Political Economists and the English Poor Laws: A Historical Study of the Influence of Classical Economics on the Formation of Social Welfare Policy

Abstract

These two books are highly complementary. Frances Cowherd studies the period before 1834, and the contributors to the A^w Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century continue the picture till the end of the century. Both are part of a resurgence of interest in the Poor Law that has grown during the past twenty years or so. Before this there was a tendency among economic historians to leave the subject to one side, possibly in the belief that all that could be said had been said and that there were richer fields to explore. But the growth of interest in the history of social phenomena and of social policy has brought this stagnation to an end, and the Poor Law is now again in the forefront of historical inquiry. The very existence of more universities and the proliferation of other forms of further education have probably helped this movement. Certainly, the study of local records is not only a fruitful field for inquiry by students at all levels?from those seeking Ph.D's to those writing undergraduate essays?but also the results are daily contributing more to our understanding of the complex subject. This renewal of interest has produced invaluable studies, studies on which those of us who try to understand nineteenth-century England must now rely, for no longer is it possible for anyone to be a specialist in anything but a tiny part of the century, or of a subject, in the sense that our knowledge is based on original research among primary sources?the very bulk of the material available is much too great for that. Even if we attempt to confine our attention to the Poor Law, we are faced with an intimidating mass of documentation. For the first third of the century alone, before the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed, the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester possesses more than thirty bound volumes, the Peyton collection, of contemporary pamphlets. As the century advanced, the Poor Law administrators, for all their faults, became more professional, at least in the sense that they kept more records. Public men, as members of Boards of Guardians, and often, too, as magistrates, wrote papers and memoranda. Bodies like the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science created a great forum for the discussion of such matters as the Poor Law and stimulated research into local social