Navigating the Old English Poor Law

Peter Jones has longstanding research and publication interests in the histories of protest, clothing, class and welfare. Most recently he has worked on the voices of the dependent poor as they engaged with the central authorities overseeing the New Poor Law. Recent publications include P. Jones and S.A. King, Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness (Basingstoke, 2020); P. Jones and N. Carter, 'Writing for Redress: Redrawing the Epistolary Relationship under the New Poor Law', Continuity and Change (2019), 1-25; and P. Jones and S.A. King (eds.), Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws, 1600-1900 (Newcastle, 2015).Steven King has a long history with the history of welfare. He started his career investigating the historical demography of poor people in West Yorkshire in the period between 168 and 1820. Subsequently he has worked on the theoretical modelling of British and European welfare regimes and most substantially on the experiences and agency of the poor between 1750 and 1910. He also has supplementary interests in the histories of courtship, clothing, death and burial, the medical marketplace and histories of the family. His Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s (McGill-Queens University Press, 2019) won the British Academy Peter Townsend Prize for 2019.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroductionTHE KIRKBY LONSDALE LETTERS, 1809-1836BibliographyIndex

An impressively rich resource of primary sources ... It is simultaneously fascinating and depressing to see the historical problems of poverty that echo today ... providing an enriched understanding of the workings of an historic system of poor relief.