Household and Family Among the Poor: The Case of Two Essex Communities in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.

By Thomas Sokoll (Bochum, Germany: Universitatsverlag Dr. Norbert Brockmeyer, 1993. xxiv plus 383pp.).

This is a very clever book. By linking individuals mentioned in population listings and census enumerations with welfare documents which were made to keep account of money distributed to the poor, Sokoll provides a close analysis of the residential organization of those for whom the Old Poor Law existed as a miniature welfare state. Sokoll directly confronts the omissions in two closely-related--but usually distinct--fields of micro-historical inquiry: household structure and the experience of poverty.

Much of Sokoll's work is a tribute to the pathbreaking studies which launched Peter Laslett's historiographical claim to fame in family history. But Sokoll breaks with Laslett by linking population listings with other forms of social historical documentation even though he still adheres to the paradigmatic framework within which social structural analysis has been carried out in Cambridge. As a result of this micro-historical approach, something is gained in precision but much more is also lost in not giving the reader a sense of the representativeness of the detailed research in terms of other historiographical concerns. As is common with publications connected with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (with which Sokoll was affiliated when he was a doctoral student), the reader cannot fail to gain a strong sense of the self-referential vision of social history with which this work is characterized. In a sense, any researcher who seeks to investigate broader processes while only studying one or two communities is caught on the horns of a dilemma. To a certain extent, Sokoll has been fortunate that this problem was resolved for him when he chose to examine the richly-documented farming community of Ardleigh in which the majority of the population was engaged in wage labour on a handful of large farms. This choice enabled him to reconstruct the relationship between Ardleigh's capitalist agrarian economy and the domestic social structures in which the Ardleigh poor were found to be living in 1796. The dense interrelationship between wage employment opportunities, gendered work, poverty, poor relief, and residential organization is brilliantly explicated. Yet I must hasten to add that I was rather less happy that Sokoll did not confront directly the complementary issues surrounding the relationship between the Old Poor Law and the reproductive behaviour of the poor which Thomas Robert Malthus had made so urgently and insistently problematic for contemporaries. These relationships have remained unsettled for social historians and Sokoll has missed an opportunity to make a significant contribution by linking his two data-sets with the parish registers of vital events. This is all the more surprising because Sokoll touches on these issues in the first section of the book but he never comes back to them in his concluding remarks. This is a great pity since I would have liked to have read more about his opinions and, in particular, his ideas about the impact his revisionist methodology makes to both social structural studies and the social history of poverty under the Old Poor Law.

The second community studied by Sokoll is the neighbouring market town of Braintree which had been a proto-industrial center around 1700 but, from the early eighteenth century, was in the throes of de-industrialization. By 1800 there was little evidence of this past while Braintree's population was in decline at the same time that rapid growth was the order of the day. Sokoll's choice of Braintree seems to have been determined by document-survival: the "Poor Books" which listed those individuals in primary poverty who were in receipt of regular, weekly out-door allowances and the second set of pauper lists which names those individuals who were in secondary poverty and received flour from the parish each week. These individuals were then linked with a manuscript version of the 1821 census so that their residential arrangements could be precisely analyzed. The precision of his focus shines through most clearly when he embarks on a comparative discussion of those in Braintree who were in `primary poverty' and/or `secondary poverty' and compares them with the rest of the population. What we learn is instructive: the sharp focus shows that destitution was accompanied by different residential arrangements while deprivation seems to have been the product of the life-cycle. In other words, the truly indigent had uniquely different households. They were not only different from those who had too many young children--but they were also different from those who were not poor. Parenthetically, it is evident from all of Sokoll's evidence that the burden of poverty bore down heavily on children and was intimately connected with large, young families. In itself, Sokoll's disaggregation of the experience of poverty is a significant revision to the usually accepted analysis of household structure which, as he painstakingly shows, has been insufficiently attentive to sociological distinctions within the communities it has studied. In this way, Sokoll also describes how old, infirm, and widowed women may have been identified individually in the pauper lists yet were frequently found to be residing together or else with their daughters--or sons if they had no daughters. The point is that these women were not solitaries--as a cursory examination of just the pauper lists would suggest--but rather they were caught up in an institutionalized nexus that connected the provision of entitlements with state-sponsored intrusion into their domestic arrangements.

The second significant contribution made by Sokoll's study relates to the way in which gendered employment opportunities changed the life-cycle pattern of leaving home in Braintree. Whereas poor boys from labouring families in agricultural communities had usually left home to embark on service-in-husbandry in their early teens, the lack of such employment opportunities in and around Braintree meant that they stayed on. The presence of these unemployed boys and young men dragged their parents and younger siblings into poverty. And, when they left home, they usually left Braintree altogether thus depriving the family of their financial contributions and other forms of assistance that could provide a cushion against the deprivations of proletarian life. In contrast, the demand for female domestic servants by the local middle class (the sort of people studied by Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff in Family Fortunes) was abetted by the establishment of five silk mills in Braintree which were listed in the 1821 census enumeration. These mills enabled the town's teen-aged girls and young, single adult women to leave home much earlier than was usual in other rural communities. By comparing Braintree's young women with those detailed in the 1782 listing of Cardington, Bedfordshire--which had a home-based, protoindustrial sector that employed girls and women--Sokoll is able to show how the organization of work turned the usual pattern of leaving home upside down for females. Braintree, then, was a fortuitous choice precisely because it was not representative of the usual way in which employment opportunities were gendered and life-cycle stages were experienced.

Sokoll's decision to base his choice of research on document-survival is reasonable but I am a little concerned that he has only gone part way in linking relevant materials. As I read through his detailed discussion I couldn't help wondering why he did not attempt to connect the individuals mentioned in enumerations and poor law records with the parish registers. In addition, the book lacks an index, and one only becomes aware of the value of an index by its absence. These criticism notwithstanding, Household and Family among the Poor represents a very substantial contribution to several historiographical literatures: first, it extends the range and precision of social structural studies of households and domestic organization; second, it radically alters the focus of studies of the Old Poor Law by placing the recipients of welfare at the center of the stage; third, it gives the historical study of the welfare state and social entitlements some much-needed perspective; and, fourth, it provides very valuable, sensitive, and detailed discussion of the experience of childhood and old age. Anyone interested in these subjects will discover that Sokoll's work greatly extends their understanding by drawing out the interconnections among them. This is no mean feat. I recommend this work enthusiastically.