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

在过去的三十年里，对《旧济贫法》（1601-1834）的研究重塑了我们对这一制度的理解。这种自由裁量的福利制度给了大多数人申请支持的权利，但没有权利接受它，不同社区之间的做法可能差别很大。以前的观念认为，管理福利的各个教区的经济地位决定了谁能得到什么，现在这种观念已经让位于一种认识，即习俗的复杂配置、个别官员的个性、慈善和人道主义的残余模式，以及当地贫困的确切分布，在很大程度上决定了政策方面的因素。这种重新解释最令人兴奋的方面之一是重新发现了大量的穷人的声音（以寻求救济的穷人信件的形式）和穷人机构，这样我们现在就明白了穷人不是穷人法的被动主体，而是有空间、修辞和信心来谈判他们在其中的地位。在这样的背景下，尽管有胡伦、格林和胡克的著作，《新济贫法》的史学研究自20世纪80年代初安妮·克劳瑟（Anne Crowther）的著作以来进展甚微。除了大卫•格林（David Green）对伦敦的研究或金（King）对博尔顿（Bolton）的研究外，针对个别工会的微观研究很少发表，比较研究就更少了。因此，我们仍然认为1834年至1845年期间，大多数教区被合并为新济贫法联盟，分发福利，标志着英格兰和威尔士福利的性质，组织，意图和结果的决定性变化。自由裁量权制度被中央指挥和控制与剩余地方决策和完全地方财政相结合的制度所取代。这个新制度的主题是济贫院，以及试图控制（有时甚至是拒绝）作为旧济贫法基础的户外救济的起起落落。主要的时间叙述是，在19世纪70年代和80年代，所谓的反对户外救济的十字军东征标志着强制实施新济贫法的最后尝试，正如1834年建筑师所打算的那样。失败导致其范围逐渐缩小，以至于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摧毁了最初的基础。最重要的是，穷人受制于这一制度，第二个主题是对穷人的胁迫和济贫法丑闻的兴起。据推测，他们的声音基本上被湮灭了。我们的项目挑战了这种广泛的代表性。在两个调查国家档案馆藏品MH12的试点项目中，我们发现穷人的声音并没有被压制，穷人机构也没有被压制。穷人和他们的支持者继续写信给当地官员，试图与他们谈判救济，但中央权威和监督的到来，为穷人以写信给伦敦官员的形式表达自己的声音提供了一条新的途径。在这个更发达的项目中，我们希望对这个庞大的集合进行系统的抽样（见CFS）。我们将找到并转录大约11000封这样的信件，并将这些成绩单提供给学术界和非学术界。将它们转录后，我们将开发新的方法工具（见CFS）来分类和理解这个语料库，这些规则将利用并与相当大范围的学科相关，这些学科一直与所谓的自我文件或更准确地说，普通写作有关。我们对这些材料的分析将受到一些关键问题的驱动，这些问题集中在穷人拥有代理的程度上，并利用它来谈判他们在一个他们以前仅仅被认为是主体的体系中的救济。从1834年以前的历史中吸取比较教训，我们将从底层提供《新济贫法》的历史，以及关于读写能力、国家权力的本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.