Welsh Journals

Though uneven in quality and occasionally inaccurate (e.g. the Venezuela boundary dispute of 1895 is wrongly dated as 1902-3), this volume justifies its claim that British historians can make a notable and distinctive contribution to American history. If it helps to break down the Americans' historical 'tariff barrier' against comparative history, it will have a lasting value. MICHAEL SIMPSON Swansea THE NEW POOR LAW IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Edited by Derek Fraser. Problems in Focus, MacMillan, 1976. Pp. 288. £ 5.95, paper £ 2.75. Apart from Michael Rose's well-edited collection of extracts from documents, there has been no attempt at a comprehensive history of the nineteenth-century Poor Law since the Webb's massive three volumes of Poor Law history in the 1920s. Yet Poor Law studies are immensely popular and, thanks to the wealth and availability of local records, have been a target for regional investigations by M.A. and Ph.D. students for the last twenty years. So many theses now exist, albeit unstandardised in chronology, coverage and depth, that it is surprising to find Dr. Fraser in his introduction calling for many more before general conclusions can be reached. One wonders how the unfortunate synthesiser will cope. In these circumstances there is much to be said for a book of essays by different authors on different poor law topics. It allows greater depth and specialist knowledge than a single historian could easily encompass. It has of course, disadvantages. Some repetition, unevenness and some inconsist- encies of approach are inevitable. But the volume, generally well-written, has also been well-edited, and discrepancies have been reduced to a minimum. There are some unaccountable omissions. With a full chapter on the Poor Law in Scotland, there is nothing about Ireland. David Ashforth's essay on the urban Poor Law is confined largely to the industrial north; and London, where the large urban workhouses were well-known feeders to the prisons, has been omitted. More on actual workhouse administration, and on the Poor Law officials, including that key figure, the Relieving Officer (on whose role and development a good thesis exists), would have been useful. But any historical work on a subject about which so much is known (equally with one about which little is known) must be selective. Among a number of able essays Anne Digby's on the rural Poor Law is important. The days of Mark Blaug's famous discovery that the allowance in aid of wages, instead of demoralising the rural labourer (as Poor Law propaganda had successfully inculcated for over a century), served to keep him alive, are passing. Miss Digby has shown that the allowance, combin- ed with the make-work devices of the various roundsman or stem systems and the parochial restrictions of the law of settlement, was the means by which local farmers organised the agricultural labour market to their own advantage. The continuing surplus of rural workers subjected them to the domination of employers, who used such devices to keep down wages. Both Anne Digby and David Ashforth show that the allowance in aid of wages-often reappearing as outdoor relief to casual labourers-survived 1834 and continued throughout the century.