A fresh look at the complex question of outdoor poor relief in the
nineteenth century.
The consequences of extreme poverty were a grim reality for all too many
people in Victorian England. The various poor laws implemented to try to
deal with it contained a number of controversial measures, one of the
most radical and unpopular being the crusade against outdoor relief,
during which central government sought to halt all welfare payments at
home.
Via a close case study of Brixworth union in Northamptonshire, which
offers an unusually richcorpus of primary material and evidence, the
author looks at what happened to those impoverished men and women who
struggled to live independently in a world-without-welfare outside the
workhouse. She retraces the experiences ofelderly paupers evicted from
almshouses, of the children of the aged poor prosecuted for parental
maintenance, of dying paupers who were refused medical care in their
homes, and of women begging for funeral costs in an attempt toprevent
the bodies of their loved ones being taken for dissection by anatomists.
She then shows how increasing democratisation gave the labouring poor
the means to win control of the poor law.
ELIZABETH T. HURREN is a Reader in the Medical Humanities, University of
Leicester.