Welfare's forgotten past : a socio-legal history of the poor law
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Bibliographic Information
Welfare's forgotten past : a socio-legal history of the poor law
Routledge, 2011, c2010
- : pbk
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Note
Originally published: 2010
"First issued in paperback 2011"--T.p. verso
"A GlassHouse book"
Bibliography: p. [206]-224
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
That 'poor law was law' is a fact that has slipped from the consciousness of historians of welfare in England and Wales, and in North America. Welfare's Forgotten Past remedies this situation by tracing the history of the legal right of the settled poor to relief when destitute. Poor law was not simply local custom, but consisted of legal rights, duties and obligations that went beyond social altruism. This legal 'truth' is, however, still ignored or rejected by some historians, and thus 'lost' to social welfare policy-makers. This forgetting or minimising of a legal, enforceable right to relief has not only led to a misunderstanding of welfare's past; it has also contributed to the stigmatisation of poverty, and the emergence and persistence of the idea that its relief is a 'gift' from the state.
Documenting the history and the effects of this forgetting, whilst also providing a 'legal' history of welfare, Lorie Charlesworth argues that it is timely for social policy-makers and reformists - in Britain, the United States and elsewhere - to reconsider an alternative welfare model, based on the more positive, legal aspects of welfare's 400-year legal history.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: A History of Forgetting 2. Rights of the Poor: Towards a Negative Modernity 3. Socio-Legal Juristic Narratives: Poor Law's Legal Foundations 4. Deconstructing from the Negative: A Critical Historiography of Legal [Mis]conceptions 5. Lived Experience: The Poor 'Speak' 6. Paupers as Textual Analysis: Exploring the Settlement Entitlement Through Little Dorrit 7. Lived Experience: Poor Law Administration 8. Developments and Transformation Over Time: Dichotomising the Poor 9. The Road to Beveridge: Deforming Welfare 10. End Thoughts: On the Transience of Legal Memory
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