Before 1834, the cost of looking after the poor was growing more expensive each year. After many complaints, a new law was introduced in 1834 imposing a system that would be the same all over the country. This was a law which replaced earlier legislation, attempting to change the poverty relief system in England and Wales. It intended to curb the cost of poor relief and address abuses of the system by enabling a new one. Most people welcomed it since they believed it would reduce the cost of looking after the poor, take beggars off the street and enable poor people to work to support themselves. Under this new law, all who wished to receive aid had to live in workhouses.

During this period, those who were dependent poor were classified in three groups:

-Those who couldn’t look after themselves or go to work, such as the ill, the elderly and children who had no one to properly take care of them. It was generally regarded that they should be looked after.

-The able-bodied poor, referring to those who were unable to find work. There were several attempts to assist these people and get them out of this category, usually consisting in relief in the form of either work or money.

-Those called ‘vagrants’ or ‘beggars’, which were those who could work but had refused to. They were also called the idle poor.

This New Poor Law, as it was also named that way, ensured that the poor were housed in workhouses, clothed and fed. The children who entered the workhouse would also receive some schooling. In return, people would have to work for several hours each day. But some were against this use of the workhouses in this new Poor Law and called them “Prisons for the Poor” (National Archives, 1). This is what Richard Oastler did in a political campaign as an industrial reformer, calling them “cruel and un-Christian” aside from prisons due to the conditions people lived in. (2)

While the Law was good in theory, in execution it lacked a lot. After this law was introduced, many scandals started to appear: reports where inmates were starving, with the most famous one in this case being Andover Workhouse, where it was “reported that inmates were found eating the rotting flesh from bones” (3). As a response, stricter rules were set for those who ran the workhouses as well as setting up regular inspections.

Conditions in the workhouses tended to be deliberately harsh and degrading in order to discourage the poor from relying on too much relief. While there were some amendments to their treatment, people were still at the mercy of masters and matrons who treated them with contempt or abused the rules. It ended becoming a threat: while most people didn’t have to go to the workhouse, it was where they would end if they ended up unemployed, sick or old. As time passed, workhouses stopped being for relief and ended up keeping orphans, the old, the sick and the insane. It seemed to punish people who were poor instead of what was originally planned.

These conditions improved later in the century, and social welfare services supplanted workhouses altogether by the 19^th century.

Works Cited: 

The National Archives. “1834 Poor Law.” The National Archives, The National Archives, 3 Mar. 2022, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/1834-poor-law/.