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Shifting Notions of Poverty in Industrializing Britain

at the Time of the New Poor Laws of 1834

Mary E. Murphy

Notre Dame Sion High School

Kansas City, MO

2012 NEH Seminar for School Teachers
Historical Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in Britain

In the course of the 2012 NEH Seminar on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, a recurring theme was the social upheaval that occurred within the laboring classes in Britain. It was that social class that was the primary "engine" in the rapid industrialization of Industrial Revolution. While there are disagreements among historians as to the exact effect on the material condition of the laboring class, there is no disagreement that there was serious disruption in the fabric of society, especially at its more frayed edges.

This paper (and the document study following it) looks at a fairly specific issue that confronted me as a student of the history of the Industrial Revolution during this seminar: To what extent, if any, did society's image of poverty and the poor, particularly as reflected in its Poor Laws, change in Britain in the early 19th century as a result of the Industrial Revolution taking place there? In an industrializing society in which labor and individualism under the principles of laissez faire capitalism were key components of growth, were those who failed to prosper or, worse, to barely eke out subsistence in the new economy seen differently by the rest of society? If so, did they see themselves the same way?

I come to this issue from a couple of places. First of all, I am a student of history myself and issues such as this intrigue me. Large segments of the seminar reinforced the argument that much of the societal change in Britain was well underway long before Richard Arkwright installed water frames in his mills along the Derwent River. Yet, it was equally emphasized and argued that something significantly new developments had certainly happened, at least in degree, by the mid-19th century that rendered Britain, and England in particular, a profoundly different place than it had been 100 years earlier. Eric Hobsbawn suggests that while the question of whether “the Industrial Revolution gave most Britons absolutely or relatively more and better food, clothes and housing is naturally of interest" to historians, the historian who focuses on mere "addition and subtraction" will have missed the larger point. The real emphasis, according to Hobsbawn (and others), is that the Industrial Revolution in Britain caused fundamental social change by transforming human lives "beyond recognition." Moreover, it was particularly the laboring poor whose "traditional world and way of life the Industrial Revolution was destroyed, without automatically substituting anything else." It is this disruption, he argues, that is at the heart of the question about the social effects of industrialization (Hobsbawn, 58, 63).

Second, I am a teacher of European history, where my students are 17- and 18-year-olds in a school that has as an important strand of its stated mission that students be responsive to the most marginalized members of society. I want my students to be both serious students of history and engaged in understanding the history of all social classes. Presenting this question to them allows them (and me) to both (1) address the history of the Industrial Revolution in a substantive and intriguing way, and (2) think more broadly about our own attitudes about poverty and the poor. Engaging in historical empathy allows an easy transition into contemporary empathy. Hobsbawn is informative here, as well:

“Those classes whose lives were least transformed were also, normally, those which benefitted most obviously in material terms (and vice versa), and their failure to grasp what was troubling the rest, or to do anything about it, was due not only to material but also to moral contentment. Nobody is more complacent than a well-off or successful man who is also at ease in a world which seems to have been constructed precisely with persons like him in mind” (Hobsbawn, 58).

The great bulk of my students and I are by almost any historical measurement materially successful and the trick for us is to not become similarly complacent. As an historical exercise, by focusing on the changing attitudes toward the laboring poor at a particular moment in time, I can present students a singular and fairly precise issue from a variety of perspectives, including the official reports of Edwin Chadwick and Nassau Senior, the government officials assigned the task of re-examining (and re-writing) the Old Poor Laws; the political economists and Utilitarians upon whose writings Chadwick and Senior often drew; contemporary novelists, journalists and illustrators; and, finally, the laboring poor themselves.

Moreover, the issue allows students to develop historical analysis skills, such as historical empathy, evaluation of documents (including point-of-view analysis), and issues of continuity as well as change. Thus, students will be asked not only to analyze short writings of Malthus and Ricardo, the political economists whose writings provided much of the intellectual underpinning of the New Poor Law of 1834, but also to analyze how those writings were interpreted by 19th century industrialists, reformers and the ruling classes, including the two architects of the New Poor Law, Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick. As John and Barbara Hammond suggest, we should be concerned not just with "what Malthus taught the world, but with what the upper classes learnt from him" (Hammond, The Town Labourer, p. 202). And I would suggest that we ought to also look at how the laboring classes viewed themselves following the changes in the Poor Laws.

David Englander suggests that when evaluating what came to be referred to as the New Poor Law of 1834, one should examine not only the extent to which the reformed Poor Law constituted a radical break with the past, but also the extent to which it was an extension of the unreformed Poor Law and a continuation of what had gone before. Students -- and their teachers -- tend to want to simplify, and say "here's a big change," but the reality is more often than not that certain aspects of new paradigms really are not all that new; they are just tweaked or reconfigured. Analysis and discussion of attitudes and responses to the poor in Britain as it became fully engaged in the Industrial Revolution presents a good opportunity for interpreting both change and continuity.

Historical Background For The Documents

When Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century, it was forced to confront a host of societal issues that the previous century (and more) had produced as Britain industrialized, issues that had not only been deferred during the war but which were exacerbated by the rapid introduction of soldiers and sailors into the economy and society. Among the societal issues presenting themselves in 19th century Britain was mounting pressure on the old Elizabethan Poor Laws, a collection of statutes that had created a universal (although not centrally administered) system of tax-financed relief that Kenneth Morgan describes as "the envy of the rest of Europe" (Morgan 64). Those "Old Poor Laws" were reflected in two formal Acts of 1597 and 1601 which established a parish-based system of relief payments based on a range of categories of paupers. However, rapid population growth (from some 8 million in 1781 to 14 million fifty years later), together with changes in employment patterns, caused expenditure on poor relief to soar, nearly tripling between 1790 and 1812; circa 1800 some 28 percent of Britain's population was on poor relief (Morgan, 64). Much of that poor relief was designed to accommodate the recognized and accepted challenges found in the normal life cycle (illness, childbearing and old age) and work-cycle downturns caused by industrial slumps in cities and agricultural slumps in the countryside and give "outside relief" to able-bodied workers as well as those who were physically unable to work.

Thus, as Britain entered the age of rapidly expanding industrial growth, there had been a widespread understanding that there was such a thing as the "laboring poor" who required relief through no fault of their own. Indeed, there was no clear distinction between the “labourer” and the “poor” (Englander, 4). “Indeed, until the eve of the Industrial Revolution the two were practically synonymous” and the term “laboring poor” included “the independent with the dependent poor and the deserving with the undeserving poor.” (Morgan, 6). That did not mean that all the poor received the same type of relief under the Elizabethan Old Poor Laws, as there were several categories of "the poor" and relief that was intended to match those categories: the aged and infirm received alms, sometimes in alms houses; orphaned children were apprenticed out for work; able-bodied men generally obtained outdoor relief ("the dole") or, less frequently, work; and "work-shy" vagabonds and beggars were punished through whippings or assignments to workhouses (Morgan, 64-65.). It was the large number of migrant workers that most tested the Elizabethan system, and it was the Act of Settlement of 1662 that attempted to solve the problem by giving local parishes, the level at which the Old Poor Laws were administered, the authority to remove masterless migratory workers to their old parishes, which had the effect of restricting laborers’ mobility (Morgan, 66). Moreover, local parish administrators often had to adapt to specific cases of need and to specific, localized labor conditions. The most innovative experiment with the system of relief was the Speenhamland “allowance” system, named after the community in Berkshire that created a system of outdoor relief in which the poor, both employed and unemployed, whose income fell below a minimum subsistence level would be given relief based in large part on the size of their family (Morgan, 68). The system was approved by Parliament and was widely adapted in southern counties, but it caused alarm among political economists who saw it as an inducement to larger families and a part of the problem of runaway costs of poor relief.

The demographic, social and economic pressures in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were accompanied by a fairly dramatic shift in the intellectual and philosophical arguments about how to best grow the national economy and national wealth. Edwin Chadwick and Nassau Senior, the government officials at the national level who would be charged with examining the old laws – and ultimately shepherded the New Poor Law of 1934 through Parliament – relied on the classical economic ideas of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus to critique the old laws. Those critiques gained the support of both Tory and Whig politicians and reformers. Ricardo criticized the old laws for running counter to exercise of the free-market principles (Morgan, 69). Laissez faire principles encouraged property owners who wanted to change the social welfare system “away from ...an ideology of natural rights and ... into conformity with notions of self-help and a free labor market” (Lees, 116). Malthus, in his influential 1798 Essay On Population, argued that poverty had its “origins in the unequal race between population and the means of subsistence rather than in the prevailing social and political arrangements” (Englander, 8). Malthus’ primary fear, was that the Poor Laws, particularly as practiced, had encouraged “improvident marriages” and the “proliferation of children for whom there was no support.” (Idem). Thus, as population numbers climbed, living standards fell, and applications for parish relief soared. Malthus’ verdict was that The Poor Laws “served to ‘create the poor they maintain.’” (Idem). In addition to these theories, Chadwick and Senior also relied on the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarianism argued maintaining poor relief but with significantly more accountability and administration from the central government and larger, and arguably more efficient, units of local government (Morgan, 70), a proposal that led to the creation of administrative local Poor Law Unions.

By all accounts, by the year 1832 the “thinking about poverty had changed decisively” (Englander, 6). Thus, when a Royal Commission was created 1832 and Chadwick and Senior were named to lead it, change came quickly and dramatically. Equally strong was the historical consensus that Chadwick and Senior cut corners in amassing the evidence of the existing Old Poor Laws, that they “reached conclusions in advance of the evidence,” that they drew selectively “in defence of a preconceived project,” and that policy “had become the determinant rather than the outcome of empirical inquiry” (Englander, 12; Lees, at 119). “They mixed classical economics and moral indignation” while drawing conclusions about poverty from isolated observations, Morgan argues (70-71) that the Chadwick report reflected a lack of understanding and “that the dislocation and underemployment of the early industrial economy was the root cause of poverty,” a point echoed by Englander (12). The report addressed rural rather than urban industrial requirements and failed to mention “involuntary unemployment caused by movements in the trade cycle or labour displacement due to the mechanization of labor.” Similarly, Lees suggests that property owners sought to move the social welfare system from “its basis in an ideology of natural rights” toward “notions of self-help and a free labor market,” with the new ideology “underpinned by what they thought they knew about poverty” (Lees, 116). She argues that the widely circulating fear of “pauperism” that ran through middle-class British society in the 1830s moved into a “new phase with the government’s appointment of the Poor Law Commission,”which proceeded to “reconstruct public knowledge about the destitute,” mostly through the use of social statistics about the poor (Lees, 120, 121). “In order for the New Poor Law to work,” Lees argues, “welfare clients had to lose their individual stories and be treated according to fixed principles.” That could not happen if, as had been the practice under the Old Poor Law where “each applicant remained an individual who gained relief according to local knowledge of their needs and history” (Lees 121).

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 made a dramatic change in the way that poor relief was administered to the poor in England. It has been described as "the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted .... [a] radical redefinition of the principles of social policy" that "fixed the parameters for all subsequent debate and discussion" (Englander, 1); a "massive shift away from the social consensus of the [poor] regime in England" (Lees, 114);and a "radical reform of the old system" (Mingay, 93). Hobsbawn argued that "there have been few more inhuman statutes" (at 67). Among its principal effects was the “brute represssion of able-bodied male pauperism,” a sharp reduction of rates, and the rapid construction of workhouses within the new Poor Law Unions (Englander, 14). The law made all relief ‘less eligible’ than the lowest wage outside, confined it to the jail-like workhouse, forcibly separating husbands, wives and children...” (Hobsbawn, 67), and replaced a system that “had given relatively equal weight to male and female destitution” with a system that “assigned benefits according to attitudes to gender” (Lees, 114). But, as Englander notes, even admitting the importance of the new legislation does not solve some major questions. Was it progressive or reactionary? Malevolent or misguided? A triumph of “ideology over reality” or victory of “common sense over chaos”? In the end, Englander identifies what I believe are the principal changes: in the years leading up to the new law, there was already change afoot, which he describes as a movement from principles of a moral economy to principles of a political economy and a relationship regulated by custom to a relationship regulated by cash. And by 1834 an assumption had arisen that poverty was a voluntary and therefore reversible condition. “The pauper was not so much the victim as the perpetrator of his own distress” (Englander, 12). Under such a system, then, the “poor were marginalized, rather than incorporated” and what had, in the past, been a general approval of aid to the poor “changed to hostility” (Lees, 114).

Eric Hobsbawn diagnosed the change similarly, describing it as a conflict “between the ‘moral economy’ of the past and the economic rationality of the capitalistic present” (66). The traditional view, Hobsbawn argued, which was still present “in a distorted way in all classes of rural society” as well as within the working class, “was that a man had a right to earn a living, and if unable to do so, a right to be kept alive by his community” (66). Whether cognizant or not of the Hammonds’ argument that we should know not only what Malthus argued but “what the upper classes learnt from him,” Hobsbawn suggests what that lesson learned entailed:

“The view of middle-class liberal economists was that men must take such jobs as the market offered, wherever and at whatever rate it offered, and the rational man would, by individual or voluntary collective saving and insurance make provision for accident, illness and old age. The residuum of paupers could not, admittedly, be left actually to starve, but they ought not to be given more than the absolute minimum – provided it was less than the lowest wage offered in the market – and in the most discouraging conditions. The Poor Law was not so much intended to help the unfortunate as to stigmatize the self-confessed failures of society” (66).