Edwin Chadwick – the founder of the 1834 New Poor Laws – saw the real problem of the old laws was that they undermined the incentives to work. To remedy this, the ‘Poor Law Report suggested three main planks for the new system: the principle of “less eligibility”, the dogma of the workhouse test and the bureaucratic panacea of administrative centralisation and uniformity.’ [Fraser, 2003:47] Thus the aim of the New Poor Law was to encourage industry rather than solve the problem of poverty. It was also meant to relieve the taxpayers from the increasing costs of relief. The extent of an able-bodied pauper’s need depended on the whether he was prepared to enter the workhouse. However, the conditions of the workhouse were to be less attractive – less eligible than ‘the situation of the independent labourer of the working class.’ [The Poor Law Report of 1834] The Workhouse Test abolished outdoor relief and only institutional relief was now available – and that too only in the workhouse. The conditions in the workhouse were so punitive that no one would go there unless they were extremely desperate. ‘So well indeed did the framers of the 1834 Act do their work that the stigma of “going on the parish” remained with the working class for the next hundred years, and was in large part responsible for the reluctance of many to accept state supported welfare reforms early in the 20th century.’ [Evans, 1978:59] However, it was thought that the new system would help the Poor themselves. As Fraser says:
‘Beneath the harshness this was in a strange sort of way a benevolent programme, given the social philosophy of the day...society was acting like the loving parent inflicting sharp painful punishment on the miscreant child – being cruel to be kind. The child, like the pauper, resented the short-term discomfort but benefited from the long-term improvement in character.’ [Fraser, 2003:51]
Chadwick’s assumption that the problem lay in the abuse of the system by able bodied paupers was based heavily on the industrial south where the main problem was structural unemployment for agricultural labourers, which had given rise to the system of allowances and subsidies to labourers wages. It had no real bearing with the situation in the industrial north, where the economy went through cycles of boom and slump. The New Poor Law was implemented in the north from 1837, coinciding with the onset of an economic depression that gradually worsened to the disastrous years of 1839 and 1842. The implementation of the Poor Law thus faced severe resentment. The ratepayers were unhappy to have to pay for the expenses of the workhouses. Those in the poor relief scheme hated the system and the ‘new Bastille’s.’ The industrialists criticised it for being an inappropriate form of relief for periods of industrial slump. These reasons gradually led to the initial widespread non-compliance with the laws. Local discontent even reached the point of violent outbreaks. The north witnessed massive anti-poor law demonstrations and disturbances from 1837 onwards. Local resistance conspired to frustrate the centralist scheme of the new poor laws. Besides regional and local variations of the law persisted. Also the Poor Law Commissions authority was very limited, and it was finally disbanded in 1948. These reasons resulted in the Poor Law finally being implemented in a different way than in which it had originally been intended.
At the heart of the New Poor Law it seems that there was the Victorian commitment to self-reliance or independence. They were willing to make exceptions for the sick, the aged, very little children and widows. But otherwise, dependency – at least for men was seen as a severe moral failing. And the Poor Law was meant to drive the pauper back to respectable work. Initially at least the New Poor Law ‘did achieve one of it’s many objectives – it reduced poor rates. In the ten years following 1834 poor rates nationally fell to between 4.2 million and 5 million per annum, and for the twenty years after that, expenditure fluctuated between 5 million and 6 million.’ [Fraser, 2003:53] The New Poor Law did exceedingly well in the south between 1834 – 1836 on its inauguration. [Fraser, ibid.] But in reality it improved neither the moral nor the material conditions of the working class and was extremely unpopular. In 1837 anti-poor law propaganda reached its climax with the New Poor Law being introduced in the north.
In the face of the rising relief costs and protests the laws were modified to distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor. Many of the Victorian elite’s meant to ‘make exceptions’ for the non-able. The individual conditions of the applicants were examined and those appearing to be capable of getting back to work along with the sick, the elderly and widows were labelled deserving poor. For the rest the Poor Law remained the option. Dependence itself, rather than merely able-bodied dependence were stigmatised by poor law institutions – local as well as central. The Act was not very successful in its principle object of ending outdoor relief, which continued unabated in various parishes. Also, the theories of the political economists and Benthamite administrators were frustrated in the sense that local improvisation and diversity continued. Some historians point out that the New Poor Law was not framed and implemented fully in the pattern that Chadwick laid down for it, enough of Chadwick’s ideas were still in the laws that were passed or enforced to make them highly relevant. Though the New Poor Law was modified at different times – its essence remained the same for most of the century.
Marxist analysis of the Victorian Poor Law suggests that the 1834 reform Act was the high point of capitalism because it marked the establishment of labour power as a commodity. Whereas the old poor laws offered subsidies and benefits, the new law offered the paupers a sharp choice between the workhouse and low paid jobs (and more often than not unemployment). The working class was in a state of absolute poverty. Its needs were completely subordinate to money in the form of poor rates, and to the imperative to exchange labour power for wages. Thus, the working class’ existence depended completely on the accumulation of wealth by the middle and upper classes that were the ratepayers. [Snell, 1995:104-137] The feminist analysis describes the 1834 Act as the great edifice of Victorian ideology where women were overlooked, or considered the dependent of their husband even if she earned her own income. The old Poor Laws had ‘reiterated and reinforced patriarchal notions of service, dependence, and family responsibility’, whereas, the new ones ‘also tried to enforce the notions of dependency, both through the poor law and through the Poor Law Bastardy Act’. [Gittins, 1985: 138/141] The legislation passed on women and children’s were erratic and sporadic and their hours and wages were curtailed which often adversely affected the financial conditions of single, separated or widowed women. ‘Yet as men migrated in search employment, “there was an increase in female headed households and a decrease in the proportion of women who lived in patriarchal type households.”(Gittins, 1983)’ [Gittins, 1985:142]
The course of the Victorian Poor Law history does suggest the inevitability of subjective socio-cultural stigma once it becomes connected with an objective economic condition such as dependence. In spite of that and its various other failures resulting from that, when considering the success of the New Poor Law, the answer might not be entirely negative. ‘The internalisation of the shamefulness of poor relief, so that the great bulk of the Victorian working classes accepted this attitude as their own, was a prodigious success, perhaps the one big success of the century, for the transmission of the middle class standards, through tough laws and institutions, to the working classes’. [Thompson, 1988: 355] It remains to argue whether the expansion of middle class values among the working class can be counted as a success. But the success of the New Poor Law might be in the fact that it did result in the promotion of not moral but some material things like productivity, rise of the working class standard of living etc. Whatever be the level of success of the New Poor Law, we can conclude by saying that it certainly was the most influential piece of legislation to be passed in the 19th century.
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TOTAL WORD COUNT: 1935 WORDS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Barker, P. 1982. Founders of the Welfare State. London: Heineman. Ch. 2.
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Brundage, A. 1978. The Making of the New Poor Law. London: Hutchinson.
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Burnett, J. 1994. Idle Hands: the experience of unemployment 1790-1990. London: Routledge.
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Evans. E. J. 1978. Social Policy 1830-1914: Individualism, Collectivism and the origins of the Welfare State. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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Fraser, D. 2003. The Evolution of the British Welfare State. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
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Fraser, D. (ed.) 1976. The New Poor Law in the 19th Century. London: Macmillan.
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Gittins, D. 1993. The Family in Question. London: Macmillan.
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Snell, K. 1985. Annals of the Labouring Poor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 3.
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Thompson, F. M. L. 1988. The rise of respectable society : a social history of Victorian Britain 1830-1900. London: Fontana.
