Abstract
AN obvious preliminary to any study of poverty in the nineteenth century is to determine approximately how many people were in poverty during this period. Yet this is a question which is impossible to answer with any degree of accuracy even with regard to those who, having applied for poor relief, were officially recorded as paupers. This seems curious in view of the massive collection of statistical tables which filled the appendices to the annual reports of the central authority for poor relief, the Poor Law Commission, after 1847 the Poor Law Board and, after 1871, the Local Government Board. ‘English poor law statistics surpass those of all other countries both in their scope and in the time over which they extend’, wrote an eminent German judge in a study of the English poor law system. Yet he followed up these words of praise with a detailed critique of the deficiencies of the statistics, which the Webbs echoed in their final volume on English poor law history.21
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