A new source for the historian of urban poverty: a note on the use of charity records in Leicester 1904–29

This article reviews the potential use of charity records in reconstructing the lives of the poor in the early twentieth-century city and suggests how computer-assisted modes of quantitative and qualitative techniques of analysis can expand the known source base of research on poverty. Although the poor have themselves left only a small direct imprint on the historical record, the historian of poverty has managed to use the diverse and voluminous Victorian records generated by officials of the Poor Law which has resulted in a variety of administrative and institutional analyses of pauperism within various urban and regional settings. These studies have attracted a certain amount of criticism because of their dependence upon a narrow range of sources and orthodox historical methodology. It can be argued, however, that the full potential of Poor Law records in terms of what they contribute as well as what can be done with them has not yet been fully exploited. There is scope, for example, for the linkage of Poor Law material with demographic sources, such as the census enumerators' returns, to explore the geography of urban poverty in the nineteenth century. The value of Poor Law records would be enhanced if research questions could be phrased in relation to the socio-geographical context of the city, taking into account the dynamics of urbanism. For example, in Victorian and Edwardian Leicester it is possible to consider the consequence of socio-economic changes in a move from a domestic to a predominantly factory-based mode of production in the hosiery and footwear trades and the impact of the Poor Law during this transformation as patterns of discrimination characterized the provision of relief in certain districts of the town.