Parliament and Poverty in Mid‐Eighteenth Century England*

The Loes and Wilford Poor Law Incorporation 1765–1826: ‘A Prison with a Milder Name’

“…Although the volume acknowledges that East Anglian Rural Incorporations received attention from the 1832 Commission in regards perceived 'good practice' in the administration of poor law, Shaw's focus on the developmental nature of the incorporation, amended by Act in 1791 and 1810, counters assumptions of Old Poor Law practice being essentially stagnant until the reforms of the 1830s. Here, Shaw provides concrete evidence for Connors's (2002) analysis of the eighteenth-century parliamentary debates around poor law reform, illustrating a prolonged anxiety and discussion about the purpose, scope and administration of poor law well before the latter decades of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries. These closing and opening decades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have received most attention within the literature, being conceived as the pivot for the 'crisis' of the Old Poor Law (Connors, 2002: King, 2000: Eastwood, 1997, particularly after 1795 when the creation of the Speenhamland system; changes in settlement law; and general economic malaise caused increasing levels of pauperism and ballooning poor law expenditure.…”

“…Here, Shaw provides concrete evidence for Connors's (2002) analysis of the eighteenth-century parliamentary debates around poor law reform, illustrating a prolonged anxiety and discussion about the purpose, scope and administration of poor law well before the latter decades of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries. These closing and opening decades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have received most attention within the literature, being conceived as the pivot for the 'crisis' of the Old Poor Law (Connors, 2002: King, 2000: Eastwood, 1997, particularly after 1795 when the creation of the Speenhamland system; changes in settlement law; and general economic malaise caused increasing levels of pauperism and ballooning poor law expenditure. By bridging the 1760s to 1820s, the volume's temporal packaging allows for a wider embedding of these important decades to examine some of the main conclusions made by the literature in regards the closing period of the Old Poor Law, namely a shift towards an increasingly negative sentiment towards the poor; larger amounts of habitual pauperism; and rising anxieties about rocketing national poor law expenditure.…”