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Letters to the Editor |
Reply to Bernard Harris
St John's College, University of Cambridge Cambridge CB2 ITP, UK. E-mail: srss{at}cam.ac.uk
Many thanks to Bernard Harris for his close reading of our articles1–3 and for his thoughtful and constructive suggestions. I wish only to respond to two of his critical points, since to let these pass might undermine the credibility of the historical interpretation presented in the original article in the eyes of IJE readers. These are first, the question of Poor Law historiography and second of the chronology of mortality change.
I certainly concur with Bernard Harris that the Poor law reform in 1834 was probably the most significant single legislative act of violence against the rights and material circumstances of the poor in this country's history. An event of this scale has of course many dimensions to its significance and many impacts. It surely goes without saying that a 50% reduction in the nation's social security budget must have had a devastating impact on the material resources of the poor? In our article, the New Poor Law was discussed as an illustration of the profound problems with social capital at that time in British society because that was what this article was about—and certainly not because we consider that to have been its sole importance.
The article argued that the poor state of bridging and linking social capital in a society disrupted by the pressures of industrialization was part of the reason why this new ideology of ‘individualism’ and ‘the market’ became plausible and legitimate to the British governing class which legislated the New Poor Law into existence, having previously supported a more humane and paternalist system for centuries. Though I did not cite it, I was following the interpretation in Peter Mandler's classic article on this process of political education, which concluded that ‘The New Poor Law was indeed a landmark in the creation of a market system. ... it was a sign that the landed gentry had integrated market logic into their way of thinking’.4 Careless drafting in the relevant section of the rejoinder left the superfluous and misleading term ‘urbanising’ in the text, instead of referring to ‘the propertied class’, as was intended and as was used in the relevant section of the original article, where the Poor Law was discussed (p. 658). I am grateful to Bernard Harris for giving me the opportunity to correct this in the rejoinder (he will also find a description of the New Poor Law which conforms with the Mandler and Brundage emphasis on landed property as its progenitor and its subsequent unpopularity in the industrial north in Szreter 2004).5 This errant term in the rejoinder seems, however, to have led Harris to conclude that the account of the Poor Law offered in the original article is vitiated and he goes on to object to statements made there about segregation of the sexes and cessation of cash handouts on the grounds that current historiography has shown great variation in the subsequent practices of Poor Law Boards of Guardians. This is quite true. However, the statements in this section of the original article, to which he objects, were describing the motives and intentions of the creators of the law. Nevertheless, I do believe that these intentions were translated into realities in many, though certainly not all places. His statement that ‘the vast majority of those who continued to receive poor relief did so outside the workhouse’ is true, but omits to inform readers that these were women and children; and that there was a massive reduction after 1834 in the numbers of able-bodied adult males permitted outdoor relief, as Karel Williams6 has shown and as Harris7 has acknowledged in his valuable new textbook (p. 53).
As Harris notes, my own research with Graham Mooney shows expectation of life at birth in Britain's largest cities recovering in the 1850s from the crisis levels of the 1830s and 1840s.8 However, it also shows no further improvement in the 1860s; and that the level of mortality in these two decades, though better than the 1830s and 1840s, is worse than that for Glasgow in the 1820s (the only large industrial city for which we can make a reliable estimate of expectation of life at birth for that decade). Harris concludes that the moderate improvement of the 1850s must be attributable to the rising real wages of that decade. But real wages were rising before that decade, too! The problem for those who want to argue the McKeownite thesis, that trends in real wages were the main driver of mortality and health patterns during the nineteenth century, is that there is no plausible correlation between the two series.
There must have been more research devoted to the real wage trend between 1770 and 1850 than any other topic in the field of modern economic history, of which Charles Feinstein's work is a distinguished recent contribution. None of this research has ever indicated a trend fall in average real wages at any time after 1815 down to 1850. The debate has all been over how much real wages rose after c.1810, whether the trend rise was initially slow and then accelerated a little, or whether there had also been a trend rise even before c.1810 and, if so, whether for a decade or two or perhaps even back to the 1770s (something which Feinstein's most recent work suggests but certainly does not prove). Harris emphasizes that Feinstein's most recent estimates show real wages were rising gradually throughout the period since the 1770s and were rising somewhat faster after the 1810s. I chose, instead, to emphasize a lack of trend across the second half of the eighteenth century before the more definite evidence of trend improvement from the 1810s onwards. The reason for this was not ignorance of Feinstein's work but careful attention to the author's own qualifications on his headline findings. In particular, Feinstein pointed out that ‘For the late eighteenth century there is considerable uncertainty about the estimates’ (645) and he summarized his findings for that period as follows: ‘From the 1780s to the end of the Napoleonic Wars ... there was almost no increase in average real earnings.’ (642). Furthermore, as Feinstein himself recognized (649–50), the modest real wage increase which Harris mentions over the half century c.1770–1820 (a 12.5% rise), would have been almost exactly cancelled out by the proportionate increase in mouths to feed in each family across that same period, which saw fertility reach its peak. It was the lack of any further increase in fertility after the 1810s, which makes me more certain that average real wages (and net household incomes) really did rise from the 1810s onwards.9 On the argument that real wage trends are the primary influence on population health, none of these possibilities would provide a convincing explanation for why the health of the industrial urban workforce should have experienced a prolonged crisis in the 1830s and 1840s, right in the middle of a period of rising real wages.
Thus although rising national real wage trends and associated improvements in average private purchasing power should have been having a beneficial effect on population health by enabling individuals and families to attain more and better food, clothing and housing, the really interesting question, it seems to me, is why that did not happen between 1811 and 1871? Something else was swamping this beneficial effect; and that something seems to have been acting most forcefully in the industrial towns, which is precisely where the best real wages were to be had. I believe that the historical and epidemiological evidence indicates that the overall environment of these towns and cities was failing its inhabitants—and most of them could not buy their way out of it. In my interpretation this was a problem of collective political will and it was not resolved until the 1870s when a new political vision emerged, pioneered first in Birmingham and in Glasgow. Only then, once cities had begun a cumulative upward rate of investment in their collective environment and health services, could private gains in income also manifest their health-enhancing potential.
In the industrial towns of the 1850s there was an alleviation of the intense mortality of the previous two decades, but this did not signal the beginnings of a new municipal politics. The improvement of the 1850s was principally due to alleviation of the single most pressing and devastating health problem of the previous two decades, which was an absolute dearth of water supply. However, as John Hassan ingeniously demonstrated in a classic article two decades ago, in many industrial towns this increase in water supply was the by-product of an opportunist response by industrialists to the 1848 Public Health Act.10 It enabled them to cut the costs and increase the supply of an important industrial raw material—water—provided they paid lip service to the Act's sanitary purposes. Thus, urban water supply did improve substantially from the desperate situation prevailing in the 1830s and 1840s, but this did not reflect the kind of new thinking necessary to cut the Gordian knot of a failure of collective will, nor did it signal the commencement of a strategy and a continuous programme to address the urban environment and the population's health needs.
Harris notes that Antony Wohl cited Chamberlain's statement that ‘the foundations of property are made more secure when no real grievance is felt by the poor against the rich’. Of course, Chamberlain was a rigorous political realist and would have achieved nothing otherwise; but the point is that he was also so much more than this. He developed a strategy, which eclipsed that of the mere pragmatic defence of propertied privilege against the forces of ressentiment. As Antony Wohl has also put it: ‘The idealism [of the civic gospel], with its accompanying pragmatic cutting edge, was powerful enough to lead to a revolution in urban affairs.’11
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1 Szreter S, Woolcock A. Health by association? Social capital, social theory and the political economy of public health. Int J Epidemiol 2004; 33:650–67.
2 Szreter S, Woolcock A. Rejoinder: Crafting rigorous and relevant social theory for public health policy. Int J Epidemiol 2004; 33:700–04.
3 Szreter S. Author response: Debating mortality trends in 19th-century Britain. Int J Epidemiol 2004; 33:705–9.
4 Mandler P. The making of the New Poor Law Redivivus. Past and Present 1987; 117:131–57, p.157.
5 Szreter S. Health, economy, state and society in modern Britain: the long-run perspective. Hygiea Internationalis 2004; 4:205–27.
6 Williams K. From Pauperism to Poverty. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
7 Harris B. The Origins of the British Welfare State. Social Welfare in England and Wales, 1800–1945. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
8 Szreter S, Mooney G. Urbanisation, mortality and the standard of living debate: new estimates of the expectation of life at birth in nineteenth-century British cities. Econ Hist Rev 1998; 50:84–112.
9 Feinstein CH. Pessimism perpetuated. Real wages and the standard of living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution. J Econ Hist 58:625–58.
10 Hassan JA. The growth and impact of the British water industry in the nineteenth century. Econ Hist Rev 1985; 38:531–47.[CrossRef]
11 Wohl AS. Endangered Lives: Public health in Victorian Britain. London: Methuen, 1984, p. 175.
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