One of the first legislative acts of the newly reformed parliament, expanded after 1832 to enfranchise a majority of middle-class men, was to address the problem of the escalating cost of poverty relief. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act divided the nation into administrative units for the provision of poor relief, called unions. Henceforth the “able-bodied” poor could only receive state welfare within the setting of their union's workhouse. Since workhouses were intended to be the place of last resort, they offered only the most basic amenities and required that all able-bodied men engage in relatively hard labor. Scholarship on the New Poor Law consistently notes the parsimonious and often putrid nature of workhouse food, highlighting the disciplinary role of food in an institutional context.Footnote 1 Historians who have attempted to reevaluate the relative “cruelty” of this legislation and its enactment have similarly raised the issue of the workhouse diet. They have argued that, though uninteresting, it was sustaining and no worse than what was being eaten by the independent laborer.Footnote 2 The scholarly debate over workhouse food has therefore focused primarily on its quantity and nutritive value—its materiality—thus inadvertently reproducing the Malthusian abstraction of the poor into “machines that eat.”Footnote 3 But exactly what food was denied workhouse inmates and the symbolic meanings of these exclusions not only to those that governed but also to the poor themselves has remained underanalyzed.
In the early years of the New Poor Law, workhouses were explicitly prohibited from serving roast beef and plum pudding—that most English of meals. Historians have recently begun to focus increased attention on the cultural meanings invested in specific food products and the politics of their production, distribution, and consumption.Footnote 4 Unpacking the contentious disputes between local and central Poor Law authorities over the provision of roast beef to workhouse inmates similarly reorients the discussion of the pauper diet to address, not the amount or quality of food provided, but rather the cultural politics of what exactly a pauper was allowed to eat. A study of when and why paupers were and were not furnished with a festive meal of what was often termed “Old English Fare”Footnote 5 provides a way of rethinking the place of the poor within local and national communities at a moment when attitudes toward poverty were undergoing profound change.
The Workhouse Dietary
When the New Poor Law was passed in 1834, it had at its heart the principle of “less eligibility.” This meant that the new workhouses—erected to house the poor and the only channel through which the able-bodied could now receive government aid—could not be more desirable than earning one's own keep.Footnote 6 In order to discourage dependence upon the state, the conditions within these institutions needed to deter all but the most destitute. Workhouses thus provided poor quality and unvaried food in amounts calculated to sustain the inmates without exceeding either the quantity or the quality of the diet of the laboring classes in the immediate vicinity.Footnote 7 Paupers were fed based on a dietary table that was approved by the Poor Law Commission (PLC) and later the Poor Law Board (PLB), which took over the administration of relief in December 1847. These dietaries clearly stipulated the specific meal to be provided on each day of the week and the amount of food allotted for each inmate, who could request that the portion be weighed in front of him or her. Any changes to the dietary table once formally adopted, no matter how seemingly insignificant or expedient, needed to be approved by the central Poor Law authority, for these dietaries were effectively a contract: they were issued “under Seal,” thus making their “observance imperative.”Footnote 8 These rules governing food were part of a vast system of utilitarian regulations aimed at standardizing the system of relief. They were intended to make the provision of state welfare independent of the arbitrary or capricious decisions of local authorities and render it uniform, efficient, and impersonal.Footnote 9
In 1835, Edwin Chadwick, secretary to the PLC and one of the architects of the New Poor Law itself, circulated six sample dietaries for unions to choose from, which were based on those that had been deemed acceptable under the Old Poor Law.Footnote 10 All were apparently “sufficient in quantity” but varied according to the local availability of ingredients and regional eating habits.Footnote 11 Chadwick instructed boards of guardians, who oversaw indoor and outdoor poor relief at the local level, to assess “the usual mode of living of the Independent Labourers of the District in which the Union is situated” before choosing which dietary to adopt.Footnote 12 This would ensure that the pauper diet did not exceed “the ordinary mode of subsistence of the labouring Classes of the Neighbourhood.”Footnote 13 For inmates of the workhouse to be fed in a way that was superior to those who subsisted by their own “honest industry” would lessen the “stimulus to exertion” and only encourage “idle and improvident habits,” Chadwick maintained.Footnote 14
The meals prescribed by these dietaries consisted largely of bread, cheese, broth, gruel, suet or meat pudding, potatoes, vegetables, bacon or salt pork, and boiled or baked meat. In its Eighth Annual Report issued in 1842, the PLC maintained that the dietaries were all comparable but differed in order to “assimilate them, as much as possible, to the ordinary food of the working classes in the neighbourhood.”Footnote 15 The dietaries favored by the boards of guardians in Kent and Sussex consisted mainly of bread and cheese, while the northern counties more frequently chose those based on potatoes and oatmeal porridge. In Cornwall, fish appeared in the dietary because it was “consumed by the working classes of that county.”Footnote 16 It did not feature prominently elsewhere, because throughout the nineteenth century meat was the preferred type of animal protein among all classes and second only to bread in terms of its centrality to the British diet.Footnote 17
With the exception of in coastal fishing communities, the commissioners did not generally sanction dietaries that included no meat at all.Footnote 18 In fact, a moderate amount of meat was widely considered to be essential to health and was thus a staple of the pauper's diet in most regions. But in order to keep the cost of poor relief low and to discourage the working poor from seeing the workhouse as preferable to competing in the labor market, inmates were generally fed bacon and salt pork more often than fresh “butcher's meat.”Footnote 19 None of the dietaries allowed more than fifteen ounces of cooked fresh meat per week, and most provided considerably less.Footnote 20 The amount of meat furnished, its quality, and its preparation all differed considerably from district to district, and in the 1830s and the 1840s, even a cooked Sunday dinner was never mandated.Footnote 21 In practice, then, workhouse dietaries varied according to regional eating habits, local food networks, the skill of workhouse kitchen staff, and the attitudes of the district's guardians.Footnote 22
Despite these variations, the PLC expressly prohibited workhouses from providing food and drink that it categorized as “luxuries” or “indulgences” such as fresh or dried fruit, alcohol, sweets, and prime cuts of roasted meat.Footnote 23 The Poor Law commissioners explicitly directed boards of guardians and workhouse masters that they should not provide any special meals to inmates. Even Christmas dinner was forbidden to the indoor pauper in the early years of the New Poor Law. While other Britons, if they could afford it, enjoyed the traditional meal of roast beef and plum pudding, paupers were denied these food items even when they were paid for through charitable donations. To provide this festive meal to the inmates of workhouses, the Poor Law officials determined, would render the conditions within these institutions, at least for a few hours, superior to those outside, because few of the working poor could afford such a meal. However benevolent the impulse behind the desire to furnish the poor with a Christmas treat, the commissioners repeatedly maintained that to do so contravened the deterrent policy at the very heart of the New Poor Law.Footnote 24
The Gift of Roast Beef
In the 1830s and the 1840s, most boards of guardians and workhouse masters probably stuck closely to the letter of the law and provided no special meals. In fact, at times the PLC had to police excessively parsimonious practices such as in the notorious Andover Union where the workhouse master was accused of starving the inmates.Footnote 25 But in a significant number of cases, the principles of the New Poor Law, even in the early years when the regulations were most stringent, were balanced by the generosity of local overseers, who broke the rules and regaled their paupers with a Christmas dinner of roast beef and plum pudding.
This impulse to furnish a Christmas dinner for the inmates of workhouses stemmed from a belief that the provision of a holiday meal to the poor was an old English practice and that adherence to ancient Anglo-Saxon customs was itself an important expression of national character.Footnote 26 Christmas had not consistently been celebrated in the British Isles and had been suppressed under the Puritans during the interregnum of the mid-seventeenth century.Footnote 27 But Victorians embraced Christmas and reestablished its importance, not as a patriotic holiday, but as one of the few occasions that was universally celebrated across the nation and thus that drew all British subjects together through shared rituals. For Victorians, Christmas was a time to practice what they viewed as the quintessentially British values of domesticity, benevolence, and hospitality through extending the comforts of the home to those less fortunate.Footnote 28 In Charles Dickens's 1843 A Christmas Carol, Scrooge's miserliness is magnified at Christmastime precisely because the Yuletide season was widely acknowledged to be “a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”Footnote 29 Early Victorians valued the universal participation of all British people in festivities that drew on old charitable customs because these rituals of mutual obligation promoted a sense of social harmony during a period when class conflict was marked and provided an anchor during a time of rapid change.Footnote 30 Thomas K. Hervey's 1836 Book of Christmas claimed that old Christmas customs promoted “a reciprocal kindness of feeling” and forged the “bond of good will” between “those remote classes, whose differences of privilege, of education, are perpetually operating to loosen it, and threatening to dissolve it altogether.”Footnote 31
One of the most important components of the celebration of Christmas in the early Victorian period was the demonstration of benevolence to the poor through attention to their material needs.Footnote 32 As Tara Moore has argued, aid to the destitute at Christmas often came in the form of food, particularly those specific food products that were identified with a mythic English identity. “Food-wealth,” she argues, was relatively unproblematic because it could be redistributed “without undermining class relationships.”Footnote 33 The food that Victorians most associated with Christmas, which was thus often furnished to the poor, was roast beef and plum pudding. Despite the fact that this specific festive meal was a relatively recent invention and its consumption was by no means universal, Victorians invested roast beef with the authority of tradition.Footnote 34 Exotic birds, game, and wild boar had taken pride of place at medieval and Renaissance feasts, and by the eighteenth century, turkey had become the centerpiece of the middle- and upper-class Christmas table and remained so into the twentieth century.Footnote 35 But, beef—and high-status blood-rich roasted beef in particular—was almost universally acknowledged to be the quintessential food of the English people.Footnote 36 Partaking of what was often referred to as “Old English Fare” or merely “Christmas Fare” was thus synonymous with keeping Christmas Day in “the good old English fashion.”Footnote 37 In his 1823 Letters on England, the French commentator Victoire, Counte de Soligny observed that the “English custom” of eating roast beef and plum pudding on Christmas “is perhaps without exception the most universal of any that prevails in this country.”Footnote 38 When the Ghost of Christmas Past returns Scrooge to the Christmas feasting and dancing of his days as a young apprentice, Scrooge takes note that his employer served copious amounts of beef. Dickens suggested that these festivities uniting master and man through the sharing of particular foodstuffs stretched back not only into Scrooge's recent past but also deep into Britain's historical past. The ritual consumption of roast beef and plum pudding thus linked Britons both across space to each other and across time to their ancestors.Footnote 39
In a preindustrial agrarian England, the laboring classes consumed beef in large quantities because it was widely seen as the necessary food for the industrious English body, especially when accompanied by a boiled pudding.Footnote 40 Henry Fielding's popular 1730s song “The Roast Beef of Old England” promoted beef as central to the English body: he contrasted “the Englishman's food” that “ennobled our hearts, and enriched our blood,” with the “nice dainties” and “ragouts” of “effeminate Italy, France, and Spain.” But Fielding also championed the “mighty roast beef” as the food that forged the English character. The opening stanza of his song asserted that its consumption had in days or yore made England's soldiers “good” and its courtiers “brave.” Although the song in fact critiqued contemporary British habits and fashions that drew heavily on continental trends, its rousing chorus ensured that it remained popular well into the nineteenth century and was frequently sung on patriotic occasions.Footnote 41
These associations between roast beef and Britishness were commonplace in the vibrant print culture that characterized the mid- to late eighteenth century and were further cemented during the next hundred years. William Hogarth's best-selling prints frequently drew on the imagery of plentiful beef as evidence of Britain's superior status among European nations.Footnote 42 John Gillray's 1792 satirical illustration, “French Liberty–British Slavery,” affirmed this connection by portraying John Bull, the corpulent personification of the nation, gorging himself on roast beef while his scrawny French counterpart gnawed on raw onions.Footnote 43 By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the idea that beef was linked to liberty, particularly its English form, was firmly established. As Julia Twigg has argued, in this period of reforms and revolutions that spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, meat was widely touted as the food of freemen rather than slaves, and the right to beef was popularly regarded as “the very basis of English liberties.”Footnote 44 In the 1830s and the 1840s, radicals seeking the extension of full citizenship to the working classes deployed roast beef as a potent symbol of the rights of the freeborn Englishman. They frequently invoked the days of Merrie Olde England where jobs were plentiful, all men were equals under the Magna Carta, and “John Bull enjoyed roast beef, beer, and plum pudding every night.”Footnote 45 By the time the New Poor Law was passed in 1834, roast beef had thus become fraught with meaning, and its worth was valued more than its price per pound. As a food gift, it was thus a particularly significant object of exchange.Footnote 46
In paternalistic societies, relationships of mutual obligation are dynamic; they can be redefined from below as well as by those with greater social authority. Gifts from those in power can over time be appropriated by the poor as a right.Footnote 47 By 1834, the provision of roast beef at Christmas and other festive occasions had become an established prerogative of the poor, an entitlement claimed by the poor for themselves and granted by the propertied classes with whom the guardians generally identified.Footnote 48 Despite the New Poor Law's attempt to redefine relationships of responsibility toward the poor by curtailing outdoor relief and institutionalizing the pauper within workhouses, this type of gift exchange continued to serve as a stabilizing force to blunt tensions around social and economic inequalities. When the guardians at Gateshead fed their workhouse inmates roast beef and plum pudding on the Coronation Day of Queen Victoria, they were participating in a ritual of this nature. At this event, the paupers were waited on by members of the town council, the board of guardians, the town clerk, and the local churchwardens.Footnote 49 This inversion of relationships of deference evoked the spirit of the early modern carnival and suggests that the provision of a roast beef dinner to the poor could operate as a safety valve, helping to regulate a society where differences of rank and status constantly threatened social harmony.Footnote 50 For many guardians, paupers, and the public alike, the provision of roast beef was not merely an ancient rite, but it continued to perform a critical social function: as the guardians at Thirsk argued in 1837, these types of traditions not only pleased the poor but also had a “beneficial effect with the public,” drawing all members of the nation together.Footnote 51
Less Eligibility and the Categorization of the Poor
In the decades leading up to the passage of the New Poor Law, the tradition of providing roast beef to the poor at Christmas was alive and well. In 1808, the Earl of Chesterfield provided a Christmas dinner of “old English fare” to his tenants.Footnote 52 In 1822, the Earl of Warwick provided roast beef and plum pudding to all of his laborers on Christmas Day.Footnote 53 The inmates of workhouses operational under the Old Poor Law in the 1820s were frequently fêted at Christmas: in 1827, residents of the Brighton workhouse were “liberally regaled with the true old English fare of roast-beef and plum-pudding.”Footnote 54 In the Liverpool workhouse in 1824, paupers also ate roast beef at Christmas and had been doing so for at least twenty-one years.Footnote 55 Even prisoners and debtors were sometimes furnished with a proper Christmas dinner at the end of the 1820s.Footnote 56 In the first years of the New Poor Law's operation, there was thus considerable confusion and concern over the provision of Christmas dinner. Given that roast beef and plum pudding had been provided not only to the outdoor poor but also in workhouses and other institutions in the recent past, the commissioners' policy seemed at variance with age-old traditions. Boards of guardians, ratepayers, the press, and even paupers themselves contested what appeared to many to be a draconian policy, which seemed to establish that workhouse inmates were not in fact Dickens's “fellow passengers.” Instead, the New Poor Law configured them as what The Satirist called an “unfriended race of paupers,” highlighting their double otherness as a separate tribe cut off from a caring community.Footnote 57
In 1836, the first year that the workhouses were fully operational under the new welfare regime, the guardians at Ringwood wrote to the PLC to ask whether a Christmas dinner of roast beef and plum pudding could be provided to the paupers if paid for by subscription. The PLC responded that it regretted that it could not justify such a departure from the dietary because “all indulgences of this nature have the tendency to lessen the objections which should be entertained by the independent poor to parochial relief.”Footnote 58 The request of the guardians, their justification for making it, and the response of the PLC typify the debate over Christmas dinner in the 1830s. Indeed, when the guardians at Gloucester applied to the PLC to provide a Christmas treat in 1838, they were similarly cautioned that this indulgence might render the workhouse “temporarily less unattractive than under ordinary circumstances.”Footnote 59
The Poor Law commissioners constructed their argument against providing roast beef for Christmas as a question of utility and deterrence, and stressed the importance of holding firm to the principle of less eligibility. They informed local boards of guardians that the provision of special meals was at “variance with the principles” upon which the “efficiency” of the “workhouse system” depended: the condition of the workhouse inmates, the commissioners argued, should not be “desired or envied” by the independent laborers. Paupers could not, therefore, be supplied with “indulgences” that the working poor were obliged to forgo.Footnote 60 The PLC further stressed that in the winter months and during holidays, the independent laborer, “pressed by difficulties from which the inmate of the workhouse is free, begins to despair of being able to maintain himself and his family.” It was thus even more important at Christmastime, the commissioners reasoned, that the workhouse appear less appealing than the labor market.Footnote 61
Even though the PLC forbade expenditures on holiday meals regardless of who was footing the bill, many boards of guardians ignored these directives and did provide special treats to workhouse inmates without asking permission. As Anthony Brundage has argued, because much of the Old Poor Law was not statutory, a patchwork of different practices “flourished in luxuriant profusion” around the country.Footnote 62 When the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed, many boards of guardians found it difficult to break from these deep-rooted local customs that stressed reciprocal rights and responsibilities.Footnote 63 Paternalism, and the philanthropy it generated, remained alive and well in early Victorian England, and it was expressed even within the context of state poor relief despite the about-face in government policies that the New Poor Law was supposed to represent.Footnote 64
Many guardians used the language of the customary rights of the poor to defend what they saw as a well-established tradition of providing roast beef at Christmas.Footnote 65 In their defense, the Gloucester guardians claimed that they had “invariably” provided “roast beef, plum pudding, and ale” on Christmas because they felt that the paupers were “entitled to it.” They were not inclined to be the ones to withdraw a privilege and “comfort” that the paupers had become accustomed to receiving and that was likely, they maintained, provided for in other Poor Law unions.Footnote 66 In the central London workhouses, many of which had been incorporated before the New Poor Law was passed and thus operated independent from the oversight of the PLC, the “custom” of providing “the old English cheer” of roast beef and plum pudding on Christmas Day “prevailed.”Footnote 67 At St. George the Martyr in the London borough of Southwark in 1839, the board of guardians resolved to provide this traditional meal to the inmates because it was a “good and wholesome custom.”Footnote 68 Given that the poor themselves were unlikely to have understood the difference between the incorporated and unincorporated unions, some boards of guardians felt that it was unfair that London paupers should receive these treats while those in the rest of the country were denied them. The guardians of the Thirsk Union proclaimed that their “strong feeling” regarding these customary rights compelled them to provide Christmas dinner to their inmates even though this meant flouting the PLC's directives.Footnote 69
Requests for Christmas dinner came not only from guardians seeking to defend and honor the customary rights of the poor but also from the paupers themselves, who lodged demands for roast beef. In 1839, thirty-six adult male paupers in the Eastry Union petitioned the local board of guardians to provide a proper Christmas dinner. Having understood that it is the custom of several other unions in the country to provide “Old English Fare” on Christmas Day, the petitioners asked the board to provide the same at Eastry. The custom of the Eastry Union since its establishment had been to provide a Sunday dinner of beef pudding and vegetables on Christmas, which “the Guardians considered was as great a deviation from the Dietary ordered by the Commissioners, as was consistent with due regard to the interest of the poor rate payers.” Given, however, the clerk continued, “that it is notorious, that in almost every other union in this county, as well as in London, the Old English Fare of Roast Beef and plum pudding is provided for the workhouse inmates on the day in question, and in some instances even Beer is allowed, it cannot be unreasonable, that the paupers in this workhouse should request the same indulgence.”Footnote 70 The board of guardians stood firm and decided that the usual Sunday meal should be provided. But they nevertheless wrote to the PLC for guidance. This suggests that they were not unconvinced by the paupers' and the clerk's attempts to draw connections between the Eastry inmates and, at the very least, their fellow British subjects in other workhouses through the ritual consumption of “Old English Fare.” Unsurprisingly, the PLC reaffirmed its position that the guardians should not capitulate to the paupers' request.Footnote 71
That paupers themselves petitioned the local authorities implies that they had determined that, despite their poverty, they had the right to the same festive meal shared by other British subjects and provided for in other communities. Indeed, those who were allowed this meal sometimes used it as an occasion to express their Britishness. In 1843, the inmates of the St. Pancras workhouse in London celebrated Christmas with a roast beef dinner. During the festivities, they toasted the Queen, Prince Albert, and the army and the navy, and sang the patriotic naval song “Arise, Arise, Britannia's Sons Arise.”Footnote 72 Some workhouse inmates had thus clearly not internalized the meanings of the New Poor Law, which rendered the pauper a second-class citizen.Footnote 73 At Eastry and at St. Pancras, paupers clearly articulated a sense of themselves as grateful and respectful subjects of the Crown and as members of the nation entitled to participate in its rituals. To refuse them Christmas dinner was thus not just a privation, they implied, but it undermined their ability to enact their Britishness.
One of the reasons why the PLC's policy on Christmas dinner rankled so many is that it seemed to deny the most deserving, rather than the least deserving, members of society participation in a collective celebration. The New Poor Law had been introduced precisely to solve the problem of government expenditure on poverty relief for the able-bodied, particularly able-bodied men.Footnote 74 Because outdoor relief—in the form of money, food, medicine, or clothing—remained a possibility for the elderly, disabled, and infirm, the New Poor Law operated on the principle that workhouse inmates would all be able-bodied young men. In fact, in the 1830s at least, this was not true or, at the very least, not perceived to be true by those with local knowledge.Footnote 75 Local officials often believed that they were in a better position to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.Footnote 76 For some local boards of guardians, paupers existed, not as an abstract group to be treated according to a general philosophy of poverty, but as real individuals who were members of their community and directly under their care. In making the case for festive roast beef dinners, guardians often stressed that their workhouses were in fact free from able-bodied paupers. The poor they housed were instead the elderly, the infirm, widows, and children—groups who were in fact entitled to outdoor relief and who for most Victorians, including the Poor Law administration, existed firmly within the category of the “deserving poor.” When the guardians at Ringwood requested Christmas dinner in 1836, they made the point that their paupers “consist exclusively of aged and infirm persons, women and children.”Footnote 77 Similarly, the Gloucester guardians had decided to continue the practice of providing roast beef at Christmas in defiance of the commissioners precisely because the paupers in their workhouse, they claimed, were “for the most part old, infirm, and decrepid [sic].” Given that there was not “at present any able-bodied male pauper in the house,” they declared that these inmates were not the type of paupers to whom the PLC was referring in its orders when it forbade the provision of special meals.Footnote 78
The press often articulated a similar position. In January 1837, the ultra-Tory periodical John Bull reported on the “Whig-Radical Poor Laws.” It noted that for the “first time in the memory of the oldest inhabitant” of Bridgwater, the tradition of providing a roast beef dinner on Christmas Day to the inmates of the workhouse had been “discontinued” by order of the PLC. Similarly, it reported that in Bath from “time out of mind” the “deserving aged, sick, and poor” were furnished with roast beef and plum pudding on Christmas Day. But, it complained, the PLC had now restricted “paupers” from receiving this “extra and unnecessary beneficence,” forcing the “aged and crippled poor” to be “deprived of their Christmas allowance” and fed instead upon “the scanty fare of bread and cheese.”Footnote 79 The journal's use of quotations marks around the word paupers here suggests that the writer felt this to be new terminology with specific and negative connotations. This journalist clearly contested the understanding of poverty that this word embodied, maintaining instead that the workhouse inmates were in fact merely the old and lame, and thus the deserving poor, not the malingerers the Poor Law commissioners assumed were sponging off the generosity of the state.
The muckraking journal The Satirist took this critique even further. That same month, it argued that Christmas Day had now became a “day of mortification and disappointment” rather than gladness for the pauper class. While hitherto they had been “treated like human beings, regaled with a scanty portion of roast beef and plum-pudding,” there was “no beef and pudding now for them.” When men become “paupers,” it argued, they clearly “cease to be Christians; losing their all in this world, they may properly forfeit their inheritance in the next; having no money they have no souls.” Rather than uniting the people, the PLC had, this journalist charged, rendered Christmas a time to further differentiate the population. The PLC's policy on festive meals, this columnist implied, redefined the proper relationship between the destitute and the state: taking this policy to its natural conclusion, he facetiously argued that it would be “an act of patriotism” for paupers to commit suicide because it would “relieve their country of a mass of wretchedness.”Footnote 80
These debates over Christmas dinner thus reveal a profound division in understandings of poverty. The PLC assumed that the workhouse inmates were able-bodied men, precisely the population that needed to be discouraged from reliance on government support. The New Poor Law had been framed and workhouses erected with this population in mind. In his 1834 report on the administration of the Poor Laws, Chadwick asserted that while seven ounces of cooked roast beef was provided in south London's Lambeth workhouse on Christmas Day to each individual, not even one-fifth of the inmates were indeed “deserving objects” of such benevolence; most were there due to “idleness, improvidence or vice.”Footnote 81 To provide the “undeserving poor” with treats not available to hard working members of the laboring classes was not only costly but also flew in the face of the principle of less eligibility upon which the New Poor Law rested. If the PLC's rhetoric focused on deterring working-class men who could and thus should be supporting themselves and their families independently, the local officials who contested these policies spoke of the poor in older terminology that referenced paternalistic responsibility for members of their own community who clearly could not be independent laborers.Footnote 82 The first group, the PLC implied, had surrendered their rights of citizenship by refusing to labor (a point underscored by their loss of voting rights upon entering the workhouse). But the aged, the infirm, orphans, and widows were still, boards of guardians and other defenders of these rights implied, the guiltless poor and thus valued members of the nation entitled to roast beef.Footnote 83
Because the question of providing “Old English Fare” was about much more than the menu for a single meal, it became a complicated issue for the PLC when its policy of restraint was actually put into practice. Although the commissioners argued vociferously that they were adhering to the principle of less eligibility, and despite the fact that their utilitarian philosophy was intended to assure uniformity in the implementation of policy, they occasionally broke their own rules. In January 1838, the auditor for the Boston Union alerted the PLC that a dinner costing £25 had been provided to workhouse inmates on Christmas Day. Given that this was not in fact “legal, unless granted by you as [a] matter of favor,” he wrote to ask for guidance. The meal consisted of beef, plum pudding, cake, tea, and apples for the children. The inmates shared this repast in each of the union's workhouses alongside the workhouse masters and their families. The PLC condemned the provision of this dinner for the usual reason that many ratepayers were not able to afford such indulgences. But rather than holding the guardians personally liable for the expense, the commissioners issued only a warning on the assumption that they were not familiar with the rules that strictly forbade these types of dinners: the guardians would now, they maintained, “not fail to view the question in a proper light, as one of principle” and thus in future abide by the dietary even at Christmas.Footnote 84 But in East Retford, a festive dinner of roast beef and plum pudding was actually approved by the PLC to be given on 1 January 1840 if paid for by subscription, thus explicitly contravening the “principle” that the PLC repeatedly asserted was necessary to uphold.Footnote 85 This inconsistency was a product of the newness of the New Poor Law's administration, which was still in its infancy. But it also highlights the thorny issue that the provision and consumption of roast beef at Yuletide was a custom that was for many central to notions of Britishness because of strong and ancient traditions of charitable giving and because of the symbolic power of roast beef itself. This problem was particularly difficult for the PLC to navigate when in 1838 many Poor Law unions requested that paupers be allowed to participate in the festivities planned for the coronation of Queen Victoria.
Coronation Beef
Before the introduction of the New Poor Law, roast beef and plum pudding had been provided in some workhouses to mark the coronation of both George IV in 1821 and William IV in 1831.Footnote 86 When Victoria's ascension to the throne was celebrated in 1838, several unions continued this tradition.Footnote 87 In Macclesfield, the board of guardians resolved that on Coronation Day the workhouse inmates would be “regaled” with roast beef and plum pudding.Footnote 88 In Southwell, the guardians intended to host a “Workhouse Festival” and provided not only roast beef and plum pudding but also plum cake, tea, and ale.Footnote 89 The PLC's response to the provision of these meals was inconsistent. The commissioners allowed these dinners on this day of “festive celebration” provided they were financed through subscription and not out of the rates. It was improper, the PLC asserted in response to several different unions, even on so “joyful” an occasion, to increase the “burthens” of ratepayers, many of whom by “the most strenuous exertion and rigid economy can only just keep themselves above parish relief,” and thus by implication would not also be enjoying a roast beef dinner.Footnote 90 The commissioners were willing to “relax” the dietary only if a private subscription was to cover the cost.Footnote 91 But in unions that did not request prior sanction and merely charged the expense to the workhouse accounts, the PLC ultimately did not require the auditor to disallow the charges and thus in effect passed on the cost to tax payers, despite having asserted that they would not in fact do so.Footnote 92 The unevenness of the PLC's reaction suggests that the Coronation Dinner presented a quandry. The principle of less eligibility required the commissioners to withhold “luxuries” from the undeserving poor. At the same time, the celebration of this event among all members of society was part of a national expression of loyalty to the Crown. To deny these dinners might, therefore, be interpreted as unpatriotic.
Much of the debate around the provision of a Coronation Dinner in the workhouses rested on whether paupers could and should be understood as British subjects. In a critique of the “uncontrolled dictatorial powers” of the PLC, George Palmer, member of Parliament for Essex Southern and a senior partner in the Huntley and Palmer Biscuit firm, defended “the constitutional rights and liberties” of all British people, which seemed to include the right to a Coronation Dinner. In a speech in the House of Commons, Palmer argued that the “poor of England” should have a “protector,” as did “the unfortunate negroes, whose case had excited so much sympathy in this country.” He argued that it was unjust that, as he had read in the papers, a workhouse master should be condemned to one month's imprisonment for ordering roast beef and plum pudding on Coronation Day for the inmates of his workhouse.Footnote 93 By comparing paupers with recently liberated African slaves, Palmer implied that the rights of the latter had to date taken precedence, perhaps unjustly, over those of the freeborn Englishman. This same point had been made a year earlier by “A Humane Observer,” who, in a letter to the Hampshire Advertiser, condemned the policy of banning “old English fare” in workhouses as similarly infringing on the liberties of British subjects: the “Negro” might now be free, this correspondent commented, but the New Poor Law had turned Englishmen into slaves.Footnote 94 This was a common rhetorical move in the 1830s, deployed by factory reformers, Chartists, and radicals who sought to position the working classes as full citizens precisely because of their national and by implication racial affiliation.Footnote 95 Both Palmer and “A Humane Observer” were drawing on the language of popular constitutionalism in order to extend the rights of the freeborn Englishman to the pauper class.Footnote 96 They asserted that no distinction should be made between the destitute and other more fortunate British subjects who should all be entitled to partake in the festivities associated with a Coronation Dinner.
Requests from guardians were also framed using a rhetoric that either explicitly or implicitly included the pauper class in the nation through participation in the Coronation celebrations. When the guardians at Shepton Mallet and at Ashby-de-la-Zouch wrote to ask for beef and plum pudding for workhouse inmates, they stressed that this meal was to be given to the outdoor poor as well. This indicated that they did not draw a distinction between the working poor and the pauper, who, they suggested, were equally eligible to participate in the festive meal.Footnote 97 The guardians of the Northampton Union argued that they wished “to see everyone from the highest to the lowest enjoy themselves on the day of the coronation of our Gracious Queen.” They thus resolved that the inmates of the workhouse be “regaled with the old English fare of roast beef, plum pudding, and beer.”Footnote 98 In the Bridgwater Union, the guardians felt that the paupers should be involved in the festivities being arranged for the coronation and that “they should celebrate the glorious event in common with all her majesty's loyal subjects” by being provided with a “substantial dinner . . . without stint” accompanied by beer or cider so that they could “drink the health of her majesty and prosperity to her reign.”Footnote 99 The guardians thus established that the inmates were also loyal subjects of the Crown and that this loyalty, because it was a shared feeling, was best expressed “in common” with their compatriots. At Bridgnorth, a similar inclusive spirit reigned; the paupers were not only to receive a special dinner on Coronation Day but also to participate in a procession, provided they were not the parents of illegitimate children.Footnote 100 Those paupers deemed morally upright—and thus eligible for inclusion in the national community—were to be visible in the streets taking part in the local expression of national belonging. Their relationship to other loyal British people was thus not merely imagined, it was tangibly felt as all classes of people celebrated the day in each other's company.
Even those who were not directly responsible for the welfare of the paupers proposed including them in the coronation celebrations. In June 1838, several inhabitants of Haverhill wrote to the PLC asking for permission to provide a “good dinner” to the poor, and tea and buns to workhouse inmates on the occasion of Victoria's coronation. They had undertaken to collect these monies and host these meals as a “testimonial of our Loyalty.” They expressly stated that they desired the inmates of the workhouse to participate in “the enjoyment of a festival” marking the occasion.Footnote 101 Their own loyalty to the Crown was thus expressed through a bond with the least fortunate members of their community, whom they clearly desired to include in the national celebration.
Sanctioning Subscriptions and Enforcing Audits
In March 1840, in the wake of numerous requests to provide Christmas dinners as well as dinners on the coronation of Victoria and on her wedding day,Footnote 102 the PLC issued a circular to its assistant commissioners that explicitly articulated its new policy on festive meals in workhouses. The circular acknowledged that on Christmas Day and other festive occasions the guardians of “various unions” had provided dinners that “both in quantity and quality of food and its cost, have greatly exceeded the usual diet of the Workhouse inmates, and even of many of the less prosperous portion of the rate-payers.” The commissioners claimed that they were “very unwilling” to interfere with these practices, “owing to their respect for the motives which have given rise to them,” but that they could not sanction payment for these meals out of the public rates. It was an “injustice,” they maintained, to apply “the proceeds of a compulsory tax, raised only to relieve destitution, to provide for the inmates of a Workhouse luxuries which are beyond the reach of those by whom the tax is paid.” They henceforth instructed all auditors to disallow these expenses, thus making this policy clear and explicit. The PLC maintained, however, that it would no longer object to the provision of special meals on “extraordinary occasions” if they were fully funded by private individuals.Footnote 103
The PLC's shift in policy from outlawing special meals entirely to allowing those funded by subscription or by the guardians themselves was in fact a remarkable move. It explicitly contravened the principle of less eligibility upon which the New Poor Law rested by rendering the provisions in workhouses at festive occasions better than could be enjoyed by those outside. But by refusing to use state funds for these meals, the commissioners continued to uphold the rights of the “deserving poor,” who paid their taxes and whom they insisted should not be called upon to furnish the “undeserving poor” with luxuries that they themselves could not afford. The PLC defended this decision by maintaining that it was charged with using public funds to provide for the “real necessities of the destitute” and that it needed to make a “sufficient distinction between the condition of the inmates of the workhouse and those who support themselves independently,” thus returning to the principle of deterrence, at least in theory. Turning the language of gratification and indulgence on its head, the PLC further argued that these dinners could not be paid for out of the poor rates because though the guardians and the PLC might be gratified to have provided such a meal, in doing so they would have “indulged themselves in this gratification at the expense of others many of whom . . . might be unable to provide for themselves similar repasts.”Footnote 104
Despite the fact that the PLC continued to champion the rights of the working poor and to defend the deterrent principles of the New Poor Law, the 1840 circular clearly represented a concession to the demands and desires of local boards of guardians. The commissioners acknowledged that “many persons” wished “to extend to others the enjoyments which have been immemorially connected” to Christmas and have been “unwilling to cut off from the inmates of the workhouse all such manifestations of sympathy.”Footnote 105 By conceding to the desire of guardians to provide these meals, the PLC ultimately loosened the state's commitment to the principle of less eligibility and to uniformity, recognizing the rights of communities to adhere to local traditions, especially when these customs promoted national feeling.
In 1840, the London workhouses governed under the New Poor Law provided roast beef on Christmas or New Year's as they had in the past. This year, however, the excess costs were born by guardians and the “benevolent rate-payers” in order to be in compliance with the regulations.Footnote 106 In its Christmas Day edition, The Times reported that “through the kindness of the guardians and the liberality of the inhabitants of those parishes . . . the poor will not go without a Christmas dinner.” It then listed the menus for the metropolitan and suburban workhouses, commenting that “it will be seen that upwards of 30,000 of our fellow-creatures will be furnished with the staple fare of Old England this day.”Footnote 107 After 1840, several other unions also paid for roast beef dinners either themselves or through private subscription.Footnote 108
In December 1841, the bishop of Norfolk used these new rules in order to provide a “good dinner of old English fare of roast beef and plum pudding” to the inmates of the local workhouse on the occasion of the birth of the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne. The Norfolk Chronicle reported that it was a “pleasing sight” to see so many unfortunate people “sitting down before fine joints of beef” of the “primest kind.” The bishop toasted Queen Victoria and proclaimed that as an “English-woman” with an “English heart,” “the beloved Sovereign of a loyal, free, and grateful people,” nothing could give her “more real pleasure” than seeing “400 poor persons regaling themselves on the occasion of her son's birth.” It was gratifying, he declared, to see so many poor people enjoying themselves “on an occasion joyful to England itself.”Footnote 109 The guardians at Norwich similarly decided to sponsor a roast beef dinner for the workhouse inmates on the day of the prince's christening. These guardians believed “that giving the poor a good dinner on an occasion which cannot but be peculiarly interesting to their gracious Queen is by no means adverse to the inculcation of loyal and right sentiments in their minds,” reiterating the position that many guardians had taken when they provided roast beef on Coronation Day.Footnote 110
But this new policy was not widely embraced by many boards of guardians, who continued to maintain that these meals should properly be funded by the state. Some guardians continued to charge the cost of these meals to the rates, as in Hastings and Saffron Walden, claiming when they were audited that they had never been notified about the circular.Footnote 111 The guardians of the Launceston Union deliberately flouted the order by resolving on 23 December 1840 that “the Master of the workhouse do make the same provision for a dinner for the poor as on the last occasion of Christmas.”Footnote 112 This resolution was, strategically, only received by the PLC on Christmas Day, too late to alter their plans. In other unions such as Edmonton, the guardians obeyed the circular the first year and then decided in the following years to charge the cost of roast beef and plum pudding to the workhouse's operating fund.Footnote 113 In Blaby, Bosmere and Claydon, and Westbury-on-Severn, the guardians never even attempted to obey. They explicitly ignored the circular and resolved to serve roast beef and plum pudding without raising extra money for the expense.Footnote 114
Some guardians went further and openly challenged the PLC's decision. In 1845, the Dudley Union provided a traditional Christmas dinner to the inmates of its workhouses. When the auditor disallowed the expense, for the first time ever, the guardians wrote to the PLC to complain. The Dudley guardians argued that Christmas dinner was an “ancient privilege” that they were extending to their “unfortunate fellow-creatures”: the “impotent or aged and infirm adults, or destitute children,” who were residents in their workhouses. The provision of this Christmas treat was “in conformity with a custom which has been invariably adhered to not only since the formation of the union, but from time immemorial.”Footnote 115 The guardians at Trowbridge were equally upset by the refusal to sanction a Christmas dinner paid for out of the poor rates. They declared that the paupers should be able to “rejoice at this season with the rest of the Christian world.”Footnote 116 The Bourn guardians similarly defended the long tradition of providing a “Christmas treat,” arguing that in their union this had not only been furnished to the “unfortunate inmates of the workhouse, but even to the criminal inmates of the prisons,” extending even further the boundaries of the national community to include even the patently undeserving poor.Footnote 117
These guardians further defended their position by arguing that the ratepayers in their communities also supported the financing of Christmas dinner out of state funds precisely because it was the outward expression of the “feeling of benevolence and ‘goodwill’ (so characteristic of the season).”Footnote 118 The Dudley guardians maintained that it was “cruel” to “deprive the poor in future of an enjoyment which by them is received with gratitude, and which the ratepayers feel a pleasure in providing for them.”Footnote 119 This policy was cruel, the guardians implied, not only because the paupers were deprived of their dinner but also because it deprived the more fortunate members of society from themselves rejoicing in these acts of benevolence. The Trowbridge guardians made this complaint patent, arguing that “it was the established custom” for workhouse inmates to “partake of the usual Christmas fare with their richer neighbours.” They declared that “at least nine tenths of the rate payers would hold up their hands in favour of such an indulgence being allowed.”Footnote 120 The Crickhowel guardians resolved that as guardians of the poor, “it cannot be wrong in enabling them on Christmas day to join in some small degree in the universal feeling of thankfulness and rejoicing that reigns around them.” They maintained that there was no “repugnance on the part of the rate payers” to contribute to the “minute” cost of such a festive meal.Footnote 121 In Bridlington, although beef was not provided at Christmas, only the customary plum pudding and spice cakes, the board of guardians maintained that there would have been “much dissatisfaction both amongst the paupers (the greater part of whom are aged and infirm people and children) and the rate-payers” had this usual treat not been furnished.Footnote 122 The Bourn guardians echoed this sentiment, claiming that “the rate-payers in general” are “so willing to contribute their proportions.”Footnote 123 In 1846, the Worcester guardians insisted that “not one” of the ratepayers would “raise the slightest objection” to funding a roast beef dinner for the poor out of the rates.Footnote 124 The townspeople of the Sheppey Union proved this point in 1840 when they immediately donated the funds required “to give a cheerful and substantial repast to the sons and daughters of distress” in order to counter the parsimony of the PLC's order.Footnote 125
The guardians at Bourn and Dudley both warned the PLC that the withdrawal of these customs that linked the nation across lines of rank, status, and class could lead to widespread discontent with the New Poor Law itself. The Bourn guardians maintained that they were “anxious for the success and continuance of the new [poor] law,” but strongly felt that this order was “inexpedient” and “impolitic.”Footnote 126 The Dudley guardians went further, arguing that withholding this “privilege will have a tendency to exasperate the feeling of the community against the New Poor-law system.”Footnote 127 These were not idle threats because the decade between 1834 and 1844 had witnessed widespread rioting and acts of civil disobedience in opposition to the Poor Law Amendment Act.Footnote 128 These guardians thus upheld not only the rights of the poor to receive roast beef but also the rights of communities to participate in these customs of benevolence through the dispersal of their poor rates for this purpose.
What was equally at stake for local officials was their power to dispense relief as they saw fit within their own communities. They sought to preserve not only the rights of ratepayers to have their monies used for charitable ends but also their own reputations as benevolent guardians of the poor—not merely as lackeys of the Poor Law commissioners. Despite the fact that the PLC did not have absolute control over the administration of poor relief, its independence from parliamentary oversight rankled those who chafed against its unchecked authority and against the centralization of government more generally. In 1839, the commissioners declared that they sought to “exercise their powers” so as to avoid all “unnecessary interference” with local authorities.Footnote 129 To many opponents of the New Poor Law, however, the PLC appeared little different from an Oriental potentate, the epitome of despotism. In his speech against the introduction of the 1834 act, George Julius Poulett Scrope—geologist, political economist, and the member of Parliament for Stroud—argued that the proposed mechanisms for administering the New Poor Law undermined the Englishman's inherent right to appeal against the judgments of his superior. The pauper could not appeal to the PLC, argued Scrope; “he might as well be told to apply to the great Mogul.”Footnote 130 Referring to it as the “three Bashaws,” “the Tyrants of Somerset House,” or the “Triumvirate,”Footnote 131 local authorities complained that the PLC's meddling and its unrestricted power ran contrary to “the spirit of local independence and self-government” that the commissioners themselves had proclaimed was key to the “characteristic excellence of the English people.”Footnote 132
The guardians of the Bourn Union attempted to negotiate their delicate relationship to the PLC while asserting their own authority. They maintained that they had always had a “cordial” relationship with the central board, “cheerfully acknowledged and respected” their “authority and opinions,” and frequently sought their advice. But, they argued, it was “beneath the authority and official importance of the Poor Law Commissioners to interfere in such a matter” given the trifling cost to the ratepayer of the “excess” expense of providing roast beef rather than merely adhering to the ordinary diet. They also resented the idea that they themselves were expected to foot the bill for such meals. Given that their jobs were unpaid, they saw the performance of their duties as itself a charitable act. To pay for this extra meal themselves thus seemed an unreasonable expectation because it rendered their “onerous duties . . . still more onerous” and undermined the philanthropy inherent within their position as guardians.Footnote 133 The Dudley guardians were less diplomatic, arguing that this regulation was “arbitrary, oppressive, and cruel,” contrasting the commissioners' tyranny with their own benevolence. They announced to the PLC that they considered it their duty “to take every step to relieve their own character from the odium of having ever given their assistance or sanction to this cruel” policy. These guardians not only distanced themselves from the PLC's decision but also argued that it interfered with their own authority. They strenuously objected to being “placed in the degrading situation of not having the power to order a small addition to a dinner on Christmas-day to the inmates of the workhouse, which has been customary from time immemorial, without being subject to the interference and caprice of the auditor.”Footnote 134
As the case of the Dudley Union makes clear, local authorities had been providing a Christmas dinner and paying for it out of government funds in some unions without any “interference” from the auditor. If the 1840 directive on festive meals attempted to make these practices more uniform, it was the changes to auditing practices passed four years later that had the greatest impact on rationalizing expenditures across the over six hundred Poor Law unions. As the Dudley guardians pointed out, although the policy of funding special meals through subscription had been in place for five years before they lodged their complaint in 1845, this was the first time the auditor had disallowed the expense. Despite being in charge of overseeing the workhouse accounts, many auditors had clearly been deliberately overlooking these illegal expenses or had not fully understood the policy. Until 1844, Poor Law auditors were appointed by local boards of guardians.Footnote 135 They were often lawyers who took these appointments precisely in order to drum up more business for their private practices.Footnote 136 It was thus in their best interest to turn a blind eye to these illegal expenses. In his History of the English Poor Law, George Nicholls argued that the mode of appointing auditors was “obviously open to much objection” given that the auditor's job was to oversee the accounts of “the parties by whom he was appointed.”Footnote 137 It was not until 1844, with the consolidation of auditing districts and the employment of full-time auditors responsible for many unions to which they had no tie, that incompetence and embezzlement on the part of auditors was curtailed.Footnote 138 It was thus the combination of a clearly articulated written policy on festive meals and the increased scrutiny now brought to bear on all workhouse expenditures that irritated many boards of guardians, who struggled to uphold local interpretations of poverty relief and local attempts at control even a decade after the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed.Footnote 139
The Right to Roast Beef
The 1840 directive was in the end short-lived. In the mid-1840s, the PLC came under increased scrutiny due largely to the Andover scandal. During the course of the 1845–46 inquiry into the excessive cruelty of this workhouse's regime, which had become synonymous with privation and abuse, an inmate was asked whether roast beef had ever been provided at Christmas. This suggests that the provision of a festive meal was in fact considered to be the norm in most unions despite the fact that the state refused to pay for it. When the pauper answered “no,” Radical member of Parliament Thomas Wakley, an outspoken opponent of the New Poor Law, further inquired whether the guardians had not themselves taken up a subscription to furnish such a meal. The witness answered merely: “[W]e never had it.”Footnote 140 That no Christmas dinner of roast beef had been provided, even though this was entirely optional and not financially supported by the state, spoke volumes to reformers such as Wakley and became fodder for attacking the New Poor Law itself. Indeed, the notorious and inflammatory Book of the Bastiles, published in 1841 as an open attack on the New Poor Law, had listed the denial of festive dinners to paupers as one among many outrages perpetrated by the PLC.Footnote 141
As the Bourn and Dudley guardians had intimated, the debate over the financing of festive meals in workhouses was beginning to reflect badly on the PLC. In 1847, in the wake of the Andover scandal that had exposed the extremes to which some Poor Law officials had taken the parsimonious dietary policies of the New Poor Law, the PLC reformed its statutes again. Article 107 of the new General Order allowed for unions to alter their dietaries so that a special meal could be provided, and paid for out of the rates, but only on Christmas Day.Footnote 142 Providing the meal was optional, and exactly what this meal might consist of was left to individual unions. This was the PLC's last directive because it was dissolved in December 1847 and replaced with the PLB, which was headed by a member of Parliament who was in turn responsible to Parliament.
Given that under Article 107 of the new order Christmas dinner was entirely optional, some boards of guardians continued to treat Christmas as any other day or provided merely cake and tea. Others such as Bridgwater sanctioned a double allowance of dinner rather than specifying a special meal.Footnote 143 However, many seem to have consistently furnished roast beef and plum pudding, and provided beer to the men, tea to the women, and sometimes fruit for the children.Footnote 144 At Ruthin, not only was a “liberal” supply of beef provided on Christmas, but on this one day of the year the inmates were allowed to eat “to their hearts content,” as opposed to having their rations carefully portioned and weighed out.Footnote 145 In the metropolitan unions of London, roast beef and plum pudding appeared in the official dietary for Christmas Day, making the provision of the meal binding upon workhouse staff, and thus not left to the discretion of an elected and thus shifting board of guardians.Footnote 146
In the 1850s and 1860s, the PLB permitted roast beef dinners not only on Christmas but also on other celebratory national occasions. As Ian Miller argues in his article in this issue, by the 1850s and the 1860s able-bodied men had become a small minority within the workhouse system. As a consequence, the PLB began to adjust its food policies, moving away from alimentary regimes that were explicitly disciplinary to cater to the specialized needs of the sick, infirm, aged, and young—groups that guardians had long defended as the deserving poor.Footnote 147 With these changes came a shift in attitude toward festive meals. In several workhouses, all the paupers were treated to special meals in conjunction with the military successes of the Crimean War. In Sheffield in 1855, the board of guardians desired that the workhouse inmates “should be allowed to participate in the general feeling of the town” and be afforded a treat of a dinner “similar to what is usually provided on Christmas Day” in celebration of the triumph of the allied armies at Sebastopol.Footnote 148 Similarly, when the peace was finally declared in 1856, the guardians at Alverstoke decided to include the paupers in the festivities organized to celebrate both the end of the war and the Queen's birthday by providing a Christmas-style dinner.Footnote 149 The guardians of the South Molton Union also provided an extra diet to celebrate the “happy return of Peace.” The guardians felt it was “rather a hard and severe infliction upon the inmates of the workhouse” to know that “great rejoicing and festivity” were taking place “outside their walls whilst not kindred feeling or consideration was manifested toward themselves to enable them also to participate in the general enjoyment.” Although the auditor for the district disallowed these charges, the PLB overturned the judgment, acceding to the idea that the paupers did have a right to participate in the “general national” rejoicing.Footnote 150 In Barnsley, the guardians unanimously decided to treat the paupers to a special dinner of Christmas fare in celebration of the peace. Although the clerk and the master of the workhouse both informed them that this was illegal, they declared that “as all the work people in the town were being entertained by their employers, the inmates should also have a dinner, and they desired the master to provide a dinner accordingly.” As well as the meal, all the children of the workhouse and approved adults were to be allowed to “go into the town” under proper supervision in order to celebrate the peace alongside other members of the community.Footnote 151
In each of these cases, the auditor disallowed the charges because Article 107 allowed a special meal only on Christmas. While the PLB upheld this decision as right and proper, it consistently remitted the charge based on the special circumstances of the occasion. By the 1850s, then, the PLB, which unlike the PLC was responsible to Parliament, and thus to the voters, was conceding that paupers could take part in national celebrations. Although the provision of extra or superior rations ran counter to the Poor Law's policy of relief, the inclusion of the indoor poor in patriotic rituals seemed to have trumped this philosophy. This was clearly evident in the PLB's attitude toward the celebration of the Prince of Wales' marriage in 1863.
When the Princess Royal was married in 1858, a correspondent to The Times argued that those who were to attend the royal balls in conjunction with the marriage should also donate money so that the poor could be fêted with a celebratory roast beef dinner. The fact that the poor are not forgotten on these occasions, he maintained, “endears the English gentleman to his less affluent fellow-subjects.” This “loyal subject” announced that he had been surprised to hear respectable members of the working classes disparage the royal wedding festivities. If the rich were to donate dinner for the poor, then the less-fortunate members of society could also enjoy the day and “remember with gladness the marriage of England's eldest daughter.”Footnote 152 This correspondent explicitly underscored the two important uses of the roast beef dinner that had been central, though often implicit, in the earlier debates over these meals: it united society across divisions of class and it promoted national feeling among the lower orders, those most likely to cause social upheaval. Identifying himself as a “loyal subject,” this writer underscored the importance of cultivating a sense of allegiance among the working classes to the Crown and the need for the upper classes to form affective bonds, to “endear” themselves to their poorer “fellow-subjects.” Roast beef dinner, in the mind of this citizen at least, was the fine print in the social contract and thus central to national harmony and security.
If only a few unions sought to acknowledge the marriage of the Princess Royal with an improvement to the dietary,Footnote 153 more than one hundred of the over six hundred Poor Law unions provided a special meal, generally roast beef, for paupers on the wedding day of the Prince of Wales, the future king of England. Although there were some issues around accounting errors and lack of authorization, in all cases the PLB allowed the meal and ultimately footed the bill, suggesting that the tide had indeed turned in relation to the provision of roast beef in workhouses. The requests for these meals, and the justifications for providing them after the fact, returned repeatedly to the rhetoric of solidifying the national bonds that cut across lines of class, and by extension the promotion of loyalty to the Crown. At Newport, a roast beef dinner was provided on the prince's wedding day precisely “so that the poorest as well as the highest may take pleasurable part in the national rejoicing.”Footnote 154 The master of the Thorne workhouse also furnished a roast beef dinner to the paupers because, he argued, the “rejoicings” were “universal.”Footnote 155 When the auditor for Keynsham initially disallowed the expense of a Christmas-style dinner for the royal wedding, the workhouse master proclaimed that he was surprised that the government would not cover the costs “connected with the universal, and loyal, celebration of that event.”Footnote 156 In Kingston-Upon-Hull the guardians proposed a roast beef dinner for “the unfortunate people under their care” because they too were “wishful that all proper and loyal respect may be shewn to the Prince.”Footnote 157 When the guardians at Stamford sought to substitute a nuptial dinner for the allowable Christmas dinner, even the auditor petitioned the PLB on their behalf. He expressed his “hope that the spirit of loyal attachment to the throne, evinced by this proposal, may well and wisely be encouraged not only at Stamford but in every union in the kingdom.”Footnote 158
These pleas to provide roast beef on the marriage of the Prince of Wales clearly articulated that, despite the fact that paupers lacked some of the rights of citizenship (such as the vote), they were loyal British subjects. To deny them the right to participate in the national rejoicing ultimately removed their ability to express their patriotism and thus their loyalty to the crown. Conversely, providing them with a special festive meal financed out of the poor rates allowed the more fortunate members of the nation to express their own sense of themselves as compassionate and thus model British subjects. In practice, then, the draconian principle of less eligibility did not always trump the claims of the poor precisely because the exchange of roast beef served an important social function. The ritual provision of Old English Fare to the poor on festive occasions was a practice that many felt was worthy of upholding precisely because it promoted a sense of unity, loyalty, and national belonging among all members of society at a time when class distinctions had become ever more firmly entrenched.
Debates over roast beef were, therefore, not trivial negotiations. In fact, they illuminate how the borders that surrounded the national community were being constructed and contested at a crucial moment in the making of modern Britain. An older vision of responsibility toward the poor was sustained in the local administration of relief despite a utilitarian impulse to centralizing, standardizing, and rationalizing the problem of poverty.Footnote 159 The desire of some guardians to provide a roast beef dinner to the inmates of their workhouses, and their ultimate success in upholding their right to do so, suggests that a preindustrial and paternalistic view of society in which all its members were tied together as part of a community of freeborn Englishmen through customs of mutual obligation remained alive and well despite the passage of the New Poor Law. Interrogating the politics of roast beef thus reveals that the transition from moral economy to political economy was a protracted and uneven process, and one that was perhaps never entirely complete.Footnote 160
