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book to assess the impact of a national issue on local political behaviour, no attempt is made to posit any general model of the relationship between national and local politics in this period. The extent to which this book is consolidatory rather than revelatory may ultimately indicate that the limits of usefulness of computer analysis of poll-books have been reached. MATTHEW CRAGOE Swansea POOR RELIEF IN MERTHYR TYDFIL UNION IN VICTORIAN TIMES. By Tydfil Thomas. Glamorgan Archive Service, 1992. Pp. 185. £ 15.00, £ 17.50 by post. If there was a single area in which the operation of the New Poor Law of 1834 was put to the test, that area was newly industrialized south Wales, and, in particular, Merthyr Tydfil Poor Law Union, an amalgamation of nine parishes, stetching from Ystradyfodwg (Rhondda) in the west to Gelligaer in the east, centred upon 'the Klondike of Wales', Merthyr Tydfil. In this, the second of two publications by the Glamorgan Archive Service on the subject of poverty and its relief (the first being R. D. J. Grant's On The Parish), Tydfil Thomas examines the workings of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act between 1836 and 1894, and details its effects in terms of local administration and human suffering. Victorian attitudes towards poverty, and the influence of a small but powerful group of middle-class ratepayers are implicit in the story of the plight of those people who were forced by ill health, old age, widowhood, unemployment and other circumstances beyond their control to seek relief from the Board of Guardians. It is a story in which the interests of economy are heavily weighted against humanitarian concerns. The long delay of almost twenty years in building a workhouse, partly the result of those 'Bastilles' being so despised by the working classes, reflects both the Guardians' concern with cost-effectiveness and their uneasy relationship with the central authorities. When the Board, forced by the epidemics of 1847-9 and the onset of a serious depression in trade in 1850, finally agreed to build a workhouse 'in the joint interests of humanity and economy', the numbers in receipt of outdoor relief continued to outnumber by far the indoor paupers. In the debate surrounding the erection of a workhouse, and similarly that regarding the provision of an industrial school for pauper children (opened in 1875 yet argued for twenty-seven years earlier), it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that for the majority of the Board's members, the economical management of ratepayer's money had priority over the well-being of the poor in their care. Indeed, the nineteenth-century Poor Law, designed as it was to deter the needy from seeking relief, meant that all other means-the pawning of possessions, dependence on family and neighbours, migration, begging and even prostitution-were resorted to, with poor relief sought only when there was no alternative. The large numbers of official paupers (over 20 per cent of the population in the peak year of 1868) was only the tip of the iceberg, for poverty was a fact of life for many more.