ABSTRACT
As many eighteenth-century political economists observed, the level of independent poverty, surviving on a subsistence income had eroded to the level of dependent poverty: depending on the parish dole or private charity for subsistence. Because of legislative measures and the needs of nascent capitalism in the mid- to late eighteenth century, social conditions were set for laborers to be dependent on wages as well as on the parishes and private philanthropy. Reading Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts and Maria Edgeworth's Popular Tales revisits an important episode in the history of women's philanthropic endeavors, women's writing and class relations. This kind of women's fiction, with its philanthropic function, was the medium through which the lower classes could be united in economic and ideological purpose with the middling classes. Thus, women's writings for the lower classes became a powerful source of social control as well as social reform.
