The Birmingham Parish Workhouse, 1730-1840

Chris Upton

• Publisher: University Of Hertfordshire Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781912260140
• eBook ISBN:
  9781912260188
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Very little is known of the first workhouse in Birmingham. Even the assumed date of its building, given as 1733 by William Hutton, is wrong. This book is the first attempt to write a history of the workhouse and the ancillary welfare provision for Birmingham, frequently referred to as the 'Old Poor Law.' This study of welfare in Birmingham in the century before the Poor Law Amendment Act reveals some surprising facts which fly in the face of the scholarly consensus that the old system was incompetently administered and inadequately organized. The records of the Overseers and the Poor Law Guardians reveal a complex balancing act between maintaining standards of care and controlling spending. Although there was mismanagement, the picture which emerges will be familiar to our age when welfare services struggle to meet public needs with limited budgets.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Birmingham Poor Law
• 2 ‘The residence of a gentleman’: The Birmingham Workhouse
• 3 A Day in the Life
• 4 Putting Names to the Nameless Poor
• 5 The Ghost of a Workhouse
• 6 Managing the Poor: The Overseers and Guardians
• 7 Thirty Acres and a Cow: The Use of Birmingham’s Parish Land
• 8 Managing the Poor: Masters, Matrons and Clerks
• 9 Birmingham’s First Hospital: The Workhouse Infirmary
• 10 The Doings of Death
• 11 The Asylum for the Infant Poor
• 12 ‘Bitter, unbroken lamentation’?: The Treatment of the Mentally Ill Pauper
• 13 Putting the Poor to Work
• Afterword – Ian Cawood
• Appendix
• Bibliography