Alan Kidd

State, society and the poor : in nineteenth-century England

Acknowledgements - A Mixed Economy of Welfare - The State and Pauperism - Voluntary Charity and the Poor - The Working Class, Self Help and Mutual Aid - Poverty and Welfare in Historical Perspective - Appendix - Notes - Further Reading - Index

Canals, Rivers, and the Industrial City: Manchester's Industrial Waterfront, 1790–1850

This article presents new data on mill location in Manchester in 1850 to show that water-transport infrastructure played a key role in determining the intra-urban pattern of factory development.The shift from water to steam power introduced new patterns of industrial water use, rather than the relocation of factories away from waterways. Five new public canals and 23 private canal branches activated a major expansion of Manchester’s waterfront, providing the majority of the manufacturing sites that enabled the town to become the world’s foremost factory centre. Without effective municipal water supplies, canals were the best available water source for steam engines.

Water Transport in the Industrial Age: Commodities and Carriers on the Rochdale Canal, 1804–1855

Manchester was a major centre of transport innovation in industrial Britain. Research has focused on the pioneer transport links with Liverpool, neglecting the towns extensive eastern canal network. This article analyses the commodities conveyed from 1800 to 1855 on the Rochdale Canal, the most heavily trafficked of the towns eastern waterways. It highlights the canals importance in carrying corn to feed Lancashires industrial work force as well as its role in transporting cotton textiles to east-coast ports and in supplying Manchester with building materials. The article also analyses the types of firm carrying goods on the canal and assesses the canals importance in relation to Manchesters other major water routes.

A Mixed Economy of Welfare

The growth of central government provision of health and welfare services for all citizens, financed from the revenues of national taxation, has been a significant feature of the histories of the industrialised nations in the twentieth century. Britain’s welfare state owes most to the combination of social ideals and political will that crystallised during and after the Second World War, finding expression in the Beveridge Report of 1942 and the Labour reforms of 1945–51. By contrast, in the nineteenth century the social welfare obligations of the state were limited to assisting the destitute and much was expected of voluntary welfare services and agencies operating outside the sphere of state competence. This pluralistic approach to social provision and the much more restricted character of public welfare it involved reflected a quite different pattern of state responsibility.

The Working Class, Self-Help and Mutual Aid

For those in poverty, the presence or absence of state welfare provision is a major issue. In the late twentieth century, the forms and interviews, the officials and regulations of the welfare bureaucracy are an everyday fact of life for the poor. By contrast, the impact of the state in the nineteenth century, although real, was much more distant. The contraction of taxed-based redistributive policies from the 1830s and the concurrent outpouring of charitable funds might suggest a voluntary redistribution to replace the decline in state provision. However, voluntary income was variable, and the causes supported more often reflected the enthusiasms and anxieties of the charitable than the practical needs of the poor. Whilst the contribution of both the voluntary sector and the state to the provision of care and welfare in the nineteenth century should not be underestimated, in the prevailing climate of individualism and self-help, much was left to the resources of the individual. Those in poverty, and those in fear of poverty, were most dependent upon their own resources and those of their family, their neighbours and their class.

The State and Pauperism

For much of the nineteenth century the state relieved only a minority of the poor. Moreover, its welfare role was a declining one with both the costs of poor relief and the numbers assisted consistently falling after 1850. This was a deliberate consequence of the policy set out in the Poor Law Report of 1834 and enacted through the New Poor Law. However, it was far from being uniformly enforced. Considering the extent to which the exercise of authority was a matter of negotiation between the central and the local state, it is not surprising that there was a great deal of diversity in poor—relief practice across the country. This very diversity has helped shape the historian’s picture of the Poor Law, in which contradictory generalisations are often made according to the evidence from particular local case studies. None the less, it is possible to discern a broad pattern across time. In essence, there were two Poor Laws, one operating up to (and possibly beyond) 1834 and derived from centuries old notions of entitlement which were relatively broad and inclusive. The second gradually replacing the old system during the middle decades of the century and based upon a narrower and increasingly more punitive approach to adult applicants for relief. However, almost by default, this second system found itself responsible for a range of welfare services for the sick and infirm and for children.

Poverty and Welfare in Historical Perspective

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the liberal conception of rights and responsibilities, which had underwritten the political and social system of the Victorian era, began to disintegrate as central governments increasingly intervened in domains, such as social welfare and industrial relations, formerly confined to the ‘private sphere’. The intellectual roots of this chiefly lay in the New Liberal redefinition of liberty in the late nineteenth century, in which negative determinations of liberal basic rights were superseded by the ‘positive’ rights of opportunity and social ‘justice’ to be realised through the actions of the state.1 International trade and imperialistic rivalries encouraged the process, culminating in the experience of the First World War, which did considerable damage to ‘liberal’ values. Ultimately, the ‘liberal state’ was transformed into the post-1945 ‘social welfare state’ in which central government stood committed to the social rights of citizens.

Voluntary Charity and the Poor

A corollary of the limited duties assigned the state in the welfare of the poor was the importance placed upon voluntary action. Charity, which plays a supporting role in the welfare services of the present day, was considered by many in the nineteenth century to be the vital element in the welfare equation. Many of the statutory social services of the welfare state were pioneered by voluntary action in Victorian times. However, the place of charity then was as partner to state welfare rather than the subordinate position it has assumed during the twentieth century. The selective discretionary gift of charity was considered preferable by many to the notions of entitlement implicit in any legal machinery of relief, and many of the ablest social welfare minds of the nineteenth century sought solutions to social problems through voluntary rather than statutory action. Moreover, philanthropy flourished in the intellectual climate of an age in which the tenets of individualism were reinforced by the vitality of evangelical religion. To the charitable, saving souls was at least as important as healing bodies. But charity to the poor was not an invention of the nineteenth century.