ABSTRACT
This chapter presents statistics on the total number of children on the poor law, indoors, and outdoors at five-yearly intervals from 1851. These totals are directly available in the official statistics of an era that idealised age and sex divisions, for example, in its workhouses after 1834. The proportion of children to all paupers is significant. The chapter deals with those classified in the official statistics as ‘widows with dependent children’. In the nineteenth century, out-relief was seldom offered to the separated or unmarried woman with dependent children; thus there is an important difference between ‘widows with dependent children’ on out-relief and the late twentieth-century group of single-parent families on social security. After 1912, the count is of widows with dependent children rather than able-bodied widows with dependent children. Practically, the change of category makes no difference.
