M
mlchance
Guest
**Welfare and Charity: Lessons from Victorian England **
**GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB **
The word “welfare” is ambiguous.
Does it mean the well-being of the citizenry? Or does it mean relief — state-subsidized relief, which now goes by the euphemism of “welfare”? Perhaps I am especially sensitive to such euphemisms because they were conspicuously lacking in my own field of study, Victorian England. And the example of Victorian England has never been as pertinent as it is today.
More than a century and a half ago, a few years before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, a Royal Commission of Parliament proposed a major reform of the Poor Law. In its report, the Commission deplored “the mischievous ambiguity of the word ‘poor’.” The very name, Poor Law, was a misnomer; it was a pauper law, not a poor law. Most of the poor — which is to say, virtually all the working classes — were indeed poor, but they were not paupers. They were “independent” — that is, self-supporting — laborers. Unfortunately, the enormous expansion of relief in the preceding decades, including relief “in aid of wages” (to supplement wages), had confused the distinction between pauper and poor, thus contributing to the “pauperization of the poor.”
– Mark L. Chance.
**GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB **
The word “welfare” is ambiguous.
Does it mean the well-being of the citizenry? Or does it mean relief — state-subsidized relief, which now goes by the euphemism of “welfare”? Perhaps I am especially sensitive to such euphemisms because they were conspicuously lacking in my own field of study, Victorian England. And the example of Victorian England has never been as pertinent as it is today.
More than a century and a half ago, a few years before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, a Royal Commission of Parliament proposed a major reform of the Poor Law. In its report, the Commission deplored “the mischievous ambiguity of the word ‘poor’.” The very name, Poor Law, was a misnomer; it was a pauper law, not a poor law. Most of the poor — which is to say, virtually all the working classes — were indeed poor, but they were not paupers. They were “independent” — that is, self-supporting — laborers. Unfortunately, the enormous expansion of relief in the preceding decades, including relief “in aid of wages” (to supplement wages), had confused the distinction between pauper and poor, thus contributing to the “pauperization of the poor.”
– Mark L. Chance.