The Victorian Era

How Did Victorians Treat the Poor

Article · Society & Daily Life · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The treatment of the poor in the Victorian period was defined by a single legislative act, the New Poor Law of 1834, and by the long series of philanthropic, social, and political movements that grew up around it. The New Poor Law replaced the old system of outdoor relief with a national network of more than 600 Poor Law Unions, each with its own workhouse, and it set the terms within which the Victorian generation thought about poverty for the next seventy years. The workhouse was one institution; alongside it, the Victorians developed the new model dwellings, the Settlement houses, the Charity Organisation Society, the social surveys, the cooperative stores, the friendly societies, and the new unionism of the unskilled, and the period from 1834 to 1911 saw the slow construction of the modern British welfare state.

The New Poor Law and the Workhouse

The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, established in 1832 under the chairmanship of the Bishop of London, Charles Blomfield, with Edwin Chadwick as its secretary, reported in 1834 that the old system of outdoor relief was encouraging idleness, improvidence, and the dissolution of the family, and it recommended the abolition of outdoor relief for the able-bodied and the construction of a national network of workhouses. The new system was administered by three Poor Law Commissioners, of whom Chadwick was the leading figure, and by elected Boards of Guardians in each Union. The workhouse was to be a deterrent institution, and the principle of “less eligibility” — that the conditions of the workhouse pauper should be less “eligible” (that is, less desirable) than those of the independent labourer — was the standard by which the new system was to be measured. The standard workhouse of the period was built to the designs published by the Commissioners’ architect, George Gilbert Scott (the same Scott who was later to design the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras), and it had separate wings for the able-bodied men, the able-bodied women, the aged, the children, the sick, and the “casual” poor. By 1850 there were more than 700 workhouses in England and Wales, housing some 200,000 inmates at any one time.

The workhouse was the central image of Victorian poverty. It was a powerful symbol of the punitive instincts of the new poor law, and it was the object of one of the most sustained literary campaigns of the period, in the novels of Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist (1837–39), with its workhouse gruel and its famous “Please, sir, I want some more,” was read by every literate Victorian; A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852–53), Little Dorrit (1855–57), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) all included memorable workhouse scenes; and the imagery of the workhouse entered the popular vocabulary of the period as a byword for cruelty and despair.

Charity, Settlement, and Social Science

The New Poor Law did not exhaust the Victorian response to poverty. From the 1860s onwards a series of new philanthropic and social-scientific institutions was created to deal with the problems the workhouse could not reach. The Charity Organisation Society (COS), founded in 1869 in London by a group which included Henry Bunnett, C. S. Loch, and Octavia Hill, attempted to introduce a “scientific” method of relief: trained visitors would investigate the circumstances of every applicant, distinguish the “deserving” from the “undeserving,” and coordinate the work of the disparate London charities. The COS established the first district visiting system, the first systematic casework, and the first training courses for the new profession of social work, and its methods were imitated in the Charity Organisation Societies of the United States and the British Empire. Its opponents, who included the social reformer Arnold Toynbee and the Settlement house residents of East London, accused it of stinginess, and the long quarrel of the “Cos” against the “Charity” was a feature of late-Victorian social policy.

The Settlement Movement was the chief practical alternative to the COS. The first and most famous of the Settlements, Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, was opened in 1884 by the Reverend Samuel Barnett, vicar of St Jude’s Whitechapel, as a house where university men might “settle” among the poor; it established clubs, classes, exhibitions, and a programme of social investigation which became the model for similar Settlements across the country (Oxford House in Bethnal Green, Mansfield House Settlement in Canning Town, the Women’s University Settlement in Southwark). The American Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in Chicago in 1889, was modelled directly on Toynbee Hall, and the Settlement idea crossed the Atlantic with it. In East London the People’s Palace, opened in Mile End Road in 1887 by the philanthropist John Meade Falkner and the new People’s Palace Technical Schools, was another version of the Settlement idea in a larger, more popular key.

The Model Dwellings and the Sanitary Reformers

The poor of the period lived in overcrowded slums, and one of the great Victorian answers to the housing problem was the model dwelling. The Peabody Trust, founded in 1862 by the American philanthropist George Peabody with a gift of £150,000, and enlarged in 1866 and 1873 to a total of £1,500,000, was the largest of the new bodies; by 1900 it had built some 5,500 tenements housing more than 20,000 of the London poor, and the Trust’s blocks at Westminster, Spitalfields, Bermondsey, Islington, and Chelsea were the model of the new philanthropic housing. The Improved Industrial Dwellings Company (1844), the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company (1867), the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes (1841), and Miss Octavia Hill’s pioneering work at the St Marylebone property in 1864 were the other great instruments of the new housing reform, and the Artizans’ Dwellings Act of 1875 and the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890 gave the state its first powers of compulsory demolition and improvement.

The sanitary reform that underlay the new housing policy was the work of Edwin Chadwick, the Poor Law Commissioner who had been removed from office in 1846 and then returned to public life as a propagandist; of Thomas Southwood Smith, the physician of the London Fever Hospital and a leading member of the Health of Towns Commission; and of John Simon, the Medical Officer of the Privy Council from 1858 and of the Local Government Board from 1871 to 1876. The Public Health Act of 1848, the Local Government Act of 1858, the Public Health Act of 1872, the Public Health Act of 1875, and the consolidating Public Health Act of 1875 together created the new system of medical officers of health, sanitary districts, and urban authorities that has lasted into the present century. The cholera outbreaks of 1831–32, 1848–49, 1853–54, and 1866 were the spur; the great sanitary works of Bazalgette in London were the visible monument of the new system.

The Social Surveys and the Discovery of Poverty

The new social science of the period produced two great surveys of the poor. Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, the first edition of which appeared in 17 volumes between 1889 and 1903, classified the 4,000,000 Londoners of the 1891 census into eight grades of poverty, and concluded that some 30 per cent of the population were living in poverty, defined as income below 18 to 21 shillings a week for a family of moderate size. B. Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901) applied Booth’s method to the city of York, and concluded that just under 10 per cent of the working-class population of the city were living in “primary” poverty, that is, in poverty severe enough to prevent the maintenance of mere physical efficiency. Rowntree’s work was the foundation of the modern minimum-wage policy; Booth’s was the foundation of the modern old-age pension.

The Self-Help of the Workers

Beneath the official poor law and the new philanthropy, the working class built up a long tradition of self-help. The friendly societies, mutual-aid organisations in which working men pooled their contributions to provide sickness and funeral benefit, were the great social institution of the period; the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, founded in 1810, had 800,000 members by 1900; the Ancient Order of Foresters, founded in 1834, had 700,000; the Hearts of Oak, founded in 1842, had 250,000. The Cooperative movement, founded in 1844 by the Rochdale Pioneers at the Toad Lane store, grew into a network of 1,500 retail societies with 2.4 million members by 1900, and the Co-operative Wholesale Society, founded in 1863, was the largest business in the world run on a non-profit basis. The building societies, the savings banks, and the trade unions completed the structure of working-class self-help.

The new unionism of the unskilled workers, who had been outside the old craft unions of the period, was the second great movement of working-class self-organisation. The “new model unions” of the 1850s and 1860s — the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (1851), the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (1860) — had been unions of the skilled artisan. The “new unionism” of the 1880s and 1890s was a unionism of the gas stokers, the dock labourers, the general labourers, and the matchgirls; the match-girls’ strike of 1888, the London dock strike of 1889, and the formation of the General Union of Textile Workers in 1889 were the founding moments. The new unions founded the Independent Labour Party in 1893, the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and the modern Labour Party in 1906; the new politics that emerged from the East End of London in the late 1880s was the politics of the skilled, the semi-skilled, and the unskilled organised for the first time in a single body.

The Education and the Children

The School Board for London, established by the Education Act of 1870 under the chairmanship of the University of London professor W. H. L. Smith, was the first of the new educational authorities. The board schools that it built and the new profession of board-school teachers that it established were the foundation of the new system of elementary education; the School Boards were abolished by the Education Act of 1902, which transferred their powers to the new local education authorities, and the new system of secondary education established by the Education Act of 1902 was the foundation of the modern English education system. The school meals campaign of 1906 and the Education (Provision of Meals) Act of 1906, the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act of 1907, and the medical inspection of school children of 1907 were the foundation of the new welfare state of the Edwardian period. The schools of the Ragged School Union, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC, founded 1884), the Barnardo’s homes (founded by Thomas John Barnardo in 1867), and the reformatory and industrial schools of the period completed the new system of provision for the children of the poor.