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该制度的理解。这种自由裁量的福利制度使大多数人有权申请支持，但无权接受支持，而且不同社区的做法可能大相径庭。旧的观念认为，管理福利的各个教区的经济地位决定了谁得到了什么，已经让位于承认习俗的复杂配置，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，在政策方面起了很大作用。这种重新诠释最令人兴奋的方面之一是重新发现了大量的贫民声音（以贫民来信寻求救济的形式）和贫民机构，这样我们现在就明白了，贫民并不是穷人法的被动主体，而是有空间、言辞和信心来谈判他们在其中的地位。在这种背景下，尽管有赫伦、绿色和胡克的工作，自20世纪80年代早期安妮·克劳瑟的著作以来，《新济贫法》的历史研究进展甚微。除了大卫绿色的工作对伦敦或国王对博尔顿，出版的微观研究个别工会一直罕见和比较研究更罕见。因此，我们仍然认为，1834- 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。自由裁量制度被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制度所取代。这一新制度的主旨是济贫院，以及试图控制、有时甚至拒绝支持《旧济贫法》的户外救济的努力的起起落落。占主导地位的时间顺序叙述是，19世纪70年代和80年代所谓的反对户外救济的十字军运动标志着1834年《新济贫法》设计者意图实施的最后尝试。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，贫民要服从这个制度，第二个主题是对贫民的胁迫和穷人法丑闻的兴起。人们认为，他们的声音基本上已经消失了。我们的项目挑战了这种广泛的代表性。在调查国家档案馆收藏的MH 12的两个试点项目中，我们发现穷人的声音并没有被压制，穷人的机构也没有被取消。贫民和他们的拥护者继续写信给当地官员，试图谈判救济，但中央权威和监督的到来为贫民以写信给伦敦官员的形式行使声音提供了一条新的途径。在这个更成熟的项目中，我们希望对这一庞大的收藏品进行系统的抽样（见CFS）。我们将找到并转录这些信件中的大约11，000封，使这些成绩单可供学术/非学术界使用。转录后，我们将开发新的方法工具（见CFS），用于分类和理解这一语料库，规则将借鉴并与相当大范围的学科相关，这些学科与所谓的自我文件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代理权，并利用它来谈判他们在一个他们以前只是被认为是主体的系统中的救济。从1834年以前的时期比较借鉴，我们将提供一个新的济贫法的历史，从下面，以及键入有关识字，国家权力和阶级的性质更广泛的辩论。

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.