David Green prefaces this valuable study by highlighting the surprising fact that no comprehensive examination of the London Poor Law exists for the important reforming period from 1790 to 1870. Poor Law scholars have been invested for some time in deep local studies as a means to examine how “central” policy was put into local practice and to examine the gaps between government expectations and local community realities, yet London itself as a locality has been neglected. While specific London parishes, such as Poplar, have become well known for their resistance to Poor Law draconianism, we have much less knowledge concerning the ways London parishes related to one another. Green does an excellent job creating this knowledge, using a wide variety of Parliamentary, printed, and archival sources.

Green’s introduction provides a very good overview of the material changes and ideologies that contributed to Poor Law reform in 1834 and London’s place within this context. His chapters move from focused discussion of London under the Old Poor Law, to the politics of reform at the local and national levels, to the development of New Poor Law administration and institutions in London. Chapter 5 looks specifically at the experiences of the poor with the Poor Law, while the final two chapters detail how the pressures of migration and fiscal crisis in the 1860s led to acceptance of the need to share the Poor Law burden among rich and poor London parishes.

Green is housed in a geography department, so it is no surprise that Pauper Capital is very much a history of place. He pulls London apart into its constituent parishes, revealing conflict and diversity in contradistinction to many existing studies that often position “the Metropolis” in opposition to “the provinces” or specific localities outside the center. Green defines his project primarily as a study of the “relationships between place and policy” (157), and it is in this context that his book is strongest. He very clearly demonstrates the ways that changing human geographies contributed to changing Poor Law policies.

By positioning his narrative across 1834, rather than ending or beginning at the point of the Poor Law Amendment Act, Green presents the continuities in the pre- and post-1834 relief systems as well as the more definitive breaks. Green traces the growing pressures on London’s Poor Law structure at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Increases in population and migration and the resulting upturn in pauperism, coupled with a less sympathetic view of poverty, led the London parishes to emphasize deterrence and the use of indoor relief much more so than was the case nationally. The proximity of the London parishes to one another created one strategy to deal with the costs of pauperism: overseers tried to shift their casual poor to neighboring parishes. However, parish proximity also helped poor people game the system by applying for outdoor relief from more than one parish at the same time. Green offers compelling stories of the strategies used by the London poor, arguing that “paupers well versed in [London’s] complex social geography of provision could sustain deceptions for several years” (75). Fraud was rife.

The nineteenth century saw increasing gaps in wealth among London parishes. Londoners who could afford to do so moved to the west, while the poor migrating to London settled in the east where cheap housing was available. This left the inner parishes and especially those to the east with few rate-paying inhabitants to pay for the Poor Law. As the costs of relief grew, the eastern parishes demanded redistributive reform that would force the more wealthy parishes to help support their poorer neighbors. Yet, as Green argues, redistribution required a sense of London as a “single entity” (79), a sense that did not exist until later in the century.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 forced London parishes to reconsider their relationships with one another, through the creation of Poor Law Unions. Although a number of parishes did not adopt the New Poor Law, most functioned using New Poor Law principles anyway, as deterrent workhouses were already the norm. According to Green, opposition to the New Poor Law came from the vestries, rather than from the London working-class population. Anti–Poor Law sentiment was more about politics than about the hatred of the workhouse and what it stood for, as was the case in the northern industrial regions. In fact, because workhouses already existed, the New Poor Law provided the opportunity to create specialized Poor Law institutions in London, paving the way for improved health care and the care of poor children. “Scale and geographical proximity” (155) facilitated the development of institutions such as district schools and asylums to deal with problems of workhouse overcrowding. Additionally, scale and geography allowed private contractors to provide alternatives to the Poor Law. Size and place thus created unique possibilities in London.

While his chapter on the ways the poor encountered the Poor Law is necessary to flesh out the statistics, it is also the weakest in the book. Green could draw more on the rich social and cultural histories of the era, and specifically of the Poor Law, to further contextualize the individual stories he includes. For example, with the exception of demonstrating that women were disproportionately applicants for relief in London (as elsewhere), there is very little in Pauper Capital to indicate that gender features so largely in Green’s broader research interests (which include studies of gender and wealth). How, for instance, did the experiences of poor parishes with large numbers of dressmakers and other needleworkers compare to those with large numbers of dock workers? How did gendered processes of migration shape different parochial needs?

Green’s story ends with the impact of Metropolitan Poor Act after 1867, which consolidated the aggregation of London’s parishes in the context of the Poor Law, where “collective metropolitan ratepayer responsibility became an accepted part of poor law policy” (246). Green demonstrates very clearly in this book that Poor Law politics at the parish level were central to the development of “London” as a unified entity. Parishes that fought against each other to lighten their individual Poor Law burdens over the course of the nineteenth century increasingly needed to collaborate in order to more effectively deal with the numbers and costs associated with the Poor Law. This is a story that certainly needed telling, and Green makes an important contribution to the history of the Poor Law in doing so.