Operating the Poor Law

The Poor Law Amendment Act was implemented with speed and determination[1]. Nine assistant commissioners were appointed and this rose to sixteen within a year. Poor Law Unions were created with some rapidity. By the end of 1835 2,066 parishes had been incorporated into 112 Unions. In 1836 the score reached 365 Unions of 7,915 parishes and by December 1839 13,691 parishes out of some 15,000 had been incorporated into 583 Unions, leaving 799 mostly Local Act or Gilbert Act Unions outside. The new Poor Law territorial system was nearly as complete as it would be until 1871, although some restructuring of Unions occurred later.

• The resulting reduction in costs was considerable. By 1838 the Commissioners reported that the country had been relieved of some £2,300,000 'direct annual taxation'. Although after 1837 costs began to rise again, it was long before they reached the level of 1834. This was a success for those who aimed chiefly at reducing the poor rate.
• For those who propagated the 1834 Act as a measure of social rehabilitation it was also claimed as a success. By 1835 the Commissioners were claiming that it had already brought more prompt and adequate relief to the aged, inform and sick; was improving the education of pauper children. They were encouraging industry and moral habits in the able-bodied and thereby increasing their welfare and helping farmers to provide more employment and higher wages; was improving the relationship between rural employers and their workers. There was a decline in chargeable bastardy and better sexual morals in the countryside.

The Commission produced annual reports and the propaganda features of the 1834 Report reappeared regularly. It remains, with the help of regional studies, to see how far their claims were justified.

Implementation

The southern counties felt the impact of the new poor law even before the new Unions were created. Some places took the opportunity to reduce poor relief wholesale: the Uckfield Union in Sussex reduced its costs in one year from £16,643 to £8,733 of which only £5,675 was spent on the poor, the remainder being used to build a workhouse. Immediate reductions occurred in widely separated areas, even if not on the Uckfield scale. In East Yorkshire expenditure fell by 13 per cent in 1835 and by 27 per cent between 1834 and 1837. These examples hide the extent of opposition, the poor geographical construction of some Unions and the role of the landed classes:

1. The Commissioners wanted the Unions to consist of a circle of parishes round a market town and some Unions did conform to this pattern. But others did not. Most of Anglesey formed a large Union of 53 parishes while five parishes in the east of the island were attached to Caernarfon to which they were linked by ferry and 16 more were attached to Bangor across the Menai straits.
2. In some rural areas the Assistant Commissioners were compelled to obtain the support of the landed nobility by drawing the boundaries of Unions round their estates. In Northamptonshire the Union of Potterspuy encompassed the Duke of Grafton's interest, Aynho, the Cartwright's interest and Daventry, Charles Kingsley's interest. Anthony Brundage sees this as a process by which the great landowners created Unions to suit their own interests and so maintain their control over Poor Law administration. Peter Dunkley challenges this view. He observes that in urban areas and in some rural districts lacking great landowners, yeomen farmers or town shopkeepers and artisans secured control of the Boards of Guardians.

There was therefore considerable disparity in the size, shape, population and wealth of the Unions. Far from uniformity, the 1834 Act inaugurated a period of considerable variegation and experiment in local administrative areas.

Administrative services

The success of central policies was dependent on the character and efficiency of the Poor Law Union officials. The new government service included Clerks to the Boards, Relieving Officers, Workhouse Masters and Medical Officers. Some of these posts were part-time and the salaries varied according to the size and population of the Union. The officials in the front line were the Relieving Officer and Workhouse Master, sometimes one person holding two posts:

1. The Relieving Officer decided the fate of applicants for relief; whether they should be relieved at home, enjoy free medical treatment, be sent to task work or 'offered' the workhouse. He was also supposed to supervise outdoor relief.
2. The Workhouse Master ran the House. He served two masters, the Commission and the Board of Guardians, who not infrequently issued conflicting orders. He was required to fulfil the demands of Medical Officers for the supply and treatment of pauper patients. He needed to be of firm character and the Commissioners hoped that the Guardians would use their powers of patronage to appoint both Relieving Officers and Workhouse Masters from the police or military NCOs. Even so between 1835 and 1841 90 Relieving Officers were dismissed for theft, neglect of duty, misconduct or drunkenness.

The inevitable result of local patronage was the dismissal and then re-appointment of officials from the old poor law system.  imilar problems occurred in establishing professional Poor Law medical services. Initially the Commissioners encouraged Unions to offer part-time medical posts at the lowest tender but this led to many complaints of neglect and ill treatment before the Select Committee of 1837. After this Unions appointed qualified doctors at reasonable wages. From 1842, when the first General Medical Order was issued, attempts were made by the Commissioners to regulate the improvement the service. Unions were divided into medical districts each with its own Medical Officer. Workhouse infirmaries did provide indoor medical treatment and increased in number but they were often overcrowded and without adequate equipment or staff. They failed to improve until 1867, when the Metropolitan Poor Law Act, began the process of taking the London infirmaries out of Union control. In 1885 the Medical Relief Disqualification Act removed some of the stigma of pauperism from those who received only medical assistance from the poor law and the poor law authorities administered three-quarters of all hospital beds.

The workhouses

The well-regulated workhouse was the centrepiece of the new system[2]. Chadwick never intended that the deterrent workhouse test should apply to all. He intended to build new workhouses for orphans, the old and infirm while driving the able-bodied to provide for themselves and their families. Existing parish workhouses were to be included in the Unions for the separate treatment of classified paupers, the old, the young and the able-bodied. He hoped to extend this principle to the separate housing of lunatics, the blind and other special categories. This proved impractical and a single large Union workhouse was more efficient with the result that the 'deserving poor' were treated little different from the 'undeserving' able-bodied.

The Commissioners never intended that workhouses should be places of repression for the able-bodied. Paupers might be better fed and housed than in a labourer's cottage. But they would be put to heavy work and subjected to discipline including the denial of tobacco and alcohol and the separation of men from women. But the workhouses were to be intended as 'prisons without crime'.  Dietaries published by the Commissioners were not wholly insufficient and took notice of local eating habits but food was stodgy and monotonous.  Inmates had to wear workhouse uniform but the Commissioners resisted the attempts of some Guardians to clothe unmarried mothers in yellow as a badge of shame.

The picture of a stern and uniform regime in the workhouse -- a picture reinforced by radical writers called them 'Bastilles' -- belied the facts. Just how cruel the new poor law workhouses were is a question often obscured by propaganda and myth. They were often overcrowded but their character varied between areas. The character of the Master and Matron, the Union boards and the regional Assistant Poor Law Commissioner regulated the actual conduct of the workhouses. The new workhouses were often less crowded and insanitary than those built before 1834. The most resented deterrent effect of the new poor law, and the most obvious contrast with the old system, was the strict workhouse routine and the increasing stigma attached to pauper status.

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[1] D. Fraser (ed.) The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century, Macmillan, 1976 is a collection of excellent essays on the operation of the system.

[2] The workhouse is discussed in N. Longmate The Workhouse, Temple Smith, 1974, A. Digby Pauper Palaces, Routledge, 1978 and M. Crowther The Workhouse System 1834-1929: The History of an English Social Institution, Methuen, 1984. Felix Driver Power and pauperism: the workhouse system 1834-1884, CUP, 1993 is a useful recent study.

Reforming the Poor Law

The reform of the Poor Laws extended the growing chasm between the middle classes and the working population.  The poor law, as it existed in the early 1830s was not a system but, in Sidney Checkland's words, "an accretion", determined by statutes passed two centuries earlier in a different economic and social world, without central organisation and left to the discretion and vagaries of local parishes. Any attempt to reconstruct the poor law would have to be both bold and grand. The old poor law, constructed in the late sixteenth century, touched almost every aspect of domestic government. It provided the only general social securities and the only general regulation of labour. But its main characteristic was perhaps the almost compete lack of either central control or uniform policy. The old poor law also provided no clear answers to certain critical questions: was unemployment to be regarded as an offence or a misfortune? Was relief to be administered as a deterrent, as a dole or as a livelihood?  Economic distress in the mid 1790s led to the introduction of 'allowances on aid  of wages', generally though not accurately known as the 'Speenhamland system' after its first application in Berkshire in 1795.  What was initially perceived as a temporary expedient became a necessity for the labouring population in the depressed agrarian south after 1815.  Escalating costs, changing ideological perceptions and the 'Swing' riots of 1830 led to  an increasingly focused challenge to the existing system which was seen  as corrupting and lenient and for demands that more  rigour should be imposed on the poor[1].

Retention or reform?

Broadly speaking, opinion on the poor laws was divided into three: into those who wished to retain them, those who wished to modify them and those who wished to abolish them.

1. Humanitarians, sentimental radicals and paternalistic Tories belonged to the first group. They believed that there was a strong imperative of humane social responsibility in providing a basic measure of social security for the labouring poor and this seemed to them to outweigh its disadvantages.
2. The second group, who wished to modify the existing system, were to some degree motivated by the same sentiments but were alarmed by its escalating cost and sought to reduce it.
3. The third group was the most influential and powerful if the least numerous. Its guiding lights were political economy and Malthusianism. They believed that labourers must operate within the framework of the free market economy and 'social discipline'.

The latter had the better of the argument and by the early 1830s it had become  a commonplace wisdom among the middle classes and many of the aristocratic elite, especially the Whigs, that the poor laws encouraged indolence and vice.

A Royal Commission

The Royal Commission set up in 1832 to investigate the workings of the poor law was weighted towards 'progressive' opinion and quickly confirmed what the Commissioners had set out to prove. There may have been exaggeration of the abuses of the old poor law in the 1834 Poor Law Report. Mark Blaug has shown that its economic consequences were not understood by contemporaries or  by  later historians but there was no misunderstanding of purpose by those who framed the Poor Law Amendment Act, especially Edwin Chadwick its guiding force. Chadwick could not adopt any of the approaches argued by the three groups. He objected to the basic security conception of the humanitarians and to the notion of the 'parish in business'. He, however, differed from the Malthusians and political economists in two important respects:

• The idea of abandoning any attempt at control was deeply opposed to his bureaucratic temperament.
• He did not agree with the Malthusian proposition that population must inevitably outrun resources and asserted that there was no economic problem that greater and freer productivity could not solve. His primary objection to the old poor law was that they held down productivity by effectively pauperising the independent labourer and the laws of settlement immobilised a huge labour force that factories were crying out for. Chadwick wanted to 'de-pauperise' the able-bodied poor and drive them into the open labour market.

This could be achieved, Chadwick believed, by making it the labourer's interest to join the free labour market through the process of less eligibility. This would induce the majority of able-bodied paupers to refuse poor relief and provide capital for development and productivity.

The 1834 Act

The 1834 Act did not aim to deal with the nature or lack of provision, but only with excess. It had not been  politically practical to abolish public relief completely but the relief for those unwilling to unable to make provision for themselves was to be on terms less favourable than those obtained by  the  lowest paid  worker in employment [the principle of 'less eligibility']. This would eliminate abuse and fraud. Pauperism was a defect of character as there was always work available at the prevailing market price if it was sought strenuously enough.   Hard work and thrift would always ensure a level of competence, however modest the level at which individuals were working. These values, reflecting emergent middle class ideology, made a lasting impression on society for the rest of the century.  The sense of shame at the acceptance of public relief, the stigma of the workhouse and the dread of the pauper's funeral were central facets of the attitudes of the working population. They played a major role in the definition of 'respectability' that emerged among both the middle classes and labourers.  The 1834 Act embodied the ideology of the political economists but it could be presented by its opponents as an abuse of the poor: the poor law agitation before 1834 was aimed at amelioration but after 1834 the rigour of the system generated a counter-pressure in favour of easement[2].

The 1834 Act was important in three respects.

1. First, unlike factory or mine reform, the thinking behind the act was  rural rather than urban in basis. This led to the adoption of a programme  entirely unsuitable and unworkable in the industrial urban setting of northern England and accounted for the widespread opposition to its introduction after 1836.  A simple reversal from relaxation to rigour could succeed in the agrarian south to a considerable extent but matters were different in the industrial north.  There the new poor law was  politicised, first by the anti-poor law agitation and  then by the effects of the introduction of the electoral principle into poor  law  affairs.
2. Secondly, 1834 was the result of a generalised view of a whole range of problems and contained a moral rather than an environmental view of the poor and within this framework aimed at comprehensiveness and internal consistency.
3. Finally, it created the first effective element of centralised British  bureaucracy, intended to preside over a general social policy with central control and supervision with local administration.

The standardising intentions of national legislators  almost immediately came into conflict with the responses of local people who dealt with the realities of immediate situations. Localities could and did ignore or evade the instructions of the Commissioners.  Outdoor relief could not be withheld in seasonal employment like agriculture or during trade depressions in industrial centres. Checkland has argued that this "generated a kind of schizophrenia when placed alongside the concepts embodied in the governing Act  of  1834....[producing] concessions to common sense and common humanity."

Despite this there is no doubt that imposing 'rigour' resulted in much  hardship under the Act.   There are accounts of deficient diet, penal workhouses, families torn apart and the denial of dignity to the old.  The poor were abused because of  a combination  of indifference to their plight and social  zealotry because of the dogma enshrined in the enabling legislation.

The  Act was intended as an attack on a structural problem:  the conditions and behaviour of the labouring poor, especially in agrarian regions, the intention of reducing abuse, and to stop confusion between wages and relief. Can this be seen as an expression of middle class values grounded in the  ideology of political economy?   In simplistic terms it probably can  but the  relationship between political economy and poor law policy was  in practice far more complex. The uniformity of support by the middle classes for political economy can be easily over-exaggerated  and the nature of the trade cycle resulted  in their refusal  to implement the full rigour of the 1834 Act  in their industrial centres.

The Poor Law Report may have been over-optimistic in believing that uniformity of practice was possible but its principles  established  attitudes to poverty, which still have current significance. Ursula Henriques maintains that "In 1834 the new development was given a scope, a momentum and a character which  made  it irreversible.   The  change  was more immediate  and more complete in the south than in the north,  but it  was  lasting.... The Victorian workhouse  and  all  it  stood for.... was  perhaps the most permanent and binding institution of Victorian England.   Not until the working class had obtained the vote  and entirely different attitudes to poverty in general  and unemployment  in particular began to creep in at the turn of  the century did the principles of 1834 start to lose their grip."

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[1] The  debate over the poor laws is best approached through  J.R. Poynter Society  and  Pauperism:  English Ideas on  Poor Relief  1795-1834, Routledge, 1969  and R.G.Cowherd Political Economists and the English Poor Laws, Ohio U.P., 1978. G.R. Boyer An Economic History of the English Poor Law 1750-1850, CUP, 1990 is an important defence of Malthusian ideas. G. Himmelfarb The Idea of Poverty: England in  the Early Industrial Age,  Faber, 1984 is a challenging study.  J.D. Marshall The Old Poor Laws 1795-1834,  Macmillan, 2^nd. ed., 1985 is a brief  bibliographical essay.

[2] A. Brundage The Making of the New Poor Law 1833-39, Hutchinson,  1979, S.G. and E. Checkland (eds.) The Poor Law Report of 1834, Penguin, 1974, A. Digby The Poor Law in Nineteenth Century England and Wales,  The Historical Association, 1982, D. Fraser (ed.) The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth  Century, Macmillan, 1976, M.E. Rose  The  Relief  of Poverty 1834-1914, Macmillan, 2^nd ed., 1985 and P. Wood Poverty and the Workhouse in Victorian England, Alan Sutton, 1991 are the  most useful books on the introduction and operation of the 'new' poor  law.