The Girl Who Lived On Her Clothes
The People of Paisley and the New Poor Law, 1839–76
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Tables and Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Inspector Brown and the New Poor Law for Scotland
- Chapter 1 The Case of the Unemployed and Destitute Inhabitants: Managing Poverty in Paisley before the New Poor Law: 1834–42
- Chapter 2 The Case of the Distant Legislature: How the New Poor Law Came to Paisley: 1842–6
- Chapter 3 The Case of the Girl Who Lived on Her Clothes: How the People of Paisley Met the Poor Law
- Chapter 4 The Case of the Starving Men: Relieving the Able-bodied Unemployed: 1847–66
- Chapter 5 The Case of the Widow’s Settlement: The New Poor Law and Women’s Agency: 1850–61
- Chapter 6 The Case of the Crowded Asylum: A Contest for Local Control: 1858–1876
- Epilogue: Inspector Brown’s Legacy: The New Poor Law in Paisley after 1876
- Bibliography
- Index
Tables and Illustrations
Table 1Precipitating Events as a Percentage of Applicants, 1851, 1861, 1871
Table 2Sex and Marital Status of Applicants for Relief 1851, 1861, 1871
Table 3Family Condition of Applicants for Relief in Paisley, 1851, 1861, 1871
Table 4Percentage of Individuals in Handloom Weaving-Related Occupations
Illustration 1Notes on the Case of Alexander Getheral
Illustration 2Original and Expanded Poor House Complex: 1839 and 1858
Acknowledgments
No project of this kind is the product of individual effort, and I have incurred significant debts in the two decades I have been rummaging through the poor law in Paisley. First, credit must go to Professor Sir Tom Devine, who pointed me toward Paisley in 1995 and set me on a track I’ve been following ever since. On that first visit to Paisley and every subsequent one I have been greeted and supported by the archival staff at The Heritage Centre @ OneRen (previously part of the Paisley Central Library), particularly David Weir. Through multiple relocations and refurbishments they have accommodated my needs for space and power. Mr Weir has been especially helpful in reading manuscripts at a number of stages and patiently correcting my Americanisms. I’m also extremely grateful to Cath Mitchell and Dan Coughlin at the Sma’ Shot Cottages, who kindly gave me an extensive tour and conversation outside the normal season, enabling me to more effectively imagine the lives of Paisley’s weavers. Any errors that remain in this text are my own alone.
This book builds on and extends numerous shorter projects regarding Paisley and the New Poor Law. Only one of those articles came substantially into the text, but the community of scholars working in Scottish, gender, and migration history have all contributed to my thinking and understanding as I have worked toward this monograph. A 2013 Conference on Singles in the Cities of North-West Europe, c. 1000–2000 hosted by the University of Antwerp was especially influential in shaping my thinking about people in and outside of families and their resulting relationships to the law, and also ways to tell the stories I was uncovering. Completing these projects has relied on a community of scholars whom I have never physically met, including editors and readers for the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies and Professor Kevin James at the Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Guelph. With Professor James’s support, the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland granted tangible support for my final research push in 2022. In addition, I had a remarkably good time with the British Association for American Studies in Hull that Spring, when at last I knew the right questions to ask about local government in the nineteenth century and found an audience happy to answer them.
My students and colleagues at SUNY Plattsburgh in the History Department and across the campus have earned my appreciation in innumerable ways, from sabbatical funding to interlibrary loan to tolerant ears and probing questions that reassure me there really is an interesting story to tell about a seemingly arcane subject. Vincent Carey and Jeff Hornibrook have been especially supportive of my scholarship since the moment I set foot in Plattsburgh. The late Douglas Skopp and Kathy Lavoie were crucial cheerleaders, role models in balancing all the responsibilities of a career in public academia. Recognition is also due to United University Professions (especially Patty Bentley who pulled me into union work); I can’t imagine completing this project without the stability a unionised university system provides.
At last to the family: I am immeasurably grateful to my parents for just about everything but most recently to my father Tom for his ‘layman’s eye’ over the manuscript and commiseration over the woes of a historian. My mother, Patricia, passed away from multiple myeloma in 2020, and I am thankful every day for her legacy of grace, whimsy, and sharp editorial eye. Most fervent thanks and love go to the Guenther contingent of our GuenGord Conglomerate. Chet and Vivien have lived with this project their entire lives, and a couple of trips abroad seem like small repayment for the joy they have brought to my life. Ed, who does remember the before-Poor-Law time of my life, has been a constant source of support and distraction when I need it most, as well as a timely push to just get the job done. Thank you for being a part of everything.
Introduction: Inspector Brown and the New Poor Law for Scotland
James Shaw Brown devoted his life to the poor people of Paisley. From his first professional position as a teacher at Hutcheson Charity School to his death in 1876 he worked in daily contact with the people in Paisley who had no resources and nowhere else to turn. Whether sick, abandoned, profligate or unlucky, desperate people in Paisley relied on the poor law, colloquially called ‘the parish’, when their options narrowed to that or houselessness and hunger. From 1845, when he formally became Paisley’s Inspector of the Poor, Brown’s job was to determine who qualified for relief from the poor law, to manage the paperwork involved, and to keep the elected officials he served apprised of the situation. As Inspector, he stood at the centre of a relationship between the poor, the ratepayers, and the text of the law governing poor relief.
None of Inspector Brown’s personal writings are known to survive, but it is hard to look at the records of his life and actions and not conclude he held a deep compassion for the poor people he served. Telling the story of the New Poor Law in Scotland as far as possible through his experiences emphasises the human interactions that were at the heart of caring for the poor in the nineteenth century (as they are today). Then as now, it was easy to generalise the poor as an undifferentiated mass of misery, lacking power and too numerous to help if one wanted. It was a poor law inspector’s job to look past the misery and discover the human details that brought a person to desperate want. Through the records Paisley Burgh kept and husbanded for well over a century, that humanity can be revealed again today. Fundamentally this – as every discussion of poverty should be – is a book about people, the difficulties they faced and how they sought to help or be helped. Inspector Brown, quiet though he was, is an apt guide.
Poverty and Poor Relief in Scotland: Definitions
An Act for the Amendment and better Administration of the Laws relating to the Relief of the Poor in Scotland, more commonly called The Poor Law Amendment (Scotland) Act, the New Scottish Poor Law, or a similar variation, was broadly based in the idea that poverty was endemic to society, even divinely ordained, and that some poor people had a right to support from the church or civil government. A ‘poor law’ governed which poor people were entitled to formal relief and how the funds to pay relief would be raised, allocated, and distributed. In England, civil authorities took over the distribution in the late years of Elizabeth I’s reign, and the law there was reformed in 1834. In Scotland, while there were laws governing vagrants (unemployed strangers) and mendicants (beggars) passed during the reign of James VI, the Kirk (Church of Scotland) took the leading role in collecting and distributing relief until 1845.
Poor relief in Scotland rested on two key philosophies: first, that only some kinds of poverty deserved to be relieved, and second, that individual communities were responsible for supporting their own poor. Vagrants, who came from outside a locality, and beggars, who defied the Kirk’s gatekeeping over alms, violated this philosophy. The so-called ‘deserving poor’ were those who had no ability to support themselves, primarily envisioned as the elderly, orphaned, and severely disabled. In Scotland (more so than in England), an ‘able-bodied’ person was considered automatically disqualified from poor relief. Historians have argued over how absolute this prohibition was over time, and the poor relief community themselves argued this point well into the period of concern here.1 Philosophically, however, the exclusion of able-bodied people from deserving relief was a key factor distinguishing the Scottish law from its English counterpart.
The official position that paupers were disabled led to relatively sympathetic treatment. There is no doubt that the amount of relief given was insufficient both before and after the passage of the New Poor Law in 1845, but the attitude that paupers must be punished or reformed of moral failing (as Charles Dickens extravagantly illustrated in Oliver Twist) was not endemic in Scotland. Poorhouses (not ‘work houses’) in Scotland were conceptualised as care facilities, and ‘indoor relief’ was granted to paupers who could not access or maintain their own housing. ‘Outdoor relief’, without incarceration, was far more common and more economical to give. In the period under study here, and particularly in Paisley, the Scottish poor law does not align with the broad-brush description derived from Dickens or many English histories.
The New Poor Law Act, subsequent amendments, associated legal cases and the bureaucracy that implemented them (broadly referred to in this text as the uncapitalised poor law) utilised additional specialised vocabulary that will appear in these pages. The basic administrative unit for the law was the parish, a civil division based on ecclesiastical boundaries within a county. The men who administered the law were given a range of specific and general titles, most commonly managers or overseers of the poor, and the New Poor Law organised them into a parochial board for each parish. When an individual or family applied for help from the poor law (relief), their information was recorded on a paper form that was referred to as a schedule or a statement. The individuals who were officially approved to receive relief were recognised paupers, which was a different legal status than being simply poor. A few technical terms were used to further define the paupers: pupillarity referred to young people who were past infancy but not yet self-supporting, and nonage indicated anyone considered too young for legal responsibility. When these young people did take jobs and leave their parents’ homes, they were considered forisfamiliated. Paupers might receive relief either in money or in kind – a cash payment was also called an aliment. The funds to pay the aliment were raised through a local tax called a poors’ rate or simply rates. Logically, the members of the community who were liable to pay (or to be assessed) this tax were usually called ratepayers. The ratepayers, who ranged from large landowners to simple operatives employed in the town’s mills and factories, were enfranchised to elect the poor law managers, thus keeping daily control of the poor law a local affair.
Poor Law and the Local State
Scotland’s separate control of poor relief was an important feature of the nation’s agency and identity within the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. Following Parliamentary Reform in 1832 and the subsequent reform of municipal governments, burgh-dwelling Scots took renewed control of community issues such as water supplies and road works. These projects were managed by town councils, police boards, and similar governing bodies that emerged in response to demand. The passage of the Poor Law (Scotland) Amendment Act in 1845 gave new local bodies, the parochial boards, responsibility for carrying out the national law at local scale. Unlike most other local concerns, the poor law required correspondence and negotiation between parishes and between the parochial boards and a national body, the Board of Supervision. Through these conversations across decades, the Scottish poor law was defined and shaped into a uniquely Scottish institution, a source of national pride for the men engaged in its management. Fully aware that the Poor Law (Scotland) Act and its amendments were passed by the UK Parliament where Scotland was a minority voice, managers of the poor were alert for evidence that English ideas and practices would be imposed on their Scottish concerns.
Scots were able to have such a strong voice in the interpretation of the poor law because of the peculiar structure of Scottish governance following the Union of Parliaments in 1707. Although Scotland retained its distinctive legal system and religious autonomy under the Union, there was no administrative structure for these institutions at the national level. Instead, towns, counties, and parishes managed areas that were left to Scottish control such as policing and education. Since the 1990s, historians of Scotland have adopted the idea of a ‘local state’ (which originated from sociologist Cynthia Cockburn in 1977) to describe the peculiar system of government for Scotland within the United Kingdom.2 Graeme Morton wrapped such local oversight into the idea of a Victorian civil society that was managed primarily by voluntary organisations rather than national bureaucracies.3 Relief for the poor, originally administered through the established churches in both Scotland and England, fell into the same category.4
Therefore, while the Parliament at Westminster passed the Act for the Amendment and Better Administration of the Law Relating to the Relief of the Poor in Scotland in 1845 for the whole of Scotland, it was implemented at the most-local level.5 The newly-created parochial boards were to oversee relief, and day-to-day functions would be administered by newly-hired poor law inspectors. The Act encouraged combination of parishes that were physically proximate to reduce confusion, but that rarely occurred before the end of the century. The Edinburgh-based Board of Supervision at first neither claimed nor exercised strong central control.6 For the first few decades, the board ‘spent most of their time considering appeals against inadequate relief’ rather than imposing a uniform interpretation of the law.7 It was only in the early 1860s that the board began to require even standardised record-keeping from the parishes.8 The implementation of the New Poor Law, then, first came at the parish level, where it was subject to a wide variety of interpretation by the various inspectors, who were either new to the job or familiar with whatever older system of relief had been in place in their parish before 1845. Details of how the poor law was enacted – who received relief, from what source, how it was funded and how transactions were recorded were worked out first at the parish level and then through dialogue among the parishes. When parish-level interpretations came into conflict, they were resolved in the courts or through extra-judicial consultations with Sheriffs or other knowledgeable arbitrators. Particularly difficult questions in the courts moved upward from the Sheriffs’ Courts through appeals to the Courts of Session, the Scottish Supreme Court, and in occasional cases to the House of Lords. Court decisions then flowed downward to influence the extra-judicial arbitrations and discussions among the inspectors. In this way, although the law itself came from the Parliament of the United Kingdom, interpretation and implementation of the New Poor Law for Scotland was an organic expression of Scottish values from the local level.
Scotland’s New Poor Law
The Poor Law Amendment (Scotland) Act and its effects has received far less scholarly attention than its counterpart passed for England in 1834. In part, this is attributable to the general conflation of Scottish history with British history, strongly favoring the southern partner after the Union of 1707 and the conclusion of the Jacobite movement in 1745. Only since the revival of a strong movement for Scottish independence in the 1990s has separate study of the Scottish experience in the post-Union period and later become common, expanding and redefining the idea of nation as it grapples with Scotland’s relationship to the United Kingdom and empire.9 Academic interest in Scotland’s poor law has also been limited by the undeniable fact the Poor Law Amendment (Scotland) Act strongly reflected the preferences and prejudices of the English-dominated Parliament in Westminster that passed it. In broad strokes, the parsimonious, judgmental image of a Dickensian poor law can be applied across the United Kingdom with some accuracy. Narrowing the focus even slightly to Scotland’s experience, however, reveals important differences between the nations.
Details
- Pages
- XII, 220
- Year
- 2024
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781803744162
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781803744179
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781800799905
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21617
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2024 (April)
- Keywords
- Poor Laws Paisley (town in Scotland) Poverty Scotland Family history demographics Local government
- Published
- Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, 2024. XII, 220 pp., 4 fig. col., 4 tables, 2 maps.
