Popular opposition to the 1834 Poor Law

JOHN KNOTT, Popular opposition to the 1834 Poor Law, London and Sydney, Croom Helm, 1986, 8vo, pp. 284, £19.95. Many distinct advances in scholarship have recently converged to re-emphasize the centrality of the Poor Law to the social history of English medicine. It has lately become clear, for the first time, just how extensive were disbursements for sick paupers under the parochial system of outdoor poor relief first set up by Elizabethan statute and continuing right down to the abolition of the Old Poor Law in 1834. By the eighteenth century, an informal "health service" for the poor operated in most parishes, and it had become normal for vestries to contract with a local surgeon to provide comprehensive (if necessarily somewhat rudimentary) health cover for the aged, the sick, and the incapable. The Old Poor Law came under increasing fire early in the nineteenth century for its alleged "extravagance", and it is clear that medical bills formed no small proportion of its costs. When the New Poor Law was introduced in 1834 under the ideological direction of Benthamite political economy, much tighter control was kept on medical payments. Not surprisingly, resistance to the New Poor Law was fierce and prolonged. For, as John Knott's lively book rightly insists, popular hostility to it was based not upon vague and ignorant anxieties, but upon a well-informed grasp of how it would further penalize misery. Dr Knott devotes most of his space to an account of the shaping of opposition to the passing, and then to the implementation, of the New Poor Law. Petitions, riots, and the storming of the new workhouse "bastilles" began in the South, but spread to Wales, East Anglia, and the industrial North. In numerous towns, elections to the new boards of guardians were boycotted, or were used as embarrassing shows of strength by the opposition; and Knott shows, in the core of his book, how the election of members hostile to the new system created administrative chaos in such centres as Oldham, Todmorden, and Huddersfield, where working-class hostility was strengthened by middle-class backing and the influential support of dissident Tories such as Richard Oastler. Importantly, he establishes that more was at stake in popular resistance than questions of payments to the poor, or even the principle of "less eligibility" and compulsory institutionalization in the workhouse. Hatred of the New Poor Law echoed and amplified a multitude of other fears articulated by the common people that they were about to be dragooned by a new police state. The cholera epidemic of 1832 had triggered panic over powers of compulsory quarantining and hospitalization; and, above all in the popular mind, the New Poor Law seemed to combine in a pincer movement with the 1832 Anatomy Act. Surgeons were to have automatic access to unreclaimed bodies from the workhouse for dissection purposes. Thus it seemed as if paupers were being made over as medical guinea-pigs. Medical History readers may well have a feeling of dejai vu when examining Dr Knott's passages dealing with this issue (pp. 260-263); that sense will be increased by additionally scrutinizing his 'Popular attitudes to death and dissection in early nineteenth century Britain: the Anatomy Act and the poor' (Labour History (Australia), 1985, 49: 1-18). The reason for this is that they will already have read much of it, literally verbatim, elsewhere, in Dr. R. Richardson's 'A dissection of the Anatomy Act', Studies in Labour History, 1976, 1: 1-15. Line after line, and occasionally sentence after sentence, is reproduced by Dr Knott, with at most the token "fig leaf' of a word or two altered. Thus Richardson wrote in 1976 that Henry Hunt "spoke of fear of dissection as one of 'the natural feelings of mankind' and cited the case of Dr Hunter, who although 'he had dissected so many himself, up to the very last moment of his life declared that he