The first poverty line? Davies' and Eden's investigation of rural poverty in the late 18th-century England (original) (raw)
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Nearly every conceivable aspect of the old poor law in England appears to have been studied.Yet some fundamental questions about parish-level provisioning remain hard to answer. These include the amount that people received from the parish, from all sources, each week; how the balance between types of payments shifted over the period, and (correspondingly) within the individual life-course; the range of services or supplements that such individuals received, from the parish, over the course of their lives; and how this spectrum of relief adjusted to the massive macro-level changes that we know occurred in the poor relief system between the 1760s and 1834. This study attempts to answer these questions in new depth, by employing a dataset that encompasses all payments to named individuals within the Essex parish of Terling between 1762 and 1834, totalling 143,801 payments to 1,508 recipients. Analysis of this dataset provides new insights into the size, scope, changes, and significance of poor relief in labouring families’ lives in southern England in this period. Forthcoming in Economic History Review 2015
2011
This article introduces a newly discovered household budget data set for 1904. We use these data to estimate urban poverty among working families in the British Isles. Applying Bowley's poverty line, we estimate that at least 23 per cent of people in urban working households and 18 per cent of working households had income insufficient to meet minimum needs. This is well above Rowntree's estimate of primary poverty for York in 1899 and high in the range that Bowley found in northern towns in 1912–13. The skill gradient of poverty is steep; for instance, among labourers' households, the poverty rates are close to 50 per cent. Measures of the depth of poverty are relatively low in the data, suggesting that most poor male-headed working households were close to meeting Bowley's new standard.
The Wretch of Today, may be Happy Tomorrow: poverty in England, c 1700-1840
2017
But think of this Maxim, and put off your Sorrow,/The Wretch of Today , may be happy To-morrow' … so ended John Gay's hugely-successful Beggar's Opera of 1728 with a satirical display of familiar and slippery morality. Ten years earlier, Gay had supplied verse for Handel's Acis and Galatea, in which 'happy Nymphs and happy Swains' brimmed with pastoral joy on the Arcadian plain. 1 But while he appeared to offer a glimpse of happiness among the wretched and the lowly, his works were more concerned with vulgar cant and aristocratic gambols, than with contemporary landscapes and labourers. 2 Gay's philosopher cousin, a forerunner of utilitarian morality, argued that God had 'no other Design in creating Mankind than their Happiness … I am to do whatever lies in my Power to promote the Happiness of Mankind'. His own happiness may have been dependent 'on others', but in a period when poverty shaped the lives of millions, this talk made little connection with the predicament of the destitute, sick or hungry, in workhouse, hospital or cottage. 3 The poor were everywhere: destitute or dependent on their labour to survive, vulnerable to changing circumstances. Nationally, poverty and its problems attracted social commentators and moral improvers. Poor relief dominated parish business and was a major focus of law and taxation. 4 As fundamental principles of social organisation, poverty and labour were deeply implicated in eighteenth-century developments that drove and responded to material and ideological change: consumer goods, agricultural improvement, sentimental outbursts, popular religion, imperial expansion, novels and poems, the transatlantic slave trade. 5 This chapter connects two eighteenth-century preoccupations: an expansive interest in 1 John Gay, The Beggar's Opera.
The study of consumption has expanded considerably over the past thirty years and has grown to become one of the key cornerstones of eighteenth and nineteenth century British history. Yet, very little research has been undertaken to find the extent to which the poor were active consumers, whilst the literature on the middling and upper classes has swiftly grown apace. Most of the literature on the poor's consumption is clouded in Marxist theorem and narrow economic and monetary methodologies, and very little has been conducted beyond East Anglia and clothing. Thus, through the use of pauper inventories which detail household possessions, this paper will address this major historiographical distortion by empirically chronicling the extent to which paupers in Dorset were able to acquire goods, from basic furniture to the new and expanding items of the time, such as timepieces, tea and mirrors. The paper will argue that, whilst the middling and upper classes were able to increasingly consume more and benefit from English commercial expansion, the lives of the poor did not change significantly and that they continued to struggle and live a basic and relatively destitute life. Through these findings the paper will offer fresh perspectives on how marginal counties and groups coped over the Industrial Revolution, and will ultimately get to the very heart of what it meant to be poor, through their material goods.
Poverty in Britain in 1904: An Early Social Survey Rediscovered
2007
Until now there have been no national estimates of the extent of poverty in Britain at the turn of the 20 th century. This paper introduces a newly-discovered household budget data set for the early 1900s. These data are more representative of urban working households in Britain in the period than any other existing record, although they are not without deficiencies. We use these data to estimate urban poverty in the British Isles in 1904. Applying Bowley's poverty line we find that about fifteen percent of people in urban working class households had income insufficient to meet minimum needs. This is close to Rowntree's estimate of primary poverty for York 1899 and in the range that Bowley found in Northern towns in 1912-3. This average masks a heavy concentration of poverty among the unskilled and those with large families. JEL Classification: N33, O15
Poverty, old age and gender in nineteenth-century England: the case of Hertfordshire
Continuity and Change, 2006
This article examines the relative incidence of poverty among the elderly in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire with special reference to gender. Both national and local sources are employed to highlight the particular difficulties experienced by the elderly, male poor under the New Poor Law, and the short and long term problems they faced as a result of seasonal unemployment and an overstocked labour market. For elderly women, the extent to which their poverty was relieved by employment in cottage industry, almshouse accommodation, the continuing receipt of out-relief and a higher incidence of family support are examined to provide an assessment of the manner in which poverty was gendered in the nineteenth century.