Poverty of a Beggar and a Nobleman. Experiencing and Encountering Impoverishment in the Nineteenth-century Finland

Social mobility and threshold age between early modern and modern era are regarded as characterizing features of 19th century. The boundaries of traditional estates became more and more flexible and finally lost their dominating standing. At the same time the proportion of the landless people was growing. Everyday life was based on old mentalities and practices but societal and institutional changes required new kind of orientation to the future all over in Northern Europe. This caused threats and direct impoverishment for people in various levels of society.

Previous research has shown that the attitudes towards the poor changed during the nineteenth century. So far the focus of previous research has been on the public discussion on poverty, charity as an agency of new citizenship, the politics of poor relief, and its religious background. Thus, the definitions of poverty have been formulated by the contemporaries of 19th century; on the one hand thinkers and on the other hand those, who provided aid for the poorest of the poor. However, working out poverty needs to be seen from the perspective of those individuals experiencing hard times, too. Especially in Finland, this view has so far concentrated on the end of the century. Thus it is time to reach the long 19th century in whole and particularly its beginning. We argue that understanding the nineteenth-century impoverishment still requires research on how it was lived through and struggled against on the micro level in different social segments of society.

We are looking for articles that diversify and give new empirical, methodological or comparative approaches to the image of impoverishment in the nineteenth-century Finland.

The proposals can relate to some of the following themes (not limited to):

• Finland and Northern Europe - comparative viewpoints on the impoverishment
• Poverty and the social backgrounds of Finnish-American immigrants
• Status and lifestyle threatened: perspectives on impoverishment of higher and lower social groups (nobility, gentry, civil servants, military officers, clergy, students, merchants, free-holder peasants, landless people, workers, etc.)
• Incurring debts and failed business
• Microhistorical perspectives on subjective experiences of poverty
• Representations and contexts of poverty in contemporary art and literature
• Poverty and gender
• Poverty in the lineage of generations and societal changes in the 19th century
• Strategies of survival (education, social networks, etc.)

Please submit proposals of 350-500 words either by email to Pirita Frigren, pirita.frigren@jyu.fi and Tiina Hemminki, tiina.hemminki@jyu.fi.

Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2013. Deadline for first versions of accepted articles: November 30, 2013.