It is always difficult to review polemical books, and this one is no exception. At the core of the volume are two intertwining contentions. The first, endlessly restated, argument is that historians have largely tended to ignore the national legal framework of the poor laws Old and New. Many of those who have contributed to the welfare historiography over the last three decades, particularly Steve Hindle and Norma Landau, but also myself, are taken forcibly to task for this perceived omission. The second contention, also endlessly restated, is that if we read the 1601 Act, which gave parishes a duty to relieve the impotent poor, alongside accumulated settlement legislation, which gave everyone a place in which to claim and provide evidence of impotency/deservingness, then it is clear that the poor had an absolute and legally enshrined right to poor relief which deserves to ‘be remembered and celebrated’ (p. 6). While local practice could vary, all places ‘were bound, regulated by and operated within the overarching legal framework’ (p. 142). Because historians have failed to appreciate that an absolute right existed, Charlesworth contends, they have fundamentally misread the poor law. She goes on to explore the nature of this misreading in chapters which deal with the evolution of the legal framework of the poor laws, the nature of poor law administration, the voice of the poor, the legal basis for treatments of particular groups of paupers, and the long term evolution of welfare practice and law into the twentieth century. In turn, it is from these dual contentions that both the strengths and weaknesses of the book emerge.

In terms of strengths, chapter two offers a subtle analysis of the way in which welfare law evolved and the role of legal authorities in this evolution, arguing that ‘poor law reform was a battleground not just within the political sphere but between competing jurisprudential theories’ (p. 19). All serious poor law historians should read this material. Chapter six, an imaginative reconstruction of the actual and fictionalised settlement histories of characters in Little Dorrit, is both entertaining and thought provoking. In a more overarching sense, the volume also refocuses our attention away from the socio-cultural history of the poor law and back to questions of the interpretation and use of the law by officials, ratepayers and paupers themselves.

There are also, however, weaknesses in the polemic. These coalesce under three broad heads. The first is conceptual. In chapter three, Charlesworth enters into a long attempt to justify the view that the evolution of the poor law generated an absolute right for the settled poor to receive relief, suggesting that even in 1601 it is ‘understood that the parish poor are, must, and will be relieved’ (p. 44), something in turn reinforced by case law. This is a particular reading of the meaning and intent of the national statutes. While I cannot speak for the variety of historians taken to task in this volume, my guess would be that they, like me, would argue that the 1601 Act in combination with settlement legislation merely gave a right to apply for relief in a given place, not a right to receive it. This is the overwhelming lesson to be drawn from local studies of relief systems which point persuasively and persistently to the fact that officials could and did turn down large numbers of applications for relief, few of which made it to the magistrates on appeal. The distinction is subtle but important both for the validity of existing historiography and the experiences of the contemporary poor.

The second set of weaknesses is historiographical, with much material that one might expect to see cited and used in a book such as this absent. David Feldman, Elizabeth Hurren, Bernard Harris, Thomas Sokoll, Alannah Tomkins, whose thesis is noted but nothing else, and above all Keith Snell's magisterial Parish and Belonging are all missing from the discussion. Some of the work is cited incorrectly; Steve Hindle's On the Parish? is quoted as coming out in 2000 (pp. 92, 102, 214) rather than 2004, which hardly inspires confidence in the strong assertion that Hindle misreads statute and practice and ‘denies’ a right to relief. The failure to engage with this historiography leads to numerous partial readings of the views of historians. On page 77, for instance, Charlesworth suggests that historians have focussed on the ‘harm settlement caused’, with no reference to Snell's contention that settlement, especially into the nineteenth century, might be viewed almost as an inheritance in some poor families, given difficulties in gaining new settlements, and so often leading to reliance upon paternal settlement. On page 82 we encounter criticism of George Boyer and James S. Taylor for their assertion that the system of out-parish relief had no legal basis, even though it clearly did not. On page 87, we learn that Snell is ‘unaware that in the matter of settlement enquiries, only the non-settled and unsettled poor came within the remit of parish officials’, even though his work is deeply embedded in this distinction. Of course, one could argue that this volume operates at a different level to these micro-studies and that it was not important to engage with the historiography at a really detailed level. It is less easy to explain, however, why almost none of the work on Justices and the law at local level appears in the bibliography. When dealing with the evolution of the role of the Justices of the Peace, Charlesworth cites one of her own articles, and there is little engagement with the work of Norma Landau, Joan Kent and other socio-legal historians on this matter. In particular the volume does not cite a single piece from Peter King, nor engage with his model of the way in which justice, including poor law justice, was remade from the margins by Justices who, as Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton remind us, dispensed ‘personal justice’ which might have little or no connection with statute law. Thus, when Charlesworth takes me to task for my reading of case law (‘there is no legal basis for King's suggestion that case law over-ruled poor law statutes’, p. 3) she ignores a considerable body of detailed and influential scholarship that argues exactly the opposite.

Following on from the first two sets of problems, a third is that we find little by way of primary source material for the assertions in the book. Chapter seven deals with evidence from the Tranmere vestry, but largely for the period after 1800, Chester, and the Wirral Poor Law Union. While interesting, this material struggles to provide an empirical foundation for the core assertions outlined above. It also takes no account of debates about the regionality of poor law practice and the activities of Justices. Much of the rest of the book focuses on what should have happened in terms of statute, not what did. This is an opportunity missed. Chapter five on the voices of the poor, for instance, focuses on material from William Holland, John Clare and Dorothy Wordsworth, with no attempt at all to engage with the direct voices of the poor in the form of pauper letters despite the fact that ‘Ideally, the historian of law seeks the voices of those who spoke specifically of law, preferably from their own experience’ (p. 117). Given the starting point of this book, there was no overriding imperative to do detailed archival work. This is a perfectly respectable position, but there was an analogous need to undertake a survey of the lessons of numerous archive based micro-studies which consistently show more or less highly variable practice, a propensity for officials to define deservingness according to the depth of the pockets of their ratepayers, and a variety of practices that did not simply bend the law but broke it. Some ‘local officials considered and paid up as was their legal duty’ (p. 83), but most did not recognise any legal duty.

It is an inevitable tendency for polemical books to attract mixed reviews. I enjoyed reading Welfare's Forgotten Past even if I did not agree with many of its assertions and readings of the literature. At base, Charlesworth and I, and many other historians, have a different view of the intent and meaning of black letter law and of the extent to which it was modified and ignored at local level. This difference of view hinges on whether paupers had a right to receive relief or merely a right to apply for it, and it is fundamental to our understanding of the poor law and the experiences of the poor. Charlesworth has produced a book which brings our attention firmly back to the socio-legal frame-work of welfare practice and all scholars of welfare history will need to engage with it.