Study 4024 - Poor Law Statistics, 1859 - 1939

In general, the Poor Law Board and its successor the Local Government Board provided detailed bi-annual statistics of numbers of paupers in each county in its Annual Report and similar statistics for the individual unions in a separate Return to Parliament. The sheer volume of this material poses considerable problems, and building up systematic coverage has proved difficult: our transcriptions are selective by level of reporting unit, area, period and variables transcribed.

Tables described in this section:

'plaw_c': county-level data on numbers of paupers. English counties plus three divisions of Wales, for 1st January and 1st July from January 1859 to January 1915 plus January 1919.

'plaw_c_f': full county-level pauperage statistics from Annual Reports of Poor Law Board and Local Government Board. English counties plus three divisions of Wales for 1st of January and 1st of July 1860, 1863, 1866, 1868 and 1879.

'plaw_u': selective transcription of numbers of paupers from Returns to Parliament by the Poor Law Board. Each union for 1st January from 1900 to 1912 plus selected unions for earlier dates.

'plaw_u_f': full union-level pauperage statistics for selected unions from Returns to Parliament by the Poor Law Board. January 1860 to July 1871

'plaw_iw': inter-war poor law statistics for all of England and Wales. Unions from 1922 to 1930 and counties and county-boroughs from 1931 to 1939. Data for 1st of January only. For copyright reasons data for years 1922 to 1927 only is made available.

'plaw_20': poor law statistics for 1920 and 1921 for selected poor law unions in England and Wales. Data for 1st January only.

Availability of data

In general, the Poor Law Board and its successor the Local Government Board provided detailed bi-annual statistics of numbers of paupers in each county in its Annual Report and similar statistics for the individual unions in a separate Return to Parliament. The sheer volume of this material poses considerable problems, and building up systematic coverage has proved difficult: our transcriptions are selective by level of reporting unit, area, period and variables transcribed.

At the time of writing, the following pre-1920 reports have been photocopied:

The following towns in England and Wales have at least 80 entries in the 'wages' table and were selected for inclusion in an extended transcription (Stoke-on-Trent does not meet this criterion, but was included to ensure that this major conurbation was represented):

(c) Humphrey Southall, David Gilbert and Ian Gregory, 1996.