‘Virtue’ and the poor law in Britain and Ireland in the 1830s

John Offer

doi:10.46692/9781847421487.003

Rethinking the poor law

It is nearly 60 years since the demise of poor law legislation in 1948, though workhouse buildings (already then designated public assistance institutions) survived longer, sometimes to this day, with new functions within health and social service provision. At least one is a ‘heritage’ icon (Southwell in Nottinghamshire, owned by the National Trust). Within historical studies the poor law still receives reassessment (Brundage, 1978; Digby, 1978; Dunkley, 1982; Neuman, 1982; Crowther, 1983; Mandler, 1990; and Harris, 1992). Within social policy studies, however, the ‘moral defects’ of poor law practice and theory tend to be emphasised, in contrast to the enlightenment embodied in the new legislation enacted in the 1940s on health provision, social security, education and the care of children, though there are exceptions such as Deacon (1981, 1982) and Pinker (1964). Histories of a discipline from ‘within’ tend to be conceptualised as stepping stones towards the present-day key achievements and concerns (Lewis, 1995). This chapter sets out to avoid this tendency and draws into the picture some wider interpretative concerns relating to the poor law, particularly its theoretical sources. As Edward Norman observed:

After a long bleak interlude, historians are once more beginning to take the religious issues in nineteenth-century England seriously. For decades ‘secular’ historians have tended to regard the incidence of Christian belief, where they have come across it either in the lives of particular statesmen or in social groups, as a fringe cultural phenomenon, perhaps useful as a matter of social control. What they have not perceived as of importance in the modern world has not seemed to them, as noticed in the immediate past, as much more than the lingering evidence of a discarded order. When Morley, for example, wrote his famous biography of Gladstone he could not, as an atheist, bring himself to regard Gladstone's religious priorities as real priorities. The result, with an enduring legacy, was a depiction of Gladstone as a moralist (for atheists can understand moral priorities) rather than a man motivated by a religious view of the world. (1987, p 56)

However, as explained in the Introduction, this chapter is also designed to contribute to an intellectual framework that, it will be contended, assists us in making new sense of conceptions of the individual user of services in social policy and social policy studies in the twentieth century and beyond.

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