Teasing out individual experiences through new poor law scandals: policy, practice and subjugation

Description/Abstract

Within the past decade research from the 'welfare from below' perspective has
increasingly sought to uncover the experiences and strategies of the poor in eking out
their existence (Hitchcock 2004). Such work has moved beyond past understandings
which related the support of the poor exclusively to the poor laws to a much broader
consideration of a variety of overlapping practices of self- and community-help,
including mutual aid, criminal activities and the support provided through kinship
networks. Hitherto studies have however neglected paupers' experiences during the
early years of the New Poor Law. In part this has perhaps been a function of the fact that
the lives of individuals tended to be obscured by the record-keeping practices of
individual unions - and the Poor Law Commission in London – and in part due to the
prevailing historical orthodoxy which suggests that all powers of policy innovation were
removed from the local level (Eastwood 1994). This paper attempts to critically address
these two assumptions through the lens of New Poor Law scandals, the 'one-off' events in
poor law history which, somewhat paradoxically, occurred with shocking regularity
during the implementation of the new centralized system. Scandals despite their one-off
nature generated huge amounts of documents which were concerned with detailing the
everyday decision-making processes and practices of individual unions and their impact
upon welfare recipients. Indeed, somewhat unusually under the New Poor Law, these
documents contain the transcriptions of in-depth semi-structured interviews with the
very 'individuals' whose experiences in this period remain obscure. In particular this
paper utilises the documents created before, during and after two scandals which were
critical to the early evolution of the New Poor Law: the Droxford and Fareham Unions
scandal in which three young children were severely punished for their 'dirty habits' and
a scandal in the Bridgwater Union whereby a young woman was denied outdoor medical
relief during a fraught pregnancy. It is shown that not only were local Boards of
Guardians responsible for determining much New Poor Law policy but also that their
union officers had immense powers to dictate the form of these important social policies,
policies which had a huge impact upon the lives of many dependent and vulnerable
people. As such, inconsistencies from officer to officer and a system in which there were
few formal checks and feedback mechanisms created a culture in which abuses and
maltreatments could occur and endure. The obsession of the Poor Law Commission with
the 'problem' of able-bodied male labourers and the subsequent lack of central policy
directed towards women and children meant that these were extremely vulnerable to the
whims of their welfare providers and the vicissitudes of local policy.