No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
This article reviews the potential use of charity records in reconstructing the lives of the poor in the early twentieth-century city and suggests how computer-assisted modes of quantitative and qualitative techniques of analysis can expand the known source base of research on poverty. Although the poor have themselves left only a small direct imprint on the historical record, the historian of poverty has managed to use the diverse and voluminous Victorian records generated by officials of the Poor Law which has resulted in a variety of administrative and institutional analyses of pauperism within various urban and regional settings. These studies have attracted a certain amount of criticism because of their dependence upon a narrow range of sources and orthodox historical methodology. It can be argued, however, that the full potential of Poor Law records in terms of what they contribute as well as what can be done with them has not yet been fully exploited. There is scope, for example, for the linkage of Poor Law material with demographic sources, such as the census enumerators' returns, to explore the geography of urban poverty in the nineteenth century. The value of Poor Law records would be enhanced if research questions could be phrased in relation to the socio-geographical context of the city, taking into account the dynamics of urbanism. For example, in Victorian and Edwardian Leicester it is possible to consider the consequence of socio-economic changes in a move from a domestic to a predominantly factory-based mode of production in the hosiery and footwear trades and the impact of the Poor Law during this transformation as patterns of discrimination characterized the provision of relief in certain districts of the town.
1 The revolution in the standards of public enquiry and record-keeping with reference to Poor Law records is discussed by: Thomson, D., ‘Workhouse to nursing home: residential care of the elderly people in England since 1840’, Ageing and Society, III (1983), 43–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a local listing, see Thomson, K. M., ‘Poor Law source materials in the East Midlands’, unpublished directory of record survival, Leicestershire County Record Office, November 1984.Google Scholar
2 Rose, M. E. (ed.), The Poor and the City: Urban Poverty 1834–1914 (1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 History Workshop (1979)Google Scholar, Editorial: Urban history and local history, History Workshop, no. 8 (1979), iv–vi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A notable exception here is: Kidd, A. J., ‘Outcast Manchester: voluntary charity, poor relief and the casual poor 1860–1905’, in Kidd, A. J. and Roberts, K. W. (eds), City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester (1985).Google Scholar
4 See, for example, a recent study of nineteenth-century Birmingham which focuses on the spatial characteristics of poverty based on out-relief records and the 1851 Census Enumerators' Handbooks. The results are published by Parton, A. G. and Mathews, H. in ‘The returns of Poor Law Out-relief — a source for the local historian’, Local Historian (February 1984), 25–31Google Scholar and, by the same authors, ‘Geography of poverty in midnineteenth-century Birmingham: a pilot study’, Final Report to SSRC, November 1981.Google Scholar
5 These themes are considered in Page, S. J., ‘Aspects of late Victorian pauperism’, Trans. Leicester Archaeological and Historical Society, LX (November 1986).Google Scholar
6 The most noted reviews of the Charity Organization Society are those of Owen, D., English Philanthropy 1660–1960 (1965);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mowat, C. L., The Charity Organization Society 1869–1913 (1961);Google Scholar Woodroofe, K., ‘The Charity Organization Society and the origins of social casework’, Historical Studies (November 1959).Google Scholar
7 Ashton, A. F. and Young, E. T., British Social Casework in the Nineteenth Century (1967);Google Scholar Moore, M. J., ‘Social work and social welfare: The organization of philanthropic resources in Britain 1900–1914’, British Studies, XVI (2) (1977), 85–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Fido, J., ‘The Charity Organization Society and social casework in London 1869–1900’, in Donajgrodzki, A. (ed.), Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain (1978).Google Scholar
9 The reasons behind this change together with long-term trends in the nature of applicants are given in: Rooff, M., A 100 years of Family Welfare: study of the Family Welfare Association 1869–1969 (1969).Google Scholar
10 Statistical Packages for Social Scientists (SPSS), version X.
11 For an explanation of the operation of these statistical techniques see Goddard, J. and Kirby, A., An Introduction to Factor Analysis (1976).Google Scholar
12 These packages are currently available on Leicester University's mainframe computer network and may be used by other institutions using the JANET network available at most universities and polytechnics.
13 These results are derived from a 300-case sample of Charity Records for Edwardian Leicester and represent part of a wider research project currently in progress by the author.
14 See Dennis, R. J. (compiler), ‘The Victorian city’, Trans. Institute of British Geographers, new series, 4 (1979), 125–319.Google Scholar
15 The general theme of the internal social structure of the Victorian city can be found in: Lawton, R., ‘The internal social structure of cities in nineteenth century England’, Studia Geographica, CXXIII (1980), 37–64Google Scholar and Lawton, R., ‘Population and society 1730–1900’ in Dodgson, R. and Butlin, R. (eds), An Historical Geography of England and Wales (1978), 313–66.Google Scholar
16 Dennis, R. J., ‘Intercensal mobility in a Victorian city’, Trans. Institute of British Geographers, new series 2 (1979), 349–63;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lawton, R. and Pooley, C., ‘Individual appraisals of nineteenth century Liverpool’, Social Geography of Merseyside Project (Working Paper No. 3. 1975)Google Scholar focuses on the diary of D. Brindley.
17 The Leicester Charity Organization Society placed restrictive clauses on the use of case histories which are held at the Leicestershire Records Office. The aim of the restricted use is to preserve the anonymity of the people who applied for relief and the confidence in which information was obtained.
18 Outdoor Recommendations were sought to provide free medical treatment for the people referred, as a large number could be obtained through the Society for the most deserving cases. The majority of cases were then referred to the out-patients department at the Leicester Infirmary.
19 In Leicester, sweated trades such as glove stitchers were a common occurrence in working-class households as out-workers supplemented meagre household budgets. On average this form of casual work rarely earned the workers more than 4 shillings a week, usually paid on a piece-rate basis. This rate was kept artificially low by the large supply of female labour willing to undertake this work.
20 The most notable example of the Edwardians' concern for the treatment of children and their condition in working-class households is seen in the 1907 Feeding of School Children Act (Provision of Meals). In Leicester, the Charity Organization Society extended their concern for children by referring cases of child neglect and cruelty to the NSPCC. A good description of this interest among the Edwardians is found in Roberts, R., The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the first quarter of the Century (1971), 45.Google Scholar
21 The argument has been put forward by Thomson, D., ‘The decline of Social Welfare’, Ageing and Society, IV, 4 (1984), 451–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar He has shown that the large numbers of elderly in the mid nineteenth century were relatively more prosperous under the allowances distributed by the Poor Law than under the pensions introduced after 1912 in the gradual move towards a Welfare State.
22 Hagerstrand, T., ‘Survival and arena: on the life history of individuals in relation to their geographical environment’, in Carlstein, T., Parkes, D. and Thrift, N. (eds), Human Activity and Time-geography (1978), 122–45;Google Scholar Pred, A. R., ‘Production, family and “free-time” projects: a time-geographic perspective on the individual and societal change in nineteenth-century US cities’, J. Historical Geography, VII (1981), 3–36;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Thrift, N., ‘On the determination of social action in space and time’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, I (1983), 23–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar