Lives of the Poor in the West End of London, 1725 - 1824

The project aimed to reconstruct the lives of paupers using the unusually rich poor law records for St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster across the long-eighteenth century. The main objectives were:<br> 1. To discover and analyse the characteristics of recipients of both indoor and outdoor relief with a view to understanding their total life situation, the frequency with which they received relief, and the duration of that relief.<br> 2. To analyse the changing experience of children and old people within the welfare system.<br> 3. Wherever possible, to uncover the familial and life-cycle circumstances of the pauper population, and how alterations in these circumstances were related to poor law payments and interactions with the institutions of relief.<br> 4. To produce some basic statistical measures of poor relief including long-run patterns of expenditure on the poor.<br> 5. To compare material derived from the pauper biographies of Westminster with those from other settlements and parishes, both in the capital and elsewhere.<br>