Talk:Opposition to the English poor laws

Oliver Twist
What about Oliver Twist! Surely that should be mentioned? Colin4C 17:58, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Shouldn't Malthus come first on the list of objectors? Ricardo based his theories on Malthus' surely thats worth a mention?

Opposition to New Poor Law - tale on policies not the same as for structures
The PLAA of 1834 - passed to implement the recommendations of the 1832 Commission - set up a new structure/organisation for Poor Law administration, and left it to the 3 Poor Law Commissioners to specify for each Poor Law Union the regime to be implemented. The delared aim was to implement uniformly nation-wide the 1832 Commission recommendations (no outdoor relief (and therefore no subsidy of wages), all paupers to be confined in workhouses, classified and segregated), in full rigour. There were therefore two separate grounds for opposition and two separate battles. I think the article needs to reflect this better, but I am just passing through. (I came here whilst working on the Richard Oastler article,  having started out a year ago working towards a coherent account of the Factory Acts up to c 1850, only to get bogged down in trying to understand the Tory radicals and their involvement in factory reform.  Further digression is not really an option.)

When the time came to introduce the new organisation to the North of England the Assistant Commissioners were quite prepared to give assurances that key recommendations of the 1832 Commission (eg abolition of outdoor relief) would not be applied in (eg) Huddersfield. Aided by those assurances they eventually succeeded in defeating the opposition and setting up the New Poor Law structures. That seems to be what the article reflects. However the tale on implementation of the NPL policies is somewhat different. When a prominent West Riding opponent of the New Poor Law died in 1858, the Huddersfield Chronicle wrote "..the controversy closed and English common sense has settled down on the poor-law question somewhat nearer to the views of Oastler and Pitkethly than those of their opponents." In Leeds in 1860 recipients of outdoor relief outnumbered workhouse inmates 3:1 (and from stuff I looked at when barking up the wrong family tree a couple of years ago I seem to recall that if you go on the workhouses website you can find there Home Office guidance from the 1860s saying that outdoor relief should be the preferred/default form of relief; workhouse admission should be reserved for (1) cases where the pauper was in need of more care than could be given outside (2) cases where the application seemed dubious) Rjccumbria (talk) 15:34, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Pluperfect tense
The pluperfect tense tells us what happened before another thing in the past. So "Although at the height of the Chartist agitation of 1838 he urged Chartists to concentrate on the fundamental reforms..." happened, and is stated in the simple past tense (urged). What happened before is that "his position had been that Anti-Poor Law meetings should do nothing to alienate non-Chartist sympathisers". "Previously" is redundant: it is telling us exactly what the pluperfect tense (had been) is telling us. Nothing more. Ground Zero &#124; t 22:56, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Thank you for at least not attempting an instant revert; on the other hand, I would trust that on reflection you would not wish to be thought to be assuming that any failure of other editors to fall in with your views on style is to be explained by their ignorance of English grammar.
 * Firstly, it is my view that (other than in literary productions) clarity is everything - the author's aim should be not purity of style but obviousness of meaning
 * Secondly, it is my (UK-based) experience that the (sparing) use of adverbs, even where they are - strictly speaking - redundant, gives a better chance of the normal reader grasping the sequence of events than the correct use of tense alone
 * Thirdly, (as noted in my last edit tag, which seems to have been ignored) my view would be that (if you look at the content as well as the "grammar"/style) F's position 1 related to the conduct of APL agitation, his later position 2 related to the conduct of Chartist agitation. It would have been possible for him to hold both views simultaneously, and the use of simple past and pluperfect does nothing to rule this out. ("Although he recommended Lord Combermere for the command of an expedition to capture Rangoon, the Duke of Wellington had called him a fool")  'Previously' was meant to confirm that position 2 rendered position 1 inoperative. Perhaps one has to have lived through Watergate to give that weight to the adverb. In case that is so, I have recast the relevant paragraph to spell things out in more detail. Regards Rjccumbria (talk) 19:39, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Andover workhouse scandal
There is a lot more detail here about the Andover workhouse scandal than in the article with that title. Wouldn't it be better to move the relevant material into the other article? Rathfelder (talk) 19:51, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I can see where you are coming from: the more specific article gives a lot of background stuff, and next to nothing on the actual scandal, and judging from a tag on the section has been incomplete for 6-7 years. The section in the 'Opposition to the Poor Laws' article, therefore, doesn't find it difficult to give more detail than the 'Andover workhouse scandal' article; but it was drafted to give details of the authorities' response to the scandal, rather than of the scandal itself - it was the cover-up, rather than the scandal itself, that doomed the Poor Law Commission. (In an ideal world, the Aws article should have been expanded when the OttPL one was, but expanding the OttPL article was not the work of a moment, and would have taken forever if all linked articles were included in the scope)
 * it would probably be sensible if the OttPL section were copied across to the Aws article, but there would still be a missing middle, and the stuff copied across might benefit from expansion/rejig to fit it better for its new use
 * not sure how much (if any) you were contemplating cutting from the OttPL section, so hard to comment. What's left would have to explain the scandal and show the unravelling of the cover-up (the latter in in some detail), so the laziest option ('copy', rather than 'move' to the Aws article) would, I feel, have quite a lot going for it Rjccumbria (talk) 20:43, 10 June 2017 (UTC)


 * I'd be happy with a copy. This is not my area of expertise.  I just found the Andover workhouse scandal article disappointing. Rathfelder (talk) 22:16, 10 June 2017 (UTC)