The Poor Law and the Relief of Unemployment

Abstract

The movement to revise the Elizabethan system of poor relief gathered momentum steadily during the first third of the nineteenth century. The desire to make a change was nourished on a varied diet of hard facts and new ideas. The former included the steady spread of the Speenhamland allowance system, the disproportionate rise in poor rates (though in some districts these rates fell to some extent after about 1820), and the revolt of the rural labourers in 1830. The most influential ideas were those of Malthus and Bentham, allied to a fairly general acceptance of the Wage Fund theory. Bills to reform the poor law which reflected some of these theories and apprehensions were introduced by Pitt in 1796 and by Samuel Whitbread in 1807. The proximate cause of the appointment in 1832 of a new commission to enquire into ‘the administration and practical operation’ of the poor laws was the labourers’ revolt of 1830. This Royal Commission, chosen, it was said, ‘with a total absence of party feeling,’ was the first of a long line of notable enquiries: it set a pattern and a procedure for the numerous parliamentary investigations which paved the way for many of the social reforms of the nineteenth century. Its chairman was a well-known reformer, Dr. Blomfield, Bishop of London, and its nine members included Sturges Bourne, the chairman of an earlier Select Committee of 1817 on the poor laws, Nassau Senior, the ‘Maynard Keynes of his day’, as a recent writer has described him, and, from 1833, Edwin Chadwick.