First published in 1981, From Pauperism to Poverty consists of seven essays, three of which focus on the English poor law between 1800 and 1914 and four of which examine texts of social investigation by Mayhew, Engels, Booth and Rowntree. Rather than making a specialist contribution to the history of social thought and policy, the essays raise general questions about current ways of writing history and alternative analyses of specific texts or institutions are developed. In doing so, the previous histories of the relief of pauperism and the discovery of poverty are revised at many points. Most notably, it is demonstrated for the first time that relief to unemployed men was virtually abolished after 1850. This book will be of interest to those studying the history of social welfare and poverty.

First published in 1981, From Pauperism to Poverty consists of seven essays, three of which focus on the English poor law between 1800 and 1914 and four of which examine texts of social investigation by Mayhew, Engels, Booth and Rowntree. Rather than making a specialist contribution to the history of social thought and policy, the essays raise general questions about current ways of writing history and alternative analyses of specific texts or institutions are developed. In doing so, the previous histories of the relief of pauperism and the discovery of poverty are revised at many points. Most notably, it is demonstrated for the first time that relief to unemployed men was virtually abolished after 1850. This book will be of interest to those studying the history of social welfare and poverty.

The consequences of extreme poverty were a grim reality for all too many people in Victorian England. The various poor laws implemented to try to deal with it contained a number of controversial measures, one of the most radical and unpopular being the crusade against outdoor relief, during which central government sought to halt all welfare payments at home. Via a close case study of Brixworth union in Northamptonshire, which offers an unusually rich corpus of primary material and evidence, the author looks at what happened to those impoverished men and women who struggled to live independently in a world-without-welfare outside the workhouse. She retraces the experiences of elderly paupers evicted from almshouses, of the children of the aged poor prosecuted for parental maintenance, of dying paupers who were refused medical care in their homes, and of women begging for funeral costs in as attempt to prevent the bodies of their loved ones being taken for dissection by anatomists. She then shows how increasing democratisation gave the labouring poor the means to win control of the poor law. ELIZABETH T. HURREN is Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University, Centre for Health, Medicine and Society, Past and Present.

Pauperism and pauperization are two of the most persistent and widespread phenomena in India. While a fierce debate rages on the line separating the poor from the non-poor, there is scant discussion on the huge mass of paupersnot less than one-fifth of the countrys populationliving in destitution. Rural and urban case studies conducted in the state of Gujarat highlight the ordeal of these paupersthe non-labouring poor unable to take care of themselves, the migrant labour driven away from the village and back for lack of work, and an urban underclass redundant to demand, often experienced by the better-off as a nuisance. A comparative study of the politics and policies in present-day India in relation to the condition of the ultra-poor in Victorian England reveals a disturbing common factora deeply ingrained mindset of social inequality resembling the spirit of nineteenth-century social Darwinism. That ideology of discrimination and exclusion is back with a vengeance the world all over and not least in India. This book examines poverty and inequality through a sociologicalanthropological lens that goes beyond the quantitative and unravels the fuzzy landscape of the informal economy. It fills a conspicuous gap in the literature on casual labourthat on the floating and footloose transient labour.

Introduction: Big Moll and the science of scientific charity -- "Armies of vice": evolution, heredity, and the pauper menace -- Friendly visitors or scientific investigators? Befriending and measuring the poor -- Opposition, depression, and the rejection of pauperism -- "I see no terrible army": environmental reform and radicalism in the scientific charity movement -- The potentially normal poor: professional social work, psychology, and the end of scientific charity.

Few measures, if any, could claim to have had a greater impact on British society than the poor law. As a comprehensive system of relieving those in need, the poor law provided relief for a significant proportion of the population but influenced the behaviour of a much larger group that lived at or near the margins of poverty. It touched the lives of countless numbers of individuals not only as paupers but also as ratepayers, guardians, officials and magistrates. This system underwent significant change in the nineteenth century with the shift from the old to the new poor law. The extent to which changes in policy anticipated new legislation is a key question and is here examined in the context of London. Rapid population growth and turnover, the lack of personal knowledge between rich and poor, and the close proximity of numerous autonomous poor law authorities created a distinctly metropolitan context for the provision of relief. This work provides the first detailed study of the poor law in London during the period leading up to and after the implementation of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources the book focuses explicitly on the ways in which those involved with the poor law - both as providers and recipients - negotiated the provision of relief. In the context of significant urban change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, it analyses the poor law as a system of institutions and explores the material and political processes that shaped relief policies.

Poverty and Policy in American History is about people who needed help in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is about the ways in which the perception of poverty and other forms of dependence affected the development of public programs and the conduct of voluntary reform. It also about the ways in which people have written about welfare. The book contains three chapters and opens with a description of the life and death of a poor family in early twentieth-century Philadelphia based on case records. It attempts to show many of the themes in the lives of the poor through the close analysis of one extended example. The second chapter moves back in time and consists of four case studies drawn from the project's empirical research. The first case study takes up the history of a neglected institution, the poorhouse. The second case reports on a survey of the causes of pauperism undertaken by the New York Board of State Charities in the mid-1870s. The third case analyzes a sample of the seven special schedules of the 1880 U.S. census, which enumerated the ""defective, dependent, and delinquent"" population. The final case uses a register of tramps from various places in New York State during the mid-1870s to assess the relation between popular images of tramps and what appeared to be their actual characteristics. The third chapter uses the results of the project's research and other recent work on related topics to examine American historical writing about dependence as a field and offers a sympathetic critique.