Manchester University Press Pauper Policies: Poor Law Practice in England, 1780–1850

Pauper policies examines how policies under both Old and New Poor Laws were conceived, adopted, implemented, developed or abandoned. The book engages with recent literature on the experience and agency of poor relief recipients, and offers a fresh perspective on poor law administration. Through a ‘policy process’ approach, the author exposes several significant areas of poor law history that are currently unknown or poorly understood, each of which is explored in a series of thematic chapters. This volume contains important new research on: the adoption and implementation of enabling acts at the end of the Old Poor Laws, Gilbert’s Act of 1782 and Sturges Bourne’s Acts of 1818 and 1819; the exchange of knowledge about how best to provide poor relief in the final decades of the Old Poor Law and formative decades of the New; and the impact of national scandals on policy-making in the new Victorian system. It points towards a new direction in the study of poor law administration, one which examines how people – both those in positions of power and the poor – could shape pauper policies. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in welfare, poverty and society in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, as well as those who want to understand the early workings of the welfare system.