The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Law and the People, 1700-1948.

MacKay, Lynn

The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Law and the People, 1700-1948, by Lynn Hollen Lees. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997. ix, 373 pp. $64.95.

This is an admirable and much-needed study of the poor laws and their clients in the period from 1700 to 1948. Insisting that the poor law system must be seen as a negotiated process, Lees reject interpretations that see the history of public assistance as a unilinear, evolutionary progress culminating in the welfare state. Instead, she traces the oscillations between more and less generous provision for the poor. Lees argues that the poor laws played a prominent role in defining community, by which she means "the collective ties that bound citizens together, while dividing them along lines of culture and class" (p. 10). In delineating who was entitled to assistance, poor law deliberations became regular examinations of social duties and social rights by both rich and poor. Decisions to give or refuse assistance determined community boundaries and the degree of inequality that was acceptable. The operation of the poor laws, in short, helped to define social citizenship in each local community of England and Wales.

Lees identifies three phases in the operation of the poor laws between 1700 and 1948. In each of these, different policies guided the operation of the system; different segments of the population were targetted for exclusion from assistance; and the social consensus on which the system rested shifted. Lees's first phase, "residualism taken for granted," ran from 1700 to 1834. By residualism she means that the state intervened only in extreme cases of need, giving means-tested assistance. During this period the legitimacy of the poor law system was widely accepted by both givers and receivers. Need was understood broadly to include illness, large family size, low wages, and unemployment for both men and women. By the late eighteenth century, however, widespread opposition by rate payers began to emerge as war time strains caused a dramatic increase in the number of assistance claims. By 1815, both Parliament and local parish officials were experimenting, in order to restrict assistance and to "redefine the terms of local welfare bargains" (p. 15).

Lees's second phase runs from 1834 to 1860 during which period residualism was redefined. As cities expanded rapidly, as popular radical politics became stronger, and as fears of crime increased, upper-class knowledge of the poor lessened and compassion for the latter was replaced by fear. This new attitude was codified in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act which attempted to maintain communal obligations "for people whom many regarded as having broken the bonds of community" (p. 114). Not surprisingly, it was punitive in approach. Lees says that under the new act the poor were marginalized, that the welfare system no longer tried to bind together the community, but "shifted paupers outside the limits of the polity" (p. 114). Able-bodied men, in particular, were targetted for exclusion and working-class approval of poor relief slowly changed to hostility.

Lees calls the third phase of poor law operations "residualism re-evaluated and rejected," and says it ran from 1860 to 1948. In her view, as civic rights broadened with the extension of the vote the legitimacy of the new poor law declined. As workers gained a political voice it became more and more necessary to take into account their priorities and concerns about welfare provision. The system had been designed chiefly to meet the problems of rural poverty and increasingly it seemed incapable of dealing with the urban, industrial situation of the late nineteenth century. The poor law system was also transformed from within by newly professionalized staff and social workers. As environmental explanations of poverty gained ground at the expense of moral ones, poor law workers came to focus on improving the poor rather than On disciplining them. Poor law institutions were now used "to compensate for defects in the social environment" (p. 231). These shifts in a system that was still largely administered at the local level meant that welfare provision became an even more contested terrain both in analysis and in implementation. Contradictions abounded and in time the system atrophied as politicians sought new solutions such as social insurance to remedy destitution.

Lees's insistence that welfare has been a negotiated process is a much-needed corrective in a field of study where the poor have been conspicuous by their absence. If she had only synthesized the vast literature on poverty and its treatment, Lees would have performed a valuable service. Her primary research on the operation of relief in six poor law unions, however, raises some intriguing questions. Whereas Lees says women dominated county town welfare populations only after 1834, my own research on London before 1820 reveals a somewhat different pattern in pauper demographics: women were already the majority by far in relief clienteles by the 1790s. These differences are problems that those of us working in the field will need to explore.

There is one perhaps niggling criticism to be made of this fine book: why does Chapter Six, "Pauperism in Practice," cover the period from 1834 to 1870? Is there a reason for abandoning the periodization set out previously -- 1834 to 1860? Or is this simply a typographical error?

This book is a valuable addition to the field of poverty studies, and undoubtedly will be a standard for years to come.

Lynn MacKay

Brandon University