Steven King’s new study builds on a massive database of over 25,000 items, mainly letters, by, for and about the poor, sent from 1500 and directed to 559 communities across England and Wales, though a fifth of the total items derive from ten parishes with especially large collections. The earliest items he considered date from the 1750s, though such letters were more frequently written (or perhaps kept) from the 1780s, and even more so from the 1810s and 1820s. Pauper letters have attracted much attention since Thomas Sokoll published his Essex collection in 2001, not least from King himself and his collaborators across Europe. But in this book, King pushes the envelope and takes us somewhere a bit different. He tells us that his interest in this kind of source dates from 1989, when he first encountered such letters during his doctoral research in Lancashire. That provided the germ for the ‘regional perspective’ on poverty in England and Wales offered in his first book. Since then, family relations, sickness, migration and more generally exploring poor relief from below have been among his persistent preoccupations, and all are in evidence here.

King tells us that he found less regional variation in these sources than he had expected, though Wales (deserving more attention, he suggests) emerges as a distinctively tough-minded region, exacting more deference from its poor, and dealing more brusquely with liars. He found no such marked north–south divide as emerged from his study of relief payments, though occasionally northern upland parishes displayed Welsh characteristics. Its sheer scale and range apart, other distinctive features of his source base are that he has studied letters from overseers and ‘advocates’ alongside those of the poor, and has compared patterns of ask and response in vestry minute books. On this basis, he argues that in their basic competences and worldview, the poor differed less from the officials they dealt with than we might have expected. Furthermore, both in self-presentation and in the responses they received, the resident poor were not notably different from the non-resident poor. King has generated a probing and imaginative array of questions from the sources to extract a striking body of insights from them. Sometimes he exposes us to almost too much of the effort: there is a bit too much setting out of questions, and some repetitiveness. Did we need quite so many chapters on the rhetoric of the letters? Moreover, there seemed to me to be a few straw men: I am sure he is right that not every historian has recognised either that payments to the poor arose out of negotiations, or that relief was not generally expected to make more than a contribution to support, but surely many of his readers will know these things? But these are minor reservations. Overall, the book is a significant achievement, taking the reader far into what King persuaded me was the to-some-extent shared world of the working poor and lower middling sort: into their material and social experience and their responses to that experience; their familiarity with life as struggle; their commitment to getting by; their sense of familial obligation; their frustrations and occasional anger; their pride and their shame. The study excels too in setting the poor in a social landscape: hunting down paper and ink; being coached by landlords in how to appeal for rent; advised and commiserated with, if sometimes culpably neglected by parish officers.

The picture painted is broadly optimistic. It shows us people who led hard lives but who valued and sustained various forms of belonging, who might have experienced desperation but were mainly civilly treated, by others who saw them as human beings (and only occasionally as idle, roguish, deceitful human beings). These interchanges bred expectations and habits on all sides, which would ultimately soften the intended rigours of the New Poor Law, King suggests; his future work will flesh out that story. One final worry. Are the letters not likely to underrepresent agricultural labourers – given that they relate above all, as he says, to migrants to towns? I think only once among the letters quoted was there any reference to an unemployed labourer being set to parish work – though was the increasingly felt need to provide such work not central to the gathering sense of ‘crisis’ in the old poor law that King, on the basis of his sources, downplays? There may be elements in the larger picture concealed from us here. But what we do see is compelling.