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This article traces the response to the Elizabethan Poor Laws in two parishes in Jacobean London. The Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 attempted to create a system of reliable poor relief in response to a series of late sixteenth‐century economic and population crises. The establishment of an organized system of almsgiving formally centered in the parish and its officers shifted the understanding of charity from a voluntary and interpersonal act to a more bureaucratic process. Focusing on the diverging accounts of charity by John Downham and William Gouge, this essay demonstrates how the bureaucratic logic of the Elizabethan Poor Laws was debated and challenged in print and from two of London's most influential pulpits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Overseers of the Poor group of local-level officials who were responsibly for implementing state laws regarding poverty and citizenship in the early republic era in America's Northeast region, and it mentions violations of poor laws, surveillance, and control. The powers of local government officials are assessed, as well as events in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New York, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island.

This article will demonstrate that poor law nurses made a major contribution to the professionalisation of nurses. It focuses on the northern Durham unions over the second half of the nineteenth century with special attention given to the Sunderland union, the largest urban union in the county. Using national and local records this article examines the changing face of the nurse in the union workhouse infirmary. It examines the use of paupers as nurses in the early decades of the New Poor Law and the gradual move towards the use and payment of non-pauper nurses. The research will show that guardians increasingly recognised the need for trained nurses to care for the sick which resulted from medical advances in the second half of the nineteenth century, and until 1897 the central authorities had no policy on nurses or nurse training leaving decisions on nurse developments at local level. This article examines the development of nurse training at the Sunderland workhouse hospital, a service that received praise in a parliamentary report. It is argued that the nurse training programme was an important step towards the professionalisation of nurses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, as in many countries, wealth levels and wealth inequalities have widened significantly during the years of neoliberalism, with the stock of private wealth in the UK now around eight times the level of GDP, compared with its level of three times GDP in the 1970s. If we are now to build back better in order to address and overcome the repeated challenges that the coming century is already bringing thick and fast, we need governments that can learn the true lessons from Britain's past and recognise that the outright individualism of neoliberalism is a dangerous siren luring us all onto the rocks of ecological disaster. Keywords: Covid-19; Poor Laws; Elizabeth I; collectivist individualism; Joseph Chamberlain; welfare systems; neoliberalism EN Covid-19 Poor Laws Elizabeth I collectivist individualism Joseph Chamberlain welfare systems neoliberalism 239 244 6 04/03/23 20230301 NES 230301 In this commentary we argue that after the crisis of Covid-19, and what it exposed about how vulnerable our society had become, the UK must now reinvent an empowering state, drawing inspiration from two extraordinary periods of history beginning over four hundred years ago. [Extracted from the article]

This article uses a microhistorical approach to investigate the "workhouse experience" of a single pauper in late nineteenth-century London. Its subject is Frank Burge, a remarkably prolific (though by no means unique) correspondent who wrote several lengthy letters of complaint from the Poplar workhouse to the Local Government Board (the central poor law authority) between 1884 and 1885. It places these letters, and the official responses they stimulated, alongside other public and official documents and uses a blended methodological approach to uncover a rich narrative of hardship, struggle, and personal agency. In doing so, it argues that, in contrast to more orthodox histories of welfare, it is only through this kind of painstaking and sensitive historical reconstruction that we truly can understand the nature, and the legacy, of poverty and the "workhouse experience" on the nineteenth-century poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Queen Elizabeth I's Poor Laws, Jane Addams espoused the rhetoric of social justice. Addams is an example of social reform between 1890 and 1930s as tied to eugenics, which is also evident in disagreements between Addams and Ida B. Wells. Despite the contributions of white women to social work, their subtle transgressions exist behind the veil of a feminist façade. It operates as a culture of ideas, and ultimately a prescribed assortment of race-based behaviours. Leading white women such as Addams dedicated their careers aloof to the subjugation of non-white issues that Ida B. Wells challenged via lynching. After constant prodding from Wells, Addams emerged from her silence to oppose lynching. Wells responded to Addams' discourse that she viewed as passive white rhetoric. According to contemporary descriptive data, white women/students are similarly aloof to non-white issues provoking womanism in response to feminism's Women's Ku Klux Klan. Ultimately, in the rescue of social justice, white women activists, including Social Work students, must denounce the feminist façade that social justice rhetoric and social justice activism coalesce for all oppressed populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines poor law hospital reform during the 1920s and 1930s. Northern Ireland's failure to dissolve the poor law system until the 1940s is viewed as one of its major failures in health policy, as the other countries in Britain and Ireland had broken up the system by 1929. Recent historiographical examinations of interwar healthcare have challenged older negative accounts of the period and instead identified diverse, vibrant and expanding health systems. Much of this has concentrated on English and Welsh health systems or comparisons between large, industrialized nations. Research remains lacking on the trajectory of healthcare in smaller, nascent countries that witnessed political realignment and new settlements during an era of transformation in empire. Irish partition and the establishment of two new states – Irish Free State and Northern Ireland – represented a major reshaping of the British Empire. This article concentrates on Northern Ireland and argues that where local workhouse infirmaries were transformed into district hospitals local authorities brought positive improvements in healthcare evident in many countries. Such improvements were, however, limited to the north-east and the west and south of Northern Ireland, which were marked by political and religious tensions, witnessed limited reform. Local authority policy innovation was thwarted by state interference in local government, which included the temporary dissolution of dissenting Nationalist authorities and gerrymandering of electoral boundaries. This article also argues that the failure to dissolve the poor law was a result of limited medical professional interest in reform. Northern Ireland's powerful medical profession was key to shaping the direction of Northern Irish policy. This was a result of the devolved administration's limited expertise in policy making and the dominance of the constitutional question and Nationalist–Unionist divisions in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the factors central to the practices and realities of historical educational support for destitute and neglected children in the Manchester Certified Industrial Schools (MCIS) to determine how the schools acted to support the lives of children who were removed from parental guardianship. In nineteenth-century England, the most vulnerable children, destitute and often neglected (specifically, those considered to have improper guardianship), posed a serious challenge to public order in urban society. This study employs primary records to trace the experiences of four children during and after MCIS enrolment. Prior to the current study, none of these records had been used in research. The analysis of records demonstrates that MCIS officers supported and followed up students even after they were discharged to help them survive without their parents and become conventional members of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although they linger in historical memory as "Pauper Bastilles," in the long eighteenth century , English workhouses functioned in many ways as institutions of care, as well as places of discipline. This article uses an unusual set of source materials—including a Master's Query Book—to examine the nature of workhouse discipline in the Leeds township workhouse in the mid-eighteenth century. A close analysis of this remarkable source allows us a clear view of both the structures of authority and the agency of poor inmates in this institution. Poor Law officials monitored material conditions in the workhouse—the provision of food, clothing, and medical care—with great attentiveness, ensuring inmates were kept in good health, while leaving records that reveal intensive surveillance of the material objects inside the house. The workhouse committee also, however, kept an eagle eye on the workhouse master, allowing inmates a direct line of complaint. Workhouse inmates responded to these conditions by vigorously resisting rules that restricted their freedom of movement inside and outside the institution. Masters in such institutions were intermediaries between parish governors and the poor, rather than "technicians of discipline." At the same time, workhouse records show that children were far more vulnerable, subjected to discipline at the discretion of master and mistress; we must disaggregate their experiences from the general population of inmates. These findings conform well to a widening strand in the historiography that reveals Old Poor Law workhouses as complex, hybrid institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the heart of this article stand three questions that we believe are crucial to an understanding of the character of the poor law and its role in the lives of the poor who had to navigate its rules. First, what was actually 'new' about the central administrative structures and processes required to make the New Poor Law function? Second, how did those processes change over time and, in particular, how far did the central authority itself engage with the poor directly? Third, did the processes and structures of the central authority afford a space in which the poor could learn to better navigate the New Poor Law and exercise their own agency? Using a sample of letters written directly to 'the Centre' by paupers in the English midlands, and the subsequent epistolary responses of the central authorities, we trace a situation in which the Centre was duty bound to respond to poor letter writers much as they did to everyone else. Rights to contest local welfare regimes remained strong in the post-1834 period, and the central authorities, through their responses, afforded a space of agency that came to be well known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following poor law amendment in 1834, unions of parishes bought enormous quantities of goods to feed and clothe their paupers. As institutional poor relief grew dramatically during the nineteenth century, the role of poor law unions as customers in their local economies expanded. Suppliers were not subject to central government's rules, so the unions to whom they sold enjoyed some freedom in their contractual arrangements – in stark contrast to the restrictions surrounding almost every other aspect of unions' practices. This enabled a unique business atmosphere to develop. Poor law procurement was therefore embedded in social, as well as economic, geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of a husband had adverse economic effects for the majority of Victorian women, but for working-class mothers the threat of destitution was an almost inevitable feature of widowhood. Widows, with some restrictions, were entitled to outdoor relief under the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), and they comprised the largest group of adult paupers outside of the workhouse well into the early twentieth century, outnumbered only and always by their children. Able-bodied widows therefore presented crucial opportunities for poor-law officials in the quest to minimize outdoor relief and make significant reductions in welfare spending. Focusing particularly on the 1830s, 1840s, and 1870s (the first decade of the so-called 'crusade' against out-relief), this article examines the competing discourses of deservingness and deception that dominated the representations and treatment of able-bodied widows in poor law legislation, orders, reports, and parliamentary debates. An uneasy combination of sympathy and suspicion shaped officials' treatment of these women, rendering them ambiguous figures in the dominant dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, potential drains on the economic prosperity of the state, threats to the nuclear family, and, by extension, a danger to the nation's moral core. These discourses, I suggest, reflect a wider ideological unease with, and attempts to mitigate and police, the widow's exceptional social status in Victorian Britain as a woman with sexual experience, potential economic independence, and yet no male guardian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malthus' very name is associated with pessimism-only somewhat undeservedly so. Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, appeared toward the end of a tumultuous decade in Great Britain. Where Adam Smith, in his 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, had imagined a commercial society harmoniously regulated by the operations of a self-regulating market generating self-sustaining growth, the vision of the economy which Malthus presented some two decades later was rather more grim, at least for the poor majority. Lacking a theoretical rigor on par with his peers, Malthus' Essay was nevertheless soon recognized as the second foundational work of Political Economy behind Smith's Inquiry. This paper will seek to situate Malthus in his time and will argue that his popularity with ruling landed elites is can be explained by their need for a champion in the debates on economic theory and by his round condemnation of the poor as the agents of their own suffering by overpopulating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of magistrates on one of the most critical areas of local government, the English welfare system. It does this by employing a micro-political survey of Gloucestershire parishes who implemented one specific welfare reform, Gilbert's Act 1782. It focuses on the interplay between parishes and particular local magistrates to illuminate the diverse impact justices had on welfare practice. This approach shows how the input of magistrates was highly variable and individualized. Magisterial intervention did not ensure strict compliance to statute, but rather application of relief reflected their 'discretion' in the implementation of the poor law, where they deigned to participate with it. By demonstrating magisterial influence was strategically and operationally applied, this article also suggests that the impact of justices was more pervasive than previously acknowledged and highlights the need for further research to reappraise understanding of the justices' role in Georgian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the linguistic landscape of the nineteenth-century Highlands through the lens of the labour market. It analyses a corpus of over 600 job advertisements seeking Gaelic speakers which appeared in the Inverness Courier between 1817 and 1899 and draws on a further 200 from selected years of the Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman. It examines the range of roles in which an ability to speak Gaelic, alongside English, was seen as either a necessity or advantageous by employers, considering in turn, education, health and social welfare, commerce, domestic service, law and order, estate and land, and the church. Some of the factors behind growing opportunities for skilled and semi-skilled Gaelic speakers are explored, such as the expansion of the health and welfare system in the wake of the 1845 Poor Law (Scotland) Act, and the accommodations made for the needs of Gaelic speakers when new roles were created. The continuing utility of Gaelic in Highland commerce also emerges as a counter to contemporary views of the language as unsuited for such transactional contexts. The evidence from these advertisements underlines the complexity of language usage in the Highlands in the nineteenth century as well as the need for further research to extend our understanding of the use of Gaelic in both public and private spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines challenges by three nineteenth-century Irish writers-Thomas Moore, William Maginn, and John Wilson Croker-to Harriet Martineau's prescriptions for their country. While these critics expressed legitimate concerns about Martineau's support for Malthusian ideas and her criticism of the Poor Laws, their concerns were overshadowed by male indignation at an alarmingly successful and transgressive woman writer. The Irish riposte against Martineau demonstrated not only the multifaceted nature of Irish writing in the nineteenth century, but also the misogyny attached to its eloquence and wit. Ultimately, Martineau bore the brunt of a cynical treatment that ridiculed her sex as a means to air Irish grievances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth-century Ireland saw the emergence of a campaign to have orphaned and abandoned children 'boarded out' from workhouses to live with families in return for payment. Despite growing anxiety about the unsuitability of workhouses for children, communities could show resistance to having these children, particularly those from urban workhouses, living in their own neighbourhood. Using the case of alleged abuse towards three children boarded out from Belfast workhouse to a family living in a remote rural townland, this paper explores the experience of, and attitudes towards, workhouse children boarded into rural communities. Using testimonies of neighbours and poor law officials at the resultant 1872 Poor Law inquiry, it examines the relationship between the children, their foster family, and the wider community and reveals the extent to which those families who took in workhouse children became subject to surveillance not just from welfare authorities but also from members of their community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the crucial role that ideas about race and slavery played in the formation of the Early Republic. Instead of highlighting, as have others, the paradoxical emergence of race-based slavery in a society devoted to freedom and liberty, Jason Young instead envisions this conflict as merely a more recent iteration of a much larger trans-Atlantic concern. The central conflicts of citizenship and alienation that were at the heart of key Constitutional debates in the Early Republic were also playing out in West Africa and Western Europe. Instead of reflecting novel problems of state, these debates animated political formations and conceptions long before they arrived on American shores. In this way, viewing the Early Republic through an African Diasporic lens promises new ways of thinking not only about slavery and abolition but also about the processes of nation-building around the Atlantic rim at the turn of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 18th century, back‐bench members of parliament played a critical role in creating social policy. This article provides a case study of the political campaigns of the Lichfield MP, Thomas Gilbert, and his attempts at a comprehensive reform of the poor law in 1765 and 1782. These individual endeavours were energetic, sophisticated, but unallied to a particular agenda or based on Gilbert's original perspectives. Instead, he harnessed the power of local interests and extra‐parliamentary forces, particularly magistrates, through the adept use of print culture in his later campaign to form social policy based on a broad political consensus. A skilled political operator, he used these same methods to help navigate his bills through parliament. To better fit the context, the campaigns were moulded around political expediency and influenced by the development of Gilbert's humanitarian reputation and the burgeoning of the press, parliamentary reporting, and political debate. The political environments of 1765 and 1782 were, therefore, different, and broader trends influenced the two campaigns. This article demonstrates the importance of the press to political campaigning and suggests that to be successful (in social policy at least) a would‐be reformer was required to engage with a developing participatory political culture. However, given Gilbert's approach, the importance of ideology as a basis for social reform in an 18th‐century context is questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of childbirth in England has gained increasing momentum, but no studies have been carried out for Wales, and therefore the nature of childbirth in early modern Wales remains largely unknown. This article seeks to redress this imbalance in two ways: First, by examining Welsh parish, court and ecclesiastical records for evidence of those who attended parturient women. This evidence demonstrates that Welsh midwives were not a homogeneous group who shared a common status and experience, but were a diverse mix of practitioners drawn from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Secondly, by assessing the care these practitioners provided to some of the most marginalised in Welsh society: unmarried pregnant women. Parish resources were limited, and poor law provision often covered only what was considered absolutely necessary. Analysis of what was deemed essential for the safe delivery of illegitimate infants provides a revealing glimpse of to the 'ceremony of childbirth' in eighteenth-century Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of the Report of the Care of Children Committee in 1946 was a pivotal moment for the out-of-home care of children in Britain. With its key recommendations implemented in the 1948 Children Act and the creation of bodies such as the Central Training Council in Child Care and the Home Office's Advisory Council on Child Care, the report also had wider public significance in associating progressive approaches to child-care with the emerging post-war welfare state. This article argues that the creation of the Curtis Committee was far from inevitable and resulted from the inter-play of the growing recognition of the problems associated with a fragmented legislative and administrative framework for children's care and a successful public campaign to reform standards in residential child-care which created the political conditions in which the Labour Government felt obliged to establish a formal Committee of Inquiry. The degree of interest that these processes generated in the Committee's work led to its final report receiving substantial public attention. Although its effects as a mechanism of policy change were uneven, the context through which the report was produced meant that it became a significant benchmark for child-care standards in the emerging post-war welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malthus was severely critical of the old poor law, especially when the payments paid to recipients were made in conformity to the principles adopted by the local magistrates in Speenhamland in 1795. He considered that it encouraged early and improvident marriage with unfortunate consequences. There have been a number of attempts to determine whether Malthus was justified in supposing that the old poor law had this effect, some concluding that he was correct in his assumption, others that he was mistaken. The information contained in the first four English censuses did not include a breakdown of the population by age, sex, and marital status, and therefore did not provide a basis for a definitive test of Malthus's assertion before the repeal of the old poor law in 1834. The 1851 census, however, did provide this breakdown for five-year age groups which makes it possible to compare marriage patterns in counties in which a large proportion of the male workforce were 'peasants' (Malthus's term for agricultural labourers), and the Speenhamland provisions were widely adopted, with other counties. The results show that Malthus was mistaken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically analyses how overarching policy goals and practices surrounding access and entitlement to health care (HC) have been dominated by a conflicting system of libertarian and equity‐based principles. We examine how this mixed‐motives system originated and the importance of policy legacies inherited from the Poor Laws era in shaping modern conceptions of access and entitlement to HC. We also considered how these determined the scope of state intervention in this policy domain. Drawing on empirical evidence and interviews with key stakeholders in Irish health policy, we explored the appetite to engage in meaningful HC reforms that address the growing gaps of inequity between higher and lower socio‐economic groups in society. Rather than emulating European counterpartsapos; emphasis on universal coverage within an egalitarian paradigm, Irish policy actors have sought to instill a spirit of fairness in HC delivery. Under the guise of equality of opportunity and equity, the policy focus has centred on directing publicly funded HC towards lower‐income groups and the most vulnerable in Irish society. However, we argue that the operation of the mixed‐motives structure has also created conflict and policy ambiguity surrounding overarching goals which frame the governance and consumption of HC in Ireland. This is evidenced by the dysfunction and complexity of the two‐tier system of public‐versus‐private access to HC services. Ultimately, we argue that the policy aspirations of equality that underpin the HC structures surrounding access and entitlement should be revisited to achieve greater health outcomes and create a more equal society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]