English Poor Law Policy was published by Longmans, Green in 1910, the year after the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress published its reports. Beatrice Webb had served on the Commission from 1905 to 1909 and had produced its most consequential document — the Minority Report, which proposed scrapping the entire Poor Law framework and replacing it with specialized government services for health, education, old age, and unemployment. This book provides the historical and analytical backdrop to that recommendation.
The Poor Law that the Webbs attacked had its origins in the great reform of 1834, which replaced the old parish-based system of outdoor relief with the workhouse — the “bastille of the poor,” as its critics called it. The principle of “less eligibility” dictated that conditions in the workhouse must be worse than those of the lowest-paid independent laborer, ensuring that only the truly desperate would enter. The system was administered by elected boards of guardians, supervised by a central Poor Law Board (later the Local Government Board).
The Webbs’ critique was devastating in its specificity. They showed that the 1834 system had never worked as intended: outdoor relief (payments to people in their own homes) had never been eliminated, the workhouses had become dumping grounds for the sick, the aged, the mentally ill, and children, and the quality of administration varied wildly from one union to another. By 1905, when the Royal Commission was appointed, the system was a patchwork of competing authorities, conflicting policies, and accumulated anomalies that satisfied no one.
The Minority Report’s solution — “breaking up the Poor Law” — meant transferring the care of different categories of poor people to different government departments: the sick to the health authorities, children to the education authorities, the elderly to pension schemes, the unemployed to labor exchanges and insurance schemes. Each category of need would be addressed by specialists rather than by general-purpose guardians whose main qualification was willingness to serve. This proposal, radical in 1909, was substantially realized by the Beveridge Report of 1942 and the Attlee government’s legislation of 1945–1948.
English Poor Law Policy is the scholarly argument behind the political proposal. It demonstrates, through exhaustive historical evidence, that the Poor Law had failed on its own terms and that piecemeal reform could not save it. The only solution was a fundamental reconception of the state’s responsibility to its citizens — from punishing poverty to preventing it.
Collecting English Poor Law Policy
First edition (Longmans, Green, London, 1910): Blue cloth.
Market values:
- First edition: $30–$80
- Later reprints: $10–$25