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The Poor Law Report Reexamined

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Mark Blaug
Mark Blaug
Affiliation:
University of London
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Extract

In an earlier article, I pleaded for a reappraisal of the Old Poor Law. Despite what all the books say, the evidence that we have does not suggest that the English Poor Law as it operated before its amendment in 1834 reduced the efficiency of agricultural workers, promoted population growth, lowered wages, depressed rents, destroyed yeomanry, and compounded the burden on ratepayers. Beyond this purely negative argument, I tried to show that the Old Poor Law was essentially a device for dealing with the problems of structural unemployment and substandard wages in the lagging rural sector of a rapidly growing but still underdeveloped economy. It constituted, so to speak, “a welfare state in miniature,” combining elements of wage-escalation, family allowances, unemployment compensation, and public works, all of which were administered and financed on a local level. Far from having an inhibitory effect, it probably contributed to economic expansion. At any rate, from the economic point of view, things were much the same after 1834 as before. The Poor Laws Amendment Act of 1834 marked a revolution in British social administration, but it left the structure of relief policy substantially unchanged.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 1964 , pp. 229 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1964

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References

1 Blaug, , “The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New,” Journal of Economic History, XXIII, No. 2 (June 1963), 151–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A version of this article was read at a Symposium on Victorian Affairs, held under the joint sponsorship of the American Council of Learned Societies and of Indiana University, at that University, in March 1962. The stimulating discussion that followed the reading of the paper led me to pursue my argument in the present article. I wish to thank all the participants of the Symposium for their suggestions and, particularly, R. G. Cowherd, for his helpful comments in private correspondence.

2 Report of the Poor Law Commission. 1834 (9), XXVII, pp. 11, 25, 35, 44Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., p. 2.

4 See “The Myth of the Old Poor Law,” (cited in n. 1), pp. 159, 166.

5 Poor Law Report, p. 12 (my italics).

6 Ibid., Supplement No. 1, pp. 207–15. I was not aware of the existence of this supplement when I wrote the earlier article. I had been using one of the many reprints of the Report of 1834, all of which unexplainably omitted this supplement.

7 Ibid., p. 212.

8 Ibid., p. 2.

9 It turns out, however, that only 0.2 per cent of the parishes in England and Wales made payments for the first two children, and even in those cases there were usually other children in the family under ten years of age.

10 Poor Law Report, p. 68.

11 See “The Myth of the Old Poor Law,” p. 160.

12 For a convenient list of the three groups of counties, see Deane, P. and Cole, W. A., British Economic Growth, 1688–1915 (Cambridge [Engl.]: The University Press, 1962), p. 103Google Scholar.

13 See “The Myth of the Old Poor Law,” Appendix E.

14 See Ibid., pp. 160–62.