of employment experiences, and parish-specific links to particular trades and manufactures.Website 
• Levene A, 'Between less eligibility and the NHS: the changing place of poor law hospitals in England and Wales, 1929'39'
  Twentieth Century British History 20 (3) (2009) pp.322-345
  ISSN: 0955-2359 eISSN: 0955-2359,
  Abstract In 1929, the Local Government Act broke up the apparatus of the Poor Law Guardians and Unions, and transferred responsibility for the care of the poor to local councils. In theory, the period between the passing of the Act and the formation of the National Health Service witnessed a large-scale reclassification of the sick poor as patients rather than paupers. In reality, as this investigation of contemporary judgements of hospital quality and bed and staff numbers in English and Welsh county boroughs shows, the national picture was very varied at the local level. Local and sometimes regional traditions of care, finance and council priorities had a large influence on the ongoing development of a unified medical service which included the poor. In the best case scenario, hospitals were classified by patient type, and the principle of"less eligibility" was discarded. Elsewhere, economic status continued to direct medical treatment, but in almost all cases, the chronic and elderly poor were more likely to remain in low-quality and unmodernized buildings than the acutely sick. The investigation highlights the disjuncture between the changed vision for the sick poor and its patchy enforcement on the ground. Website 
• Levene A, 'Children, childhood and the workhouse: St Marylebone, 1769-1781'
  London Journal 33 (1) (2008) pp.41-59
  ISSN: 0305-8034
  Abstract This article examines the admission and discharge registers of the sizeable workhouse of St Marylebone in the second half of the eighteenth century to examine the nature and characteristics of child poverty. Indoor relief for children is specifically linked to notions of childhood and the possibility that the young could be shaped to become hardy and responsible adults. The workhouse admissions registers show that children formed a significant presence among entrants, and that in terms of sex ratio, mode of exit and length of stay, they represented quite a different group of paupers from adults. Children were, of course, more likely to leave the workhouse because they were being apprenticed or sent to a parish nurse, but even these options disguise a variety of family forms and hint at flexible ideas from officials on the benefits of family versus institutional care. Case studies of families and individuals who used the workhouse on more than one occasion during the period covered probe these findings further, indicating also that older children may sometimes have used the institution with a degree of agency of their own. The registers thus indicate that children were a group of paupers who took up a great deal of institutional officials' time, and that a flexible set of responses to their care and potential training were in place in this period.Website 
• Levene A, ''Honesty, sobriety and diligence': master-apprentice relations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England'
  Social History 33 (2) (2008) pp.183-200
  ISSN: 0307-1022
  Abstract Master-apprentice relations have long been characterized as problematic and uneasy over the turn of the eighteenth century. Historians have argued that a decline in the usefulness and policing of formal apprenticeships made youths (generally males in their late teens) recalcitrant and insubordinate, with a close sense of communal solidarity. This may have been highlighted in an age of periodic mob violence, for example, in the Gordon Riots and Wilkite disturbances in London. In this article, personal testimonials from youths and masters bound by the London Foundling Hospital are interrogated to test the strength of these notions. Although problems concerning poor personal characteristics, bullying and thieving are identified, the majority of testimonials point ultimately to a large degree of harmony. Approximately half of foundlings bound as apprentices in the early nineteenth century made a testimonial to the hospital to ask for an advertised gratuity at the completion of their term, and approximately three-quarters of these were awarded the full sum. The conclusions suggest that we should regard apprentices as a more homogenous group of young people than is usually appreciated. The foundling apprentices, for example, may have remained tied to a rhetoric of subordination and gratitude to authority which was being discarded among other sections of the wider group. This rhetoric was distinctly different from the aspirational demands of parents, or from the desire for basic training or shifting of financial liabilities of parish officials and pauper children. Even in a time of revolutionary threat and trade dispute, therefore, foundling apprentices remained largely valued for their honesty, sobriety and diligence.Website 
• Levene A, 'Reasonable Creatures - a Common Sense Guide to Childcare (william Cadogan)'
  History Today 56 (2007) pp.30-36
  ISSN: 0018-2753
  
• Levene A, Powell M, Stewart J, 'Patterns of Municipal Health Expenditure in Interwar England and Wales'
  Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78 (2004) pp.635-669
  ISSN: 0007-5140
  

Book chapters

• Levene A, 'Family and community' in Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Age of Enlightenment, Berg Publishers (2010)
  ISBN: 9781845208264
  
• Levene A, 'Infant abandonment in Europe 1700'1850' in Childhood and violence in the western tradition, Oxbow Books (2010)
  eISBN: 1-84217-978-0
  Abstract The violence and neglect suffered by children today is a common subject of media attention and much political hand-wringing, not just in Britain but in other parts of the western world. As yet, however, there has been no attempt to explore this concern historically and look at how the boundary between good and bad parenting may have changed across time. This book attempts to fill the gap by examining the role of violence and neglect in the relations between parents/carers and children from the Bronze Age to the present. By demonstrating how the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable forms of childrearing has shifted through the ages, and not necessarily in a linear direction, it will emphasise how relatively recent our contemporary understanding of good and bad parenting is, and hence the high likelihood that that understanding has not been completely digested. The book is divided into six, multi-authored chapters. The first four deal with different manifestations through the centuries of what would be today considered violence and neglect: 1) child sacrifice; 2) infanticide and abandonment; 3) physical and mental cruelty; and 4) exploitation. The fifth and sixth chapters look at the various violent and non-violent strategies used by children as coping mechanisms in what to us seems a very harsh world. Each chapter consists of a number of short chronologically or thematically specific extracts, written by nearly 40 historians, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars and theologians, and knitted together into a coherent narrative by the editors.

Monographs

• Levene A, The childhood of the poor: welfare in eighteenth-century London , Palgrave Macmillan (2012)
  ISBN: 9780230354807
  Abstract Did new modes of thought and a new perspective on ideologies of poverty and childhood affect the treatment of the young poor? Was there a notion of childhood for the labouring classes, and was it distinctive from that of the elite? In TheChildhood of the Poor, Alysa Levene utlilises a wide range of sources examining parish nursing, the workhouse, charity, self help and family support to reveal how children and their families were assisted through hard times. In doing so, she uncovers an overlapping and sometimes contradictory set of assumptions about pauper childhood, family life and the reform of society. Poor children were innocent, valued for their future labour, entitled to parental nurture and an asset to society. However, for those offering assistance 'on the ground' they were also expensive, potentially delinquent and a live expression of the Malthusian poverty trap. This book traces these changing priorities and values over the eighteenth century: a period when childhood took on its most recognisably modern attributes.

Reviews

• Levene A, review of Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2012) pp.254-255ISSN: 1754-0194
  Website 
• Levene A, review of Pauper Capital: London and the Poor Law, 1790-1870, in London Journal 35 (2011) pp.309-310ISSN: 0305-8034
  
• Levene A, review of Child Workers in England, 1780-1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force., in Journal of British Studies 48 (2009) pp.228-230ISSN: 0021-9371
  
• Levene A, review of Infant Mortality: a Continuing Social Problem. a Volume to Mark the Centenary of the 1906 Publication of Infant Mortality: a Social Problem, in Medical History 52 (2008) pp.545-547ISSN: 0025-7273
  
• Levene A, review of Womens Work in Industrial England: Regional and Local Perspectives, in History 93 (2008) pp.290-291ISSN: 0018-2648
  
• Levene A, review of Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, in Journal of British Studies 47 (2008) pp.701-702ISSN: 0021-9371
  
• Levene A, review of Hertfordshire Children in War and Peace, 1914-1939, in Economic History Review 61 (2008) pp.1015-1016ISSN: 0013-0117 eISSN: 1468-0289
  
• Levene A, Powell M, Stewart J, review of The Development of Municipal General Hospitals in English County Boroughs in the 1930s, in Medical History 50 (2006) pp.3-28ISSN: 0025-7273
  
• Levene A, review of Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor: Londons Foul Wards, 1600-1800, in Social History of Medicine 18 (2006) pp.520-521ISSN: 0951-631X eISSN: 1477-4666
  Website 
• Levene A, review of Down and Out in Eighteenth-century London., in Journal of British Studies 45 (2006) pp.163-164ISSN: 0021-9371
  
• Levene A, review of Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England, in Women's History Review 15 (2006) pp.806-808ISSN: 0961-2025 eISSN: 1747-583X
  
• Levene A, review of From Sin to Insanity. Suicide in Early Modern Europe, in Social History of Medicine 18 (2005) pp.331-332ISSN: 0951-631X eISSN: 1477-4666
  Website