Learning Disability and the New Poor Law in England, 1834-1867

Abstract

Scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to the role of the state in the provision of accommodation for the learning disabled before the twentieth century. This paper will address this lacuna by investigating the fate of pauper 'idiots' in Victorian England. As this paper will illustrate, 'idiots' and 'imbeciles' fell under two overlapping jurisdictions - the Poor Law Board and the Lunacy Commission. The tension between the two systems led to a call for a different type of asylum - a hybrid of the county asylums and pauper workhouses - that was eventually constituted under the authority of the Metropolitan Asylums Board in 1867. This paper illuminates the local negotiations which resulted in the congregation of 'idiots' and 'imbeciles' in Poor Law Union workhouses, and explores the nineteenth-century ideology of 'moral treatment', which devalued the learning disabled as 'incurable' and thus unworthy of expensive, specialised state provision.