English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act was published in multiple volumes by Longmans, Green, beginning in 1906 and continuing intermittently until 1929. The work eventually comprised nine volumes (later consolidated into eleven), covering the Parish and the County (1906), the Manor and the Borough (1908), the story of the King’s Highway (1913), statutory authorities for special purposes (1922), and the old and new Poor Law (1927–1929). It is the Webbs’ most purely scholarly work — less polemical than their studies of trade unionism, more archival than anything else they wrote — and it represents one of the most sustained feats of institutional history ever undertaken.
The project grew out of the Webbs’ conviction that you could not understand modern government without understanding its institutional origins. The chaos of English local administration in the eighteenth century — where parishes, boroughs, counties, turnpike trusts, sewer commissions, improvement commissioners, and dozens of other overlapping authorities shared responsibility for roads, poor relief, policing, and public health — was not a failure of design but the product of centuries of incremental, pragmatic adaptation. The Webbs traced each type of institution back to its origins, followed its development through the eighteenth century, and showed how the pressures of industrialization and urbanization eventually forced the great reforms of the 1830s: the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, the New Poor Law of 1834, and the beginnings of the modern system of elected local councils.
The research was prodigious. The Webbs spent years in local record offices across England, examining vestry minutes, borough records, quarter sessions papers, and the archives of now-forgotten statutory authorities. Beatrice’s diaries record the tedium and occasional excitement of this work — the discovery of a crucial minute book, the frustration of illegible handwriting, the satisfaction of reconstructing the actual workings of an institution from fragmentary evidence.
The resulting work is dense, detailed, and not easy reading — even admirers acknowledged that the Webbs’ prose style was utilitarian rather than elegant. But for anyone interested in how government actually works — not the theory of government but the daily practice of administration — there is nothing else remotely comparable. The volumes on the Poor Law, in particular, remain essential reading for historians of social policy.
Collecting English Local Government
First editions (Longmans, Green, London, 1906–1929): Multiple volumes published over two decades. Blue cloth.
Market values:
- Complete set, first editions: $200–$600
- Individual volumes: $20–$60
- 1963 Frank Cass reprint set: $80–$200
Complete first-edition sets are scarce because the volumes were published over such a long period that few buyers acquired them all as they appeared. The Frank Cass reprints from the 1960s are more commonly encountered.