Pauper Capital: London and the Poor Law, 1790–1870 (review)

There is, as David Green points out, an extensive literature on the English Poor Laws. In the 1920s, the work on the history of English local government by Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter Webb devoted three volumes to the old and new poor laws, as a background to their own reformist agenda. The Poor Laws, and later welfare legislation, tried to resolve the long-standing conundrum of how to deal with the nation’s poor economically, while maintaining a socially acceptable approach to the “deserving” poor. Historians have been busy trying to untangle the costs and benefits of the system ever since, with an eye to the implications for current policy. The Tudor poor laws had a clear objective of reducing social unrest. Arguably, this paid off over time, in spite of the cost to local communities, since countries like France, with less reliable systems of social support, experienced more violent popular upheavals than Britain. The post-1834 poor law, while emphasizing deterrent policies towards applicants for relief, nevertheless retained an interest in political stability. Relief could not be denied to anyone in urgent need, and even the less-regarded members of society, such as immigrants and vagrants, were entitled to temporary assistance. Current social policy continues to wrestle with the problem of reconciling humanitarianism and cost effectiveness, and is always keen to listen to strategists (Edwin Chadwick’s heirs, perhaps) who claim to have found a method of resolving it.

The Webbs concentrated on central policy and paid little attention to local variations. Later historians have examined the nuances of local practice, because laws passed with an agrarian economy in mind did not produce local uniformity in an industrializing country. Earlier histories were also written with policy at the forefront, while more recent studies have analyzed the system from the recipients’ points of view. David Green’s contribution to the debate is noteworthy because he tackles one of the most important yet neglected aspects of the Poor Law: its implementation in the nation’s capital. There have been interesting accounts of individual parts of London, particularly the insurrectionary management of Poplar, but seeing the capital as a whole is a major challenge.

London’s relief administration was not overridden by the Poor Law Act of 1834. Some parishes operated under local acts, and others had adopted earlier enabling legislation allowing some combination for Poor Law purposes. Yet London’s dense population was the crucial determinant of local administration. Several London parishes, as Green points out, were as large as industrial towns. They had wide extremes of income that worsened as the affluent classes moved out of the east end of London and into more favored parishes like Kensington and Chelsea. Further, London grew at an exceptional pace and attracted large numbers of immigrants from other parts of Britain and beyond. Given this huge pool of casual labor, London had little interest in the outdoor dole strategies used by other local economies to discourage workers from moving away when demand was slack. Green gives an exemplary account of the complexities of the laws of settlement, which could bear very hard on the poor. Individual settlements might be lost by a movement across parish boundaries within London, but the laws could also be exploited by more astute applicants who claimed relief from several parishes. Discouraging such claims was a major feature in drawing London toward institutional solutions. Building a large workhouse seemed more cost effective than paying outdoor doles to the able bodied, or spending large sums to remove them to their home parishes.

Accordingly, London was building large institutions well before the new poor law of 1834. The result was a much higher proportion of indoor to outdoor paupers than in other parts of England. It is a central irony of Green’s account that London, with a substantial number of radical parish administrations—mini republics as he describes them, with a strong anti-poor law agenda—nevertheless...