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Politics, Protest and Reform in Wales and England c.1780-1880

The motives for social reform and the new Poor Law

  • 3 things to know
  • AS Unit 1

Overview

Benthamite utilitarianism, speenhamland system and principle of less eligibility.

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Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

How did evangelical religion drive social reform?

Key term

What was Benthamite utilitarianism, and how did it shape reform?

Numbers

Who was Edwin Chadwick?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How did evangelical religion drive social reform?

    Model answer

    Evangelicals believed that visible sin and suffering placed a duty of rescue on the Christian conscience, which carried campaigners such as Lord Ashley from the anti-slavery cause into factory and mines reform.

  2. 2

    What was Benthamite utilitarianism, and how did it shape reform?

    Model answer

    The doctrine that institutions should be judged by whether they produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which justified sweeping away old arrangements and replacing them with uniform, inspected, centrally directed systems.

  3. 3

    Who was Edwin Chadwick?

    Model answer

    A disciple of Bentham who shaped the 1834 Poor Law report, ran the Poor Law Commission as its secretary and then produced the great sanitary report of 1842.

  4. 4

    Why were royal commissions and blue books so important to reform?

    Model answer

    They gathered sworn evidence and statistics that made conditions undeniable, so that reform could be argued from facts rather than sentiment.

  5. 5

    How did fear contribute to the reform impulse?

    Model answer

    Swing, Merthyr, Chartism and the cholera epidemics all suggested that an unreformed and unhealthy society was politically dangerous as well as morally wrong.

  6. 6

    What argument was used against state intervention?

    Model answer

    Laissez-faire held that contracts between employer and worker were nobody else's business and that interference would raise costs, destroy trade and in the end harm the workers themselves.

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