The Life Histories of the Elderly Poor in Late-Victorian England

A User Guide to the Dataset

Dr Tom Heritage, University of Cambridge

August-September 2022

Introduction

This is an individual-level and longitudinal dataset comprising the life histories of men and women aged 60 years and over who were 
recorded in source materials related to the New Poor Law regime in late-Victorian England. The New Poor Law was responsible for the 
overall administration of state-funded welfare for the poor, particularly to those who were deemed ‘not-able-bodied’, of which the 
‘aged and infirm’ were a substantial subcategory. The majority of those applying for welfare (or what was then termed ‘poor relief’) 
would receive a weekly allowance paid in one’s household, or ‘outdoor relief’. On average, single applicants could receive between 
2-3 shillings weekly, although married couples could receive up to 4 shillings (Lees, 1998). 

However, an application for outdoor relief could be rejected by the Board of Guardians, who were responsible for issuing poor relief 
in their respective Poor Law Union. There were approximately 650 Poor Law Unions in England and Wales, comprising a group of adjacent 
parishes, and were roughly coterminous with the registration districts used as boundaries when preparing a national census. The Board 
of Guardians could instead offer ‘indoor relief’, or accommodation and care inside a Poor Law Union workhouse. Historians have found 
that workhouse populations came to be dominated by older men and women, and the character of the workhouse gradually changed from 
punitive prison into an institution predominantly providing care for older people (Ritch, 2014; Boyer, 2016; Schurer et al., 2018).

Studies have shown that older men over women were more likely to be offered indoor relief, owing to perceptions about the domesticated 
nature of women and their more adequate provision of child care at home (Goose, 2005). Others point to variations in age profile, where 
those in their seventies and eighties were more likely to be offered outdoor relief (Boyer, 2016). Their research has often been conducted 
without detailed reference to the life histories of actual individuals recorded in the census enumerators’ books (CEBs). Therefore, the 
objectives of this dataset are: 

1. To reconcile the entries of those recorded in the New Poor Law source materials with their appearance in the CEBs.
2. To trace the appearance of these names across censuses to build a more comprehensive picture of the socio-economic profile of older 
indoor relief and outdoor relief recipients.
3. To investigate differences between older indoor relief and outdoor relief recipients.

To do this, census entries of individuals that appear in the New Poor Law source materials at two periods of their life course are 
transcribed. The ‘later period’ of their life course involves their circumstances when they were recorded in the census as aged 53-92 
years in the periods 1881-1891. Depending on their traceability, they are then traced back to the ‘earlier period’ of their 
life course, where the individuals were recorded in the census as aged between 21-68 years in the periods 1851-1861. This dataset was used 
in a paper written by the present author, which focused on an assessment of 489 individuals recorded as living in domestic 
households that were traceable in both the ‘later period’ 1881-1891 and the ‘earlier period’ 1851-1861. Descriptive and logistic regression 
techniques measured the likelihood of receiving indoor and outdoor relief via occupational structure, migration, and the extent of 
relatives in the household (Heritage, 2022). A copy of the paper, presented at the British Society for Population Studies Annual 
Conference, University of Winchester, 5-7 September 2022, is available on request at HeritageTomS@aol.com  Note that when ‘names’ are 
mentioned, they were only transcribed as part of the initial data collection, and are not released to the UK Data Service. Instead, each 
individual is distinguished by an anonymized ID code.

Further information on all variables and references are included in the user guide PDF.