Study title

This is an individual-level and longitudinal dataset comprising the life histories of men and women aged 60 years and over who were recorded in source materials related to the New Poor Law regime in late-Victorian England. The New Poor Law was responsible for the overall administration of state-funded welfare for the poor, particularly to those who were deemed ‘not-able-bodied’, of which the ‘aged and infirm’ were a substantial subcategory. The majority of those applying for welfare (or what was then termed ‘poor relief’) would receive a weekly allowance paid in one’s household, or ‘outdoor relief’. On average, single applicants could receive between 2-3 shillings weekly, although married couples could receive up to 4 shillings (Lees, 1998). However, an application for outdoor relief could be rejected by the Board of Guardians, who were responsible for issuing poor relief in their respective Poor Law Union. There were approximately 650 Poor Law Unions in England and Wales, comprising a group of adjacent parishes, and were roughly coterminous with the registration districts used as boundaries when preparing a national census. The Board of Guardians could instead offer ‘indoor relief’, or accommodation and care inside a Poor Law Union workhouse. Historians have found that workhouse populations came to be dominated by older men and women, and the character of the workhouse gradually changed from punitive prison into an institution predominantly providing care for older people (Ritch, 2014; Boyer, 2016; Schurer et al., 2018). Studies have shown that older men over women were more likely to be offered indoor relief, owing to perceptions about the domesticated nature of women and their more adequate provision of child care at home (Goose, 2005). Others point to variations in age profile, where those in their seventies and eighties were more likely to be offered outdoor relief (Boyer, 2016). Their research has often been conducted without detailed reference...