Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Histories of Nobody by Professor Elizabeth T. Hurren at the University of Leicester is a pioneering book that contains a unique collection of 8 million words of pauper letters, rediscovered during the last twenty-five years across England and Wales. It features fascinating stories of how ordinary people in poverty lived with bodies that became broken. They had to cope with disability, mental ill-health, sexual abuse, cultures of xenophobia, being rejected as immigrants. Physically their bodies were weathered by life’s very stressful situations. Most protested to secure welfare support. The Old and New Poor Law authorities often tried and frequently failed to label them ‘Nobodies’ from 1750 to 1914. This pauper past is not another country. It is happening once more around the global community. Internationally, political leaders tell the voting-public that a ‘nobody’ language will persuade poor people to ‘go away’, ‘move on’, become ‘someone else’s social problem’. When numerically what they are really talking about is ‘everybody’—you, me, and all of us, in this together. For ‘Nobodies’ turn out to resemble everyone else, everywhere—physiologically and psychologically—past, present, and future.</jats:p>