The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948 (review)

Once a community has decided to collectively support the needy or to supply for its members means of insuring against the risks of life, a host of questions has to be answered: who is to be supported, how, who is to pay for it and how much, how is a need, how is poverty to be defined. Settling these questions does not mean that they are settled once and for all. On the contrary, the basic assumptions of a community’s welfare policy may be again called into question at any time, for instance when the material conditions of living or ideas of communal duties have considerably altered. The process of these assumptions being negotiated, settled and re-negotiated on a local as well as a national level is a continuous one.

It is the controversy underlying this process of defining and redefining social citizenship in England and Wales which is at the center of this thorough study with its remarkably wide-ranging chronology. How and why the intellectual underpinnings of the poor laws changed over a period of two-hundred and fifty years, that is, their cultural meaning is its key interest. Although the English Poor Laws have been studied intensively, scholars have only occasionally turned to the changes of welfare practice over time, people’s views of them, to gender, or welfare bargaining at local levels. Only recently, mentalities rather than the actual formation of policy have come under closer scrutiny. It is in this field, the one of mentalities, identities and attitudes, helping to show welfare as a transaction within a specific historic context, that The Solidarities of Strangers is at its best.

Starting from the three main strategies of welfare policy distinguished by Richard Titmuss in his book on Social Policy in 1974, Lynn Hollen Lees deals with the English Poor Laws and the conceptions leading to their modification and final abolition as a gradual and slow change from residualism to universalism, from offering support only in extreme cases to offering it to all citizens as a matter of right. Taking the example of England and Wales not only offers the advantages of dealing with a social institution developing over a long period of time, but gives ample opportunity to explore the interconnections between the policy and the transformations simultaneously going on in society at large.

Lees divides her analysis into three parts. The first, looking at the phase of the English Poor Laws until their amendment in 1834, deals with the broad consensus these laws rested on with givers and receivers far into the 18th century, and how it broke down at the turn into the 19th. The section entitled “Residualism taken for granted” lucidly shows, too, how legal and moral entitlements of the poor came to be conceived as two distinct things even before 1834.

In the years immediately following the Poor Law Amendment in 1834, the concept of a residualist welfare system was “refined and restricted” (1834–60). As the hold of the former system of deference dwindled, the image of the poor in the middle and upper classes changed from a group generally viewed with compassion to one seen almost exclusively with distrust and even fear because of its socially disruptive potential. In order to bring the welfare system into line with the economic, political and mental changes, state and parishes tightened the criteria of eligibility and replaced the older practice of “workfare” by that of work as punishment. Henceforth, this was insolubly linked to the disciplinary institution of the workhouse. In consequence, the poor were marginalized. At the same time, potential receivers, especially industrial workers, opposed the New Poor Law and its tenets vigorously.

The background to Part III is the time from the later 19th century onwards, when social and political conditions again changed fundamentally as the general standard of living rose and citizens’ rights widened. The poverty to...