A third scandal of 1845 was associated with the poor law, one of the most controversial aspects of the ‘Condition of England Question’. When appalling abuses in a workhouse in rural Hampshire led to a public enquiry, MPs and their constituents alike were riveted by reports in the national press. The poor law was administered from the metropolis through official correspondence that ran to tens of thousands of letters each year. Press reports and a later select committee of the House of Commons revealed that the boundaries between official (semi-public) and private letters were sometimes blurred at critical moments in the Andover story. As in the Mazzini debates in the Commons, however, such letters were often the most solid evidence available. Troubling parallels between all three scandals of 1845 that are under review in this part were used by the Revd Sydney Godolphin Osborne, the most lively contributor of letters to The Times on the subject of the Andover workhouse, thus twisting the tail of Sir James Graham, the beleaguered home secretary of the day.

This chapter sets out how Elizabeth I’s extraordinary Poor Laws brought into being the world’s first collectivist-individualist society, a unique English political and moral achievement that mandated community support for orphans, widows, the infirm and sick, the old, the involuntary unemployed and single mothers and their children. It will show how this nurturing welfare system protected England from the scourge of famine – that other devastator of populations after plague – such that the English were free of large-scale famine more than 150 years earlier than the rest of Europe. It also helped power England’s exceptional economic growth, supporting a mobile workforce to develop secure in the knowledge that they would be supported if times were hard.

It details how these Poor Law provisions were misguidedly overturned in 1834 by the new, more exclusively individualist economics and utilitarianism of the nineteenth century before returning, over a century later, with the founding of the post-war Beveridge welfare state. This saw a collectivist-individualist balance restored in full all across society, a Golden Age of growth with a comprehensive welfare system funded by progressive taxation and leaders of enterprise incentivised to consider long-term returns alongside the welfare of their workforces and communities.

Marriage was often a way to contain the poverty of women and children and sometimes men.Men were expected to be the family breadwinners, earning enough to feed, clothe and house their wife and children.In reality, poorer women were always obliged to assist in supplementing or securing the family income, as were children. For many women, the desertion of a husband brought them and their children to destitution and they ended up in the workhouse.Desertion could occur at any point in a marriage, sometimes after a couple of days or even years later. The large number of newspaper notices placed by husbands cautioning the public that they would not pay any bills accumulated by their runaway wives testify to the way in which men and women took matters into their own hands to abandon a difficult marriage, without consulting a lawyer or, in many cases, their spouse.Sometimes spouses agreed to a desertion as a way of separating. The evolution of the law throughout the period saw the removal of legal constraints placed upon women granting them, for instance, greater property rights and economic autonomy.By the end of the nineteenth century, the law provided more substantial support to women who were deserted, or separated, particularly in the area of securing maintenance payments.

Chapter 6 uses the fictional working-class Jemima’s account of the poor laws and the laws of settlement and removal to discuss a series of cases involving poor and pauper women in interaction with the law. Material is drawn from magistrates’ proceedings and from the records of the court of King’s Bench, where some of the cases, including that of the slave servant Charlotte Howe, were sent on appeal. The judges’ (including William Blackstone and chief justice Mansfield) attitudes towards the poor laws are discussed.

Some ordinary working people at the turn of the nineteenth century appear to have had the knowledge and the means to employ an attorney to write a legally threatening letter to those who had offended them in some way, thus bypassing the ‘official’ legal channel of the local magistrate. Their law consciousness is explored by examining four specific cases of a purchased ‘lawyer’s letter’ and by the variety of jokes – terrifying comedy – they made about the law.