Here is a recent article that reflects my current interests. If you wish a version with footnotes, please e-mail me.
Anthony Brundage
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Historians of the English poor laws have paid relatively little attention to the parallel history of philanthropy. Most poor law histories make passing reference to a supposed phase of benevolence in the eighteenth century, characterized by compassionate private giving, before concentrating on the efforts to transform and tighten up public relief beginning in the 1790s, leading to the enactment of the New Poor Law in 1834. Private charity tends to be largely ignored until the emergence of the Charity Organization Society in 1869 and its partnership with poor law authorities in the campaign to terminate outdoor relief. Overall, the public sector has drawn considerably more scholarly attention than the private. Frank Prochaska has noted the reluctance of historians to study "practices redolent of hierarchical values and now unfashionable pieties" and has further detected a certain Whiggishness in histories of charity, "a tendency to see philanthropy as a stage in the history of the welfare state." Geoffrey Finalyson has recently amplified the latter criticism, making the Whiggish tendency to view philanthropy as a passing phase on the way to ever expanding public services the major fallacy to be attacked in his revisionist account of the history of public and private provision for the poor.
Both writers make a strong case for studying philanthropy in order to better comprehend the history of modern British society. It might be added that the history of the poor law itself can be better understood by integrating with it the history of charitable giving. While it is true that the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of 1832-34 and the resulting Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had relatively little to say on the subject, charity and public relief were in fact closely intertwined in the complex intellectual and social background to the New Poor Law, as well as in the implementation of the statute. This paper will explore some of these connections, and consider how they might illuminate the current debate over social policy.
The English Poor Law, born at the end of the sixteenth century out of a socioeconomic crisis engendered by the transition to early modern capitalism, had become a time-honored fixture of local government by the eighteenth century. Each parish was responsible for the maintenance of its settled poor, with oversight by the magistrates of the district. In the absence of central government supervision (the activist Privy Council of Charles I's day having fallen into disuse), a great variety of relief practices were to be found throughout the country. In spite of this variety, there was general agreement that the central purpose of public relief was the maintenance of a well-ordered society and a reduction in numbers of those vagrants and "masterless men" whose proliferation had first moved Elizabeth's parliament to act. The private charities of the era, though driven by a wide array of personal, humanitarian, and pious motives, shared the poor law's concern with social control. Many of them also sought to strengthen the sinews of national power. A mercantilist, pre-Malthusian concern to foster an increase of a healthy population and thus augment the labor force and military is a marked feature of the voluntary charities of the eighteenth century. Institutions like Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital and Jonas Hanway's Marine Society, in addition to saving lives and reforming character, also sought to add to the number of "useful hands," especially in the merchant marine and navy.
As mercantilism came under increasing fire in the latter half of the century, there was a corollary movement to reform both the poor laws and charity. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, while certainly the best-known assault on mercantilist economics, did not represent a radical assault on either the poor laws or philanthropy. Smith had no quarrel with a system of mandatory public relief, his strictures being confined to the inhibition of labor mobility represented by the laws of settlement. Attacks on both the poor laws and philanthropy, however, became a marked feature of the period after 1780. Edmund Burke's condemnation of the poor laws, in his Reflections on the French Revolution, was based on the premise that mandatory assessment deadened the spirit of voluntary giving, thus undermining social virtue. Burke's argument, although anticipated almost a century earlier by Sir Francis Brewster, had much greater resonance in the 1790s because of the specter of revolutionary upheaval.
Counter-revolutionary anxieties also contributed to the fervent acceptance of Thomas Malthus's views, though Malthus went considerably beyond Burke by condemning charity as well as poor relief for fueling a demographic catastrophe. The Essay on Population (1798), by injecting a supposedly scientific rigor into the discussion, became the major text brandished by those seeking to reduce if not eliminate both poor relief and charity. While Malthus was somewhat more cautious than many of his avid disciples in his condemnation of the poor laws in general and the allowance system in particular, and moderated his views considerably for the revised edition of 1803, the pessimistic message was the one that stuck. The Malthusians came to believe that poor laws and charity alike were bad policy, and the de-moralizing of political economy was the necessary antidote to harmful laws and sentimental giving.
The trajectory of thinking represented by the work of Smith, Burke, and Malthus seemed to point to abolition of the poor law and a severe curtailment of philanthropy. Indeed, during the first two decades of the nineteenth century this seemed the most likely outcome, at least in regard to the poor laws. Abolitionism was the most prominent strain in the numerous publications devoted to the topic, as well as in parliamentary discussions. That this did not occur is due to many factors. One is the recognition that too dramatic a reduction in traditional relief, public or private, might trigger revolution. Mitchell Dean may well be correct in his assertion that a foundationalist defense of the right of the poor to adequate relief, found in writers like William Paley, was of quite recent origin, and emerged only in response to abolitionist arguments. Nonetheless, it was an argument quickly embraced by spokesmen for the poor like William Cobbett. It was also an argument brandished by such Establishment propagandists as Hannah More, who pointed out that English workers had no need of revolution because they enjoyed a well-established right to sustenance under the poor laws as well as being beneficiaries of a sturdy tradition of gentry paternalism.
As an Evangelical, Hannah More was concerned not only to keep the poor quietly in their place, but to engage with them and bring about their moral regeneration. Evangelicalism was profoundly activist, fueling the campaign for the abolition of evils like slavery and working for the expansion of a certain kind of charitable activity. Evangelicals were devoted to the reformation of character and tended to believe that traditional almsgiving was a bounty on idleness and profligacy, but their critique of philanthropy was significantly different from that of the Malthusians. The latter were disposed to consider all giving as pernicious, to distance themselves from the poor and to allow market forces to effect a wholesome discipline. Evangelicals, with their intense Christian emotionalism, were eager to increase their involvement in the lives of the poor. This attitude tended to spill over into poor law reform, thus blunting the thrust of the abolitionist movement.
If Evangelicalism was loathe to withdraw from the lives of the poor, so, in a very different way, was Utilitarianism. In considering the impact of this intellectual system, it is useful to look beyond the work of Jeremy Bentham and his disciples. While Benthamism provided the central ideological core, there were many eighteenth century writers and political figures who demonstrated a similar concern to reform government and law along rational lines. An example is the poor law reformer and MP Thomas Gilbert. Gilbert's Act of 1782 (22 Geo. III, c. 83) allowed the grouping of parishes into unions in which workhouses were to be used exclusively for children, the aged, and the infirm. Though often cited for its humanitarian provisions, Gilbert's Act was even more important in expanding the area of pauper management and attempting to bring the gentry into closer involvement in poor relief administration. His statute of 1786 (26 Geo. III, c. 58) supplemented an act of the same session (22 Geo. III, c. 56), requiring that parishes furnish accurate figures on both poor law expenditure and charitable payments to the poor during the previous three years. These Gilbert Returns are of considerable significance, both because they denote the close connection in the minds of reformers between public and private giving, and because they represent the attempt to legislate on the basis of quantifiable data. The figures were widely cited by reformers, and the entire Gilbert returns were reprinted in 1810 and 1816. An accumulating body of more-or-less reliable statistics, coupled with a belief in the efficacy of reforming legislation, served further to thwart the momentum of poor law abolition.
Bentham's ideas offered the most original, if not necessarily the most practical way of legislating the country forward to a sound system of poor relief. Many of his contemporaries were intrigued by his assertion that the reformational functions of a new kind of workhouse (Panopticon) could operate in harness with money-saving methods of organization, a squaring of the circle that pointed away from the gloomy quietism of hard-core Malthusianism. His original scheme called for a farming out of poor relief functions by government to a private contractor, which he of course intended to be his own company. It was a plan that combined governmental and free market activity, interweaving public and private sectors of giving. It was no accident that Bentham called his proposed run-for-profit poor relief organization the National Charity Company. In the event, a skeptical parliament and ministry balked at such an innovation, and Bentham's later plans for poor law reform were more along the lines of establishing new government agencies to superintend more rigorous methods of relief. In spite of this reversion to somewhat less unorthodox ideas of reform, Benthamism retained some of its earlier visionary quality, inspiring an activist legislative program.
The first decades of the nineteenth century saw key Benthamites pressing for reform in both charity and the poor law system. Henry Brougham, barrister, Whig MP, and one of the founders of the reformist Edinburgh Review, campaigned aggressively for a rational reordering of the centuries-old jumble of testamentary and voluntary philanthropy. Brougham's campaign, based in part on the recently reprinted Gilbert returns, exemplified the utilitarian spirit--&emdash;the determination to avoid all sentimentality in the drive to fashion institutions suitable to a modern commercial, industrial society. His early focus was on educational charities, and in 1816 he moved for a Select Committee on the Education of the Poor in the Metropolis. The original Select Committee gave way to the Charity Commissioners in 1818, and the inquiry quickly burgeoned into a great survey covering all endowed charities, an enterprise that would take twenty years and fill forty volumes. An example of the ill-conceived endowments brought to light by the Commissioners, resulting, it was claimed, in flagrant abuses and demoralization of the poor, was the Jarvis Bequest. In 1793 George Jarvis, piqued by his daughter's marriage, left a fortune of over £100,00 to the poor of three Herefordshire parishes, whose total population was under 900. It took many years of legal and political wrangling before even a partial solution to this abuse was worked out by special legislation in 1852. Their untiring efforts show that the Benthamites, sometimes derided for their excessive individualism, saw themselves as defenders of the public interest against eccentric individuals like George Jarvis.
The Charity Commissioners, under the control of Brougham and other reformers, used their annual reports to propagandize in behalf of bringing system and rigor to charitable giving. On the surface, some of their comments appear very close to the Malthusian mistrust of the philanthropic impulse. Their 1823 report, for example, declared:
A person may be endowed with a heart 'overflowing with the milk of human kindness,' and be the occasion of much more extensive mischief than the most hardened villain. The laws in any tolerably governed state limit the powers of the latter, but the former unfortunately is often encouraged in his career by the approbation of all in whose opinion he desires to stand well. Such a man by an indiscriminate alms-giving may be the promoter of idleness and beggary, the patron of deception and vice, and so far as he holds out a premium for what is bad, an actual diminisher of the sum of good.
Yet, while the report does go on to express some alarm about philanthropy's inducement to the growth of surplus population, there is also a guardedly hopeful belief in the efficacy of education operating in harness with discriminating, well-informed giving. Most importantly, the Commissioners strove to remove the dead hand of ill-advised or obsolete testamentary bequests, redirecting substantial sums to more useful charitable purposes. Such a program required strong government, not a retreat into laissez-faire platitudes.
In addition to the work of the Charity Commissioners, there were in the early nineteenth century numerous local initiatives to bring order out of the chaotic world of private charity. The most important strategies adopted in these years were the relief ticket and district visiting. One of the earliest organizations to employ the ticket system was the Mendicity Society. To counter the sometimes menacing importunings of London's beggars, subscribers were given relief tickets to distribute. These in turn had to be presented at the society's headquarters in Red Lion Square, upon which a close inquiry would be made into the pauper's circumstances. Only after satisfying themselves that relief would have a salutary effect would the society's officer proceed to grant relief, often in kind. Not surprisingly, many of the indigent refused to submit to such scrutiny. Systematic inquiry into the character of relief applicants, which was to be such a marked feature of mid-Victorian organized charity, was thus becoming established a couple of generations earlier. So was district visiting, an even more rigorous and intrusive method of investigation.
The most significant figure in the development of the visiting movement was the Rev. Thomas Chalmers. As minister of St. John's, Glasgow in the early 1820s, Chalmers instituted a system in which visitors penetrated every street and alley and came to know many of the inhabitants of one of the worst slums in the country. Only with such detailed firsthand knowledge, he argued, could wise and socially responsible decisions be made about the granting of relief. The Select Committee on the Irish Poor Law in 1830 asked him to present evidence concerning his methods, which by that time had begun to spread to other philanthropic bodies. In 1828, a variety of Evangelical organizations joined in a General Society for Promoting District Visiting, which in a short time boasted 573 visitors making 165,000 calls annually.
Another Scotsman to exercise great influence on questions relating to poverty and poor relief was Patrick Colquhoun. A Glasgow merchant and founder of the Chamber of Commerce in that city, Colquhoun became a London police magistrate and wrote on a wide array of social issues. In his Treatise on Indigence (1806), he stressed the difference between poverty and indigence, pointing out that the former was the natural state of mankind and the source of wealth and civilization. Undiscriminating charity, far from alleviating indigence, had simply wasted vast sums and demoralized the poor. Colquhoun's stress on more rigorous relief under the poor law, coupled with his call for a professional police, make him an important forerunner of Edwin Chadwick and the reformers of the 1830s.
The crucial influence of Chalmers and Colquhoun was part of a wider pattern in which Scotland came increasingly to be looked to as a model for wholesome practices in the treatment of indigence. The Scottish Poor Law recommended itself to English reformers because it avoided the evils of mandatory assessment and relief. In Scotland, a poor relief fund was gathered by voluntary donations in each church, sometimes supplemented by parochial assessments, and was dispensed by a committee of the kirk sessions and the principal heritors [landowners]. Paupers in Scotland could thus lay no claim to a foundationalist right to relief, and complete discretion was accorded to those administering the fund. In the eyes of reformers, it was a well-nigh perfect blend of discriminating private charity and local authority, further enhanced by giving a key role to major landowners. When poor law reform was being debated in 1817, Lord Castlereagh, a leading member of the cabinet, told the House of Commons that England should try to emulate Scotland, though he admitted that a wholesale adoption of the Scottish system would be tantamount to abolition and was therefore impracticable. Nevertheless, the Scottish Poor Law influenced the fashioning of the Select Vestries Acts of 1818-19 (58 Geo. III, c. 69 and 59 Geo. III, c. 12) by which large landowners gained significant powers over poor relief in those parishes where the acts were adopted.
That such piecemeal changes as the Select Vestries Acts gave way to the impetus for sweeping reform in the 1830s is due to two factors. One was the perception of widespread social breakdown in the countryside represented by the Captain Swing riots of 1830-31. The other was the coming to power of a Whig ministry, thus making it possible for Chadwick and other Benthamites to play a central role in fashioning the New Poor Law. Yet, while recognizing the pivotal role of Chadwick, as well as that of the economist Nassau Senior, on the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, it is important to appreciate the influence of other commissioners - the Evangelical Bishop of Chester (and later Archbishop of Canterbury) John Bird Summer, the Bishop of London, C. J. Blomfield, an activist in the visiting movement, and the poor law reformer William Sturges-Bourne, architect of the Select Vestries Acts.
With such an array of Benthamites, Evangelicals, charity activists, and practical reformers drawn from the ranks of country gentlemen, reform of the poor laws was highly unlikely to be a purely ideological contrivance. This becomes more obvious when we consider that any bill would have to pass muster before an extremely aristocratic cabinet and a parliament in which the power of the landed interest was still preponderant. The continuing influence of Malthus's ideas led some contemporaries, as it later caused some historians, to assume that the New Poor Law was largely an act of applied Malthusianism. For example, William Otter, the Bishop of Chichester who published an appreciative "Memoir" to the second edition of Malthus's Principle of Political Economy in 1836, claimed that the Essay on Population and the New Poor Law "stand or fall together. They have the same friends and the same enemies, and the relations they bear to each other, of theory and practice, are admirably calculated to afford mutual illumination and support." This is a considerable exaggeration. While a measure of Malthusian thinking was not incompatible with Utilitarian or Evangelical principles, the activist and sometimes ameliorative dynamic inherent in both systems cut the other way. Chadwick, the Benthamite voice of the Royal Commission, never tired of protesting the great gulf between his views and those of the Malthusians, even though many of the New Poor Law's opponents insisted that the act was designed to decrease the "surplus population."
The Royal Commission concentrated its inquiries on the poor law system proper, drawing upon an abundance of evidence, both statistical and anecdotal. Private charity was not altogether ignored, but no single section of the Commission's Report of 1834 was devoted to the topic. Instead, there are scattered references to the evils of profuse, undiscriminating charity throughout the reports of some of the individual assistant commissioners. The greatest amount of space accorded to philanthropy is found in the report of Chadwick himself, during his tenure as an assistant commissioner for London and Berkshire. He chose to highlight the alleged breakdown of family life and increase in social pathologies created by the Spitalfields charities, both endowed and voluntary, which served as a magnet for paupers from far and wide. Commenting on his findings a couple of years later, Chadwick noted:
Éif any trustee of a public charity for the distribution of doles, instead of distributing the substance as intended, consumed it in good cheer for himself and friends; andÉany trustee of a charity for foundlings, instead of applying the substance to those purposes, kept a mistress with it, [he] really produced less mischief with such a course of proceeding, as compared with a literal administration of the trust, and was pro tanto a benefactor to the public.
Chadwick's report was the most prominent in the one-volume collection of extracts that the Whig government rushed into print in 1833 to help prepare the ground for legislative action.
In spite of such material, when the time came to draw up their final report, the Royal Commission preferred to dodge the issue of what to do with the still sprawling mass of unreformed charities. After a couple of paragraphs describing in general terms the pernicious effects of many charitable trusts and voluntary funds, they concluded:
These charities, in the districts where they abound, may interfere with the efficacy of the measures we have recommended [regarding the poor laws], and on this ground, though aware that we should not be justified in offering any specific recommendation with respect to them, we beg to suggest that they call for the attention of the Legislature.
The statute as finally approved by both houses and signed into law by the king in August 1834 (4 & 5 Will. IV, c. 76) contained only one section (Clause 85) pertaining to charity, giving the Poor Law Commissioners the power to call for returns of any charitable trust established for the relief of the poor.
The newly appointed three-man Poor Law Commission, with Chadwick, much to his dismay, as secretary rather than full commissioner, took office at the end of 1834. Their powers had been substantially reduced during the bill's passage, and the statute's implementation was necessarily often a matter of negotiation with local elites on such issues as poor law union boundaries, appointment of local poor law officials, and the regulation of outdoor relief. Parliament had seen fit to grant the Commission only a five-year term. By the time that expired in 1839, it was renewed only on a year-to-year basis until the amending legislation of 1847, which transformed the Commission into the Poor Law Board, one of whose members was to have a seat in Parliament. Such reluctance grew out of the act's unpopularity, especially in the depressed north, as well as the desire of local elites to run their boards of guardians with as little interference as possible from London. Given their rather tentative status, the Poor Law Commissioners were not disposed to demand sweeping new powers, or even to press forward vigorously with the ones they possessed. Nonetheless, the dreaded workhouses spread across the land, and were employed with deterrent rigor by local boards. Coupled with a policy of more discriminating outdoor relief, this resulted in a substantial reduction of expenditures in the first years of operation, to the delight of the nation's ratepayers.
In regard to governmental efforts at charitable reform, the New Poor Law served as something of a model. In 1835 a Select Committee on Public Charities recommended that all endowed charities be superintended by a three-man board similar in structure and authority to the Poor Law Commissioners, though this was not implemented for nearly two decades. The Select Committee's final report, issued in six parts between 1837 and 1840, was quickly dubbed "Domesday Book" for its thoroughness. In this it bore a close resemblance to the massive survey on the poor laws undertaken by the Royal Commission from 1832 to 1834. Finally, in 1853 a permanent supervisory body of four commissioners (three of them paid) was established by the Charitable Trusts Act (16 & 17 Vict., c. 137). The powers of these new Charity Commissioners, however, were considerably more circumscribed than those of the Poor Law Commissioners, and only two inspectors were authorized by the legislation. In the halting, cautious manner of the early Victorian state, poor law and charity reform were operating on parallel tracks, though there was little cooperation between the agencies. Early on, friction developed when the Poor Law Commissioners authorized the sale of parish property held in trust for the poor, and subsequently they sought the approval of the Charity Commissioners in doubtful cases.
Yet, while at the level of central administration, early Victorian poor relief and charity tended to be separate spheres, they were intertwined in the minds of many of those who administered the poor laws, especially at the local level. Not many able-bodied laborers were likely to have characterized the New Poor Law as paternalist. All too often, their application to a board of guardians was met by an "offer of the House." Even those who were kept on outdoor relief were apt to find it reduced in amount and offered partly in kind. However, large numbers of pauper applicants were aged, infirm, and children, and these were often treated humanely. Thus the workhouse wore two aspects: "Bastille" to some, place of refuge to others. As David Roberts puts it, the workhouse "combined that mixture of severe discipline and kindly benevolence in those local spheres where squire and parson thought they could distinguish between the unworthy and worthy poor." Such discrimination was a far cry from the supposedly "self-acting" nature of the workhouse test, and represented a strategy that had much more in common with private charity than it did with Benthamite doctrines of poor relief.
Examples of poor law paternalism abound. In Sussex, local boards contrived, in the face of Poor Law Commission directives to the contrary, to take some children into the workhouse so that the rest of the family could remain in their cottage, to offer generous medical relief, and to serve roast beef and plum pudding to workhouse residents on Christmas Day. Similar indulgences were granted in Wiltshire. In Northamptonshire, several boards allowed daily excursions outside by workhouse inmates, improved upon the official dietaries, and allowed elderly couples to sleep together in the workhouse. In Nottinghamshire, the doctrinaire Assistant Poor Law Commissioner for the area, Edward Gulson, tried to get the boards to stop outdoor relief altogether. Not only did they refuse, but a separate private relief fund was raised to offset the effects of trade depression, to which the chairman of the Basford Board of Guardians personally contributed £100. On another occasion, Gulson tried unsuccessfully to prevent gifts of tea and tobacco from being given to workhouse inmates, exclaiming: "Charity and compulsory maintenance of the destitute ought never to be mixed together&emdash;each stands upon a different principle.É" It is certainly important to keep in mind the deep hostility many of the poor felt toward the New Poor Law, not only in the agitated north, but even in relatively "quiet" rural areas. Yet it is equally important to recognize the benevolent tendencies of some local officials, and their refusal to accept that absolute divorce of charity and poor relief urged by doctrinaire central officials like Gulson or Chadwick.
Close cooperation between local poor law authorities and charitable organizations was also a hallmark of the early Victorian period. It became an increasingly common practice, for example, for boards of guardians to place certain categories of pauper in specialist institutions run by private charities. The mentally ill and other classes of the indigent were thus being maintained at public expense in private facilities, with guardians periodically conducting inspection tours to insure adequate treatment. Representatives of charities also had some access to poor law institutions, the most notable activity being that of the Workhouse Visiting Society. The women visitors of this organization donated money and time to improve the internal arrangements and comforts of workhouses; their activities ranged from decorating to distributing toys to establishing libraries. Visitors also assisted in training workhouse girls for domestic service and finding employment for them when they reached puberty. It is important also to bear in mind the considerable overlap in certain districts between the personnel on public and private agencies. As Norman McCord has commented:
It wouldÉgive a misleading picture to suppose that the official Poor Law machinery and unofficial philanthropy existed in two different spheres.ÉThose who sat as Poor Law guardians would very often be the same people who sat on the committees which controlled schools, hospitals, and dispensaries, and the other varied forms of charitable organizations.É
The massive and prolonged trade depression of the 1840s, coupled with the precariousness of the Poor Law Commission, insured that there would be little tampering with the wide discretion allowed to local boards of guardians. Numerous exceptions were permitted to the prohibition on outdoor relief to the able-bodied, and an Outdoor Labour Test was used in place of the workhouse test in a number of unions, especially in the towns. Even with the return of better times and their more secure footing after being transformed into the Poor Law Board in 1847, the central authority continued to display little initiative. Private philanthropy, meanwhile, continued a spectacular expansion. In London alone, 279 charities were established in the first half of the nineteenth century; a further 144 were added in the 1850s. The royal family, always a major player in the philanthropic world, became even more central in the 1840s, thanks largely to the unstinting efforts of Prince Albert.
That relatively little progress toward abolishing outdoor relief to the ablebodied had been accomplished by either the Poor Law Commission of the Poor Law Board had a good deal to do with the economics of poor relief. Niggardly outrelief, at an average expenditure of about 2 s. a head per week, cost only a third as much as maintaining someone in the workhouse. The 1860s saw outdoor relief rise by a further 25 percent, with the ratio of outdoor paupers to total population increasing from 1 in 27 to 1 in 25. As Gareth Stedman Jones has shown, by 1860 the East End of London, with its demoralized and poverty-stricken masses, was seen as being in a state of crisis, exacerbated by the withdrawal of the middle class from the district. East End boards of guardians, mainly from the class of small shopkeepers, lacked vigorous leadership, while large charitable funds originating in the West End were squandered without any thought of the consequences. A growing impatience with such a state of affairs make this decade an important watershed in the history of relief.
J.G. Fitch, an educational writer and inspector of schools, complained in 1869 that the poor law had utterly lost whatever deterrence it once possessed. The workhouse was no longer shunned, and the ablebodied made heavy use of the casual ward. These difficulties, he charged, were compounded "by professional almoners, and by the encouragement given to beggars." Florence Nightingale had already made the same point more vividly by quoting with approval an unidentified French "administrateur":
We cannot understand your English laws&emdash;you have a Poor Law-&emdash;you pay rates for your child paupers to be educated&emdash;for your sick paupers to be housed and doctored in places called workhouses, etc. etc. And then you subscribe to private charities to take your paupers out of the power of the Poor Law. If you do the one, why do you do the other? Would it not be cheaper to see that the two work in the same direction? -
Nightingale also praised Thomas Chalmers's administration at Glasgow, and the Scottish system in general&emdash;a hearkening back to early nineteenth century efforts to tighten up relief and coordinate the poor law and charity.
Such outcries clearly pointed the way to a new era of partnership between poor law authorities and charitable organizations to avoid working at cross-purposes. Close cooperation had indeed already begun on an ad hoc basis. During the 1862-1865 Lancashire Cotton Famine, occasioned by the Union's blockade of the South in the Civil War, the massive unemployment in the region produced a crisis. The Poor Law Board worked closely with charitable organizations in the cotton-spinning districts, dispatching a special commissioner, H.B. Farnell, to Lancashire to organize the relief efforts in conjunction with philanthropic leaders. Initiatives to coordinate the welter of individual charities was also a marked feature of the decade. In Liverpool, William Rathbone's efforts resulted in the amalgamation of three relief agencies into the Central Relief Board. Similar coordination was achieved by the Edinburgh Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor (1867). The London Association for the Prevention of Pauperism and Crime (1868) reflected most accurately in its name the intense anxiety about the relationship between lax poor relief and social pathology.
The Minute issued by G.J. Goschen, President of the Poor Law Board, at the end of 1869, brought many of these matters to a head. He sought to restart the campaign against outdoor relief by close cooperation with organized charity, initially in London metropolitan poor law unions. Three East End Unions&emdash;St. George's in the East, Whitechapel, and Stepney&emdash;agreed to stop all outdoor relief immediately, with charitable agencies relieving only those applicants considered "redeemable." That Goschen and the three boards of guardians were able to act so decisively is due to the fact that a major organizational breakthrough had been achieved earlier in 1869: the formation of the Charity Organization Society. The COS had already lobbied the Poor Law Board for such action and some of its members had secured election as poor law guardians. To underscore the new spirit of cooperation, Goschen himself became a vice-president of the COS .
The ideas and methods of Thomas Chalmers provided the most important model for leaders of the campaign against outdoor relief. C.S. Loch, who became secretary of the COS in 1875, frequently invoked Chalmers's doctrine that social distress was caused by individual character flaws. To insure that only the "deserving" poor would receive any relief outside the workhouse, the COS instituted the casework method, an important step towards the professionalizing of social work. By coordinating their investigations with the local boards of guardians, the COS would insure that the "house" was offered only to the undeserving. In effect, the COS would administer a test of character, which was provided by the case study, while the guardians would offer a test of destitution by a simple offer of the workhouse, as envisaged in Chadwick's original plan. The former would be the result of minute investigation into every aspect of the applicant's character and circumstances; the latter would be "self-acting." Not only was COS casework much more thorough and intrusive than the investigations of earlier visiting societies, their definition of what constituted good character was much stricter. It was no longer a question of weeding out the obviously dissolute, drunk, or work-shy. The 1876 annual report of the COS specified those contingencies which it was the obligation of the individual to make prudent provision for: temporary sickness, unemployment, early marriage, a large family, and old age. Failure to make such provision could be construed as evidence of character deficiencies, thus, in theory at least, consigning the applicant to the "undeserving" category and the tender mercies of the poor law.
In practice, the collaboration between poor law guardians and the COS was very uneven. It was quite close in Stepney, Whitechapel, Camberwell, and Marylebone; a number of Marylebone guardians were COS members. Outside London, too, certain unions were, in the eyes of the COS, models of strict administration and close cooperation: Newcastle, Darlington, Durham, and West Hartlepool. Unions in which there was little or no cooperation were, however, much more common. The most striking characteristic to emerge from a study of poor law-COS relations in the northeast is the extreme variability, even in adjoining unions, and the modest achievements even in the most "advanced" unions. A recent, comprehensive survey of COS activities outside London finds that provincial COSs were not only ineffective in the campaign against outdoor relief, but that, contrary to the claims of COS propaganda, they signally failed to assist the "deserving" poor.
In the end, the campaign to abolish outdoor relief failed to achieve its objectives, though Karel Williams's work suggests that, for a considerable time, the campaign by poor law authorities was much more effective than is often recognized. There are several reasons for the failure of the campaign. Most importantly, the policies being deployed were utterly unable to grapple with the effects of the trade cycles and mass unemployment of a mature capitalist system, or indeed with many of the "ordinary" crises of modern urban life. Other factors, however, were at work as well, including the impact of democratization and collectivism in the political sphere, professionalization of both the poor law and charitable services, and the persistence of non-doctrinaire habits and impulses among the public.
It is true that the working class entertained considerable suspicions about an activist state, and that their direct attempts to shape more liberal welfare policies began only after the formation of the Labour Party. Yet Liberals and Conservatives themselves were undergoing ideological shifts after 1867. The Tories, inspired by Disraelian paternalism, embarked on new initiatives in social amelioration in such fields as housing. Within the Liberal Party, the development of the more activist New Liberals, inspired by the corporatist, communitarian values of T.H. Green and reflected in the Settlement House movement, pointed away from the orthodoxies of 1834 or the COS. In relation to poor law administration, major changes were evident by the 1880s. Joseph Chamberlain, President of the Local Government Board in 1886, issued a circular calling on municipal councils to provide works programs for the unemployed, thus adding a third force to the poor law and charity. The Local Government Act of 1894 (56 & 57 Vict., c.73) democratized poor law elections, bringing about an end to strict policies in many unions. By the end of the century, Poor Law schools, hospitals, child care, and medical treatment were often of a quite decent standard, with aggregate spending per pauper head doubling between 1870-71 and 1905-06. Moreover, the poor were quite knowledgeable about the various programs available to them and adept at selecting those most beneficial to their families. Legislation passed by successive Conservative and Liberal governments in the years leading up to 1914 further undermined a deterrent poor law by adding new programs for unemployment and pensions. The poor law was in the process of being both transformed and superseded.
The strict charitable administration insisted on by the COS was also being eclipsed. Even at the height of its influence, the COS had never been the dominant force in the world of philanthropy. Enormous sums continued to be raised and dispensed in a far looser fashion by a variety of charities, drawing upon the emotional outpouring of donations by the public in hard times. For example, the Mansion House Fund, started up in response to the exceptional distress of 1886, had no difficulty in raising (and squandering, according to the COS) £79,000 in short order. The great majority of those contributing to charity (and this included many of the working class) had little use for the close, suspicious scrutiny of COS casework. Cardinal Manning no doubt spoke for many when he exclaimed, "As to the waste and wisdom [of donations], I am content that many unworthy should share rather than one worthy case be without help." Moreover, COS visitors were tempting targets for satire. In Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Honeythunder is "an unpleasant bullying philanthropist" working for the "Haven of Philanthropy," an organization whose approach seems remarkably like the COS. Similarly, in Bleak House, Mrs. Pardiggle, a "friendly visitor" to the poor, "seems to come in like cold weather."
Yet the COS itself was undergoing substantial changes from the 1880s. The casework of some visitors made them acutely aware of the complexity of the problems faced by the poor, propelling them away from the individualistic, laissez-faire verities of the early COS&emdash;in some cases, to advocacy of increased government action. Jose Harris has noted the gulf between older members and a younger generation of COS workers with organicist and "collectivist" values resembling those of the New Liberals. That figures generally associated with the foundation of the welfare state, like Beatrice Webb and William Beveridge, should have started out with the COS (though Webb was to develop a strong animus against it), indicates the nature of the change. As Brian Harrison puts it: "The philanthropist does not supersede the state, whatever his original intention; he skirmishes on its frontiers and prepares the way for further advance." This adaptation also helps explain the survival of the COS, and its ability to raise twice as much money for charitable purposes on the eve of World War I as it had a quarter of a century earlier. It was to transform itself into the Family Welfare Association in 1946 and to accept the Beveridge Report and the ensuing welfare state; it continues to be an important philanthropic agency.
The point here is that key aspects of this transformation were already evident by the early twentieth century. National and local legislation in areas like school meals and child care called for the direct involvement of voluntary bodies. The COS, though with some lingering reluctance, agreed to participate, as their annual report in 1908 shows:
It will be noticed how heavy is the burden that the State is placing on its citizens in the execution of these new laws. If voluntary helpers do not come forward in large numbers to fulfil the obligation which the State imposes, there can be but one alternative, that these departments will be managed by officials, and must inevitably lose most of the characteristics that will make them useful to society.
At this time, COS leaders were heavily engaged in the work of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, appointed in 1905 to study the effects of the public relief system that had been established in 1834 and to recommend reforms. The Majority Report of the Commission, signed by all the COS members on the body, far from being evidence of a negative attitude toward state intervention, reflected the new COS view that the state needed to provide an adequate base of social programs to sustain families in time of distress. The key to the success of these programs, of course, was to involve trained voluntary workers directly in their operation. As A.W. Vincent points out, the underlying philosophy of the Majority Report was that of T.H. Green's Philosophical Idealism, not Herbert Spencer's atomistic individualism.
The Minority Report of the Royal Commission, written by Beatrice Webb, with its clarion call for total abolition of the poor law and its replacement by a cluster of specialist state services, has long seemed the herald of the modern welfare state. As a result, a "caricatured view" of the Majority Report has persisted, still drawing heavily upon the Webbs' indictment of it as little more than a reiteration of the "principles of 1834." In fact, neither report provided a clear-cut blueprint. In the short term, the Liberal government chose to ignore both sets of recommendations. The poor law was ultimately allowed to pass from the scene in 1929, with the transferring of the functions of the old boards of guardians to the county and borough councils&emdash;a provision of the Majority Report on 1909. With the implementation of the Welfare State by Attlee's government after 1945, the array of services and the manner of their delivery did come more to resemble those advocated in the Minority Report, yet even here a significant level of cooperation between public and voluntary agencies was maintained. Indeed, William Beveridge, whose famous Report of 1942 was the real blueprint for the Labour government's new programs, published a book in 1948 stressing the importance of private philanthropy and the need for cooperation between it and the state.
The close and complex interconnections between public poor relief and private charity examined in this paper will, it is hoped, help foster the move away from linear, Whig histories of the welfare state. Whatever the deficiencies of the Whig approach, however, they pale before the grotesque simplifications of history promoted by conservative leaders and theorists. In Britain, the "Thatcher Revolution" entailed an attempt to discredit and cut governmental social programs. The "nanny State," according to John Moore, Thatcher's Secretary of State for Social Services, had created "the sullen apathy of dependence." Similar sentiments were voiced by Reaganites in the United States, and the clamor to roll back social programs is a major plank of the current Republican legislative agenda.
Whatever merit there may be in the philosophical arguments brought forward by conservative reformers, the version of history they deploy in the campaign against welfare is, quite simply, false. It involves an assertion that throughout the nineteenth century there was a wholesome separation between philanthropy and a minimalist state, the latter operating on consistently deterrent principles. A recent article in a libertarian magazine on Thomas Chalmers and the Poor Laws depicts the Scottish reformer as the virtual architect of the 1834 Poor Law, which is said to have abolished outdoor relief, leaving the poor, wisely, to the many charities that "sprang up like flowers in the springtime." The twentieth century, with all its liberal, bureaucratic muddle, saw the reversal of this wise system. A lengthier and more sophisticated version of this blatant misreading of history, this time applied to the United States, is evident in a recent book by Marvin Olasky, a key intellectual point man for the right in the ongoing crusade against public relief. These versions of history are a good illustration of what Albert O. Hirschman calls the "perverse effect" theory applied by reactionaries to all public programs of social amelioration&emdash;that they invariably produce greater misery.
A review and possible substantial reform of existing welfare practices is not something any society should seek to avoid. However, such a review must be grounded in the historical record; willful or naive misrepresentations of the past serve only polemical ends. An essential starting point for an informed debate on welfare reform is the recognition that both the public and private sectors of poor relief grew enormously in the nineteenth century. There was substantial cooperation between them, at the national and the local level. Similar attitudes and policies are to be found among the administrators of private and public agencies alike. Both became increasingly dependent upon experts. Both exhibited a harsh, deterrent aspect and a more benevolent one. Their underlying philosophies and relief strategies underwent major changes. Both sectors were, and are, vital to modern civilization. As is invariably the case in debates over social programs, simple dichotomies obstruct rather than facilitate understanding; bad history makes bad policy.