Analyses the attempted reform of the Poor Law system in Ireland between 1910 and 1932. This period represented one of the most formative and crucial eras in Irish politics and society with the ideas of culture, nation, state and identity widely contested.

Recent community care changes have raised issues about the changing role of the public and voluntary sectors in the provision of social care to elderly people. The purpose of this book is to set these debates in the context of the historical growth of welfare services from 1939 through to 1971.

In The Poor Law of Lunacy, Peter Bartlett examines the legal and administrative regime of the 19th-century asylum, arguing that it is to be thought of as an aspect of English poor law in which the medical superintendent of the asylum has little power. The text also examines the place of the county asylum movement in the poor law debates of the mid-19th century. Using the Leicestershire asylum as a case study, the author looks at the role of the poor law officers in the admission processes of the asylum, and relations between poor law staff, asylum staff and the poor law and lunacy central inspectorates.

First published in 1910, this volume is a dispassionate analysis of the changes in and the various aspects of official policy towards pauperism from the ‘Revolution of 1834’ to the Majority and Minority Reports of 1909. In their preface to this volume the Webbs wrote: "What obscured the history was the manner in which masses of heterogeneous facts were heaped together. To read, one after another, these complicated Orders and lengthy Reports, each dealing with all kinds of paupers and various methods of relief, was but to accumulate confusion. They resembled a heap of geological conglomerates which could not be assayed until they had been broken up in such a way as to sort the different materials into separate homogeneous parcels". This book succeeds in presenting a masterly survey of this sector of the British social services on the eve of the foundation of the Welfare State, and completes the corpus of the Webbs on the Poor Law.

This book investigates how, alongside Beatrice Webb’s ground-breaking pre-World War One anti-poverty campaigns, George Bernard Shaw helped launch the public debate about the relationship between equality, redistribution and democracy in a developed economy. The ten years following his great 1905 play on poverty Major Barbara present a puzzle to Shaw scholars, who have hitherto failed to appreciate both the centrality of the idea of equality in major plays like Getting Married, Misalliance, and Pygmalion, and to understand that his major political work, 1928’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism had its roots in this period before the Great War. As both the era’s leading dramatist and leader of the Fabian Society, Shaw proposed his radical postulate of equal incomes as a solution to those twin scourges of a modern industrial society: poverty and inequality. Set against the backdrop of Beatrice Webb’s famous Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law 1905-1909 – a publication which led to grass-roots campaigns against destitution and eventually the Welfare State – this book considers how Shaw worked with Fabian colleagues, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and H. G. Wells to explore through a series of major lectures, prefaces and plays, the social, economic, political, and even religious implications of human equality as the basis for modern democracy.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 is one of the most important pieces of social legislation ever enacted. Its principles and the workhouse system dominated attitudes to welfare provision for the next 80 years. This new Seminar Study explores the changing ideas to poverty over this period and assesses current debates on Victorian attitudes to the poor. David Englander reviews the old system of poor relief; he considers how the New Poor Law was enacted and received and looks at how it worked in practice. The chapter on the Scottish experience will be particularly welcomed, as will Dr Englander's discussion of the place of the Poor Law within British history.