Welfare's Forgotten Past: A Socio-Legal History of the Poor Law [Hardcover]

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 welfares 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 welfares 400-year legal history.

1. Introduction: A History of Forgetting  2. Rights of the Poor: Towards a Negative Modernity  3. Socio-Legal Juristic Narratives: Poor Laws 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