The Poor Law Commission: a New Digital Resource for Nineteenth-century Domestic Historians

Throughout the opening decades of the nineteenth century central government was bombarded with pamphlets, speeches and general political pressures to investigate and reform the operation of the poor laws.¹ Yet root and branch national poor law reform was never attempted. It was from the widespread violence in much of southern England (and elsewhere in the country) in 1830-31 that renewed concern developed about how poor relief was administered. The 'Swing Riots' and the coming to power of a new Whig government precipitated the Commission of Enquiry into the Poor Laws in 1832, although a disposition to reform was already detectable. ² The resulting investigation was the largest and most detailed sociological investigation at that time. Twenty-six investigators visited around 3,000 parishes and townships (out of 15,000) throughout England and Wales, mainly in late 1832. These assistant commissioners were aided by an elaborate questionnaire referring to, amongst other things, pauper costs, population size, number of labourers required, the presence of Scottish and Irish labourers, wage levels and the way in which poor relief was administered. The parish officers, magistrates or rectors of around ten per cent of the 15,000 parishes filled out and returned these questionnaires.³

The resulting report was swiftly written and published, and despite a number of amendments the government lost no time in implementing it.⁴ A bill for the amendment of the poor law was introduced in April 1834 and by August the Poor Law Amendment Act was on the Statute Book. The main thrust of the New Poor Law can be summed up as follows. A central Poor Law Commission was to be established, based in London, with three Commissioners to oversee the national poor law and impose national uniformity. ⁵ Parishes were to combine in 'Poor Law Unions', with each parish taking a share of the resources to maintain workhouse facilities.⁶ Each Poor Law Union was to be governed by an elected Board of Guardians accountable to the Poor Law Commission. Local magistrates, who previously had the power to supervise relief, were now ex-officio Guardians. Each parish would continue to levy a parish poor rate which would be collected by the overseers. Outdoor relief (where the recipient was relieved without being ordered to the workhouse) was to continue for the aged, the infirm and the able-bodied; although in the report and in practice the principle of deterrent relief ideologically excluded such a notion.⁷

As archivists rather than historians we are primarily concerned not with the history of the workings of the New Poor Law but with the records which it produced, as the newly created Poor Law Commission in London and the similarly new Poor Law Unions in the localities engaged in a continuous round of information sharing on a wide variety of subjects. This correspondence is now held in some 16,741 bound volumes at The National Archives (TNA) in record series MH 12 (Ministry of Health 12).⁸ Although the series as a whole contains correspondence from 1834-1900, we concentrate here on the period from 1834 to the mid 1850s: the years of the Poor Law Commission and the early Poor Law Board. For any investigation of working-class life, for any examination of the activities of local government, and for any study of the way the state intervened in both, the millions of letters, memos and reports held here are both essential and voluminous.⁹ They also offer scope for examining the introduction of the new system in a variety of settings. In the discussion which follows we present a number of specific cases illustrating the richness and range of these records.

These specific cases come out of the National Archives project 'Living the Poor Life', for which 105 volumes of MH 12, covering twenty-two Poor Law Unions, have been catalogued in detail and document images of each piece of correspondence made available via TNA's website.¹⁰ The cataloguing work was undertaken in 2009-10 by around 200 volunteer editors, mainly based in the localities...