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.

The causes of poverty

The causes of poverty revealed by the early poverty surveys were as surprising and disturbing to most contemporaries as the calculations of its extent. The common belief was that poverty was caused by idleness, drinking and other personal shortcomings, a belief that was used to justify the stigmatic nature of the Poor Law. Booth found that only a quarter of his 'submerged one-tenth' was impoverished chiefly by drink, idleness and 'excessive children'. More than half were in poverty as a result of insufficient earnings and a further 10 per cent due to sickness and infirmity. The crucial point was that a very considerable part of poverty was not 'self-inflicted' but derived from low wages and other circumstances over which the poor had little control.

1. Low wage rates and unemployment must have both been serious causes of poverty earlier in the century when real wages were lower, when more men and women were engaged in declining domestic industries, in arable farming with its erratic labour requirements, and at casual work and occupations liable to be disrupted by poor weather, by uncertain transport or loss of power. In these circumstances slumps were accompanied by high food prices and fewer workers had made provisions against unemployment. However, the workings of the trade cycle was still a major source of poverty in 1900: school medical reports show significant variety in the height and health of school children that reflect the amount of work available in their vulnerable early years. The only unemployment figures historians have for the second half of the nineteenth century are those for trade unionists and they show a long-term average rate of between 4.5 and 5.5 per cent. These figures hide localised slumps such as the Lancashire 'cotton famine' during the American Civil War and that which impoverished Coventry when the silk trade was opened to foreign competition in 1860 and the effects of major strikes and lock-outs after 1890.
2. Old age was not as important a cause of poverty as low wages in 1900 but it was much more important than Booth and Rowntree at first suggested. Booth did not pay sufficient attention to families in which the chief wage earner was elderly and as a result ascribed only 10 per cent of poverty to illness or infirmity. Rowntree said that only 5 per cent of primary poverty resulted from old age or illness but he omitted the numerous elderly inmates of workhouses and poor law infirmaries. In 1890 well over a third of the working class population aged 65 or over were paupers and in 1906 almost half of all paupers were aged 60 and above. This is not surprising since state pensions were not paid until 1909.
3. Sickness was still among the important causes of poverty in 1900 and was probably even more important earlier in the century. Chadwick and early public health campaigners pointed to the enormous economic cost of preventable disease and emphasised how poor rates were swollen by the deaths of working men and by the vicious circle of sickness, loss of strength and reduced earnings that delayed economic recovery. Rising wages after 1850 reduced the amount of poverty directly attributable to ill health. This was aided by the increasing number of working men who joined friendly societies that provided sickness insurance.
4. Women were the chief sufferers from most of the causes of poverty. They were prominent by a ratio of two to one among elderly paupers largely because of their outliving their husbands. Widows and spinsters also suffered from wage rates that reflected the assumption that all females were dependent. Working class wives deserted by their husbands and the majority of unmarried mothers almost invariably became paupers. Women were also affected by hardships often hidden from investigators. The male breadwinner was almost always also the meat eater and there is ample evidence of the uneven distribution of income within the family that was to the detriment to the health of wives and children. Uncertain and fluctuating earnings made budgeting difficult and led too easily to dependence on pawnbrokers and retail credit to smooth economic fluctuations.
5. Drinking was the greatest single cause of secondary poverty in York in 1899 and an average working class family spent a sum equivalent to a third of a labourer's earnings on it. Heavy drinkers claimed that beer was necessary to their strength but drink was an extremely expensive way of obtaining nutrition. Some men could not easily avoid drinking. Wages were often paid in public houses. Drinking was obviously a consequence of poverty as well as one of its causes. The public house was often warm and cheerful and full of friends and was certainly more attractive that squalid and overcrowded homes. One sign of the importance of drink among the causes of working class poverty was extensive temperance activity[1]. The temperance movement has been characterised as overwhelmingly middle class concerned to impose bourgeois value on a degenerate workforce. However, the middle class had not monopoly of the Victorian virtues and temperance was as much a working class trait as drunkenness.
6. Large families were also shown by Booth and Rowntree to be less important among the causes of poverty than many had believed. Nevertheless they were important and, like drink, were indirectly responsible for some of the poverty ascribed to low wages and other causes. Rowntree calculated that almost a quarter of those in primary poverty in York would have escaped had they not been burdened by five or more children.

Low earnings, irregular employment, large families, sickness and old age were the root causes of poverty in the nineteenth century rather than intemperance or idleness. By 1900 new levels of poverty were discovered showing clearly that official statistics for pauperism revealed only the tip of the iceberg and that comfortable assumptions based on the belief that poverty would melt away in the warm climate of economic prosperity must be considerably modified.

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[1] Brian Harrison Drink and the Victorians, Faber, 1971, revised edition, Keele University Press, 1995 is a work of major importance on the 'drink question' between the 1830s and the 1870s. It should be supplemented with the study by W.R.Lambert Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales, University of Wales Press, 1984.