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

在过去的三十年里，对旧穷人法(1601-1834)的研究重新改变了我们对该制度的理解。这种可自由支配的福利制度让大多数人有权申请支持，但没有权利获得支持，而且不同社区的做法可能会有很大差异。管理福利的个别教区的经济地位决定了谁得到了什么，这种古老的观念已经让位于一种认识，即复杂的习俗结构、个别官员的个性、剩余的慈善和人道主义模式以及当地贫困的确切星座，在很大程度上决定了政策。这种重新解释最令人兴奋的方面之一是在大量的乞丐声音(以乞丐寻求救济的信件的形式)和乞丐机构中重新发现，这样我们现在就明白了，乞丐不是贫穷法律的被动主体，而是有空间、修辞和信心来谈判他们在法律中的地位。在这种背景下，尽管有赫伦、格林和胡克的工作，但自20世纪80年代初安妮·克劳瑟的工作以来，关于新贫困法的史学几乎没有取得什么进展。除了大卫·格林关于伦敦的著作或金关于博尔顿的著作外，已发表的对单个工会的微观研究一直很少，比较研究更是罕见。因此，我们仍然认为1834年至1845年期间，大多数教区被合并为发放福利的新穷人法工会，这标志着英格兰和威尔士福利的性质、组织、意图和结果发生了决定性的变化。中央指导和控制与剩余的地方决策和完全地方财政相结合的自由裁量权制度取代了自由裁量权制度。这一新制度的主旋律是济贫院，以及试图控制、有时甚至否认支撑旧穷人法的户外救济的潮起潮落。主要的编年史叙述是，19世纪70年代和80年代所谓的反对户外救济的运动标志着按照1834年建筑师的意图实施新贫困法的最后一次尝试。失败导致其范围逐渐缩小，以致于19世纪90年代地方民主的到来和20世纪初的自由福利改革实际上撕毁了最初的基础。最重要的是，穷人受制于这一制度，第二个主旋律是对穷人的胁迫和贫穷法律丑闻的兴起。人们认为，他们的声音在很大程度上被压制了。我们的项目挑战了这种广泛的代表性。在调查国家档案馆馆藏MH12的两个试点项目中，我们发现穷人的声音并没有减弱，穷人机构也没有被取缔。乞丐和他们的倡导者继续写信给当地官员，试图就救济进行谈判，但中央权威和监督的到来为行使穷人的声音提供了一条新的途径，即以写信给伦敦官员的形式。在这个更发达的项目中，我们希望对这些庞大的收藏品进行系统的抽样(见CFS)。我们将找到并转录大约11,000封这样的信件，向学术界/非学术界提供这些抄本。在转录后，我们将开发新的方法工具(见CFS)来分类和理解这个语料库，这些规则将借鉴并与相当广泛的学科相关，这些学科一直与所谓的自我文档或更准确地说是普通写作有关。我们对这些材料的分析将受到关键问题的驱动，这些问题集中在穷人在多大程度上拥有中介并利用它在一个以前仅仅被认为是受制于他们的体系中谈判他们的救济。借鉴1834年前时期的比较经验，我们将提供一部自下而上的新穷人法历史，以及关于识字、国家权力的性质和阶级的更广泛的辩论。

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.