‘I think we ought not to acknowledge them [paupers] as that encourages them to write’: the administrative state, power and the Victorian pauper

At the heart of this article stand three questions that we believe are crucial to an understanding of the character of the poor law and its role in the lives of the poor who had to navigate its rules. First, what was actually ‘new’ about the central administrative structures and processes required to make the New Poor Law function? Second, how did those processes change over time and, in particular, how far did the central authority itself engage with the poor directly? Third, did the processes and structures of the central authority afford a space in which the poor could learn to better navigate the New Poor Law and exercise their own agency? Using a sample of letters written directly to ‘the Centre’ by paupers in the English midlands, and the subsequent epistolary responses of the central authorities, we trace a situation in which the Centre was duty bound to respond to poor letter writers much as they did to everyone else. Rights to contest local welfare regimes remained strong in the post-1834 period, and the central authorities, through their responses, afforded a space of agency that came to be well known