Petty Tyranny and Oppression: Workhouse Lives Under the Long Nineteenth-Century Poor Laws

This book focuses on one of the most contentious areas of English and Welsh poor law history: the exercise of petty tyranny by officials on the workhouse poor. The book examines the period from the late-eighteenth-century crisis of the Old Poor Law, through the adoption of the New Poor Law reform in 1834, the loosening of the ‘principles of 1834’ in the 1890s, and on past the early-twentieth-century Liberal reforms, to the eve of World War I. This long chronological sweep thus examines the ...