Abstract
THIS is necessarily a very condensed account of the background to, and the past and present controversies surrounding, those events which led to and influenced the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The latter in turn conditioned the aims, if not always the practice, of the Victorian Poor Law in general. The topic is, therefore, one of primary importance in English social history. It is also one which has been subject to widely differing emphases in interpretation, and which, as regards general agreement, has found no consensus even at the present time.
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Notes
The best account of parish administration and traditions, outside the massive work of the Webbs, is that by W. E. Tate in The Parish Chest (3rd edn., 1960), especially in the Introduction, pp. 1–35.
Relevant portions of this Act of Parliament are quoted verbatim in Bland, Brown and Tawney , English Economic History: Select Documents (1914, and later edns.), pp. 380–1.
A valuable account of the law and practice relating to settlement is in E. Lipson, The Economic History of England, vol. III (1947), pp. 457–69 and 533–5. See also D. Marshall, ‘The Old Poor Law’, Economic History Review, VIII, 1937, p. 43 and passim, and the same author, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century (1926).
For examples, see E. M. Hampson in Victoria County History for Cambs., Vol. II, p. 97; J. D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century (2nd edn., 1965), p. 243; S. and B. Webb, English Poor Law History. Part I, The Old Poor Law (1927), p. 87; Lipson, op cit., III, pp. 479 and 481–2.
See A. W. Coats, ‘Economic Thought and Poor Law Policy in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XIII (1960), pp. 39–51.
This example, given by Sir Frederick Morton Eden in The State of the Poor (1797, 1928 abridged edition), p. 195, is from Newton Valence in Hampshire. As local historical research proceeds, it is likely that many other variants of the allowance system will be revealed.
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© 1985 The Economic History Society
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Marshall, J.D. (1985). Introduction. In: The Old Poor Law, 1795–1834. Studies in Economic and Social History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08267-4_1
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