1 The following are just a few examples of the many ways that historians around the world are now using the narrative voices of the poor: Benton, G. and Liu, H., Dear China: emigrant letters and remittances, 1820–1980 (Oakland, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cameron, W., Haines, S. and Maude, M. McDougall eds., English immigrant voices: labourers’ letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s (Montreal, 2000)Google Scholar; Dossena, M. and Camiciotti, G. Del Lungo eds., Letter writing in late modern Europe (Amsterdam, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lyons, M., The writing culture of ordinary people, c. 1860–1920 (Cambridge, 2013)Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Cohen, M., The voice of the poor in the Middle Ages: an anthology from the Cairo Geniza (Princeton, 2005)Google Scholar; Crossman, V., ‘Writing for relief in late nineteenth-century Dublin: personal applications to the Mansion House Fund in 1880’, Cultural and Social History 14, 5 (2017), 583–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Earner-Byrne, L., Letters of the Catholic poor: poverty in independent Ireland, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gestrich, A., Hurren, E. and King, S. A. eds., Poverty and sickness in modern Europe: narratives of the sick poor, 1780–1938 (London, 2012)Google Scholar; Lürbke, D., ‘Seen with their own eyes: self-presentations of the poor in Freiburg and Schwerin, 1950–1975’, in Althammer, B., Raphael, L. and Stazic-Wendt, T. eds., Rescuing the vulnerable: poverty, welfare and social ties in modern Europe (Oxford, 2016)Google Scholar.

3 Taylor, J. S., Poverty, migration and settlement in the industrial revolution: sojourners’ narratives (Palo Alto, CA, 1989)Google Scholar; Sokoll, T. ed., Essex pauper letters, 1731–1837 (Oxford, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See especially Jones, P., ‘“I cannot keep my place without–being deascent”: pauper letters, parish clothing and pragmatism in the south of England, 1750–1830’, Rural History 20, 1 (2009), 31–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, P. and King, S. A., ‘From petition to pauper letter: the development of an epistolary form’, in Jones, P. and King, S. A. eds., Obligation, entitlement and dispute under the English Poor Laws (Newcastle, 2015), 53–77Google Scholar; King, S. A. and Jones, P., ‘Testifying for the poor: epistolary advocates and the negotiation of parochial relief in England, 1800–1834’, Journal of Social History 49, 4 (2016), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; King, S. A., ‘Negotiating the law of poor relief in England, 1800–1840’, History 96, 324 (2011), 410–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; T. Sokoll, ‘Writing for relief: rhetoric in English pauper letters, 1800–1834’, in Gestrich, Hurren and King eds., Being poor in modern Europe, 91–111; Tomkins, A., ‘“I mak bould to wrigt”: first-person narratives in the history of poverty in England, c. 1750–1900’, History Compass 9, 5 (2011), 365–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 S. A. King, ‘Rights, duties and practice in the transition between the Old and New Poor Laws, 1820s–1860s’, in King and Jones eds., Obligation, entitlement and dispute, 264–5.

6 Published studies include: Crowther, M. A., The workhouse system, 1834–1929: the history of an English social institution (London, 1981)Google Scholar, esp. Part II: ‘Inmates’; Digby, A., Pauper palaces (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Green, D., Pauper capital: London and the poor law, 1790–1870 (Farham, 2010)Google Scholar. For unpublished studies, see: L. Darwen, ‘Implementing and administering the New Poor Law in the industrial North: a case study of Preston Union in regional context, 1837–1861’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Nottingham Trent University, 2015); G. Hooker, ‘Llandilofawr Poor Law Union, 1836–1886: “the most difficult union in Wales”’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2013); K. Rothery, ‘The implementation and administration of the New Poor Law in Hertfordshire, c. 1830–1847’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Hertfordshire, 2016); R. Talbot, ‘North-South divide of the poor in the Staffordshire potteries, 1871–1901’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2017). Recent work on workhouse ‘scandals’ under the New Poor Law has begun to shine a light on the experiences of paupers when things went wrong in specific unions (or, at least, when neglect and maltreatment reached the public eye), but even these have tended to exclude the first-hand testimony and perceptions of paupers themselves. See, for example, Price, K., Medical negligence in Victorian Britain: the crisis of care under the English poor law, c. 1834–1900 (London, 2015), especially chs. 3 and 4Google Scholar; Shave, S. A., Pauper policies: poor law practice in England, 1780–1850 (Manchester, 2017), ch. 5Google Scholar; and Shave, S. A., ‘“Great inhumanity”: scandal, child punishment and policymaking in the early years of the New Poor Law workhouse system’, Continuity and Change 33, 3 (2018), 339–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 It is intriguing that, as early as 1978, Anne Digby wrote approvingly of a ‘growing interest in the experiences of individual paupers’; yet little evidence of this ‘growing interest’ was manifested in the years following her local study of the workhouse in Norfolk. Digby, Pauper palaces, ix.

8 Crowther, Workhouse system, 1–2.

9 For the purposes of this article, the endpoint for the correspondence considered is 1871, when the Poor Law Board was subsumed within the new Local Government Board, which assumed responsibility for all aspects of local government, particularly in the broad area of public health. Not only did this administrative change result in a considerable increase in the quantity of correspondence to the Board, it inevitably changed the nature of that correspondence, and de facto, of the board's approach to its responsibilities. Maltabie, M., ‘The English Local Government Board’, Political Science Quarterly 13, 2 (1898), 232–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Those unions that have been surveyed appear to confirm that MH 12 is unweeded and represents an almost complete record of all correspondence from poor law unions and paupers locally, along with copies of all correspondence that was sent in response. For further information, see Carter, P. and King, S. A., ‘Keeping track: modern methods, administration and the Victorian poor law, 1834–1871’, Archives 40 (2014), 36–40Google Scholar.

11 Historians of the New Poor Law have regularly dipped into the MH 12 collection in order to illustrate a particular point, or to provide details of a specific union. A few authors have recently gone further, placing the commissioners’ correspondence for a number of unions at the centre of their work. But none so far has attempted a systematic survey of the volumes for any union, or has done so on the scale undertaken for this study. See, for example, Green, Pauper capital; Price, Medical negligence; Shave, Pauper policies.

12 King and Jones, in their study of letters from those who advocated for the poor under the Old Poor Law, have demonstrated that there was a very close correspondence between the tone, content and rhetoric of these letters and those that were written by paupers themselves. King and Jones, ‘Testifying for the poor’, 9–18.

13 Englander, D., Poverty and poor law reform in nineteenth-century Britain, 1834–1914: from Chadwick to Booth (Oxford, 1998), 14–15Google Scholar.

14 For a discussion of the out-parish system under the Old Poor Law, see King, S. A., ‘“It is impossible for our Vestry to judge his case into perfection from here”: managing the distance dimensions of poor relief, 1800–40’, Rural History 16, 2 (2005), 161–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See, for example, Bailey, J., ‘“Think wot a mother must feel”: parenting in English pauper letters, c. 1760–1834’, Family and Community History 13, 1 (2010), 5–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; T. Fairman, ‘Letters in mechanically-schooled language: theories and ideologies’, in Dossena and Del Lungo Camiciotti eds., Letter writing, 205–28; King, S. A., ‘Friendship, kinship and belonging in the letters of urban paupers, 1800–1840’, Historical Social Research 33, 3 (2008), 265–72Google Scholar; Snell, K. D. M., ‘Belonging and community: understandings of “home” and “friends” among the English poor, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review 65, 1 (2011), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sokoll, T., ‘Old age in poverty: the records of Essex pauper letters, 1780–1834’, in Hitchcock, T., King, P. and Sharpe, P. eds., Chronicling poverty: the voices and strategies of the English poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke, 1996), 127–54Google Scholar.

16 Jones, ‘“I cannot keep my place”’; King and Jones, ‘Testifying for the poor’.

17 King and Jones, ‘Testifying for the poor’, 18.

18 Jones and King, ‘From petition to pauper letter’, 76.

19 Lees, L. Hollen, The solidarities of strangers: the English poor laws and the people, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998), 11Google Scholar.

20 King and Jones, ‘Testifying for the poor’, 4.

21 Ibid., 18.

22 See, for example, Englander, D., Poverty and poor law reform in Britain: from Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1914 (Abingdon, 1998), 9–17Google Scholar; Harris, B., The origins of the British welfare state: social welfare in England and Wales, 1800–1945 (Basingstoke, 2004), 47–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchison, R., Coping with destitution: poverty and relief in western Europe (Toronto, 1989), 65–8Google Scholar; Rose, M., The relief of poverty, 1834–1914, 2^nd edn (Basingstoke, 1986), 9–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Hurren, E. T., Protesting about pauperism: poverty, politics and poor relief in late Victorian England, 1870–1900 (Woodbridge, 2007), 17–18Google Scholar. The ‘workhouse test’ is simply another name for the deterrent effect of the workhouse. All those who applied for relief but who could work if employment was available (the ‘able-bodied poor’) were offered the option of going to the workhouse rather than being given relief in their own homes. This, it was believed, would deter all but those applicants who were genuinely in need, and thus filter out bogus and ‘idle’ claimants.

24 The National Archives, UK (hereafter TNA), MH 12/2095, Mr Philpot to the Poor Law commissioners, 27 May 1837.

25 King, ‘Rights, duties and practice’, 290–1.

26 Several Old Poor Law workhouses were in operation before 1834 in and around Axminster, but the largest of these (Axminster itself) held only 80 inmates. The New Poor Law workhouse for the Axminster Union was not opened until 1838. For further information, see Peter Higginbotham's exhaustively researched online resource at http://www.workhouses.org.uk [accessed 29 June 2018].

27 TNA MH 12/13076/4, Rev. George Augustus Lamb to the Poor Law commissioners, 15 May 1835; TNA MH 12/2103, John Lee to the Poor Law Board, 25 April 1855.

28 Victor, C., Old age in modern society: a textbook of social gerontology, 2^nd edn (Dordrecht, 1994), 216CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The only exception to this rule appears to have been when elderly paupers obtained a magistrate's ruling that they must be given outdoor relief rather than being ordered into the workhouse. See Archbold, J. F., The poor law, comprising the whole of the Law of settlement and all the authorities upon the poor law generally …, 7^th edn (London, 1853), 43Google Scholar.

29 Crowther, The workhouse system, 17, 49. For explicit references to the rules with regard to the workhouse test and the able-bodied poor, see, for example, the Eighth annual report of the Poor Law commissioners with appendices (London, 1842), 20–1Google Scholar.

30 Boyer, G., ‘“Work for their prime, the workhouse for their age”: old age pauperism in Victorian England’, Social Science History 40 (2016), 12 (Table 7)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 TNA MH 12/13083, Thomas Carter to the Poor Law commissioners, 3 November 1847.

32 Boyer, ‘“Work for their prime”’, 5–6; Thomson, D., ‘Workhouse to nursing home: residential care of elderly people in England since 1840’, Ageing & Society 3, 1 (1983), 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 TNA MH 12/6053, Elizabeth Burke to the Poor Law commissioners, 24 September 1862; TNA MH 12/6053, Ann Goulding to the Poor Law commissioners, 18 June 1863.

34 Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty’, 145, 147.

35 See section 2 above.

36 Snell, K. D. M., Parish and belonging: community, identity and welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge, 2006), 237–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There were other reasons why the system was frowned upon by the commissioners under the New Poor Law, including the fact that non-resident relief blurred the boundaries of responsibility for paupers between different unions and their parish officials.

37 Ibid., 238.

38 TNA MH 12/11363/112, Peter Garnett to the Poor Law commissioners, 18 December 1838.

39 TNA MH 12/11363/128, J. Ayshford Wise to the Poor Law commissioners, 16 April 1839.

40 For example, Brundage, A., The making of the New Poor Law: the politics of inquiry, enactment, and implementation (New Brunswick, NJ, 1978), 103Google Scholar; King, ‘Rights, duties and practice’, 291.

41 Local variability of treatment and experience under the New Poor Law is at the heart of a new and extended study of two unions in Staffordshire, Stoke, and Wolstanton and Burslem. See Talbot, ‘North-South divide’. Local diversity of treatment and experience is something that has also been emphasised strongly for the Old Poor Law, particularly by Hindle, S., On the parish? The micro-politics of poor relief in rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar. See also King, S. A., ‘Welfare regimes and welfare regions in Britain and Europe, c. 1750s to 1860s’, Journal of Modern European History 9, 1 (2011), 55–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 TNA MH 12/11363/128, J. Ayshford Wise to the Poor Law commissioners, 16 April 1839.

43 Ibid.

44 The words are Edwin Chadwick's, quoted in Snell, Parish and belonging, 238.

45 The General Order relating to non-resident relief was authorised in December 1844, and published in 1845. In the preamble, the commissioners explicitly stated that this order ‘does not permit or forbid the allowance of non-resident relief in any case in which such relief is not now permitted, or is not now forbidden’. See The general orders and instructional letters of the Poor Law commissioners, with an extensive index (London, 1845), 27. It is clear from the commissioners’ correspondence to guardians that they expected – or, at least, hoped – that they would be consulted in cases where non-resident relief was to be granted. However, nowhere in the orders was this actually required, and it seems very likely that it was not the case for many unions where non-resident relief continued to be routinely allowed. See also Snell, Parish and belonging, 238–9.

46 TNA MH 12/2095, M. Philpot to the Poor Law commissioners, 15 December 1838.

47 TNA MH 12/7688, Evan Evans to the Poor Law commissioners, 21 June 1867.

48 TNA MH 12/7690, Paul Mahoney to the Poor Law commissioners, 19 October 1870.

49 TNA MH 12/2108, Mary Russell to the Poor Law commissioners, 13 July 1870.

50 For a detailed discussion of the ‘privileged space’ occupied by widows under the Old Poor Law, see P. Jones, ‘Widows, work and wantonness: pauper letters and the boundaries of entitlement under the Old Poor Law’, in Jones and King eds., Obligation, entitlement and dispute, 147–52.

51 TNA MH 12/2096, G. H. Scott to the Poor Law commissioners, 14 June 1842.

52 TNA MH 12/6041, J. W. Long to the Poor Law commissioners, 11 November 1844.

53 A comprehensive history of the Old Poor Law London workhouse is still to be written, which is, perhaps, extraordinary given its importance to the history of early modern institutions in England. The best introduction to the eighteenth-century English workhouse per se remains Tim Hitchcock's doctoral thesis from 1985. T. V. Hitchcock, ‘The English workhouse: a study in institutional poor relief in selected counties, 1696–1750’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1985).

54 TNA MH 12/2096, Capt. H. G. Morris to the Poor Law commissioners, 8 July 1841.

55 TNA MH 12/6040, John Hunter to the Poor Law commissioners, 14 February 1841.

56 These other forms of first-person narrative evidence also abound in the MH 12 correspondence, but do not fall within the scope of the present study.

57 As mentioned in the introduction, it is impossible to infer patterns across all c. 580 unions in England and Wales from the sample represented here, and at this stage of our research there is little to indicate why Axminster workhouse paupers sent so few complaints to the commissioners in comparison with other unions.

58 TNA MH 12/13084, Henry Clark to the Poor Law commissioners, 6 June 1850 and 8 June 1850.

59 TNA MH 12/6055, James Ashworth to the Poor Law commissioners, 11 December 1863.

60 TNA MH 12/2107, Anonymous (‘A Pauper’) to the Poor Law commissioners, 7 January 1868. This particular letter also finished with the addendum: ‘Feed the poor clothe the naked.’

61 TNA MH 12/11368/316, Anonymous (‘An Inmate’) to the Poor Law commissioners, 25 June 1870.

62 Only 3 of the 37 complaints written by paupers were unsigned, whereas five of the twelve complaints written by advocates were written anonymously.

63 TNA MH 12/6040, John Hunter to the Poor Law commissioners, 14 February 1841.

64 TNA MH 12/7685, John Conde to the Poor Law commissioners, 3 February 1859.

65 This is something that is made clear in many of the responses of the commissioners to anonymous letters. For example, in its instructions for how to respond to an anonymous communication relating to shortcomings at the Bethnal Green workhouse, the commissioners’ representative wrote that ‘the Board do not usually attach much importance to anonymous communications’. TNA MH 12/6854, Anonymous (‘An Inmate’) to the Poor Law commissioners, 30 January 1867.

66 TNA MH 12/6059, Joseph Murphy to the Poor Law commissioners, 21 July 1866.

67 See section 3.

68 Higgs, E., ‘The rise of the information state: the development of state surveillance of the citizen in England, 1500–2000’, Journal of Historical Sociology 14, 2 (2002), 75Google Scholar.

69 Higgs, E., The information state in England: the central collection of information on citizens since 1500 (Basingstoke, 2004), 65, 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 TNA MH 12/7685, John Conde to the Poor Law commissioners, 3 February 1859.

71 TNA MH 12/6055, James Ashworth to the Poor Law commissioners, 11 December 1863.

72 TNA MH 12/13084, William Hunter to the Poor Law commissioners, 22 March 1851.

73 Anonymous (‘A Late Reliving Officer’), The poor laws unmasked: being a general exposition of our workhouse institutions … (London, 1859), 49–50Google Scholar; Green, Pauper capital, 214.

74 By way of comparison, while the metropolitan union of Poplar generated seventeen workhouse complaints from paupers and advocates between 1836 and 1870, Bethnal Green generated 87 such complaints over the same period.

75 The inquiries into various workhouse officials constitute a significant proportion of volumes TNA MH 12/6850 to 6852, and almost all of volume 6853.

76 Crowther, The workhouse system, 221.

77 Ibid., 1–2.