In what ways did prevalent perceptions of poverty and the poor change between 1750 and 1950?

John Walliss

Prevalent perceptions and attitudes towards poverty changed radically over the period 1750 to 1950, a period of time stretching one hundred and fifty years after the implementa-tion of the Old Poor Law of 1597 (amended in 1601) through the New Poor Law of 1834 to the emergence of the Welfare State following the Second World War. This shift has been accounted for by historians and social scientists in a number of ways. For some, adopting a Whig view of history, the move from the Old Poor Law through to the Welfare State has been characterised as part of a march of progress, with the poor laws “tak[ing] the role of the ugly stepmother who oppressed her virtuous, needy children until the good fairy of the welfare state banished her forever”.1 Others have adopting a conspiratorial view, and have seen shifts in welfare policy as a means to regulate or control the poor in more efficient ways. For those adopting such a position, “welfare is, therefore, characterised as a means by which order and authority are preserved, social revolution avoided and political stability maintained”.2 Yet others have characterised shift from the Old Poor Law to the Welfare State as one from an emphasis on individualism to collectivism, or from localised to nation-alised responses to poverty. This essay will chart the shifts in dominant views of poverty between 1750 and 1950. In doing so, it will show how these views were both influenced by a variety of social pressures during the period and, in turn, influenced government policy and practice towards the poor. It will show, in other words, how thinking about the poor did not exist in a vacuum, but rather reflected - and sought to provide a solution for - real and perceived social and economic pressures, particularly from the late eighteenth century to the third decade of the nineteenth century. Following Lynn Hollen Lees in The Solidarities of Strangers, three broad phases in the shift in perceptions will be highlighted; first, a period from 1750-1834, encompassing the Old Poor Law and the growing calls for its re-form or abolishment by authors such as Sir Frederic Morton Eden, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus; second, a period from 1834-1860, encompassing the New Poor Law and a shift to a more morally-tinged and punitive view of poverty; and, third, a period from 1860-1950 that witnessed a growing critique of the New Poor Law by social commentators such as Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree and the emergence of a less morally-tinged, Welfarist approach to poverty during the early-to-mid twentieth century.

Prevalent Attitudes and practice towards the poor from the early seventeenth cen-tury to the late eighteenth century were enshrined in the Old Poor Law of 1601. As with subsequent policy towards the poor, the Old Poor Law was influenced by a combination of changing intellectual currents - chiefly the influence of humanism - and social distress. The late sixteenth century was a period of growing poverty in England and Wales with food production being unable to keep pace with an increasing population. The harvests in both 1596 and 1597 in particular were particularly severe, leading to higher food prices and the growing threat of social disorder. The Elizabethan government responded to this with the passing of the Act for the Relief of the Poor in 1597, which was amended as the Poor Law Relief Act of 1601. As Derek Fraser has observed, the Elizabethan Poor Law divided the poor into three nominal categories, with each group receiving different forms of relief. The

1 Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948 (Cam-bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 7.2 David Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the industrial Rev-olution (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 7. See ‘Introduction’ for a summary of various perspec-tives that have been adopted to the history of welfare provision.

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impotent poor, who comprised the aged, those who were chronically or mentally ill, were to receive relief and accommodation in almshouses. Those who could work, but were unable to find work, were ‘set to work’ within workhouses, while their children were either put to work alongside them or were apprenticed to trades. The intention being to both harness the labour of the potentially idle - even if only through menial tasks - and to reform charac-ter. Finally, those who could work, but refused to do so - so called vagabonds or ‘sturdy rogues’ - were to be treated with less charity, being placed within houses of correction.

While legislated at the national level, Poor Law practice was, however, fundament-ally rooted in the locale; namely the parish. The Poor Law required that churchwardens and overseers of the poor drawn from leading members of each parish should organise poor relief in their parishes, the funding for which being provided through local taxes. A person became eligible for poor relief by being able to demonstrate settlement - though, in the case of men, “serving an apprenticeship there, by being hired for a year, by holding a local office, by paying local taxes, or by renting or owning local property”, while “Women acquired their husbands’ settlement upon marriage, and legitimate children inherited rights from their parents”.3 This was strengthened in 1662 by the passing of the Act of Settlement that required paupers to return to their rightful parishes in order to claim poor relief.4

In the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries, the Old Poor Law came un-der pressure from severe social and economic disruption leading to calls for its reform, if not abolishment. The period from 1750 to the beginning of the nineteenth century wit-nessed a population explosion, increasing to 8.7 million by 1801 - effectively almost a doubling in size in the half century. Coupled with this, the period also saw huge changes in agriculture and industry, chiefly through increasing mechanisation. Such changes, how-ever, as Anthony Brundage has observed, invariably led to the the increasing proletarianiz-ation of farm workers, as

previously, labourers were hired by the year (this gaining a settlement) and frequently housed (when single) with their employers. Now they were becoming ordinary wage workers, and had to shift for themselves in regard to housing. Furthermore, the ability to raise part of their own produce was severely curtailed by the effects of the enclos-ure movement, which eradicated commons’ rights for labourers.5

The fate of the rural worker was thus one of increasing proletarianization and at best un-der-employment and, at worst, unemployment.

These pressures were further exacerbated by the impact of the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815) on the British economy. The harvests for the years 1794, 1795, 1799 and 1800 were poor and, when coupled with increased demands for grain by the military and difficulties in importing corn during wartime, led to a rise in the price of bread, and thus in-creasing destitution among the poor. Consequently, between 1776 and 1803 the cost of poor relief almost tripled from £1.5m to £4m, and quadrupled between 1790 and 1820. By 1830 poor relief accounted for a fifth of the Government expenditure.6

3 Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers, p. 28.4 Paul Slack, The English Poor Law 1531-1782 (London, The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1990); Anthony Brundage, The English Poor Laws, 1700-1930 (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002); Michael E. Rose, The English Poor Law 1780-1930 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971).5 Brundage The English Poor Laws, 1700-1930, 24.6 David Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in 19th Century Britain: From Chadwick to Booth (Harlow, Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1998); Slack, The English Poor Law 1531-1782; Rose The English Poor Law 1780-1930.

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Various attempts at both the national, and particularly local levels were made to ad-apt the Old Poor Law in response to this increasing pressure placed on the system of poor relief. In 1782 the Relief of the Poor Act - or Gilbert Act, after its proposer, Thomas Gilbert - was passed. This legislation sought to relieve some of the pressure for poor relief from individual parishes by allowing parishes to join together to form Poor Law Unions, and thereby share the cost of poor relief. The Union Workhouse also effectively became a Poorhouse, housing only children, the elderly, the sick and infirm, while those able to work were set to work and received outdoor relief. In addition, magistrate-appointed Guardians replaced the widely seen as corrupt overseers. By the time of the passing of the New Poor Law in 1834, however, only 900 parishes - representing less than 1/15 of the total number of parishes - had formed themselves into 67 ‘Gilbert Unions’. Similarly, a number of par-ishes - most notably the Berkshire Parish of Speedenhamland - adopted a system whereby the able-bodied poor could receive outdoor relief by receiving wage subsidies from the poor rates.7

However, from the end of the eighteenth century to the third decade of the nine-teenth, there was a growing public debate about whether - and if so how - the Poor Law should be reformed to better respond to the growing pressures placed upon it. By the 1820s one commentator, Sydney Smith, bemoaned the volume of pamphlets circulating on the Poor Law, observing with chagrin that:

A pamphlet on the Poor Laws generally contains some little piece of favourite non-sense by which we are told this enormous evil may be perfectly cured. The first gen-tleman recommends little gardens; the second cows; the third village shops; the fourth a spade; the fifth Dr Bell [the educationalist], and so forth. Every man rushes to the press with his small morsel of imbecility.8

Numerous commentators offered their views on the Poor Law and how it should be reformed, or even why it should be abandoned. In his Thoughts and Details of Scarcity (1795), for example, Edmund Burke drew a distinction between, on the one hand, those who were poor but able to work and those who were poor because they could not work through age or infirmity. Arguing that “nothing can be so base and so wicked as the polit-ical canting language, ‘The Labouring Poor’, he claimed that “labouring people are only poor because they are numerous...In a fair distribution among a vast multitude, none can have much”.9 Indeed, he wrote in a later essay, when one pities “those who must labour or the world cannot exist” one is not only “trifling with the condition of mankind” but also hav-ing a negative influence on the worker themselves as “...this affected pity only tends to dis-satisfy them with their condition, and to teach them to seek resources where no resources are to be found, in something else that their own industry, and frugality, and sobriety”.10

The State, he argued, should take a laissez faire in regard to poor relief, leaving respons-ibility for their welfare to private charity rather than Government ‘meddling’.

This distinction between the genuinely ‘poor’ and labouring people was further elab-orated by Jeremy Bentham the following year in his ‘Essays on the Subject of the Poor Laws’ (1796), and by Patrick Colquhoun a decade later in his A Treatise on Indigence (1806). For Bentham, the crucial distinction was between ‘poverty’, “the state of everyone who, in order to obtain subsistence, is forced to have recourse to labour”, and ‘indigence’, which he defined as “the state of him who, being destitute of property...is at the same time

7 Fraser The Evolution of the British Welfare State; Rose The English Poor Law 1780-1930.8 Quoted in Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State, p. 46.9 Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (London, F & C Rivington, 1800 [orig. 1795]), pps. 3-4, 2.10 Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, Faber and Faber, 1984) p. 69.

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unable to labour or unable, even for labour, to procure the supply of which he happens thus to be in want’. Again, like Burke, he argued that both groups should be treated differ-ently; the indigent receiving poor relief - although he believed that this should be the re-sponsibility of the state - while those who could work should be required for work for their relief.11 Similarly, for Colquhoun poverty was natural; “the state of every one who must la-bour for subsistence”, while indigence was the “the state of any one who is destitute of he means of subsistence, and is unable to labour to procure it to the extent nature requires”. Indeed, he went on, poverty provided the basis of civilisation, as, he reflected,

...without poverty there could be no labour, and without labour there would be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to who may be possessed of wealth - inasmuch as without a large proportion of poverty surplus labour could never be rendered productive in procuring either the conveniences or luxuries of life.12

Consequently, he argued, it was not poverty, but rather, the ‘evil’ of indigence that the State should address, in order to “restor[e] the culpable indigent to at least an [sic.] useful condition in society”.13

Others argued for the abolition of the Poor Laws. Joseph Townsend, for example, in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786) took inspiration from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), arguing that it was the role of the poor “to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community” and that any attempt to lift the poor out of their situation did “little more than give encouragement to idleness and vice”. Going further, he argued that the Poor Law was in fact counterproductive, giving those who could work little incentive to be “industrious or frugal”;

....when they know for certain that should they increase their store it will be devoured by the drones, or what cause have they to fear when they are assured, that if by their indolence and vices, they should be reduced to want, they shall be abundantly sup-plied?14

Rather, Townsend argued, echoing Smith’s notion of the ‘Invisible Hand’, the Poor Laws should be abolished, thus forcing the poor to develop the appropriate skills and character to thrive within the Market.15

Adam Smith also provided inspiration for Sir Frederick Morton Eden’s critique of the Poor Law, The State of the Poor (1797) and David Ricardo’s, Principles of Political Eco-nomy (1817). Eden drew on Smith’s wage-fund theory to argue that that the amount of money circulating within society was finite and that money paid out poor relief reduced the amount that could be paid in wages. This in turn would harm the economy and produce further pauperisation;

11 Quoted in Bernard Harris, The Origins of the British Welfare State: Social Welfare in England and Wales, 1800-1945 (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) p. 4312 Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on Indigence (London, J. Matchard, 1806), pp. 7-813 Colquhoun, A Treatise on Indigence, p. 108.14 Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Well-Wisher to Mankind (London, Ridgways, 1817 [orig. 1786), pp. 14-1515 Brundage The English Poor Laws, 1700-1930.

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To invest a public body [i.e. the Poor Law Unions] with a part of that stock, which, at the sake of profit, sets the greater part of useful labour in motion, seems indeed re-pugnant to the sound principles of political economy.16

Moreover, he argued, poor relief was also in fact counter productive. It would be im-possible, he claimed, for any scheme that set the poor to work to not impact negatively on those engaged in similar work, by either taking work away from the latter group or under-cutting their wages. Not only this, but such a scheme would also produce dependency in the poor, weakening their desire to improve their lot. Similarly, Ricardo advocated the abol-ishment of poor relief, arguing again that the growing amounts paid out in poor relief cre-ated a vicious circle leading to wages being forced down and, consequently, increasing pauperisation.

However, the most influential critic of the Poor Law was Thomas Malthus, the au-thor of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). In this book, that went through six editions during his lifetime, Malthus argued that population growth would inevitably out-pace food production, particularly within times of plenty, leading ultimately, in less prosper-ous periods to famine. Population growth, he went on, could be checked by positive checks, such as disease, hunger and war that increase the death rate, and preventative checks, such as celibacy and postponing marriage, that would lower the birth rate. Malthus in particular favoured the latter, emphasising that couples should delay marriage and off-spring until they could afford to support them. Malthus also excoriated the system of poor relief, claiming that it encouraged people to marry early and produce offspring that they knew that they could not support. Through poor relief, the poor are thus taught two negat-ive lessons; first that “there is no occasion whatever for them to put any restraint upon their inclinations or exercise any degree of prudence in the affair of marriage because the par-ish is bound to provide for all that are born”; and, second;

that there is as little occasion to cultivate habits of economy, and make use of the means afforded to them by saving banks, to lay by their earnings while they are single in order to furnish a cottage when they marry, and enable them to set out in life with decency and comfort; because, I suppose, the parish is bound to cover their na-kedness, and to find them a bed and a chair in a work-house17

Rather than relying on poor relief, the pauper should instead, he argued, be encour-aged to rely solely on their own resources. “[N]othing perhaps would tend so strongly to excite a spirit of industry or economy among the poor”, he advised;

as a thorough knowledge that their happiness must always depend principally on themselves; and that if they obey their passions in opposition to their reason, or be not industrious and frugal while they are single to save a sum for the common contin-gencies of the married state, they must expect to suffer the natural evils which Providence has prepared for those who disobey its repeated admonitions.18

Malthus’ views exerted a huge influence on both subsequent debate and, indeed, policy. “The effect of Malthusianism was immediate and dramatic”, Gertrude Himmelfarb

16 Frederick Morton Eden, The State of the Poor; Or, a History of the Labouring Classes in England, from the Conquest to the Present Period, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011 [orig. 1797), p. 46817 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; Or, a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with An Inquiry into our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which it Occasions, volume 2 (London, John Murray, 1817 [orig. 1798]), p. 372.18 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 175

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tells us, “For half a century social attitudes and policies were decisively shaped by the new turn of thought”;

It is not too much to say that England in the first half of the nineteenth century was in a state of moral and intellectual turmoil, as some people tried to assimilate the mes-sage of Malthusianism, others frantically resisted it and still others found themselves caught up in a mode of thought and feeling that seemed to be intellectually irresistible and morally repulsive19

Thus, as James Huzel has shown, the influence of Malthusianism may be felt in a number of Governmental Papers from the 1820s, most notably the 1824 Select Committee on Labourers Wages and the 1828 Select Committee Relating to the Employment of Relief of Able-Bodied Persons from the Poor Rates.20 However, the changing attitudes towards the poor that became enshrined in the New Poor Law of 1834 did not solely reflect intellec-tual currents. Rather, again, both debate and policy may perhaps be better envisaged as responses to the increasing cost of poor relief and the perception that poor relief were stalling under increasing pressure.

Nevertheless, the influence of critics such as Burke and Malthus may clearly be seen in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, with its emphasis on differentiating between the ‘poor’ - the vast mass of the labouring poor - and the indigent or ‘pauper’.21 As David Englander observes, the assumption of the Commission that drafted the New Poor Law;

was that the labourer who was physically capable would find work and would earn a wage sufficient to maintain himself and his family. Only the partially or totally disabled who could not demand a full wage were eligible for social support. Poverty was un-derstood to constitute the natural condition of the working class and did not require social intervention.22

As the Royal Commission’s Report noted, while, it was “repugnant to the common senti-ments of mankind” to refuse relief to the indigent, “it has never been deemed expedient that the provision should extend to the relief of poverty; that is the state of one, who, in or-der to obtain a mere subsistence, is forced to have recourse to labour.”23

Believing like Malthus and Burke that poverty arose for the able-bodied from “fraud, indolence or improvidence”, the drafters of the New Poor Law made work - and the Work-house - the central plank of poor relief.24 While the indigent would receive relief in the workhouse, any able-bodied man and his family who entered the workhouse would receive relief in exchange for work. Indeed, under the principle of ‘less eligibility’, the situation of the inmate in the Workhouse should not, it was decided, be preferable in reality or percep-tion to that of the labourer; not least as, it claimed, “every penny bestowed, that tends to render the position of the pauper more eligible than that of the independent labourer is a

19 Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, pps. 100, 133.20 Huzel, James P., ‘Malthus, the Poor Law, and Population in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, The Eco-nomic History Review, 22 (3), pp. 430-52.21 Anthony Brundage, The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment and Implemen-tation, 1832-39 (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1978)22 Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in 19th Century Britain, p. 78.23 Selection of Reports and Papers of the House of Commons, volume 41: Report from His Majesty’s Com-missioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, 1836, pp. 12724 Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, p. 155.

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bounty on indolence and vice”.25 More broadly, the conditions within the Workhouse should be so grim that for the labourer able in principle to support themselves and their family, it would be the option of final resort. Separated from their wives and children in a prison-like environment (including wearing a uniform) and having to undertake hard and often tedious work in exchange for a monotonous diet, and knowing that if they died within the Work-house their bodies could, under the terms of the 1832 Anatomy Act, be passed to medical schools for dissection, the drafters believed would deter all but the most desperate. As Charles Younge, the chairman of the Sheffield Board of Guardians wrote in the Sheffield Times in 1855;

The great object of the poor law board is to ensure a constant unvarying and efficient discipline during the entire residence of the pauper within the workhouse. He rises to the minute; he works to the minute; he eats to the minute. He must be clean, respect-ful, industrious and obedient. In short the habits inculcated in the house are precisely those the possession of which would have prevented his becoming an inmate. The pauper naturally enough concludes that the relief he receives in the workhouse is a very inadequate return for the surrender of his liberty - the full occupation of his time - the value of his labour - the humiliation he must endure in being associated with some of the depraved and abandoned members of the community and the painful consciousness that he has lost all self-reliance and self-respect. Who can wonder that the honest poor should make every effort to keep out of the workhouse?26

However, within less than a decade of Younge writing this, New Poor Law practice, and the ideas that underpinned it, was beginning to be increasingly questioned. As Mi-chael Rose observes, “Between 1860s and he early 1870s, the English poor relief system was subjected to an almost continual series of shocks which exposed its basic weak-nesses and forced a searching re-examination”.27 The trade depressions in London in 1860-1 and 1867-9 as well as the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1862 stretched poor relief to breaking point as well as undermining the belief, enshrined in the New Poor Law, that the poor were to blame for their situation. The latter example, in particular, which led to a 300% increase in poor relief, demonstrated how workers in one country could be affected by socio-economic problems in another. In addition public attention was also drawn to the conditions within the workhouses and questions were raised about how well - if at all - workhouses prepared children for a life and work outside their walls. Meanwhile, poor law expenditure had risen by 40% between 1850 and 1870.28

These pressures, coupled with the influence of the Great Depression of the 1880s fed into a growing debate about the Poor Law and the poor more generally. Debate shifted from ‘the unemployed’ to ‘unemployment’ and poverty came to be seen less as the out-come of some moral failing, and instead as the consequence of abstract forces beyond in-dividuals’ control such as economic forces, trade cycles and even, drawing on Darwin, bio-logy. As Daniel Pick has shown, the late-Victorian period saw growing concern about the impact of poverty and related social ills such as diet and poor housing and the belief that it signalled a form of social degeneration that would, in turn, lead to crime and further social

25 Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, p. 12726 Quoted in Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State, p. 331.27 Michael E. Rose, ‘The Crisis of Poor Law Relief in England, 1860-90’, in W.J. Mommsen (ed.) The Emer-gence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 50-70. p. 5428 Pat Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State (Harlow, Longman, 1996).

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decay.29 This shift in the discourse about poverty may be seen in books such as Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1881), Andrew Mearn’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) or William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), that described the wretched conditions in which the poor lived and highlighted the link between environment and poverty;

The bastard of the harlot, born in a brothel, suckled on gin, and familiar from earliest infancy with all the bestialities of debauch, violated before she was twelve, and driven into the streets by her mother a year or two later, what chance is there for such a girl in this world - I say nothing of the next?’30

However, it was arguably the work of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree that played the greatest role in influencing late-nineteenth and early-twentieth views of poverty. Both men questioned the notion that poverty was the result of vice or laziness, and showed instead how the causes of poverty lay in factors outside the individual’s control, such as old age, unemployment, and low wages. Thus, Booth showed how out of 4,076 families in London’s East End living in poverty that he sampled, only 1.5% were in their po-sition as a consequence of being ‘loafers’ and 13.6% as a consequence of drunkenness. The vast majority, 62.5%, were poor as a consequence of either unemployment, underem-ployment or low wages, while 22.5% had been impoverished by poor health, infirmity or having to support large families.31

Another area of debate concerned what shape poor relief should take. Poor relief practices had always varied across the country and by the 1870s, the poor would take ad-vantage of a mixed economy of welfare provision, such as charities, families, friendly soci-eties, as well as the State. While ‘the spirit of 1834’ still remained in the early twentieth century, evidence of the shift that had taken place in public discourse about poverty may be seen in the Poor Law Commission of 1905-9, and its subsequent reports. Unable to agree on a single report, the Commission issued a Majority and Minority Report in 1909. The Majority Report located the causes of poverty in the moral failings of the poor and ar-gued that the Poor Law should remain, albeit supported by charitable organisations akin to the Charity Organisation Society, while the Minority Report argued that it was underem-ployment, not vice, that led to poverty. Moral failings, it argued, were, if anything, the con-sequences of poverty, rather than its cause. The Poor Law, its authors argued, should be broken up and replaced with a variety of State-run bureaus targeted at different areas of want. However, while both reports generated debate, the fact that the Commission had been unable to secure a consensus meant that both could be ignored by the Govern-ment.32

However, it was ultimately the vision of the Minority Report than won out in terms of Government policy. Between 1909 and the Second World War, the Poor Law was, to use Pat Thane’s term, dismantled ‘from without’ by withdrawing from Poor Relief the elderly, children and the unemployed. There was also, as Michael Rose observes, “a growing de-termination during the [First World War] that a better society must emerge with the coming of peace, a society in which the nineteenth-century poor-law system would have no place”.33 The post-war economic climate with unemployment levels ranging between one and over 3 million between 1920 and 1940, coupled with an unwillingness on the part of

29 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (Cambridge, Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1989).30 William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, Funk and Wagnalls, 1890), p. 4731 Harris, The Origins of the British Welfare State.32 Brundage, The English Poor Laws, 1700-1930; Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State.33 Rose, The English Poor Law, 1780-1930, p. 284.

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Lloyd George’s government to follow through with pre-election promises, however, did not prove conducive for a radical overhaul of the system. Indeed, on the eve of the Second World War, local authorities supported one million paupers.34 Rather, it was only to be in the aftermath of the Second World War - specifically July 1948 - that the Poor Law finally was repealed, to be replaced by the Welfare State.

Surveying the period from 1750 to 1950 reveals both change and continuities in the prevalent perceptions of poverty, with three broad phases or shifts being apparent. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century witnessed a growing critique of the Old Poor Law by authors such as Burke, Ricardo and Malthus, and calls for its abolishment or re-form. This was linked with a growing perception of the poor, as opposed to the indigent, as the architects of their own fate. Poverty, it was argued, was the result of laziness, vice or improvidence. Consequently, any attempt to provide poor relief was counterproductive both in terms of failing to encourage the poor, to quote Malthus again, “to put any restraint upon their inclinations or exercise any degree of prudence in the affair of marriage”, and providing little incentive to the labourer to work and “cultivate habits of economy...[when] the parish is bound to cover their nakedness, and to find them a bed and a chair in a work-house”. This view of poverty as a moral failing of the individual was enshrined in the New Poor Law of 1834, with its separation of the ‘pauper’ from ‘the poor’, and its emphasis on work. As Lynn Hollen Lees notes, under the terms of the New Poor Law, work - as mani-fested by the Workhouse - became both a punishment and a means by which it was be-lieved the poor would be re-moralised. However, by the 1860s, and particularly by the 1880s, there was a growing awareness of the factors - economic, biological, environmental - that lay beyond the individuals’ control which led to poverty, and, as a result, a critique of the earlier morally-tinged view of poverty. The studies by Booth and Rowntree demon-strated both the large numbers of people living in poverty, and also that in many cases the cause of their poverty lay in unemployment, underemployment and old age. However, this did not become the dominant view and, indeed, the 1905-9 Poor Law Commission and its subsequent Majority and Minority reports may be conceptualised as a struggle between the earlier morally-tinged view of poverty and an emerging spirit of collectivist Welfarism that would find its full fruition in the Welfare State of the post-war years.

(4,834 words not including bibliography and footnotes)

34 Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State.

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