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

The poor law system touched the lives of almost everyone living in 18th-and 19th-century England, whether as rate-payers or recipients. It cut to the heart of social relations and for that reason has been the focus of considerable socio-historical analysis since the Webbs’ pioneering work. It would seem difficult to enhance so deep a historiography but David Green’s new book has done so admirably. It is one of few studies to cross the divide of 1834, analyzing the system across the shift from Old Poor Law to New. This by itself is not altogether novel, as Lynn Hollen Lees’ excellent The Solidarities of Strangers (1998) shows. However, Green takes on a second challenge just as daunting by analyzing this system across the oceanic terrain of London. Because the system was administered at the parish level, and because London had well over 100 parishes, scholars hoping to generalize about poor relief in the city face a bewildering array of policies and practices. How typical it is for scholars to execute case studies of single parishes punctuated by disclaimers confessing ignorance about their typicality for the rest of the city. Rather than try to force generalizations on this sea of variety Green explores how London’s unique realities presented problems for poor relief and how these concerns influenced national developments.

Green starts by exploring the situation prior to 1834, linking up his work with that of scholars exploring regional distinctions in poor law expenditure, notably Steve King. Pauper Capital enhances their findings showing that London saw much higher costs of per capita poor relief mainly because of its heavy use of workhouses. Green, a historical geographer, demonstrates how population shift impacted relief in different parishes. The availability of affordable housing, for example, changed over time, resulting in increasing class segregation, with some parishes housing growing numbers of the working poor and fewer well-to-do ratepayers and therefore facing rising demands for relief but dwindling tax resources.

Addressing such inequities proved difficult because of local recalcitrance to centralization. The politics of reform form the core of Chapter 3 where Green shows that opposition to the 1834 reforms centred more on protecting local governing autonomy than on critiques of the reforms themselves. Radicals and reform-minded Whigs linked their criticism to issues of larger national importance, such as taxation, representation, and the franchise. Green successfully shows how London poor law agitation helped drive national political discussions. About a third of London poor law authorities did not adapt the 1834 statute, but in one of the more surprising discoveries in the book, Green shows that this distinction mattered little, as these jurisdictions ended up following similar policies anyway.

The 1834 reforms focused relief even more heavily than before on workhouses. Chapter 4 explores London’s workhouse system, showing that London lagged behind other jurisdictions in building new workhouses, in part because construction was expensive but also because numerous specialist institutions like charity schools and lunatic asylums helped free up spaces in the workhouses. The chapter enhances our understanding of the growth of specialist institutions in the city. However, one quibble concerns Green’s decision not to explore more fully the history of London workhouses before his starting point of 1790. Green notes that the workhouse system that would eventually be codified by the New Poor Law was already in place in the capital well before 1834. The proliferation of workhouses in the capital from the 1720s marks one of the ways that London was unlike any other English city. There were 80 workhouses in London by the time of a parliamentary enquiry of 1776. It is unfair to criticize a book as ambitious and successful as this one for not tackling another seventy years of complex history. However, for certain discussions London’s longer history of workhouse provision may matter. When, for example, London parishes did not rush to build new workhouses in 1834 it may have been because they were already relatively well served, a speculation...