In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law 1834-1900

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During the last three decades, research on the Old Poor Law (1601-1834) has reinvented our understanding of that institution. This discretionary welfare system gave most people a right to apply for support but no right to receive it, and practice could vary wildly between communities. Older notions that the economic position of the individual parishes that administered welfare dictated who got what, have given way to an acknowledgement that a complex configuration of custom, the personality of individual officials, residual models of philanthropy and humanitarianism and the exact constellation of local poverty, dictated much in policy terms. One of the most exciting aspects of this reinterpretation has been the rediscovery in large numbers of pauper voices (in the form of pauper letters seeking relief) and pauper agency, such that we now understand that paupers were not the passive subjects of the poor law but had the space, rhetoric and confidence to negotiate their place in it. Set against this backdrop, and notwithstanding the work of Hurren, Green and Hooker, the historiography of the New Poor Law has moved on remarkably little since the work of Anne Crowther in the early 1980s. Excepting David Green's work on London or that of King on Bolton, published micro-studies of individual unions have been rare and comparative studies still rarer. We thus still think of the 1834-45 period, during which most parishes were combined into the New Poor Law unions that dispensed welfare, as marking a definitive change in the nature, organisation, intent and outcome of English and Welsh welfare. A discretionary system was replaced by one that combined central direction and control with residual local decision-making and entirely local finance. The leitmotif of this new system was the workhouse and the ebb and flow of attempts to control and at times deny the outdoor relief that had underpinned the Old Poor Law. The dominant chronological narrative has been one in which the so-called crusade against outdoor relief in the 1870s and 1880s marks the final attempt to impose the New Poor Law as its 1834 architects intended. Failure led to the progressive narrowing of its scope, such that the coming of local democracy in the 1890s and the Liberal Welfare Reforms of the early twentieth century in effect ripped away the original foundations. Above all, the pauper was subject to this system, and a second leitmotif has been the coercion of paupers and the rise of the poor law scandal. Their voices, it has been assumed, were largely extinguished. Our project challenges this broad representation. In two pilot projects investigating The National Archives collection MH12 we have found that the pauper voice was not muted and pauper agency was not quashed. Paupers and their advocates continued to write to local officers to try and negotiate relief but the arrival of central authority and oversight offered a new route for the exercise of the pauper voice in the form of letters to London-based officials. In this more developed project we want to undertake a systematic sampling (see CFS) of this vast collection. We will locate and transcribe an estimated 11,000 of these letters, making those transcripts available to the academic/non-academic community. Having transcribed them we will develop new methodological tools (see CFS) for classifying and understanding this corpus, rules which will draw on and be relevant to the considerable range of disciplines which have been concerned with so-called ego documents or more accurately ordinary writing. Our analysis of this material will be driven by key questions centring on the degree to which paupers had agency and used it to negotiate their relief in a system to which they had previously merely been thought subject. Drawing comparative lessons from the pre-1834 period we will offer a New Poor Law history from below, as well as keying into wider debates about literacy, the nature of state power and the class.