Poverty and the Poor Law in Ireland, 1850–1914 by Virginia Crossman (review)

Virginia Crossman has written a book of great value to scholars and students interested in the Poor Law and nineteenth-century Irish society. She has carefully scrutinized the administrative records of thirteen separate Irish Poor Law unions, as well as government documents, newspaper sources, and contemporary writings. These materials provide a rich portrait of the ideological assumptions behind the Irish Poor Law, the tensions between ideology and practice in multiple local contexts, and the experiences of people who found themselves in need. Crossman tackles the traditional questions of Poor Law historiography and covers ground that will be familiar to historians of the topic. Her vivid details and numerous examples, however, illuminate the complexities and variations of welfare practice in Ireland in new and important ways.

Crossman begins with two chapters that provide background for understanding the Irish Poor Law and the people who sought relief through it. Chapter 1 focuses on the ideological oppositions that shaped interpretations of poverty: ideologies that blamed the character of the Irish for their poverty versus those that blamed the British and their policies for causing it; those that held stern understandings of self-responsibility versus those that held sympathetic attitudes toward the destitute; those that emphasized structural causes of destitution versus those that blamed immorality and weak individual character; and those that shaped Catholic strategies of giving versus Protestant approaches to charity. Crossman is careful to note, however, that these ideologies were not just binary oppositions—rich and poor alike adopted different attitudes depending on the context. Chapter 2 sets these ideologies in their material environments, as Crossman surveys the economic and political landscapes of post-Famine Ireland, changing patterns of poor relief, and geographic variations in “relief cultures” (61).

Chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on the two types of relief provided by the Irish Poor Law: outdoor relief and the workhouse. When enacted in 1838, the Irish Poor Law, unlike the English, made no provision for relief outside the workhouse. An amendment in 1847 introduced outdoor relief, but the culture of the workhouse was so ingrained in both providers and recipients that it continued to shape Ireland’s Poor Law experiences. Crossman successfully reinserts the significance of outdoor relief into the history of the Irish Poor Law. She shows that Boards of Guardians and relieving officers, who had been educated to believe that anything but the workhouse encouraged laziness and dependency, sometimes had a hard time making the transition to outdoor relief. Guardians used their discretion, being sometimes more lenient and sometimes much harsher in their relief decisions than what the central authorities intended. Poor men and women increasingly developed a sense of entitlement to outdoor relief, challenging Poor Law principles. The numbers receiving outdoor relief, especially able-bodied men and their families suffering in economic crises, rose in the second half of the nineteenth century, but they never reached anything close to the numbers in England and Wales.

Crossman’s discussion provides one of the most thorough explanations I have read of how individuals and families entered the workhouse, lived in it, left, and often returned. Her sources show that the Irish poor adopted various strategies to use the workhouse to meet their needs; they were not simply victims of an oppressive system. The workhouse sometimes provided essential services for long periods of time for people who could not survive independently. Crossman clearly demonstrates the challenges faced by the limited and under-resourced workhouse staff to care for the increasing numbers of “physically and economically vulnerable” populations, such as the elderly, sick, infirm, and mentally ill, groups she considers in chapter 5 (138). Boards of Guardians seem to have been in frequent conflict with the Irish Local Government Board regarding appropriate provisions to meet expected standards of accommodation and care. Consideration of these struggles between local providers and central authorities builds on Crossman’s previous work, Politics, Pauperism, and Power in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2006), which focuses...