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Published by EH.NET (May 2000) 
 
Lynn Hollen Lees, _The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and 
the People, 1700-1948_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xii + 
373 pp. $64.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-521-57261-4. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by George R. Boyer, Department of Labor Economics, 
School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. 
<[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
This book presents a broad overview and interpretation of the English poor 
laws from the late seventeenth century up to the early twentieth century. 
In the introduction Lees states that, despite the large literature on the 
poor laws, "we know relatively little about how such institutions operated, 
how their practices changed over time, and how they were regarded by 
ordinary people" (p. 9).  Her book is a very good first step toward filling 
that gap in the literature. 
 
The book is divided into three roughly equal parts. Part One (Chapters 1-3) 
deals with poor relief up to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. While most 
of the discussion is based on secondary sources, Lees nicely summarizes the 
recent literature on the poor law, and offers her own well-reasoned 
interpretations of the role of poor relief in the lives of the poor. Lees 
contends that, at least before 1800, the legitimacy of the poor laws was 
accepted both by recipients and by local taxpayers. Members of the working 
class might not have liked applying for relief, but they often were forced 
to turn to the poor law during bad times, and they strongly defended their 
right to public assistance. And while taxpayers, then as now, grumbled 
about the level of their taxes, they saw the payment of poor relief to the 
unfortunate of the community as a duty. Sometime around 1800, however, the 
middle class began to question the legitimacy of poor relief and to view 
applicants for relief as undeserving. According to Lees, this change in 
opinion largely was a result of the sharp increase in relief expenditures 
and numbers on relief that began in the late eighteenth century, and it was 
accelerated by the writings of Thomas Malthus and other classical 
economists claiming that the poor laws actually created pauperism. The 
middle class began to feel that the role of the poor law was not simply to 
relieve the poor but also to discipline and reform them. 
 
Part Two deals with the early years of the New Poor Law, from 1834 to 1860. 
Chapter 4 contains a discussion of the activities of the Royal Poor Law 
Commission, its condemnation of current welfare practices, and its 
recommendations for implementing the New Poor Law. Chapter 5 examines the 
responses of the poor to the New Poor Law. While the middle classes had 
come to view acceptance of relief as a sign of moral failings, the working 
class continued to regard public relief as an important form of social 
insurance. Lees rejects the argument of some historians that workers hated 
the poor laws, noting that it is necessary "to distinguish between the 
rejection by the poor of specific welfare institutions [such as the 
workhouse] and their adamant insistence upon their own entitlement to 
parish relief" (p. 165). Chapter 6, on the local administration of poor 
relief from 1834 to 1870, is the best chapter in the book. Lees 
convincingly shows that the official statistics of poor relief for this 
period do not accurately measure the incidence of relief or the type of 
relief recipients. She calculates that between 1850 and 1870, 10 to 13 
percent of the population of England and Wales received poor relief each 
year; over a three-year period perhaps a quarter of the population received 
assistance. Despite a boom in the construction of workhouses, most paupers 
continued to receive outdoor relief. In order to determine the composition 
of the "pauper host," Lees studied the settlement examinations for three 
London parishes and six towns -- Bedford, Cambridge, Cheltenham, 
Shrewsbury, Southhamption, and York -- for the years around 1850. While her 
sample of provincial towns is not representative of urban Britain in 1850 
-- it includes no large cities and no northern industrial towns -- the data 
she collects provide a more detailed, and almost certainly more accurate, 
picture of applicants for and recipients of relief than do the official 
statistics. She finds that large numbers of prime-age males continued to 
apply for relief in the provincial towns during the 1840s, and that a 
majority of those assisted were granted outdoor relief. Adult females were 
more likely to get relief in counties where the demand for their labor was 
relatively high, and yet few unemployed women appear in the account books 
Lees examined. She concludes that women who applied for relief told 
overseers stories that were likely to produce assistance, stressing 
widowhood, desertion, sickness, or pregnancy rather than lack of work. 
 
Part Three covers the period from 1860 until the official repeal of the 
poor laws in 1948. Lees maintains that the late nineteenth century saw a 
decline in the legitimacy of the poor laws in the eyes of both the middle 
and working classes. The crusade against outrelief in the 1870s led to a 
sharp decline in numbers on relief, as cities throughout Britain refused 
outdoor relief to both able-bodied and non-able bodied paupers, and large 
numbers of applicants for relief refused to enter workhouses. Lees's 
discussion of the crusade against outrelief and the Charity Organization 
Society in Chapter 8 is disappointing. She has little to say about the 
causes of the crusade, and she ignores the important work on the subject by 
Mary MacKinnon and Robert Humphreys. Aside from a brief discussion of case 
records for Stepney, in East London, for 1876-89, there is no detailed 
examination of relief practices at the local level to match her study of 
settlement examinations in 1850. In Chapter 9, Lees argues that by the end 
of the nineteenth century public assistance had become more avoidable as a 
result of rising incomes and the availability of private insurance through 
trade unions and friendly societies. As the demand for assistance declined, 
workers came to see poor relief as stigmatizing. Chapter 10 examines the 
decline of the poor law after 1906, and its replacement first by social 
insurance and then, after World War II, by the welfare state. 
 
While the analysis of late nineteenth century poor relief needs to be 
supplemented by other sources, there is much to be commended in this book. 
Especially noteworthy are Lees's discussions of the extent to which the 
precise methods and generosity of relief were determined by "welfare 
bargaining" between applicants for relief and local poor law officials, and 
of the changing attitudes of the working class toward poor relief. Lees 
also significantly extends our knowledge of how female-headed households 
were treated under the poor laws, and how the comparative treatment of male 
and female relief applicants changed over time. Overall, _The Solidarities 
of Strangers_ provides an excellent introduction to the changing nature of 
the English poor laws over three centuries. 
 
 
George Boyer is author of _An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 
1750-1850_ (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and of "The Historical 
Background of the Communist Manifesto," _Journal of Economic Perspectives_, 
Vol. 12 (Fall 1998). 
 
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