Key Definitions

• Board Schools: These were set up under the provisions of the Elementary Education Act, which was known as the Foster's Act because it was drafted and introduced by the liberal MP for Bradford. The Act established a system of school boards to build and manage elementary schools in areas where there were insufficient voluntary (church) schools. These elementary schools provided education for children aged 5-13.
• Poor Law Medical Officers' Association: An association of Poor Law medical officers who met four times a year for the purpose of sharing information and best practice.
• Workhouse Visiting Society: An organisation set up in 1858 that arranged a system of workhouse visits aimed to improve the moral and spiritual lives of pauper inmates.
• Pauper Funeral: With the principle of less eligibility, a pauper's body was wrapped in a paper shroud, placed in a flimsy wooden coffin and interred in a mass grave. Mass graves could accommodate as many as 20 coffins. Quicklime was used to speed up decomposition so the same graves could be used over and over again. The graves were unmarked.
• Adulterated Food: Food and drink that was spoiled by adding something to it. For example, adding chalk to bread to make it look white.
• Truck Shop: Some employers operated a system whereby their workers were paid partly in tokens that could only be exchanged in the firm's truck shop where the employers controlled the prices of the goods.
• Pawnshop:

  A place where the poor could go to get an immediate cash loan in exchange for one, or some, of their possessions. The possession/s could be reclaimed when the loan was repaid. If it wasn't repaid within a certain length of time, the pawnbroker could sell the item and keep the money from the sale.
• Prevailing Orthodoxy:

  Beliefs or practices that are commonly held.
• Chartism:

  A radical movement that began in the 1830s, after the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act had failed to give the vote to working class people. Chartists supported the 6 points of the People's Charter: annual elections, equal electoral districts, payment of MPs, universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot and the abolition of a property qualification for MPs. Chartism as a movement died out in the 1850s.