The organisation of this thesis is thematic, in order to disentangle the complexity and significance of the poor laws in a local area. It is a local study of poverty and the operation of the poor laws. The aim of this detailed survey is to consider the role of poor law administration in Surrey within the national context, and by examining the operation of the poor law at the parish level, to understand the experiences of real people, both ratepayer and the poor. The thesis also considers whether the old poor law was fundamentally defective or whether it can be viewed as a valid response to increasing poverty. It stresses, the relationship between the central and local authorities and the administration of poor relief in rural Surrey outside the Metropolitan area and the hundred of Brixton, Wallington and Kingston for the period 1815–1834 (see Map 1.0). It recognises that before 1834, variety rather than uniformity characterised the administration of poor relief in England and Wales. It also argues, that power and authority, within the English state was the product of negotiation between the centre and the localities. Chapter One deals with the historiography of the old poor law and chapter Two considers the decline of rural industry in Surrey, coupled with continuing economic problems in agriculture and falling demand for labour, which had a devastating effect in rural parishes. Chapter Three details the administrative system of poor relief during a period that saw costs of relief rise, while Chapter Four examines the operation of the relief system at parish level outside the workhouse. Chapter Five examines the provision of indoor relief in Surrey, and Chapter Six considers the position of the ratepayers and their ability and willingness to pay increased poor rates, at a time of agricultural depression combined with rising unemployment. Chapter Seven considers the position of the labourer, when endemic poverty meant that a labourer’s ability to provide for his family without asking the parish for assistance was more a matter of luck than personal industry. Seasonal unemployment exacerbated the situation, forcing farm workers on to the parish for assistance, especially in winter months. Chapter Eight considers the unrest of 1830–32, the so-called Swing Riots. Many studies of poor law only make fleeting reference to the riots. This study sees the disturbances as an integral part of the work and includes a detailed investigation into the riots within the social and cultural context. In Surrey, as in other parts of rural southern England, they took place against the background of the progressive pauperisation of labourers, when parishes were finding it more difficult to provide relief for the growing numbers of unemployed, able-bodied agricultural labourers. Labourers saw the riots as a rising against unemployment and the abuses of the poor law system that seemed unable to provide sufficient relief for their needs. The thesis ends by examining the reaction of the parishes immediately after the riots before the introduction of the 1834 poor law, when attempts were made at parish level to alleviate the situation and to stop further unrest.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-126). Also available on the Internet.

The subject of this study is the debate on poverty and its relief which took place in England in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1940. / Published also without thesis note. Lithoprinted. Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-236).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1973. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-126). Also available on the Internet.

This thesis aims to explore the relationship between the geographies of law, society, economy and the physical environment in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century rural England. It uses as its exploring ground the operation of the Old Poor Law in rural Oxfordshire. This county was chosen because it was both a microcosm of the farming landscape of Southern England and was one of the counties where the problem of poor relief was most acutely felt. Chapter 1 establishes that the mapping out of spatial diversity, and the consideration of the forces moulding it, is fundamental to an understanding of the functioning of the Old Poor Law. Chapter 2 uses data contained in the parliamentary returns to demonstrate some clear regional differences in the level of poor relief and the chronology of change. Chapters 3 and 4 show that these regional averages and trends do not make intelligible the kaleidoscopic welter of local variations indicated by a closer examination of parish records. Chapters 5 and 6 consider poor relief expenditure in four parishes: Cropredy, Pyrton, Spelsbury and Stoke Lyne. These show that differences in the level of poor relief expenditure cannot automatically be taken to indicate variations in the level of what we might think of as unemployment or poverty. The generosity of disbursements, and therefore the real incomes of the poor, could also vary markedly between parishes. Thus, the Old Poor Law cannot be detached from the particular places in which it acquired its meaning and saliency. Its impact upon the daily lives of ratepayers, administrators and recipient can be established and the poor treated as individuals rather than as abstract units of labour.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-111).

This thesis examines the development of self-help as an ideology and as an organisational principle for poor relief and how it came to dominate discussions over poverty and crucially inform the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The continuity of self-help with earlier discussions and reviews of the poor laws is explored and emphasised, as is the continuing moral core of poor relief despite historians’ frequent ascription of de-moralisation to the new political economy that came to heavily influence poor law discourse. The thesis analyses the evolution of the poor laws and of attitudes to poverty and begins with an examination of a divergence in the discourse relating to poverty between a more formal and centralised institutional approach and a more devolved, permissive institutional approach; the latter gained precedence due to its closer proximity to a dominant mode of thinking (as analysed by A. W. Coats) about the poor that held self-betterment as offering a solution to poverty most appropriate to the governance structures of the day. The greater role given to self-betterment and the natural affinity of more devolved schemes with a macroeconomic political economy framework pushed the evolution of poor law discourse along a route of emphasising individual probity and agency over the established model of community cohesion. Parallel to this divergence was the development of distinct intellectual traditions within poor law discourse between the older natural-law tradition of a natural right to subsistence and a new ideology of the natural law of markets and of competition for resources. By analysis of the thought of writers such as Thomas Robert Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, David Davies, Frederick Morton Eden, Edmund Burke, etc., it is shown that this newer conception of natural law, encompassing a less interventionist and more macroeconomic approach (involving the deployment of statistics and abstraction, as explored by S. Sherman), proved more compatible with the devolved, more permissive institutional approach and so came to take precedence over that of the natural right to subsistence, which was associated more with traditional paternalism and community-level responses to scarcity and poverty. The natural law tradition spoke more to the abstract conceptions of poverty associated at this time with the greater deployment of statistics and tables in the analysis of social problems. It is demonstrated how writers of the period utilised utilitarian conceptions and nascent political economic arguments to portray the greater good of the country as a whole as possessed of greater moral and economic authority than more traditional ‘moral economy’ responses, and that vocabularies of virtue and duty were used to illustrate and justify such a shift. This set the scene for self-betterment as an economic strategy to evolve into an ideology of self-help which was developed as the panacea of poverty and the answer to the social dislocations caused by industrialisation. Self-help came to the fore as an approach that was more politically resonant in the era of revolutionary France and which enabled a more permissive institutional apparatus to be advanced. These institutions, such as allotments, savings banks and schools of industry, came to prominence in the period 1816-1820 and pertained more to macroeconomic understandings of poverty. They were expounded using a theme, that of ‘character’, that described poverty as the result of personal imprudence and hence as treatable, the most appropriate level for this treatment being that of the individual. The reforms of 1818-19 and the debates that informed them are given an extended analysis as they formed the crucial juncture in the cohering of self-help as an ideology and a paradigmatic shift in poor law policy towards greater discrimination underwritten by self-help. Finally, the 1834 Poor law Reform Act is explained in terms of the ideological development of arguments of self-help and character towards a more punitive and disciplinarian platform for enforcing self-help, with the cost-efficient and systematic institutional approach of Bentham adapted to the purpose.

Questa tesi esamina il significato e il ruolo che lo spazio ha assunto nella vita e nell’opera di Harriet Martineau. Nella prima parte della tesi l’attaccamento al – o il rifiuto del – luogo, i.e., la casa, è stato ritenuto significativo per lo sviluppo identitario e il senso di benessere esperiti da Martineau. Il racconto economico di Martineau datato 1834 e intitolato The Land’s End è stato scelto invece quale focus nella seconda parte della tesi – scelta basata sulla possibilità di illustrare una strategia narrativa che si avvale dell’utilizzo concreto e simbolico di immagini spaziali da parte della scrittrice. / This dissertation examines the meaning and the role of place in Harriet Martineau’s life and work. In the first part of the dissertation, the attachment to – or rejection of – place, i.e. home, has been acknowledged as significant in Martineau’s development of self-identity and feeling of well-being. Moreover, Martineau’s 1834 economic tale entitled The Land’s End has been chosen as the focus for the second part of the dissertation – a choice based on the possibility of showing the woman writer’s narrative strategy and use of space images in both a concrete and symbolic way.