Geographies of welfare in nineteenth-century England and Wales

From 1834 the destitute of England and Wales had a new environment of rights, responsibilities and hazards to navigate, in the form of the Poor Law Amendment Act. ¹ Since the end of Elizabeth’s reign, some 15,535 parishes had been responsible for the distribution of relief. ² Each had its own practices and policies, and reformers pointed to the social and economic ills which resulted from this patchwork of administration. ³ Under the new poor law – the framework for poor relief in England and Wales which persisted until the early twentieth century – parishes were encouraged to come together as poor law unions run by elected guardians. The object was to ease the tax burden for local ratepayers by reducing the number of paupers through deterrence and by cutting costs through economies of scale.