Charitable London: F(o)unding the First Philanthropic Societies in the Metropolis

As this article is less about charity per se than it is about the relationships between place and institutional policies of benevolence, my intention is to look at how practices and laws of public charity operated in a city whose economic and social geography was changing after 1700, when the streets were populated with vulnerable people driven into poverty and when the subjects of pauperism and poor laws “engaged the attention of the legislature with increasing frequency” (Purdy 287). This article looks at the modus operandi of private and public philanthropic societies in eighteenth-century London in order to observe how both religious- and secular-driven charitable societies were motivated by the same goal of social reform, whether prompted by the Enlightenment or religious values. While the notion of Pietas Londinensis indicated the existence of various operating charities and casual philanthropic acts in the London area, charitable institutions had not been set up until the eighteenth century. In late Stuart and Georgian Britain charitable, London was shaped both by economic forces and by the various cultural meanings people attached to its space, and this new paradigm transferred all matters concerning the poor from parochial obligation to civic responsibility. The article will focus on the mechanisms which made this transfer possible while considering acts of public charity and philanthropic societies that emerged in the long eighteenth century, from hospitals and infirmaries to almshouses and charity schools, with a view to observing the changes in English mentality as a result of charitable activity.

Overseer of the Poor

The year George Washington was finishing his first term as president, 1792, William Larned was beginning his first term as overseer of the poor for Providence, Rhode Island. Larned would be reelected for another thirty-five one-year terms and arguably exercised more authority over locals than any president could. Larned’s long career in this little-known but powerful local government position illustrates several aspects of early American poor laws. Overseers of the poor could be lifesavers to locals in need. They could also upend lives, forcing families out of town. They controlled the largest portion of local tax dollars, which dwarfed state and federal tax levies from the individual taxpayer’s perspective. Overseers used these tax dollars to provide food, housing, healthcare, and other necessaries to people in need. An ancillary benefit was that these dollars also buoyed the incomes of local government relief contractors.

Warned Out

The freeborn son of an enslaved father and a free mother, Cuff Roberts’s life would be changed forever by the Revolutionary War. He served a five-year tour as part of the Continental Army, including at the Battle of Yorktown. As a veteran returning to Rhode Island, however, Roberts was not free to move around the country he helped make free. American poor laws, dating back to the seventeenth century, empowered Overseer of the Poor William Larned to repeatedly banish Roberts back to the town of Roberts’s birth. Roberts’s life would be shaped in powerful ways by American poor laws. Roberts helped local overseers by housing a needy neighbor, but came into conflict with other overseers over where he could live. After qualifying for a veterans’ pension, Roberts tried to make the life he wanted for his family in spite of the poor laws.

Hard-Working Single Mother

Poor law officials had tremendous authority over families, children, and unwed mothers. Lydia Bates was separated from her own parents as a child, when they became too poor to support her. Overseers of the poor in her small town moved her to other families’ houses. As she grew older, overseers likely treated Bates like an unpaid temporary worker. She lived, temporarily, in houses where her work could help the houseowners, including an elderly couple who might have needed poor relief without Bates’s help. When Bates became pregnant with baby Rhoda, overseers became even more involved. They used the court system to hold Rhoda’s father financially responsible. They also had the authority to decide whether Rhoda could remain with her mother or, like her mother, would have to live in neighbors’ homes. This chapter focuses on how poor laws governed sexuality and families.

Introduction

These five stories tell how poor relief shaped Americans’ lives in the early United States. Although the five subjects were unique individuals, living in the local contexts of Rhode Island towns, their stories teach much about welfare around the country at the time. This is because nearly every American state inherited colonial laws based on the Elizabethan Poor Law of England. How Welfare Worked in the Early United States focuses on several aspects of how these laws were implemented. Some aspects are rarely discussed in other histories: the difficulty of financing this safety net, the prominence of healthcare in poor relief, the use of paupers as temporary workers, and the isolation of poorhouse inmates. Other aspects, described well in other histories, are carefully illustrated in these narrative-style biographies: the benevolent effects of poor relief, the economic stimulus of poor relief spending, and the racialized application of the poor laws.

Agriculture

This chapter talks about the seventh volume of the Mishneh torah, the Book of Agriculture or the Book of Seeds (Zera'im), which deals with laws concerning agricultural issues. It includes the seven sections of the Book of Agriculture: Laws of Diverse Kinds, Laws of Gifts to the Poor, Laws of Heave Offerings, Laws of Tithes, Laws of the Second Tithe and the Fourth Year's Fruit, Laws of First Fruits, and Laws of the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee. It also explores the final chapter of the seventh section that deals largely with the special restrictions of the Levites concerning land-owning, and other issues connected with the cities given over to them. The chapter provides context for the argument about the text at the end of the Book of Agriculture. It clarifies why laws concerning charity or gifts to the poor are included in the Book of Agriculture.