1 Pat Thane's work has been particularly influential in this field. For example, Thane, Pat ed., The long history of old age (London, 2005)Google Scholar; Thane, Pat, Old age in English history. Past experiences, present issues (Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Thane, Pat, ‘Old people and their families in the English past’, in Daunton, Martin ed., Charity, self-interest and welfare in the English past (London, 1996), 113–38Google Scholar.

2 Crowther, M. A., The workhouse system 1834–1929. The history of an English social institution (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Driver, Felix, Power and pauperism. The workhouse system, 1834–1884 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; Quadagno, Jill, Aging in early industrial society. Work, family, and social policy in nineteenth-century England (New York and London, 1982)Google Scholar; King, Steven, Poverty and welfare in England 1700–1850 (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar.

3 Stewart, Simon in his Culture and the middle classes (Farnham and Burlington, 2010), 17–43Google Scholar, has argued against any sort of cohesive, discernable middle class. This essay embraces this imprecision in defining the ‘middle class’ or ‘middle classes’. I am using the term in a descriptive sense, using middle classes to encompass the gentry, professional and commercial classes which Elizabeth Harrison aimed to support through St Scholastica's Retreat. For more on the middle classes see Joyce, Patrick ed., Class (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar; Morris, R. J., Class, sect and party. The making of the British middle class, Leeds, 1820–50 (Manchester, 1990)Google Scholar; Gordon, Eleanor and Nair, Gwyneth, Public lives. Women, family and society in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 2003)Google Scholar.

4 St Scholastica's Retreat will be referred to alternatively as St Scholastica's or the Retreat.

5 ‘Death of Miss Harrison’, The Tablet, 26 October 1867, 675–6.

6 Looijesteijn, Henk, ‘Funding and founding private charities: Leiden almshouses and their founders, 1450–1800’, Continuity and Change 27, 2 (2012), 199–239CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 200.

7 Goose, Nigel, ‘The English almshouse and the mixed economy of welfare: medieval to modern’, The Local Historian 40, 1 (2010), 3–4Google Scholar.

8 Crowther, The workhouse system. Outdoor relief was available and utilised by some poor law unions.

9 Bailey, Brian, Almshouses (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Howson, Brian, Houses of noble poverty. A history of the English almshouse (Sunbury-on-Thames, 1993)Google Scholar; Howson, Brian, Almshouses. A social and architectural history (Stroud, 2008)Google Scholar. Owen, David, English philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Cambridge, 1964), 74–5Google Scholar. More localised and institutionally based works include Caffrey, Helen, Almshouses in the West Riding of Yorkshire 1600–1900 (King's Lynn, 2006)Google Scholar; Goose, Nigel and Moden, Leanne, A history of Doughty's Hospital, Norwich, 1687–2009 (Hatfield, 2010)Google Scholar. More recent academic work includes: Goose, ‘The English almshouse and the mixed economy of welfare’; Goose, Nigel and Basten, Stuart, ‘Almshouse residency in nineteenth century England. An interim report’, Family and Community History 12 (2009), 65–76Google Scholar; Goose, Nigel and Looijesteijn, Henk, ‘Almshouses in England and the Dutch Republic circa 1350–1800. A comparative perspective’, Journal of Social History 45, 4 (2012), 1049–73Google Scholar.

10 The English Almshouse Project, established in 2006 and managed by Anne Langley and Nigel Goose, is a collaborative project between FACHRS and the Local Population Studies Society. An edited volume, New perspectives on philanthropy: the British almshouse 1500–1914, will be published in 2015. http://www.fachrs.com/content/alms2.html (accessed 30 June 2014).

11 Hudson, Pat, ‘Closeness and distance. A response to Brewer’, Cultural and Social History 7 (2010), 375–85Google Scholar.

12 Rowntree, B. Seebohm, Poverty. A study of town life (London, 1901), 136–8Google Scholar. The three stages of poverty were as a young child, as a parent of young children and in old age.

13 Macnicol, John, The politics of retirement in Britain, 1878–1948 (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 These latter three terms are not given contemporary meanings; they all refer to almshouse accommodation. For example, the Royal Cambridge Asylum for Soldiers’ Widows provided a home and pension for army widows of non-commissioned officers and privates. Low, Sampson, The charities of London in 1861 (London, 1862), 64Google Scholar.

15 Joyce, Patrick, Patronage and poverty in merchant society. The history of Morden College, Blackheath 1695 to the present (Henley-on-Thames, 1982), 24Google Scholar.

16 Howson, Almshouses, 59; Bailey, Almshouses, 161–86.

17 Goose and Looijesteijn, ‘Almshouses in England and the Dutch Republic’, 1054.

18 Gilley, Sheridan, ‘Heretic London, holy poverty and the Irish poor, 1830–1870’, The Downside Review 89 (1971), 67Google Scholar; Lynda R. Pearce, ‘Catholic philanthropy in mid-nineteenth century Britain. The reformatory work of the female congregations’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Canterbury Christ Church University College, 2003), 52.

19 Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, London (hereafter AAW), Wiseman Papers – Series 3, W3/13 35, ‘The Workhouse Question’, 2 June 1859; Mrs Ram, Abel, The Little Sisters of the Poor (London, 1894), 186–7Google Scholar.

20 Both congregations offered homes for the elderly without payment. For more on the Sisters of Nazareth homes for the aged poor see Mangion, Carmen M., ‘Faith, philanthropy and the aged poor in nineteenth-century England and Wales’, European Review of History 19, 4 (2012), 515–30Google Scholar.

21 Anonymous, How to help the sick and dying (London, 1890), 24–9Google Scholar.

22 Carmen M. Mangion, ‘London's Catholic almspeople’, in Helen Caffrey, Nigel Goose and Anne Langley eds., New perspectives on philanthropy: the British almshouse 1500–1914 (forthcoming 2015).

23 Another almshouse ‘retreat’ is ‘Provident Retreat’ in Abbott's Langley, Hertfordshire for aged booksellers, their assistants and their widows. Low, The charities of London in 1861, 59–67, 121, 131, 141, 175. There were other similar serials of charities including The shilling guide to the London charities (later renamed The royal guide to the London charities) edited by Herbert Fry.

24 Archives of St Scholastica's Retreat, Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire (hereafter SSR): R. A. Kidd, ‘The Harrison family of Hackney, 1792–1876’ (unpublished typescript), 1–2. Much of what is known about the Harrisons has been pieced together by local historian R. A. Kidd. I am most grateful for his generosity in sharing the fruits of his thorough research.

25 ‘Death of Miss Harrison’, 675–6. St John's accommodated four residents, each with two rooms. There is no extant evidence that Elizabeth was involved in the operation of St John's Hospice. These almshouses were still occupied until around 1971, when the building was demolished.

26 Carter, Brian, ‘Catholic charitable endeavour in London, 1810–1840. Part I’, Recusant History 25, 3 (2001), 487Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., 675. No details of her charitable work outside St Scholastica's Retreat were noted.

28 Pearce, ‘Catholic philanthropy’, 52.

29 This seems similar to the seventeenth-century ‘monumental’ almshouses in the Netherlands. Looijesteijn, ‘Funding and founding private charities’, 214–15.

30 It was likely that St Scholastica's was named after Elizabeth Harrison's sister-in-law, Charlotte Scholastica. SSR, ‘St Scholastica's Retreat: a short historical record compiled by the warden, Major H. Gilmore, 1966’, 1. St Scholastica (480–543) is acknowledged as the founder of the female branch of Benedictine monasticism. Her brother was St Benedict of Nursia, founder of the male Benedictines. Gibson, Henry, Short lives of the saints (London and Leamington, 1896), 172–5Google Scholar.

31 These are translated to ‘a wise man can rule the stars’ and ‘deeds not words’.

32 AAW, Box FN, Letter from Major Gilmore to Stephen Welsh dated 21 October 1965.

33 Howson, Almshouses, 143; Goose and Looijesteijn, ‘Almshouses in England and the Dutch Republic’, 1053.

34 Unfortunately, no photographs have been found of the interior of the residences.

35 The apartments were lit by gas, and heating and cooking done by coal fire.

36 SSR, ‘St Scholastica's Retreat: a short historical record compiled by the warden, Major H. Gilmore, 1966’, 8. St Scholastica's chapel and school opened in 1882.

37 The trustee who handled daily matters was John Haly (1804–1874), Charlotte Scholastica's (née Haly) brother and Robert Harrison's confidential clerk. The remaining trustees were businessman Henry Dolan (1820–1884), stockbroker William Henry Bishop (1827–1908), barrister John Woollett (1821–1898) and solicitor Sylvester Dignam (1831–1892). All were Catholic laymen with professional expertise.

38 SSR, Kidd, ‘The Harrison family’, 7.

39 ‘Death of Miss Harrison’, 675–6.

40 AAW, Box FN, ‘Rights and restrictions of inmates’, 1868, 1.

41 The register lists 186 separate individuals. Of these, 117 were accepted into St Scholastica's, 31 were rejected and 38 withdrew before the vetting process was completed. Eight co-inmates who became inmates were not listed separately in the register. The inmate statistics in this article are derived from a prosopographical database (hereafter SSR Database) created using sources including St Scholastica's Inmates Register (hereafter SSR Register), minutes, correspondence and the decennial census.

42 SSR, ‘St Scholastica's Retreat: a short historical record compiled by the warden, Major H. Gilmore, 1966’, 5, 19. Gilmore was warden from 1965 to 1970. Stipends will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

43 Goose and Basten, ‘Almshouse residency’, 69–70.

44 Anderson, Michael, ‘The social position of the spinster in mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of Family History 9, 4 (1984), 377–93Google Scholar, here 390; Goose, Nigel, ‘Poverty, old age and gender in nineteenth-century England: the case of Hertfordshire’, Continuity and Change 20, 3 (2005), 351–84Google Scholar.

45 Moore, Ada, ‘The “decayed” gentlewoman: an appeal to England's chivalry’, The Westminster Review CLXII, 4 (1904), 450–62Google Scholar, here 450.

46 Gordon, Eleanor and Nair, Gwyneth, ‘The economic role of middle-class women in Victorian Glasgow’, Women's History Review 9, 4 (2000), 791–814Google Scholar; Vicinus, Martha, Independent women: work and community for single women, 1850–1920 (London, 1985)Google Scholar.

47 ‘St Scholastica's Retreat, Clapton, and the adjoining new mission of the Fathers of Charity’, The Tablet, 27 September 1862, 613; The Catholic Directory, 1862 to 1868.

48 Goose and Looijesteijn, ‘Almshouses in England and the Dutch Republic’, 8. For a table of occupations see Goose and Basten, ‘Almshouse residency’, 73.

49 Patrick Joyce in his history of Morden College contends that social status was maintained through the exclusiveness of charitable institutions for the middle classes. Joyce, Patronage and poverty in merchant society, 23.

50 SSR Database.

51 AAW, Box FN, ‘Rights and restrictions of inmates’.

52 AAW, Box AIE, ‘Correspondence copy book 1873–1874’, letter dated 27 September 1873 from probably John Haly to Mr Corney, 30.

53 SSR, SSR Register, entry 45.

54 Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell in Middle classes. Their rise and sprawl (2002), 53, 71–3 attest to the significance of respectability to middle-class identity. See also Cannadine, David, Class in Britain (London, 1998), 91–3Google Scholar.

55 Great Britain at this time would have included England, Wales and Scotland. Ireland existed as a separate realm.

56 Bryson, John R., McGuiness, Mark and Ford, Robert G., ‘Chasing a “loose and baggy monster”. Almshouses and the geography of charity’, Area 34 (2002), 48–58Google Scholar, here 51; Goose and Looijesteijn, ‘Almshouses in England and the Dutch Republic’, 1057. That said, the preliminary analysis of the FACHRS data indicates that nineteenth-century almshouse residents were probably not local people. Goose and Basten, ‘Almshouse residency’, 72.

57 AAW, Box AIE, Correspondence copy book 1873–1874: letter from John Haly to Dr S. J. Haly, dated 8 August 1874, 155. It is curious that Haly indicates ‘England’ in this letter as the published ‘Rights and restrictions of inmates’ clearly states ‘Great Britain’.

58 Belchem, John, ‘Class, creed and country: the Irish middle class in Victorian Liverpool’, in Swift, Roger and Gilley, Sheridan eds., The Irish in Victorian Britain. The local dimension (Dublin, 1999), 211Google Scholar.

59 Morris, Class, sect and party, 105–6. Also, Morris, R. J., Men, women and property in England, 1780–1870. A social and economic history of family strategies amongst the Leeds middle classes (Cambridge, 2005), 58–9Google Scholar; Lester, V. Markham, Victorian insolvency. Bankruptcy, imprisonment for debt, and company winding-up in nineteenth-century England (Oxford, 1995), 163–7, 299Google Scholar, Bourne, J. M., Patronage and society in nineteenth-century England (London, 1986), 89–90Google Scholar.

60 SSR, SSR Register, entry 83.

61 SSR, SSR Register, entry 168.

62 SSR, SSR Register, entry 130.

63 AAW, Box FN, ‘Rights and restrictions of inmates’, 1. It is difficult to calculate an average income necessary to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Lawyers, doctors and top civil servants spent approximately £100 per annum to rent homes commensurate to their status (10-room houses). With an average annuity of £39, Retreat inhabitants could not afford this quality of housing. Muthesius, Stefan, The English terraced house (New Haven and London, 1992), 44Google Scholar. See also Long, Helen C., The Edwardian house. The middle-class home in Britain, 1880–1914 (Manchester and New York, 1993), 8–10Google Scholar.

64 AAW, Box FN, ‘Miss Harrison contemplated’. Harrison's investment securities did not achieve the interest rates she had anticipated, thus investment revenues were reduced.

65 SSR, ‘St Scholastica's Retreat: a short historical record’, 14.

66 AAW, Box FN, ‘Miss Harrison contemplated’. The Charity Commission is a government body, established by the Charitable Trusts Act 1853 which registered and regulated charities in England and Wales.

67 Of the residents, 24 cobbled together their annuity from multiple sources.

68 Thane, ‘Old people and their families in the English past’, 134.

69 The Universal Beneficent Society was founded in 1857 by Charles Dickens and other philanthropists. Its aim was to ‘assist all those in need with no distinction of class or creed’. In 1851, spinster Theresa Molineux left a bequest to the Aged Poor Society setting up the Molineux Trust and Pension Funds, which was used to fund the building of St Joseph's Almshouses in Hammersmith and also to provide eligible Catholic applicants a pension of £20 per annum. See Mangion, ‘London's Catholic almspeople’.

70 SSR, SSR Register, entry 53.

71 SSR, SSR Register, entry 194.

72 SSR, SSR Register, entry 78.

73 SSR, SSR Register, entry 127.

74 SSR Database.

75 It was against the rules to have two co-inmates, but Elizabeth Harrison approved this exception (amongst others). AAW, Box AHR, Grant book, 1891–1899; AAW, Box AHY Minute book, 19 November 1890.

76 SSR Database.

77 SSR, SSR Register, entry 107.

78 SSR, SSR Register, entry 22.

79 AAW, Box FN, ‘Rights and restrictions of inmates’, 1. The warden's wife was expected to do some basic nursing but this was not meant to be done on a routine basis.

80 SSR, SSR Register, entry 44.

81 SSR, SSR Register, entries 145 and 169. See Mangion, ‘Faith, philanthropy and the aged poor’.

82 SSR, SSR Register, entry 93. For more on St Mary's Hospital, see Mangion, Carmen M., ‘“Meeting a well-known want”: Catholic specialist hospitals for long-term medical care in late nineteenth-century England and Wales’, in Bonfield, Christopher, Reinarz, Jonathan and Huguet-Termes, Teresa eds., Hospitals and communities, 1100–1960 (Oxford, 2013), 239–62Google Scholar.

83 SSR, SSR Register, entry 32.

84 Prochaska, F. K., ‘Philanthropy’, in Thompson, F. M. L. ed., The Cambridge social history of Britain 1750–1950, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1990), 375Google Scholar.

85 There are many important works on this topic including Joanna Innes, ‘The “mixed economy of welfare” in early modern England: assessments of the options from Hale to Malthus (c.1683–1803)’, in Daunton, Charity, self-interest and welfare, 139–80; Goose, ‘The English almshouse and the mixed economy of welfare’; Lewis, Jane, ‘Family provision of health and welfare in the mixed economy of care in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Social History of Medicine 8, 1 (1995), 1–16Google Scholar; King, Steven and Tomkins, Alannah eds., The poor in England, 1700–1850. An economy of makeshifts (Manchester and New York, 2003), 8–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 SSR, SSR Register, entry 45.

87 Thompson, F. M. L., The rise of respectable society: A social history of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Burnett, John, A social history of housing, 1815–1970 (London, 1978)Google Scholar, 94. Burnett argued that ‘For that part of the population whose economic resources allowed it to exercise some real choice as to how and where it lived, the home, and its physical expression, the house, were the central institutions of civilized life.’

88 The Catholic Directory, 1864, 233.

89 Charles Booth Online Archive; http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl?sub=view_booth_and_barth&args=534242,186101,1,large,0 (accessed 2 August 2014). The maps of London poverty are part of Charles Booth's inquiry into life and labour in London (1886–1903). Pink was defined as ‘Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.’; red was defined as ‘Middle class. Well-to-do.’

90 Burnett, A social history of housing, 108. For more on the division and use of rooms with respect to family and servant relationships see Hamlett, Jane, Material relations. Domestic interiors and middle-class families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester, 2010), 40–62Google Scholar.

91 AAW, Minute book, 20 December 1892.

92 Trainor, Richard, ‘The middle class’, in Martin, Daunton ed., The Cambridge urban history of Britain, III, 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 673–713Google Scholar, here 693.

93 AAW, Box FN, ‘Rights and restrictions of inmates’. Iron bedsteads were a cheap and sanitary option for institutions from the 1830s, but became, with improved designs and the promotion of their hygienic properties (particularly the discouragement of bedbugs and other vermin) essential in middle-class bedrooms. I am indebted to Jane Hamlett for pointing me to Neiswander's, Judith A., The cosmopolitan interior. Liberalism and the British home, 1870–1914 (New Haven and London, 2008), 64–6Google Scholar.

94 AAW, Box AHY, Minute book, 1890–1913, 9 July 1895, 64.

95 Cohen, W. A., and Johnson, R., Filth: dirt, disgust, and modern life (Minneapolis, 2005), 185Google Scholar.

96 The source of these types of communications is not noted; it is likely that neighbours made the porter or trustees aware of any digressions from rule V.

97 AAW, Minute book, 20 December 1892.

98 AAW, Box AIE, ‘Correspondence copy book 1873–1874’, letter dated 26 February 1873 from probably John Haly to A. F. Sprague, warden, 17.

99 AAW, Box FN, ‘Rights and restrictions of inmates’.

100 Burnett, A social history of housing, 96.

101 SSR, ‘St Scholastica's Retreat: a short historical record compiled by the warden, Major H. Gilmore, 1966’, 5, 19.

102 Monteiro, Mariana, As David and the sibyls say (London, 1905)Google Scholar, xiii.

103 SSR, R. A. Kidd, ‘The trustees of St Scholastica's Retreat’.

104 Prochaska, ‘Philanthropy’, 375. Joyce argues similarly in his study of Morden College. Joyce, Patronage and poverty in merchant society, 25.

105 The economic dependence of St Scholastica's inhabitants reflects some continuities with the medieval and early modern understandings of the ‘shame-faced poor’, where individuals unable to uphold their social status independently were recipients of charity; their deservedness was rarely questioned given the need to maintain the social order and individual respect. Similar to this was the concept of ‘honour’ to be found in residing in Dutch almshouses. Geremek, Bronislaw, Poverty. A history (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA, 1994), 39–40Google Scholar; Daunton, Charity, self-interest and welfare, 11; Brian Pullan, ‘Charity and poor relief in early modern Italy’, in Daunton, Charity, self-interest and welfare, 66–7; Rexroth, Frank, Deviance and power in late medieval London (London, 2007), 223–65Google Scholar. Margot C. Finn has noted how in many instances indebtedness was seen as a ‘misfortune’, thus absolving the debtor of responsibility or negative stigma. See her The character of credit: personal debt in English culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), 128Google Scholar. For an understanding of Dutch honour, see Looijesteijn, Henk and van Leeuwen, Marco H. D., ‘Founding large charities and community building in the Dutch Republic, c. 1600–1800’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 62, 1 (2014), 24–6Google Scholar.

106 Joyce, Patronage and poverty in merchant society, 23.