Protesting About Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870–1900 (review)

In November 1869, the president of the Poor Law Board, George Goschen, issued a famous "Minute" in which he claimed that there had been a sharp increase in the number of paupers receiving outdoor relief in London and that this increase was concentrated in areas where charities were also known to operate. Two years later, the newly formed Local Government Board issued a circular of its own prohibiting the distribution of outdoor relief to single able-bodied men and women, to wives whose husbands had deserted them within the previous twelve months, and to able-bodied widows with only a single dependent child. These two documents formed the basis of what became known as the "crusade against outdoor relief." The number of people in receipt of outdoor relief in England and Wales fell by more than 268,000 during the course of the 1870s, and although numbers stabilized during the following decade, they only began to increase from the mid-1890s.

Although these developments are well known to most students of the nineteenth century poor law and have received considerable attention from historians of the Charity Organisation Society, Elizabeth T. Hurren argues that their significance has been insufficiently recognized by welfare historians more generally. In this study, which is based on the author's University of Leicester Ph.D. thesis, Hurren sets out to redress the balance by focusing attention on the development of poor law policy during the last three decades of the nineteenth century in the Northamptonshire Union of Brixworth.

The Brixworth Union occupies an important place in the history of poor law policy for a number of reasons. As Hurren herself points out, the largest single landowners in the union were the Earls of Spencer, and it was the future third Earl, Viscount Althorp, who introduced the Poor Law Amendment Bill in the House of Commons in 1834. However, Hurren argues that the policies pursued by the union were relatively unremarkable until the launch of the crusade at the beginning of the 1870s. The three leading "crusaders" in the union were Althorp's grandson, the fifth Earl; the conservative member of parliament for South Leicestershire and leading light of the Charity Organisation Society, Albert Pell; and a local clergyman, William Bury.

In addition to describing the progress of the crusade in Brixworth, Hurren also examines the reaction it provoked. She shows how the working-class population of Brixworth joined forces with sympathetic members of the local elite to try to defend their traditional poor law entitlements. Although she recognizes that Brixworth may have been something of an "extreme" case (see, e.g., p. 252), she also demonstrates that the poor law was an important locus of political conflict, and that the crusade played an important role in mobilizing working-class political activity in the area of welfare provision.

Although the book is primarily concerned with the withholding of rights to ordinary poor relief, it also addresses the question of medical relief, and Hurren attempts to draw a connection between the crusade against outdoor relief, the passage of the Medical Relief (Disqualification Removal) Act of 1885, and the increase in the supply of cadavers to Cambridge University's Anatomy School during the 1870s and 1880s. However, at this stage the evidence for this connection still seems somewhat tenuous. Although the book is mainly concerned with the tightening of relief policy in Brixworth, this union is absent from the list of unions that supplied corpses to the University's Anatomy School between 1870 and 1920, and Hurren does not provide enough information about the relief policies of the unions that are identified to enable a firm connection to be made. It is also worth noting that the absolute total of corpses is not that great, averaging fewer than sixty per year over a fifty-year period.