The New Poor Law Guardians and the Administration of Insanity in East London, 1834-1844
Elaine Murphy
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SUMMARY: One of the main aims of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was to impose national consistency of practice in poor relief. Central guidance was designed to produce uniformity in guardians' policies on dealing with the insane. This study of the administration of insanity in the eastern metropolis in the first decade after the Act demonstrates that the new boards of guardians were as culturally distinctive in their style of administration of the new Poor Law as the parishes had been under the old regime. A complex interplay of personality, politics, and class determined the corporate culture of individual boards.
KEYWORDS: new Poor Law, social history, administration, insanity, London
Introduction
James Lock was brought in to Stepney Union's Mile End workhouse in the winter of 1838. This is the account of Mr. Warren, the Relieving Officer:
On the 3 December while the Relieving Officer happened to be at the residence of the medical officer Mr Story on other business, a message was brought requiring the immediate attendance of the latter upon an old man in Devonshire Street supposed to be insane. Both officers immediately attended and found James Lock sitting by the fire. It seems he had gone to the necessary and having stopped long his daughter went to look for him and found him lying on the stairs in the yard quite exhausted from cold.He was promptly removed to the workhouse where every attention was paid to him until his death on the 5 December upon which a coroner's inquest was held at the insistence of the Master of the workhouse. . . . [End Page 45]
The only clothing he had on him at the time was a coat and one shoe and it would seem he was in the habit of going about almost in a state of nudity. It was a respectable sort of house but there was no vestige of furniture in his room except a little flock in one corner although his daughter is understood to be in receipt of £50 per annum. 1
The Relieving Officer adds that he "considered it safer to remove him at once to the workhouse than to trust him to the care of the daughter who by the accounts given her by her neighbours, appears to be addicted to drinking." 2
More than one hundred and sixty years later, the local Stepney community psychiatrist would find this situation familiar. He would accompany the "area social worker" on a "domiciliary visit." They might well decide to admit confused James Lock to the local institution just as Mr. Warren and Mr. Story did, and, as it happens, to the very same institution in Bancroft Road, now called Mile End Hospital. Day-to-day clinical practice in U.K. mental health services today is rooted in operational systems that were established by the Poor Law authorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How did the system work? What were the responsible authorities trying to achieve, and how did they use the resources available to them? In this paper I will examine how public policy for the care of mentally disordered people was formulated and implemented by the newly created boards of guardians and their staff in the East End of London in the first decade after the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.
Various Acts of Parliament from 1714 established rules governing the disposal and care of mentally disordered people. The rules were refined through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the pattern of institutional provision changed, but the Poor Law was the administrative rock on which the system of care was constructed. Yet as John Walton first pointed out in 1984, until recently two other themes dominated the historiography of mental disorder: first, that of clinical psychiatry and psychiatrists; and second, the rise of the Victorian asylum as society's preferred response. 3 Over the past fifteen years, however, largely through the work of Peter Bartlett, David Wright, Len D. Smith, and Bill Forsythe and Joseph Melling, the asylum and "mad-doctors" have been repositioned [End Page 46] on the periphery of a target that places the administration of the Poor Law at its center. 4 My cross-sectional local study, comparing neighboring authorities' differing administrative practices, supplements recent literature using materials from a metropolitan geographical patch a world away from Melling's leafy Devon and the Middle England where Bartlett's, Smith's, and Wright's studies are set. Areas with similar sociodemographic population characteristics demonstrate the impact of corporate culture and the personal influences of elected local leaders and their employees. The work reported here forms part of a longitudinal study of the administration of insanity in east London from 1800 to 1870. 5
My findings are based on material in the minutes of meetings, correspondence, and other official documents of the boards of guardians, together with Poor Law Commission Statistics and Annual Parliamentary Returns, correspondence, and official statistical surveys. The minutes of the boards of guardians, the locally elected officers charged with the administration of the Poor Law, are full notes of all decisions—and sometimes also of arguments rehearsed during discussion at the weekly meetings of the board—and were kept in a form prescribed by the government. The handwritten draft and "fair copy" minutes and correspondence of the parish officials are preserved almost complete for many unions in metropolitan London, from the formation of the boards to their dissolution in the early twentieth century. The Parliamentary Returns for England and Wales were collected from 1842. Boards of guardians were required to list the number in the total population, the number of paupers identified as "lunatic or idiot," the numbers in the county asylum, in private licensed houses, in the workhouse, or receiving outdoor relief, and finally the weekly costs of each institution. 6 [End Page 47]
The New Poor Law
Following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, fifteen thousand small parishes in England and Wales were united to form six hundred "Poor Law Unions" for the administration of poor relief. The old Poor Law "parish trustees of the poor," who had been responsible for raising the "poor rate" local tax from householders and administering poor relief—that is, monetary handouts or food provisions—were replaced by new "boards of guardians." Guardians were elected volunteers from constituent parishes, who were charged with administering the new Poor Law under the guidance and oversight of the central government agency, the Poor Law Commission.
The aim of the reformed act was to tackle the burgeoning national poor relief bill and to reduce the dependence of able-bodied "workless" paupers. The basis of providing relief was the "principle of less eligibility"—that is, the able-bodied pauper should not be made "really or apparently" as eligible as "the independent labourer of the lowest class." 7 Poor relief was to prevent destitution and indigence, not simply to relieve poverty. Outdoor relief (cash handouts to the needy living at home) was meant to cease altogether to the able-bodied who were impoverished through being out of work, and relief would be available only in a strictly controlled union workhouse. At the heart of the new Poor Law lay a system of classification to separate the "deserving" from the "undeserving" able-bodied. The sick and aged were meant to be the "deserving," continuing to receive appropriate outdoor relief and medical care provided by union-appointed physicians and to be admitted as necessary for care in the workhouse if they required supervision and had no family to support them.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Amendment Act contained few new ideas. All the key components of the new system had been developed inside and outside Parliament during the last fifty years or so of the old Poor Law. The challenge was to integrate them into a compulsory national pattern. 8 The new Poor Law should be seen in the wider context of the nineteenth-century "revolution" in government administration. Parliamentary initiatives led to the reform and central regulation of factories, mines, education, public health, police, and emigration. The imposition [End Page 48] of governmental will through centralization was more readily achieved in areas where there was no existing system controlled by powerful interests. The Poor Laws were vital instruments for preserving rural social order and maintaining the dominant interests of land-owning peers, the gentry, and the rising factory owners. Peter Mandler argues that the new law packaged a solution to the poverty problem that was welcomed by both traditionalists and reformers. 9
The new Poor Law did not replace the old order, but rather strengthened the powers of traditional local leaders over their neighborhoods. Its success depended on the local boards of guardians, not on central government. Local policies on relief were far less changed during the nineteenth century than the watershed event of the Amendment Act has the reputation for achieving. In rural areas, outdoor relief supported the majority of people receiving relief before and also after the Act. Attitudes toward the poor by the propertied classes shifted back and forth, and the harshness of some of the new provisions was relatively short-lived in most areas. 10
The able-bodied poor were the main target of the new Act but, not for the first time, legislation designed to address one problem had an unfortunate effect on other groups encompassed in the same statute—in this case, the sick and aged "impotent" poor. Sick paupers, including the insane, were meant to benefit from the new legislation in that they were to be separately classified and have special facilities provided for them. In the event, the hardening attitude sanctioned by the Act caught all economically dependent groups in the same trap.
A central board of Poor Law Commissioners was backed up by assistant commissioners, later called inspectors, who acted as agents in regional localities. Parishes that were insufficiently large to sustain a workhouse were to be grouped into unions. Each local union had a board of elected guardians served by permanent salaried officials headed by the clerk. The process of local implementation depended on the assistant commissioners, and on the views of the landed gentry and other locally influential JPs. 11 [End Page 49]
East London Parishes under the New Poor Law
The area that comprises the modern boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets, and the City of London had a population of about half a million in the mid-nineteenth century. It comprised an ancient area, or "hundred," for legal administration of petty sessions, called the "Tower Division of the Ossulstone Hundred" in the County of Middlesex (see Fig. 1).
The new Poor Law became a bone of political contention in many urban areas. Whigs brought in the Act, and the Tories necessarily challenged it, especially the Tory magistracy. In London parishes it was the ultraradical faction that noisily opposed the imposition of central control. Unions were intended to cover a population of ten thousand or so, to incorporate up to thirty parishes, with a central market town at the hub in provincial areas. By 1837 the majority of east London metropolitan parishes had either established boards of guardians for individual large urban parishes, such as Shoreditch or Bethnal Green, or had joined, some rather more willingly than others, with their neighbors to form a union.
Some of the large single parishes in the metropolitan area that had commissioned their own series of poor acts over the previous thirty years or so, however, were content with their existing structures and simply refused to form a board of guardians. Other areas required the unification of only two or three parishes: St. John at Hackney joined with St. Mary Stoke Newington; Poplar joined with Bromley by Bow and Stratford le Bow. The smaller metropolitan parishes united with several neighbors. Most London parishes already had a workhouse, often a large one with several hundred inmates, and were already classifying paupers according to rudimentary criteria of age and health status. Figure 1 shows the boards of guardians of east London in 1840.
Four separate kinds of institutions were promoted by the Poor Law Commissioners: one for children, two (male and female) for the able-bodied, and one for the sick. New workhouse buildings were often huge, monolithic single institutions with separate internal wards. There was surprisingly little use made of small preexisting poorhouses, which, in theory, could have been adapted to a variety of uses, although many were in a poor state of repair. In east London the new unions did incorporate a number of their existing workhouses into a rudimentary classification scheme where there was no immediate alternative, but proper division into sick and able-bodied did not come until the development of separate workhouse infirmaries in the late 1860s and 1870s. Felix Driver suggests that the question of classification lay at the heart of the new Poor [End Page 50] [Begin Page 52] Law discourse on workhouse policy, illustrating his thesis by reference to the treatment of insane paupers in separate wards. 12
Withdrawal of outdoor relief to the able-bodied poor in October 1835 provoked little overt trouble in London. 13 The implementation of the new act was a triumph of crafty political administration, insofar as the Poor Law Commission issued orders prohibiting outdoor relief in a given locality only when the local inspectors judged that the union was ready for it. The inspectors' main task was to be persuasive. 14 The Commission possessed few coercive powers; effectively, power over Poor Law spending remained with the guardians. General orders were obligatory, however, and could in theory be enforced against a recalcitrant board of guardians through the courts. The Commission auditor could also disallow illegal expenditure. In practice, these powers were used only to curb more blatant flaunting of the Act.
Between 1800 and 1840, east London changed—from a prosperous, green and pleasant area on the City fringe with scattered rural villages in the hinterland to a disease-ridden, filthy, overcrowded sump of urban impoverishment. The displacement of laborers from the gentrifying West End and City and the building expansion of the docks shoved poorer people east. The constant inward migration of Irish and English rural poor and displaced native artisans from the West End created a society that was ever expanding—a scary netherland of vice, illiteracy, and pathology that provided an object for respectable Victorian fear, loathing, governmental statistics, and charity. It also provided the social context within which human distress and disease bred high rates of mental disorder.
David R. Green's study of economic change and poverty in nineteenth-century London and Gareth Stedman Jones's analysis of the disastrous fortunes of the casual labor market eloquently describe the creation of a marginalized and impoverished East End, while the Victorian economy expanded to imperial dimensions. 15 The geographical heterogeneity of the metropolitan population in 1800, rich and poor jostling cheek by [End Page 52] jowl in a complex social soup, had separated out into discrete social zones by 1870. As the City's docks and manufacturing industries grew, the West End became predominantly middle- and upper-class, and the East End predominantly artisan and poor. While the census population of England and Wales doubled between 1801 and 1851, in east London the mid-century population was two and a half times larger than in 1801.
The East End has been called the locus classicus for the study of urban poverty, a status that it acquired as the most socially deprived impoverished area of Britain in the early nineteenth century and that it has retained until the present day. 16 Green's analysis of poverty in London in 1840, using a number of social indices, ranked the districts of east London from second poorest (Bethnal Green) to eleventh poorest (Stepney) out of thirty-two districts in the central metropolis. 17 The insanitary living conditions of the East End poor were the subject of numerous government reports in the mid-nineteenth century. Fever had ravaged the poorer parishes of London in the winter of 1837-38. The Poor Law Commission called for two reports, one from Neil Arnott, M.D., and James Phillips Kay, M.D., on how causes of fever were to be eradicated, and a second from Southwood Smith on "causes of sickness and mortality amongst the poor." 18 Both reports are eloquent about living conditions across the East End. (Christopher Hamlin remarks that they "set out to discover the causes of fever . . . and found it to be filth.") 19 "On 1st May (1838) we inspected parts of the eastern extremity of London, about Wapping, Ratcliff Highway, the poorest of Stepney"; they found
houses and courts or alleys without privies, without covered drains and with only open surface gutters so ill made that in many places the fluid was stagnant. . . . Houses dirty beyond description as if never washed or swept and extremely crowded with inhabitants who had no means of separation in case of disease arising among them. . . . . Pigs kept in back yards with sties very filthy and masses of half putrid food for pigs in receptacles which in once instance [End Page 53] were in the back room of the house with an open door to the front room in which was lying a man in the last stages of fever. 20
In the eastern metropolis the old Poor Law parish trustees had adopted an institutional solution to the management of the pauper problem by the end of the eighteenth century: 21 they made extensive use of huge urban "pauper farms," 22 but also built new, larger workhouses and expanded their medical and poor relief services—yet the numbers of dependent poor people in institutional care grew inexorably. The new guardians faced some challenging problems. Their huge populations had doubled or tripled since the beginning of the century. Resentful, poor, working-class rate-payers depended on them to keep a close eye on spending, but the heavily pauperized population was used to a generous provision of outdoor relief in lean times. Poplar was the exception, where the vestry had already dispensed with most outdoor relief. The guardians' capital estate consisted of an assortment of dilapidated poorhouses, workhouses, "dumps and dosshouses," 23 and remote children's institutions in the country. Most parishes used pauper farm placements extensively for the refractory and incompetent.
The Poor Law Management of Insanity
The insane were simply another category of dependent, incompetent paupers to be subjected to the new regulations. They would probably have been well down the list of priorities except for the fact that institutional placements were costly, and managing disturbed behavior was disruptive of workhouse routine. There was minimal guidance in the new Act as to how the lunatic problem should be managed—just one reference: "Any dangerous Lunatic, insane person, or Idiot" should not be detained in a workhouse for longer than fourteen days but removed to an insane asylum. 24 It took until 1842 for the Poor Law Commission to clarify the vague wording, when a special instruction was issued under the General Order for Workhouses: [End Page 54]
No pauper of unsound mind who may be dangerous or who may have been reported as such by the medical officer for the workhouse, or who may require habitual or frequent restraint, shall be detained in the workhouse for any period exceeding 14 days. 25
Many guardians retained the majority of those classified as insane in the workhouse until they became frankly unmanageable. In east London, Shoreditch, St. Luke, Hackney, and Stepney created separate insane wards. 26 Out of thirteen thousand or so declared lunatics in England and Wales in 1842-43, only just over 42 percent were in asylums or licensed houses. 27
During 1843 the Poor Law Commission issued a stronger directive to encourage the boards of guardians to apply to the local magistrates for an order to send a lunatic to an asylum under 9 Geo. IV c. 40:
We are deeply convinced that paupers of unsound mind should, where there is a chance of cure, be sent to an asylum as soon as possible after the commencement of their malady. . . . We [called] attention to the extreme importance of suffering no motive of economy to deter the Guardians from sending pauper patients to an asylum where they might receive proper treatment at as early a time as possible. . . . The more recent a case of insanity is, the greater is the chance of cure; therefore humanity and sound policy equally demand that persons so situated should receive the best professional aid and at as early a stage as possible of their malady. 28
Thus the medical approach, stressing the need to treat and the aspiration to cure, became official Poor Law Commission policy in addition to the "safe custody" rationale.
The Insane in East London
East London was unusually well provided with institutions for the insane. Large licensed houses—that is, private asylums—specialized in the parish pauper trade and provided sixteen hundred places by 1840, used [End Page 55] mostly by local metropolitan parishes and unions, although they also served more distant parishes in the southeast. 29 The voluntary hospital, St. Luke's Hospital for the Insane in nearby Old Street, also took recent cases if the parish was willing to pay the fees. Bethlem was also available, in theory, but was almost always full and had become highly selective and expensive. 30 The charitable Guy's Hospital "mad-house" took only chronic, female, private cases by the 1820s. 31 The Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell in west London, administered by the County Justices, was opened in 1831.
The County of Middlesex Returns reported major differences between east London unions in their use of Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell, private licensed houses, and workhouses. (Shoreditch did not submit Returns because it had not formed a board of guardians and did not consider itself bound by the regulations on submitting statistics.) Institutional costs differed greatly between unions. Workhouses were generally cheap compared with elsewhere. In London, the average Middlesex workhouse cost 3s. 8d. per week per person, just a little more expensive than the average for England and Wales of 2s. 10d. Costs in east London varied from 2s. 10 3/4d. in the City's East London Union and 2s. 11d. in Whitechapel, up to 4s. 9 3/4d. in Stepney.
By 1842, Hanwell's weekly charge was comparable with other county asylums at 9s. 0 1 /2d. per week. Colonel Clitherow, chairman of the Visiting Justices, was proud of their success in squeezing costs down from 6s. 5d. to 5s. 10d. per week by increasing capacity in the late 1830s—but after the arrival in 1839 of Dr. John Conolly as medical superintendent and a new chairman, John Adams, the improved staffing ratio required for the innovative non-restraint policy required costs to go up dramatically. 32
Table 1 shows the unions' institutionalization rate per 1,000 population and the percentage of lunatics and idiots admitted to each type of institution or maintained on outdoor relief, derived from the Returns and from the 1841 census figures. The same pattern of spending across [End Page 56] the East End unions was maintained in the following years' Annual Returns up to 1845. 33 Table 2, derived from the figures in Table 1, shows the average expenditure per patient per annum, and spending per 1,000 population on lunatics and idiots per annum.
As we look at Table 2, it can be seen that the institutionalization rate rather than the cost of placement largely determined the overall rate of spending per patient and the spending rate on lunatics and idiots per year. St. George in the East and the City of London unions had high institutionalization rates, whereas Bethnal Green and Poplar kept their costs down overall by their low numbers of placements. Bethnal Green and Poplar were also the highest users of Hanwell (74 percent and 95 percent, respectively, of their lunatics were sent there), at a high per-patient cost compared with their neighboring unions. The spending per patient largely reflects choice of placement, and correlates only weakly with total spending per population. [End Page 57]
The two City unions, City of London Union and East London Union (there was a third, short-lived West London Union, which covered Holborn and the western end of the Square Mile), were not entitled to use Hanwell Asylum. The Corporation Aldermen had refused to collaborate with the Middlesex Justices in building an asylum. The City guardians continued to place the majority of patients in the licensed houses—Hoxton House and Bethnal Green Asylums—retaining a quarter or so of their lunatics in the House and supporting lunatics with outdoor relief. Table 1 confirms that the metropolitan approach to management was largely institutional: very few of those designated as pauper lunatics in east London were maintained on outdoor relief at home or with relatives. St. George's high costs are largely attributable to the high numbers of those in the workhouse who were designated as lunatics.
The Differences between Boards of Guardians
The marked differences in approach to managing their insane paupers is readily seen from the tone and content of the minutes of the boards of guardians and their attitudes to the new Poor Law. First, the low spenders of Poplar and Bethnal Green are contrasted with the high spenders of St. George in the East.
Bethnal Green:
A Low Spender
From the foundation of its board of guardians in 1837, Bethnal Green was committed to a parsimonious interpretation of the Amendment [End Page 58] Act. 34 The Poor Law Commission despaired of persuading them to improve the workhouse, "the most inconvenient, crowded and in all respects the worst premises now occupied by any Board of Guardians." 35 The Commission threatened that the parish would be forcibly united with another local union if matters did not improve. 36 Considerable energy was expended in devising ways of shifting or reducing costs in Bethnal Green, every lunatic placement scrutinized with an eye to the cheapest option. When institutionalization could not be avoided, Hanwell was used as soon as it became the most economical compared with private institutions.
There is no record of the guardians discussing their aims for this group of paupers; policy and ideology were not the Bethnal Green guardians' strong points. If possible, money was extracted from relatives: "Joseph Mann, Insane: Mr William Young of 76 Church Street came before the Board to advocate of Mr Mann late of Pollard Row, chairmaker who was now in a state of insanity and about to be removed to Messrs Warburton's [also called Bethnal Green Asylum]." 37 Mann had a weekly pension of 10s. per week from the East India Company, to which the Guardians had a legal claim for the purpose of paying Mann's asylum costs. Mr. Young wanted part of the pension to be allowed to Mann's wife; the board demurred, but agreed to reconsider if Mann went to Hanwell, where costs were lower. Mann finally got his place in Hanwell some two months later, reducing the cost burden on the parish, and the guardians agreed that the pension would be used to pay Warburton's outstanding bill of £1 17s. 6d. The sum of 5s. 6d. a week would be paid from the pension toward the cost of Hanwell. Mann's wife could keep the 4s. 6d. remainder, "to which son and Mr Young assented." 38
When Sally Bartlett died in the Asylum on the Green in 1839, the guardians placed a charge over her £30 residual estate held in the local savings bank in order to cover Warburton's bill of £14 15s. 0d.; the remainder was handed over to her son-in-law. 39 The active pursuit of relatives was not always successful, however. The guardians tried and failed to extract the cost of maintaining Sarah Charles at Hanwell from [End Page 59] either her father or her husband. 40 These examples confirm that many so-called pauper lunatics were not strictly "paupers," in the sense that they or their relatives had modest financial resources. They, like James Lock in Stepney mentioned earlier, fell within the responsibility of the guardians because of their social dependence and lack of ability to effect their own arrangements for care.
The guardians could be ruthless in their dealings with other boards of guardians. The parish maintained Jonathan Dobbs at Bethnal Green Asylum but his settlement and family were in Southampton. Worried that they would not be able to extract the maintenance costs out of Southampton Union, the Bethnal Green guardians decided that the sooner Dobbs was removed to his hometown the better. They directed the relieving officer "to go down with Jonathan Dobbs and leave him with his wife at Southampton." 41 Mary-Ann Dobbs turned up a few days later and made the better suggestion that she should get an order for his removal to Southampton Union; meanwhile, she would like her husband to remain in the asylum. The board agreed, and Mrs. Dobbs departed to negotiate with her local guardians. 42 A fortnight later the clerk reported:
Southampton Union would consent to allow him to remain at the White House on the Green paying the charge of 10/- a week and thus relieving us of every expense ab initio. The Board fully approved of the course that had been so satisfactorily taken to rid us of this heavy encumbrance. 43
Caroline Sabassa (or Sabasson, also called Garvan) wandered into the parish as a mentally deranged "casual," and she was sent to Warburton's. The clerk was inclined to get Phillips, the surgeon at Warburton's, to send her back to her previous lodgings with Mr. Walker in Westminster: since she was thought to be destitute, the guardians would be stuck with the bill if they left her in the asylum. "I have done all in my power to get rid of this poor woman," wrote Phillips; "Walker has no visible means of supporting her. I am reluctantly compelled to ask the Guardians to make her chargeable to the County, as she has no settlement in England." 44 The board decided to shift Caroline to Hanwell as soon as there was a vacancy. About six weeks later, the clerk "finally got her made a County Patient at Worship St. [magistrate's court] thus getting rid of a vast [End Page 60] difficulty and a permanent encumbrance on the parish." 45 At the same meeting, it was noted with satisfaction that the removal had been arranged of another lunatic, Elizabeth Griffen (with her child), back to Milton parish in Northampton, her home parish agreeing to foot the outstanding bill of £20 owed to Hanwell. 46
The mean-minded guardians of Bethnal Green included the usual sprinkling of small tradesmen: carpenter, pawnbroker, cheesemonger, bricklayer. No fewer than five, however, were actively engaged in the housing development boom that was rapidly changing Bethnal Green from a pleasant, semirural suburb to one of the unhealthiest places in London. The quality of the myriad one-story terrace houses was notoriously bad. One of the guardians, Nathaniel Hardingham, was a house agent who rented out huge numbers of houses in Bethnal Green; another was a local land-owning JP, William Howard. 47 It is possible that both these men fell into the category of despised profiteers. Single-minded dedication to cost containment was the plank of Bethnal Green's strategy for managing the insane.
Poplar:
A Low Spender
The parish vestry of All Saints Poplar was in the vanguard of the fight against dependent pauperism long before 1834. A tough and determined committee of vestrymen had all but done away with outdoor relief for the able-bodied workless and believed wholeheartedly in encouraging thrift, sobriety, and self-reliance. 48 When Poplar was united with the "softer" neighboring parishes of Stratford le Bow and Bromley by Bow, [End Page 61] Poplar's was the dominant culture that emerged in the new board of guardians. The culture of humorless, hard-hearted efficiency that permeates the minutes is as near to the punitive Poor Law that haunts Dickens's novels as any in east London.
Poplar parish's clean but austere workhouse was quickly adopted as the main union house, and the secondary smaller one in Bow was closed. 49 Almost at once the board began to plan a larger, even more starkly ascetic institution to satisfy the drive to classification; there is a small infirmary ward on the 1842 plans, but no provision for the insane. 50 Poplar claimed that "0" lunatics were maintained in the workhouse in the Parliamentary Return of 1842. Board policy was to send lunatics to Bethnal Green Asylum and then, as soon as a place was available, to Hanwell. The guardians may have judged correctly that their grim workhouse regime was unsuitable for even "harmless" lunatics. Thomas Holder, for example, was removed to Bethnal Green Asylum immediately after the workhouse master reported him "of unsound mind." 51
Poplar Union's cost-consciousness extended to the payment of its officers, who were remunerated at the lowest rate of all east London boards: the clerk was paid £160 per annum; the relieving officer, John Landale, £120 per annum; and the three medical officers, £300 between them. 52 The union had a smaller population than others in east London (31,091 in the 1841 census), but the geographical area was large. Half the district was docks, manufactories, and wasteland soon to be filled up with rickety housing. 53
The Poplar guardians wasted no opportunity to make real the policy of "less eligibility." Just before Christmas 1837 the union stopped the pensions of five elderly people living in Bow, ranging in age from sixty-five to ninety-three-year-old Elizabeth Kidd. The Bow parish vestry protested the inhumanity of the decision, the churchwarden and vestrymen requesting the union to reconsider. 54 Sensitive to the delicate nature of relationships with its constituent parishes, the union agreed to exempt these five pensioners from the new ruling for the time being, but stated [End Page 62] unequivocally the guardians' commitment to discontinuing such pensions in the future. The board had undertaken a systematic review of all seven hundred recipients of outdoor relief shortly after formation of the union: the elected guardians reviewed personally all cases with names beginning with the initials A to C, setting the pace and tone for the full detailed review by the relieving officer. 55
The workhouse regime was grim: The customary daily pint of small beer was quickly abolished. Regular porter could be prescribed only on a temporary, individual basis to the aged and infirm. 56 Christmas dinner was reduced in size in 1838 some years before the Poor Law Commission suggested that all unions should provide a more frugal repast. Poplar's regular dietary provision was subsistence nutrition only, predominantly bread and gruel, with the least meat of the Commission's suggested options: a meager allowance of two ounces of cheese instead of meat.
Poplar spent less than half what St. George in the East spent on lunatics. 57 They sent 95 percent of their insane paupers to Hanwell and 5 percent to Bethnal Green Asylum, and rigorously extruded mentally disordered paupers from the workhouse into specialist institutions. This may not necessarily have seemed a bad policy as far as the lunatic paupers were concerned, bearing in mind Poplar's joyless workhouse regime. It is worth considering, too, that Poplar Union may have been trying to implement the new Poor Law to the letter, reserving their workhouse for the able-bodied "undeserving" and ensuring that the most-disturbed lunatics were admitted to a public asylum. Individual cases in Poplar were sent to the most expensive placement as a matter of preference. Rather against this, however, is the evidence of their strict harshness toward the sick aged in the workhouse.
St. George in the East:
A High Spender
The large parish of St. George in the East (population 41,351 in the 1841 census) established its own board of guardians early, in 1836. The transition from old Poor Law parish vestry to new Poor Law board of guardians was achieved without much apparent change in either the culture or [End Page 63] practice of poor relief. 58 St. George's guardians were a benevolent, kindly lot, and generous as far as lunatics were concerned. One might possibly judge them profligate: they declared the highest rate of institutionalized lunatics and idiots per population, 59 and spent more on their care than any other east London board. The cost of each placement was above average. St. George was also a generous employer: their clerk was paid £275 per annum, compared with the east London norm of £200. (Stepney paid £250, but only because their legally qualified clerk, William Baker, undertook legal work on behalf of the union.) 60 St. George wanted to pay their three medical officers an above-average all-in fee to cover midwifery and vaccination cases as well as parish work, but the Commission forbade it, and indeed insisted they reduce their remuneration of medical officers. 61
The St. George guardians were willing to employ an experienced lunatic keeper to care for someone in the workhouse. Jane Taylor, "insane," was returned to the workhouse by Warburton's because she was in an advanced state of pregnancy and they felt unable to cope with her dual condition; the guardians decided to employ a special nurse to look after her in the workhouse. 62 On occasion they would waive their charge over personal assets if there seemed good reason. Anne Russell died in Hanwell, having been funded by the parish for several years in various asylums at a total cost of £60. Her executors applied to the board to have some of her residual estate, which was only just over the £60, reserved for her relatives, "being very poor"; in characteristically generous fashion, the board agreed to forgo part of their charge over the legacy in order to support her relatives. 63
The St. George guardians took a much greater personal interest, and gave more of their own time to parish work, than seems to have been the case in neighboring districts. Two of the board, for example, visited Mr. Drouet's establishment at Tooting every week to see the pauper children. Every six weeks or so they also visited the lunatics maintained at Warburton's, Byas's Pauper Farm at Old Ford, and Mr. Armstrong's Asylum at [End Page 64] Peckham (Armstrong's was used increasingly after 1843 when Hanwell and Warburton's were full); the round trip by carriage from the parish to all the asylums was done in the same day. Perhaps it was this direct regular personal contact of the elected guardians with the paupers, in preference to delegating their responsibilities to their medical and relieving officers, that kept the board's attention on human need rather than on the cost consequences of their decisions. They did not quibble about how much to spend on Christmas dinner for the workhouse—a choice of roast mutton or roast beef, followed by plum pudding, washed down with a pint of porter for every inmate, in quantities that paupers outside the workhouse might well have envied. 64 Poplar would not even countenance plum pudding, never mind beef.
By 1842 St. George's poor relief budget was running at £11,400; Hackney and Stoke Newington, with a similar-size population, spent £7,600 the same year. 65 St. George was still spending as much on outdoor relief in money as in kind, £300 a quarter or so on both. The workhouse cost £1,300 per quarter, the children at Tooting another £840, lunatic placements £250 (the Hackney equivalent was £200). Sundry other expenses are documented in figures casually rounded up to the nearest £10 in a manner not seen in other board minutes, and certainly not in the Commission-prescribed style.
Hanwell Asylum was inconveniently sited for St. George. The guardians fretted over whether they should visit personally, but it was too far to include in the regular round trip to asylums. 66 Never backward in planning to spend rate-payers' money, St. George subscribed to the growing local opinion, initiated by Stepney, that a second county lunatic asylum for the eastern part of Middlesex should be supported. 67
The board was particularly indulgent to workhouse inmates. The "in-relief" budget in 1840 was £196.8 per 1,000 parish population—nearly double that of Stepney, Whitechapel, Poplar, and Holborn, and three times as much as that of Hackney and Bethnal Green. 68 Only the City unions within the wealthy Corporation area could rival St. George in pounds spent per head. The parish was less out of line with its neighbors [End Page 65] in spending on outdoor relief, being in the middle range of expenditure at about £75 per 1,000 population. St. George topped the poll of East London parishes for total poor budget, both in the three years prior to the Poor Law Amendment Act and in the years following.
By 1842 the Poor Law Commission was confident that the Amendment Act was working to reduce the poor-rate burden as had been intended. There was a striking fall in poor relief up to 1840 in England and Wales, after the Act. In east London, the percentage fall in spending was most notable in Poplar and Holborn and lowest in St. George in the East and the City Corporation unions. 69
The St. George guardians were not, however, profligate on "management costs." While they paid their employees well, they employed fewer paid officers than other unions, and their spending on the salaries of union officers was substantially lower than their neighbors'. 70 This could explain in part why the guardians were personally so heavily committed to the practical work that in other unions was delegated to the relieving officers and medical officers. Their target efficiency was high—that is, their administration costs per pound revenue of poor budget were low. (Only the City of London Union, whose overall budget was huge, was more efficient on administration costs; in general, the higher the budget the easier it is to control administration costs as a percentage of total budget.) Perhaps this efficiency in staffing appealed to the Commission: the guardians received no letters of disapproval or adverse comments in reports on their high spending between 1836 and 1848. The casual rounding up of expenditure figures by Mr. Stone, the clerk, creates the suspicion that he may have been inclined to round down the statistical returns for expenditure in an equally casual fashion, but the general picture is not inconsistent with the tone of the minutes of board meetings.
The guardians of St. George in the East spent when they felt it was desirable, and spent when perhaps they should have debated. They blithely disregarded edicts coming out of Somerset House—such as the 1843 order that casual vagrants must be set to a task of work in exchange for food and lodging for the night. 71 And edicts, instructions, guidance, [End Page 66] and orders there were in abundance: in 1840, two thousand orders and executive letters, most as general orders. 72 The mountain of paper that poured out of Somerset House was staggering; every week the guardians' clerks would get another sackful of instructions to wade through.
The parish had recognized in the first decade of the nineteenth century that the London docks were potentially major contributors to the poor-rate coffers and tried to impose a rate of 5 shillings in the pound. The outraged dock owners brought a high-court action to challenge the legality of such an exceptional charge, and won a reduction to half that amount. 73 Nevertheless, the docks were St. George's "cash cow" for the next twenty years, which in part may explain the guardians' "freestyle" spending habits.
Who were the benign guardians of St. George? The more obvious "movers and shakers," the chairmen James Massingham, George Gibson, and Peter Rayner, are tantalizingly absent from trade directories and local lists of worthies. More of these guardians were churchwardens than in other parishes, and several served on one of the six tiny and famously inefficient local "paving commissions" that operated in this one parish. Massingham, the inaugural chairman, was a manufacturing confectioner. Three guardians were governors of the local Raine's School Foundation. 74 Perhaps it was the St. George in the East guardians that Sir J. P. Kay-Shuttleworth was thinking of when he complained that members of many London boards of guardians were "Pickwickians" from the old parochial vestry; the vestrymen, he said, needed "re-education. This is a most difficult task!" 75 The guardians of St. George were reeducated into making economies only by the catastrophic docks recession of the 1860s; they then began to adopt the new Poor Law philosophy with greater enthusiasm. 76
Middling Spenders
The boards of guardians who spent a middling amount on the care of lunatics—that is, those of Stepney, Whitechapel, and Hackney and Stoke [End Page 67] Newington Unions—maintained a substantial percentage of the institutionalized insane in their own workhouse insane wards. One of Whitechapel's medical officers, Sam Byles, took a special interest in insanity and persuaded the guardians to adopt a minimal-restraint policy in advance of other boards of guardians. 77 The high-minded, impressively fair, well-heeled businessmen who were the Stepney guardians ran an efficient and kindly regime at Wapping workhouse under the supervision of the woman "workhouse master," Jane Megson, whose efforts on behalf of her charges impressed Charles Dickens as well as the later Commissioners in Lunacy. 78 Stepney employed a special "lunatic nurse," Mrs. Ransom, at Wapping workhouse to supervise the lunatic wards. 79
The Hackney and Stoke Newington guardians were inefficient and peculiarly lackadaisical. A casual reading of the minutes would suggest that the main purpose of the union was to run a stone-breaking business for the Highways Board. 80 Other unions' preoccupation with the classification problem, ensuring that they adhered to Poor Law Commission instructions and guidance, "bench-marking" costs against other unions, monitoring expenses, and formulating policy on the sick and insane—all this more or less passed by the Hackney gentlemen unremarked. Lunatics cropped up in the meetings from time to time, and there is a casual reference in 1838 that the board "ordered that the Relieving Officer procure the admission into the County Lunatic Asylum of the several pauper lunatics of the Union"; 81 until 1840, this was the only recorded decision on the purchase of care for this group. While Mr. Commissioner Mott and Dr. Kay (later Kay-Shuttleworth), the consecutive assistant Poor Law commissioners, were regularly popping up at other eastern union board meetings and frequently sent criticisms and suggestions, central bureaucracy seems to have let Hackney and Stoke Newington plod on in its customary bumbling fashion without much interference. [End Page 68]
Discussion and Conclusions
My main rationale for researching in east London was the social context of the eastern parishes, the wealth of surviving records, and the unusually rich configuration of institutions. The huge task of administering poor relief in the impoverished East End created problems of an order not seen elsewhere in England and Wales. Poverty goes hand in hand with poor physical and mental health. The local guardians' approach to the management of insanity illustrates their successes and failures in using the provisions of the new Poor Law to discharge their duty of care to the "deserving poor" and their responsibility to their rate-payers to use wisely the poor rate.
The principal difficulty with this analysis is the accuracy of the original statistics. Not all clerks were as obsessional as William Baker in Stepney, poring over his Annual Returns to categorize and classify. 82 The figures are occasionally inconsistent across columns in the original Returns. The range of figures for each board remained remarkably consistent, however, over several years, and can probably be accepted as reflecting spending policy and a reasonable approximation of care costs for lunatic placements. The Lunacy Commissioners found broad consistency between the numbers of lunatics in the workhouses declared in the parliamentary Returns for Bethnal Green and Whitechapel in 1846, but underreporting in the Returns of City of London Union and Hackney. 83 There are other potential sources of error in the attribution of workhouse costs: Three of the higher-cost workhouses, in Stepney, the City of London, and St. George in the East, also contained the highest number of lunatics—suggesting that highly dependent paupers pushed up the overall costs of the workhouse. Whitechapel is the exception here: they declared fifty lunatics, but reported very low workhouse costs.
With the caveat, therefore, that the figures may in part reflect union policy rather than reality, the marked differences between boards of guardians reveal the importance and complexity of the Poor Law in the process of institutionalization. Sick paupers, including the insane, were meant to benefit from the new legislation, in that they were to be separately classified and have special facilities provided for them. In the event, however, the hardening attitude sanctioned by the Act caught all economically dependent groups in the same trap. [End Page 69]
Whereas the old Poor Law conferred all the advantages and disadvantages of local variation in its administration, the new Poor Law imposed a central design meant to lead to national uniformity. The principle of uniformity in the treatment of each category of destitute people was to be achieved by a central authority, which would regulate local administrators who were devoid of discretionary powers. The parishes of east London did not have a unified opinion on the Poor Law Amendment Act. The old parishes already exhibited striking differences of approach to managing their able-bodied poor. Nor were their opinions necessarily consistent internally: the elected vestry officials did not automatically share the views of their employed assistant overseers "manning the barricades" against the Saturday-night crowds seeking a bob or two to keep them going for the next week.
Peter Bartlett points out that the Poor Law was the bedrock on which the justices of the peace built the county asylum system. 84 Bartlett's work on the complex relations in Leicestershire between the justices, the guardians, the asylum administrators, and patients' families resonates with Bill Forsythe, Jo Melling, and Richard Adair's reading of the shifting nuances of administrative power at the Devon asylum: Melling's group concluded that the axis of power was balanced between the magistrates and Poor Law officials, with the later Lunacy Commission playing only a small part. 85 John Walton's study of the admission process in Lancashire and David Wright's paper on discharges from the Buckinghamshire Asylum also stressed the role of Poor Law officials in the lunatics' life career. 86 A similarly complex picture emerges from the early days of the new Poor Law period in east London, where the guardians' officials and parish physicians clearly regarded the union pauper lunatics as "theirs." [End Page 70]
"Dangerousness" was the language of negotiation used by all interested parties in east London to convince others of the need to act, the management of risk the thread running through the guardians' deliberations. The guardians attempted to match expense to the pauper's perceived level of danger and behavioral nuisance. Adair, Forsythe, and Melling have also remarked on the importance of the concept of "dangerousness" as an admissions bargaining criterion between Poor Law officials, physicians, and asylum staff in Devon. 87 The species of "danger" was not always explicit but usually meant a risk of self-harm or of the insane person harming others, either fellow paupers or staff. It was a peculiarly flexible concept, conveniently lacking in definition, which medical officers judged on subjective criteria according to their own tolerance and that of the workhouse officers, but which guardians sometimes queried. Ross, for example, the medical officer for Stepney Union, identified several patients at Wapping workhouse whom he described as "dangerous" in his returns; the board resolved that they should be removed forthwith, "except the little girl Suzanna Girling . . . afflicted with fits," who they decided could be safely left where she was. 88
In Whitechapel, the board asked Sam Byles, the most senior of the parish medical officers, "to arrange for all cases of idiot and lunatic paupers to be submitted for the joint opinion of the three medical officers to ascertain whether any such paupers be dangerous." 89 Byles and his colleague Liddle together examined all the pauper lunatics known to them, identifying eight they believed to be "dangerous." The third medical officer, Reed, sent his own separately assessed list of eight the following week; only four of Reed's eight appeared on the Byles/Liddle list. The guardians accepted that all twelve should be removed to an asylum, but Byles was instructed to visit regularly to assess the progress of "dangerousness" of the pauper lunatics in order to return them to the workhouse at the earliest opportunity. 90
The concept of "danger" was a convenient peg on which the medical officers could hang their requests for special placements and for delayed return to the cheaper workhouse. Special pleading was necessary to use other criteria. Byles, for example, resisted the board's calls for rapid removal back to the workhouse on cessation of "danger" when he considered [End Page 71] the paupers to be better off where they were, recruiting Liddle and Reed to a joint report when his own opinion might not have been sufficient to convince the board. 91 One such joint report was submitted in December 1837 recommending that eleven of nineteen paupers placed in private asylums should remain where they were, after an opinion had been expressed by a guardian that James Darkin at Byas's licensed house was fit to return to the workhouse. The medical officers were adamant that he was "by no means a fit inmate as the workhouse is presently constituted. He and some others of the foregoing list might be here [the workhouse in Leman Street] if there were wards and nurses devoted exclusively to them but such an arrangement we should by no means recommend under the present unhealthy crowded condition of the two workhouses." 92 Byles presented the report in person; the board agreed to leave Darkin where he was. Danger was a useful concept around which to establish clinical expertise, and broader issues of the quality of care and negotiations were easier where a risk of self-harm or harm to others could be established.
The high cost of placing individuals in special asylums had the positive effect of obliging the first new Poor Law guardians to consider insane paupers and their families individually, just as their predecessors, the old Poor Law overseers, had. Lynne Hollen Lees rightly identifies the personal contact between pauper petitioner and administrator, conducted in a public forum, as the heart of the process of social bargaining under the Poor Law. 93 Before Shaftesbury's Lunatics Acts of 1845 directed county justices to build lunatic asylums and obliged guardians to use them, the guardians had to decide for themselves how and where to look after their dependent insane. After 1845, the guardians had less of a role in devising policy for the insane, which was largely centrally dictated, and there was little reason to consider individual cases in depth unless pauper patients appealed against the decisions of medical and relieving officers.
Len Smith points out that the "purchaser/provider split" in the mixed public, charitable, and private care that characterized provision for pauper lunatics under the old Poor Law was a market economy in which the new county asylums built after 1808 had to compete for business. 94 And [End Page 72] so it continued under the new regime. Purchasing from the mixed economy was not optional but necessary for parishes and unions in east London. If one of the main aims of the Amendment Act was to impose national consistency of practice in poor relief, central guidance was meant to produce uniformity in dealing with the mad. There were striking differences, however, in the decade after the Act, between the treatment meted out by sage Stepney, punitive Poplar, and generous St. George, as culturally distinctive in their style of administration of the new Poor Law as the parishes had been under the old regime. The differences cannot be accounted for by differences in the wealth of the parish populations: while the City of London and East London Unions within the City Corporation area were indeed wealthy and generous spenders, the majority of these boards operated within similarly profoundly poor areas and yet had different approaches to funding the insane.
The guardians personally determined the local interpretation of the regulations and had considerable autonomy, if they had the capacity for leadership and chose to exercise it. Heartless bureaucracy can be found in the minutes, but so can sensitivity and responsiveness to individual human need, the ability to adjust to local problems with local solutions, and the essential humanity of both the administrators and those ministered to. The corporate culture of individual boards was determined by a complex interplay of personality, politics, and class. Outstanding individuals dominated some boards. Stepney had the good fortune to be served by several wealthy educated men with high-minded determination and ability. Others, like Hackney, seem to have drifted and muddled along, leaderless and rudderless. Most boards were governed by a "shopocracy" tempered by local clergymen and a sprinkling of gentlemen. 95
One of the guardians' key tasks was to "hire and fire" union officers, although every appointment had to be sanctioned by the Poor Law Commission. Recruiting and retaining staff who suited them was the main vehicle through which the guardians imposed their own values and standards on the practical administration of poor relief. Stepney Union employed staff of real ability and distinction. In Whitechapel, the union doctors had considerable influence on the pattern of treatment and care of the insane.
The increasing centralization of control of government policy on insanity
through the 1845 Lunatics Acts and the creation of the Commissioners in
Lunacy weakened the ability of the guardians to construct a
[End Page 73]
local response to insanity. In the early years they were obliged to
listen directly to families, hear their ideas for ameliorating their
problems, and work alongside the staff who struggled with inadequate
budgets to "manage" the marginalized and excluded. The early guardians
toiled within the straitjacket of their culture and under the weight of
central directives to produce acceptable responses to the small personal
tragedies of "minds diseas'd."
Elaine Murphy is Chairman of North East London Strategic Health Authority and a part-time historian. She is an honorary Visiting Professor at Queen Mary, University of London, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. Her research interests include the social administration of insanity and metropolitan pauper farms. Her address is: 382 Lauderdale Tower, Barbican, London EC2Y 8NA, U.K. (e-mail: elaine.murphy@nelondon.nhs.uk).
Notes
I am grateful for the help and advice of Roy Porter, my supervisor, who died on 3 March 2002, and George Leahy, Director of Public Health, Newham Primary Care Trust.
1. Minutes, Stepney Union Board of Guardians (hereafter Stepney Minutes), Response to Complaint to the Poor Law Commission, London Metropolitan Archive (hereafter LMA), file St BG/L/3, p. 145.
2. Ibid.
3. John Walton, "Poverty and Lunacy: Some Thoughts on Directions for Future Research," Bull. Soc. Social Hist. Med., 1984, 34 : 64-67.
4. Peter Bartlett, "Legal Madness in the Nineteenth Century," Soc. Hist. Med., 2001, 14 : 107-31; David Wright, "Getting Out of the Asylum: Understanding the Confinement of the Insane in the Nineteenth Century," ibid., 1997, 10 : 137-55; idem, Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum, 1847-1901 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Len D. Smith, "The County Asylum in the Mixed Economy of Care," in Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800-1914, ed. Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 33-47; Bill Forsythe, Joseph Melling, and Richard Adair, "The New Poor Law and the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum: The Devon Experience, 1834-1884," Soc. Hist. Med., 1996, 9 : 335-55; Joseph Melling, "Accommodating Madness: New Research in the Social History of Insanity and Institutions," in Melling and Forsythe, Insanity (n. 4), pp. 1-30.
5. Elaine Murphy, "The Administration of Insanity in East London 1800-1870" (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2000).
6. Annual Returns of Pauper Lunatics, Returns for Middlesex 1842-43, British Parliamentary Papers (BPP), Lunacy 3: 371-415, quotation on p. 405, University of London Library (ULL).
7. "Report from His Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Consequences of the Poor Laws," 1834, BPP, 44: xxvii, I, p. 24, ULL.
8. Anthony Brundage, The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment, and Implementation, 1832-1839 (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 14.
9. Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
10. Ann Digby, "The Rural Poor Law," in The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Derek Fraser (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 149-70, on p. 153.
11. Ann Digby, Pauper Palaces (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 45-48.
12. Felix Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834-1884 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 6, pp. 106-11.
13. George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848 (Chichester: Wiley, 1964).
14. Brundage, New Poor Law (n. 8), p. 14.
15. David R. Green, From Artisans to Paupers: Economic Change and Poverty in London, 1790-1870 (London: Scolar Press, 1995), chap. 7, pp. 181-219; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (paperback edition, London: Penguin, 1984), chap. 18, pp. 322-36.
16. Michael Rose, ed., The Poor and the City: The English Poor Law in Its Urban Context, 1834-1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1985), p. 9.
17. Green, Artisans to Paupers (n. 15), table 7.5, p. 195.
18. Neil Arnott and James P. Kay, "Report as to the Removal of Some Causes of Disease by Sanitary Regulations," 1838, in 4th Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, BPP, Poor Law vol. 35, suppl. 1, p. 67, ULL; Southwood Smith, "Report on the Causes of Sickness and Mortality amongst the Poor. Present Condition of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel," 1838, ibid., suppl. 2, pp. 1-24.
19. Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick (London: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 17.
20. "Letter from N. Arnott and J. P. Kay to Poor Law Commission," 12 May 1838, quoted in 4th Annual Report (n. 18), suppl. 1, p. 86.
21. Elaine Murphy, "Mad Farming in the Metropolis, Part I: A Significant Service Industry," Hist. Psychiatry, 2001, 12 : 245-82.
22. Murphy, "Administration of Insanity" (n. 5), pp. 260-61.
23. George Rudé, Hanoverian London, 1714-1808 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), pp. 138-41.
24. Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834, 4 & 5 Will. 4, c. 76, sec. 45.
25. "General Order, Workhouse Rules," rule no. 49, in 8th Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, BPP, Poor Law vol. 35, append. A, no. 3, Orders, letters, pp. 43-51, ULL.
26. Driver, Power and Pauperism (n. 12), pp. 106-11.
27. Annual Returns of Pauper Lunatics 1842-43 (n. 6). Under the provisions of 5 & 6 Vic., c. 57, sec. 6, unions were obliged to transmit a list of paupers of unsound mind chargeable to the poor rates to the Commission on an annual basis: see 9th Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, 1843, BPP, Poor Law vol. 35, para. 70, p. 19, ULL.
28. 9th Annual Report (n. 27), paras. 70-71, p. 19.
29. Murphy, "Mad Farming I" (n. 21), pp. 272-76.
30. Jonathan Andrews et al., The History of Bethlem (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 365-512.
31. "Guy's Hospital Admission Register 1831, List of Lunatics," LMA, file HG/GY/B1/15/1; Hector C. Cameron, Mr Guy's Hospital, 1726-1948 (London: Longmans Green, 1963), p. 47.
32. "Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor 1844," BPP, 1844(001) XXVI.1, chap. 5, Restraint, pp. 150-52, 158, ULL; Akihito Suzuki, "The Politics and Ideology of Non-restraint: The Case of Hanwell Asylum," Med. Hist., 1995, 39 : 1-17.
33. Annual Returns of Pauper Lunatics, Returns for Middlesex 1843-44, BPP, Lunacy, 3: 371-415, 507, ULL.
34. Minutes, Bethnal Green Board of Guardians, LMA, series Be BG, file Be BG 1, 10 April 1837.
35. Ibid., Be BG 5, p. 319.
36. Ibid., 16 September 1839, p. 47; also pp. 70, 188, 189.
37. Ibid., 1 July 1839, p. 309.
38. Ibid., 16 September 1839, p. 47.
39. Ibid., 30 September, 14 October 1839.
40. Ibid., 27 November 1839.
41. Ibid., 27 March 1839.
42. Ibid., 3 June 1839.
43. Ibid., 17 June 1839.
44. Ibid., Be BG 6, discussion of Sabassa case in minutes of 1 July, 8 July, 13 July, 3 August, and 10 August 1840; quotation from 17 August 1840.
45. Ibid., 24 August 1840. There is another account of this saga from Caroline Sabasson's friend, Mr. Williams (not Walker, as in Bethnal Green minutes), in correspondence between Hanwell and Williams: LMA, series H11/HLL/A14/1/1, letters 130 and 133, 21 and 22 April 1840.
46. Bethnal Green Minutes, Be BG 6, 24 August 1840. A "County Patient" was one whose parish could not be identified and for whom the county justices accepted responsibility for funding from their central resource.
47. Nathaniel Hardingham, Guardian, Bethnal Green, was a house agent and major landlord living in Paradise Row. He owned numerous properties in Cross Street, Green Street, and elsewhere: LMA, Parish Polling Lists, Mile End 1849; London Alphabetical and Commercial Directory, 7th ed. (London, 1838). William Howard, J.P., of 7 Newmarket Terrace, Cambridge Heath, owned two other freeholds, one in Little Union Street cleared to make way for the Commercial Railway in 1836: LMA, Middlesex County List of Justices, 1842; I. Watson, Hackney and Stoke Newington Past (London: Historical Publications, 1990), pp. 91-92.
48. "Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws," 1834, Mott's Supplement, BPP, Answers to Town Queries III, Poor Law 21: 167.
49. Minutes, Poplar Union Board of Guardians, LMA, series PO/BG, file PO/BG/001, 26 January 1837.
50. Workhouse plans were mentioned at almost every meeting in 1837-42: Poplar Minutes, PO/BG/002-003; John Morris, Workhouse Plans commissioned for Poplar Union, 1842, file PO/BG/281.
51. Poplar Minutes, PO/BG/001, 25 May 1837, p. 100.
52. Ibid., 23 December 1837.
53. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (n. 15), pp. 202, 210, 266.
54. Poplar Minutes, PO/BG/001, 2 January 1838.
55. Ibid., 28 June, 5 July 1837.
56. Ibid., 30 November 1837.
57. "Return of the Annual Average Expenditure for the Parishes Comprised in Each Union in England and Wales for the Relief and Maintenance of the Poor for 1841, 1842 and 1843," in Annual Returns to the Poor Law Commissioners, 1843, BPP, pp. 347-73, Middlesex Returns on Poor Relief Expenditure, p. 353, ULL.
58. Minutes, Board of Guardians of St. George in the East (hereafter St. George Minutes), LMA, series St BG/SG, file St BG/SG/1-78.
59. Annual Returns of Pauper Lunatics 1842-43 (n. 6), p. 405.
60. Baker was also assistant, and later acting, coroner for the Eastern Metropolis: O. Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 24, 25 n. 45, 42, 48, 347 n. 9.
61. St. George Minutes, St BG/SG/02, 16 February, 8 March, 15 March 1844.
62. Ibid., St BG/SG/01, 9 September 1836.
63. Ibid., St BG/SG/02, 8 November 1839.
64. Ibid., December 1842, December 1843.
65. Ibid., Midsummer accounts minuted 1 July 1842, pp. 206-7; "Table of Average Annual Expenditure," in Annual Returns to Poor Law Commissioners (n. 57), p. 353; Minutes, Hackney and Stoke Newington Union Board of Guardians (hereafter Hackney Minutes), LMA, series Ha BG, file Ha BG 5, 28 September, 5 October 1842.
66. St. George Minutes, St BG/SG/03, 17 August 1849, p. 446.
67. Ibid., 28 November 1845, p. 119.
68. "Return of the Annual Average Expenditure" (n. 57), Middlesex Returns, p. 353.
69. "Return of the Annual Average Expenditure for the Parishes Comprised in Each Union in England and Wales for the Relief and Maintenance of the Poor in the Three Years Prior to the Declaration of the Union," 1842, in Annual Returns to the Poor Law Commissioners (n. 57), p. 6.
70. "Table of Costs of Officers Employed by Unions and Parishes," 1842, in 8th Annual Report (n. 25), 35: 322.
71. "Table," in 10th Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, BPP, Poor Law vol. 34, p. 7, para. 17, ULL.
72. "Orders Issued," 1843, in 9th Annual Report (n. 27), append. E, no. 8, p. 379.
73. Rose, Poor and the City (n. 16), p. 139.
74. London Alphabetical and Commercial Directory (n. 47); National Commercial and Street Directory of London (London: Pigot, 1840); Raine's Schools Foundation Archive, file 811/1/4, LMA.
75. James P. Kay-Shuttleworth to Mr. Lefevre, 21 September 1838, Public Record Office, London, file MH 32/50.
76. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (n. 15), chap. 5, pp. 99-126.
77. Lunatic detention orders for Whitechapel, LMA, file St/BG/Wh/118/1; Whitechapel Guardians' discussion about restraint policy in Minutes, Whitechapel Union Board of Guardians, LMA, file St/BG/Wh/8, 3 March 1846, pp. 429, 430, 436.
78. Stepney Minutes (n. 1), St BG/L/4, 17 August, 1 October 1840; Charles Dickens, "A Walk in the Workhouse," Household Words, 25 May 1840, pp. 204-7.
79. Stepney Minutes, St BG/L/3, 7 November 1839.
80. Launched in the early 1830s, or possibly even earlier, the stoneyard took up increasing amounts of the Hackney guardians' time; in 1838, at least half of every meeting was dedicated to it. Although pauper manufactories were rarely profitable, stone-breaking could be during a period of major road construction. M. Ann Crowther, The Workhouse System, 1834-1929: The History of an English Social Institution (London: Batsford, 1981), pp. 27, 28, 98; Hackney Minutes, Ha BG 2, May 1838-July 1839.
81. Hackney Minutes, Ha BG 2, 5 July 1838.
82. William Baker to Poor Law Commission, 18 August 1838, Stepney Letters-out Book, LMA, St/BG/L/97/2, no. 423.
83. "List of Union and Other Workhouses Visited Between the 4 August 1845 and 4 August 1846," in Further Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor, 1847-48, BPP, vol. 32, p. 371, ULL.
84. Peter Bartlett, "The Asylum, the Workhouse and the Voice of the Insane Poor in 19th Century England," Internat. J. Law & Psychiatry, 1998, 21 : 421-32.
85. Peter Bartlett, "The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Admission of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth-century England with Special Reference to Leicestershire and Rutland" (Ph.D. diss., University of London 1993), pp. 278 ff.; Forsythe, Melling, and Adair, "New Poor Law" (n. 4); Bill Forsythe, Jo Melling, and Richard Adair, "Politics of Lunacy: Central State Regulation and the Devon Pauper Lunatic Asylum," in Melling and Forsythe, Insanity (n. 4), pp. 68-92.
86. John Walton, "Lunacy in the Industrial Revolution: A Study of Asylum Admissions in Lancashire, 1848-50," J. Soc. Hist., 1979, 13 : 1-22, especially pp. 6-7; idem, "Casting Out and Bringing Back in Victorian England: Pauper Lunatics 1840-1870," in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, ed. William Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, Institutions and Society, vol. 2 (London: Tavistock, 1985), pp. 132-46; John Walton and Leonard Ray, "Models of Madness in Victorian Asylum Practice," Eur. J. Sociol., 1981, 22 : 229-64; Wright, "Getting Out" (n. 4).
87. Richard Adair, Bill Forsythe, and Joseph Melling, "A Danger to the Public: Disposing of Pauper Lunatics in Late Victorian and Edwardian England: Plympton St Mary Union and Devon County Asylum," Med. Hist., 1998, 42 : 1-25.
88. Stepney Minutes (n. 1), St BG/L/7, 2 February 1843, p. 17.
89. Whitechapel Minutes (n. 77), St/BG/Wh/1, 15 August 1837.
90. Ibid., 22, 29 August 1837
91. Ibid., St/BG/Wh/3, pp. 143, 144, 148.
92. Ibid., St/BG/Wh/1, December 1837, p. 370.
93. Lynne Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: the English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 33-34.
94. Len D. Smith, Cure, Comfort and Safe Custody: Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-century England (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), chap. 1, pp. 12-51.
95. "Shopocracy" is first referred to in the Poor Man's Guardian (London), 9 June 1832, p. 419.
