Writing The Lives of the English Poor 1750s – 1830s - Review

 

Writing The Lives of the English Poor 1750s – 1830s

Steven King

McGill-Queen’s University Press.  2019. 978-0-7735-5649-2 (pbk)

King is Professor of Economic and Social History at Leicester University. The foundation work for the book was his doctorate in 1989, when he found a set of pauper letters for the area around Calverley in West Yorkshire. Using almost 26,000 pauper and advocates letters and the correspondence of overseers in 48 counties, he shows how the poor claimed, extended and defended their parochial allowances.

Under the Poor Law introduced from 1597, applicants had the right of appeal to the magistrates or the Quarter Sessions. The Settlement Acts reduced the ability of the poor to seek support in areas that were more generous. The system remained largely discretionary, was ‘an essentially local system in which the looseness and ambiguity of the law created an absolute necessity for negotiation.’ (p. 4)

Claimants’ letters show that ‘Poor people knew the stipulations of the Old Poor Law, contested and disputed refusals to engage in negotiation, wrote in sustained fashion to develop their case and shape the support attached to it, and pulled every lever they could to gain and maintain relief.’ (p. 11)

However, under the new Poor Law from the 1830s the use of local negotiation faded, replaced by writing to the central authorities. The 1834 Poor Law generated a massive poor law union correspondence held at the TNA in record series MH12 and brought to public notice by the Living the Poor Life Project (2008-10) headed by Paul Carter, which continues the story beyond the dates set by Professor King. 

‘The New Poor Law inherited a body of the poor with agency and the expectation of agency, with rights and the expectation of rights, with very considerable experience of shaping the system to which they were subject. This situation, above all, explains why its ideals were so quickly diluted in the 1840s. When those ideals were revived under the crusade against outdoor relief in the 1870s and 1880s, the deeply ingrained tradition of advocacy for the poor was also revived, and this last great experiment in poor law policy collapsed. Negotiation and malleability were, and were meant to be the central planks of poor law policy right up to the 1920s’ (p. 353).

The pace of letter writing increasing in the 1810s, which King links to growing migration, urbanisation, and industrial and agricultural change. Most letters were in an oral rather than a grammatical style. His work confirms the view that the ‘labouring poor were probably much more literate than has often been supposed or researched’ (p. 56) In support of this he cites Lyons, ‘Writing Upwards: How the Weak Wrote to the Powerful’ 

Very few sources are cited from the North East. For Northumberland King draws from the three of EP series of records at Northumberland Record Office: Ancroft St Anne overseers’ correspondence, Tynemouth select vestry minutes 1827-33, and Tweedmouth overseers’ correspondence. None are cited from the same series at Durham, County Record Office where there is surprisingly little relevant material.

Among the examples from the area, the Durham overseer wrote on behalf of the widowed Catherine Thompson to Berwick-upon-Tweed in May 1830 noting ‘that she was ‘unable to maintain herself at her advanced age (70) and her son who is with her from the poor wages which are made here is scarcely able to Maintain himself.’

James Rutherford in Livenhope wrote (dated not given) to Ancroft St Anne on behalf of Margaret nelson aged 84/5, who was ‘unable to Rise out of Bed or do the least Thing herself.’ He said that ‘you Cannot Expect her to be supported’ by  a ‘Daughter having the Bondage to uphold’ (p. 286)

John Pratt Sr wrote from Durham to Tweedmouth (date not given) ‘you will forgive my freedom in troubling you at this time – believe me its from real necessity - My helplessness and many infirmities increasing daily – and I am a greater burden to those I stay with – and they being much in the same circumstances Oblidges me too solicit your favours for a small addition to my Mite. In doing so you will much oblidge Your Humble Petitioner’ (p. 177). 

There is clearly scope for a project to examine the lives of the poor in the Northumberland and Durham EP records, as they and their advocates presented their cases, and the responses to their representations. Hopefully it will shed light on the political dynamics of the different parishes, and on whether there were differences in negotiating the system in the agricultural, industrial and fishing communities. As well as the extent of literacy.

One area that King does not explore is the effect of the Enclosure Acts on poverty levels on Poor Law provision. The other areas for research are the degree to which the growth of literacy is reflected and the relationship between the poor and the radicals.

1    Journal of Social History 48(2). 2015

This review is published in North East Labour History 2020, published by the North East Labour History Society. Thanks to NELH for its permission for me to publish it here. https://nelh.net

Sections of the draft review not published because of lack of space in the Journal

The book is a detailed analysis of the letters of the poor and of those who acted as advocates for them including the writing process, the response of the officials, success and failure, the nature of the language used, the use of rhetoric, the citing of custom and practice and rights, appeals to humanitarianism and friendship, the stress on writers honesty, sobriety, hard-working, self-reliance and dignity. A chapter examines life-cycle and gender. The ‘urgency and (often) raw emotion generated by the intensity of life-cycle conditions provided opportunities to obscure, shape, claim, and reshape the offered and perceived self.’ (p. 308) 

Those who paid and administered the poor rate were by no means in agreement. Ratepayers ‘simply held very different, often entrenched, beliefs on their individual and collective philanthropic  duty, the nature and force of custom, their role as men and fathers, and the humanitarian or Christian imperative that had always driven  the relationship between parish residents, migrants, and those with resources.’ (p. 6) There was plenty of room for disagreement and dispute – ‘fractured power’. (p. 7)

The overseers accounts books cannot be relied upon as they were subject to a range of errors, and simply record the outcome of the processing of claims. Vestry books show aspects of the processes behind the decisions, including appeals from claimants and periodic orders from magistrates. 

King notes that ‘there is almost no evidence that writers borrowed from the political pamphlets and radical texts that were circulating at the time. This is perhaps surprising given the deep involvement of poor people in radical movements between Chartism and in wider epistolary acts of resistance.’ There ‘is no evidence at all of class-based analysis of the position of the poor.  This may reflect a deliberate choice between ‘acceptable bounds of contestation’ in writing to parish officers, or ‘a disconnect’ between radical analysis and the way ordinary people thought about the national remediation of their poverty.’  What King does not analyse, because it is not within his remit, is the evidence in the parish records and radical newspapers of group lobbying over the Old Poor Law. 

Letters from advocates included one on behalf of Widow Marshall writing to Kirk Andrew in March 1813 suggesting that ‘her settlement parish might send relief because its officials ‘should suppose she would cost you less here among her friends than you could support her for.’’ (p. 253)

In June 1826 Joseph Thompson wrote from Lanchester to Greystoke in Westmoreland to recount the story of William Miller, a travelling broom maker. Having pitched camp on the public road, the family set a fire, and upon their ‘leaving it for a few moment with 3 children,’ the fire spread, destroying their camp and burning ‘ to a cinder’ a one-year old son. Thompson concluded that the family were ‘greatly necessitated’ and that their presumed settlement parish ought to act immediately for these ‘poor miserable persons’. (p. 139)

An advocate wrote in December 1830 on behalf of the wife of Robert Mole of Northam who was ‘very frail and appears like a shadow’. (p. 288)

Two claimants cited as writing were elderly.

John Pratt wrote to Tweedmouth (1790s?) because of ‘My helplessness and many Infirmities increasing daily’. (p. 288)  

78 year old John Nash corresponded from Potovers between September 1833 and February 1834 about his low level of financial support and the need to be housed until he died. (p. 220)

King’s final sentence of his Preface shows the relevance to today. ‘For a council estate boy the sense that the rules of the state were not, and were not meant to be, fixed and immovable but negotiated and negotiable is heartening.’ For those of us who came into community action through welfare rights in the 1970s, there was much room for negotiation, which has been considerably eroded especially in the last decade. That does not mean that the levels of assistance that could be improved through negotiation were generous. What the welfare rights movement achieved, including through those working for local authorities in the last decades of the 20thC was ensuring that claimants received higher levels of money than if there had not been that negotiating flexibility.

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