ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the aged, the chronic sick, and the temporarily disabled. These groups are considered jointly because they are dealt with in a series of interrelated categories in the official statistics of the period. After 1839, the aged and the chronic sick are counted together in one general category. Any reconstruction of nineteenth-century pauperism has problems about separating out sub-groups such as the aged from this larger general category. Pauperism of the aged acquired a new dimension in the 1890s when special counts were made of the total number of old persons who drew relief at some time during the year. The category of ‘aged and infirm’ is not directly comparable with the subsequent category of ‘non-able-bodied’ because the latter included only the chronically and permanently infirm.
