ABSTRACT
This chapter presents statistics on relief given to men without work for the period 1839–1939. Specifically, the sequence of tables allow the reader to identify the two massive discontinuities in the late 1830s and in the early 1920s, when there was a decisive change in poor law practice about relief to men without work. The first of these discontinuities in the 1830s has hitherto been invisible to a historiography that has partitioned off the pre-1834 statistics from the post-1834 statistics and even the 1840s statistics from the 1890s statistics. The second discontinuity in the 1920s has not been suppressed, but its definition has suffered from this partitioning. The total number of men on relief was usually much smaller; the reformed poor law had moved out of large-scale assistance to unemployed and underemployed which had been norm before 1834. In 1912 the outdoor able-bodied/non-able-bodied classification was abandoned. For 1913 and 1914, the outdoor total is of men relieved on account ‘of other causes’.
