“DESERT”, “NEED”, THE SOCIAL THEORY OF THE POOR LAW RE‐PORT OF 1834, AND JOHN STUART MILL.

The Poor Law Report of 1834 occupies an important, perhaps pre‐eminent place in attempts to understand changes in the distribution of power, social relations, and social provision in the nineteenth century. Few other documents have set in progress such a multitide of far‐reaching changes. This is true even though the Poor Law Amendment Act of the same year, very closely related to the Report, diluted considerably its recommendations for policy ‐ as the Checklands say in the Introduction to their edition of the Report, “The Government, with the understandable intention of making things easier for itself and harder for its opponents, produced a Bill that was much less explicit than the Report” (1974, p. 42). The innovations flowing from the Report included: a specialist body at central level in London (the Poor Law Commissioners, given extensive powers to set in being general rules covering poor re‐lief); nationwide units of “local government”, the union, bringing into control as boards of guardians many new people, who gained their position through elections; more systematic construction of workhouses, which often dwarfed the other buildings in their towns or villages; and a circumscribing of the power in the hands of the Justices of the Peace, stalwarts of a less formal, more paternalistic and discretionary attitude to poor relief.