Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness, by Peter Jones and Steven King

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness by Peter Jones and Steven King Marjorie Levine-Clark (bio) Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness, by Peter Jones and Steven King; pp. ix + 136. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $69.99, $54.99 ebook. Peter Jones and Steven King’s little book, Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England, explores demands for workhouse reform during the nineteenth century. It stands out as truly innovative in poor law literature while also engaging scholars of journalism and public opinion. The authors make three significant interventions (and several smaller ones) into poor law historiography, each introduced in the three main chapters of the book. Chapter 1 shows that historians need to reconsider the chronology and content of the resistance to deterrent workhouses. Chapter 2 introduces readers to Joseph Rowntree, an influential “amateur workhouse inspector and journalist,” “entirely neglected” in histories of the poor law (4). Most importantly, perhaps, the authors demonstrate in chapter 3 that (male) paupers inserted themselves in debates about workhouse reform. The study is deeply archival, analyzing sources from the massive MH 12 series of thousands of volumes in the National Archives in London. MH 12 has routinely been mined by historians to find correspondence between local poor law officials and central poor law authorities to tell stories of specific poor law unions. Jones and King use the collection differently. As principal members of the larger project “In Their Own Write: The Lives and Letters of the Poor 1834–c.1900,” they systematically scoured the MH 12 series to locate the letters of paupers across the volumes. (They expect to find 20,000 to 30,000 letters when the project is complete.) This broad look at the series also unearthed the prolific record of a man like Rowntree. In addition to their close archival readings, the authors employed digital searching of the online British Library Newspaper Archive to study the ways that the language relating to poor law reform changed over time. These two approaches to text prove richly rewarding in complicating our received historical narratives. Parts of this research have been introduced and published previously, most notably in the authors’ own edited volume Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws (2015), which underscores the agency of the poor. Pulling the research together in one book, however, allows Jones and King to address more substantively continuities across the Old Poor Law and the New and when significant changes occurred, as well as to investigate more thoroughly the specifically Victorian aspects of their material and arguments. Chapter 1 tells the fascinating story of rhetorical and thematic shifts in criticisms of the workhouse from the Old Poor Law through the end of the nineteenth century. The authors convincingly show that both the idea of the deterrent workhouse and opposition to that idea existed long before the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. It was the New Poor Law, however, that galvanized resistance and regular attacks in the local and national press. Using the results of digital newspaper searching, the authors illustrate that a language of “abuse” and “cruelty” that followed the establishment of the work-house system changed in the second half of the century to a language of “scandal” (1). While scandal certainly encompassed distinct workhouse abuses, it more importantly came to stand for a general critique of the workhouse that came to dominate [End Page 727] the pages of newspapers. Jones and King insist that “something clearly happened in the 1860s” to shift the public discourse to emphasize the need to hold poor law officials accountable to those for whom they were responsible: the poor themselves (23). This is a persuasive new way of understanding workhouse scandal. As Jones and King note, scholars have tended to use scandal narrowly to focus on individual horrors at single workhouses. The authors’ revisioning of scandal as a broad public concern with the management of workhouses and the care of the poor transforms the story of the Victorian Poor Law in creative ways. In chapter 2 the authors add more to this story by examining the...