Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as
the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding
statute was considered the single most important piece of social
legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its
institutions - from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded
workhouse - has generally been viewed as a catastrophe for ordinary
working people. Until now it has been impossible to know how the poor
themselves felt about the New Poor Law and its measures, how they
negotiated its terms, and how their interactions with the local and
national state shifted and changed across the nineteenth century. In
Their Own Write exposes this hidden history. Based on an unparalleled
collection of first-hand testimony - pauper letters and witness
statements interwoven with letters to newspapers and correspondence from
poor law officials and advocates - the book reveals lives marked by
hardship, deprivation, bureaucratic intransigence, parsimonious
officialdom, and sometimes institutional cruelty, while also challenging
the dominant view that the poor were powerless and lacked agency in
these interactions. The testimonies collected in these pages clearly
demonstrate that both the poor and their advocates were adept at
navigating the new bureaucracy, holding local and national officials to
account, and influencing the outcomes of relief negotiations for
themselves and their communities. Fascinating and compelling, the
stories presented in In Their Own Write amount to nothing less than a
new history of welfare from below.
