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Virginia Crossman
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2019 Paperback (first published 2013). x+253
p. ISBN 978-1846319419. £25
Reviewed by Eoin Magennis Ulster University
This important book offers a true
reappraisal, a more accurate, warts and all, picture of the Irish workhouse
than the one previously held. In the
book, first published in 2013 and now issued in paperback for a wider audience,
Virginia Crossman tells the less-familiar tale of how the Poor Law, after it had
been fully established in Ireland at the end of the Great Famine, was
continually modified (though not always improved) to suit both local
circumstances and demands. The book was the result not only of Crossman’s skilful analysis and
writing but of the scholarship of a research team of three early career
historians – Georgina Laragy, Donnacha Seán Lucey and Olwen Purdue – all of
whom have gone on to leave their own important imprints on our understanding of
poverty and the responses to it in Ireland since 1850. Just as crucially, the
funded team were able to provide a comprehensive all-Ireland view of the poor law
through an in-depth study of thirteen poor law unions from Glenties in Co.
Donegal to the Dublin city unions. It is a good example of a carefully thought
through and well-funded research project whose resulting publications are
continuing to appear and are much more than the sum of the parts. Other
projects, designed to chase funding rather than build upon important research
questions, generally produce outputs that do not stand the test of time so
well. Virginia Crossman stresses at the outset [7, n.27] how the politics
surrounding the legislation (and perhaps some of the critiques of it) are not
dealt with in any detail here, having been well-covered elsewhere in the work
of Peter Gray, Niall Ó Ciosáin and others. Given this, the author ran a
deliberate risk of producing a dry exercise in the processes and procedures through
which the poor law was administered and engaged with. The peril of turning the
work into a history as ‘one damn fact after another’ is skilfully avoided here
by a mixture of taking a thematic approach and by the use of individual case
studies, derived from the registers and report books of Relieving Officers which
survive in some poor law unions. When used with the minute book sources of the
boards of guardians a fuller, even comprehensive, approach begins to emerge in
this book. This is best shown in the chapter on the statistical trends –
including numbers of entrants, lengths of stay and the regional differences in
these – and the final three on different groups within the workhouse
population: the sick, women and vagrants. Looking at the system through these
lenses we begin to see how the workhouse became more of a medical setting as
time went on and how some within the groups tried to exercise some agency when
dealing with the system (not often with much success). Virginia Crossman did not avoid the trickier questions in this book
about the poor law in Ireland, in particular whether the administration of the
poor law was driven by colonial attitudes or by those more informed by class
and religion. Her conclusion is that the day-to-day operations of the poor law
in Ireland after 1850 differed little from its counterpart in England. And that
attitudes towards the poor were driven by views of what could be termed ‘respectability’,
something which is supported by Niall Ó Ciosáin’s work. This is perhaps most
clear in the chapter on vagrancy by Crossman where she definitively shows how the
modifications in relief over time produced a system which criminalised those
who fell victims to lack of regular employment and a need to access the
workhouse on an occasional basis. The case of Mary and Joseph G. moving from
workhouse to workhouse, from Kinsale to Glenties, in 1890-91, demonstrates that
any ‘tramp problem’ was a product of the system which was not shaped by the
needs of the poor. Since the initial publication of this
book the reappraisal or the poor law and poverty in Ireland has continued
apace. Articles and books by the research team – including a fascinating
monograph by Donnacha Seán Lucey on the end of the poor law in the 20th century
(2015) and a number of important articles by Laragy and Purdue on the treatment
of children and the response of local elites – have led the way. This work has
been accompanied by the books published by Lindsey Earner-Byrne on the letters
of the poor between 1920 and 1940 (2017) and by Ciaran McCabe on the 18th-century
story (2019) and others. In all of these a more rounded picture has begun to
emerge of the agency exercised by the poor in their relations with the poor
law, charity and welfare systems, as well as some crucial thinking on the
limits of this. Seven years after Virginia Crossman’s book first appeared, this
part of Irish social history is a field which remains a vital and exciting one.
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