'I am very bad in my bed Cloths which you know is very bad this weather and... I have no Shoes to Come in I assure you with all the indeavours of my wife we are very poorly off both in bed and Clothing. An English pauper named John Jump wrote this letter containing a request for cash relief on 2 February 1830.
In an IRSH research article (vol 54, 2009, no 2) Steven King investigates the way in which the English poor used the rhetoric of clothing in their engagement with local officials as they attempted to secure poor relief. The poor employed concepts such as raggedness, lost clothing, nakedness, compromised dignity and community presence and the link between poor clothing and unemployment, to assert their deservingness. Paupers and officials had a shared concept of minimal clothing standards and a shared linguistic register for linking clothing and deservingness.