Charities and the Poor Law (Alan Kidd book)

Just finished reading Alan Kidd's book State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth Century England, which I should have read at the beginning of all this reading rather than one year in. It's a pretty useful overview. The main points for my studies are:

not having a teleological approach to welfare to avoid seeing everything as anticipating the welfare state leading to too much emphasis being placed by historians on the Poor Law (but if you're looking at immigrant communities in this period you're unlikely to do so as they were largely outside the Poor Law's remit)

that charity was placed somewhere between the safety net of the Poor Law and self-help organisations (like friendly societies) and the support of family, friends and neighbours (though again, this might be less true for immigrants who could not access the Poor Law and who might have more difficulties accessing support from kin and connections - ie less social capital - so might therefore be more reliant on charity if they were in need. They would also need to locate themselves very near friends and family if they were to get help from them in an era before public transport and rapid communications. And high population movements "interfered with kinship networks" so that there was a need for stability in an area before kinship systems could work. Which ties in with the suggestion that immigrants would tend to live in areas which allowed them “to strengthen internal ties for self-support as well as to start to create external links with their host society” (from Laura Vaughan and Alan Penn on immigrant quarters in Leeds and Liverpool. See “Jewish Immigrant Settlement Patterns in Manchester and Leeds 1881” in Urban Studies, Vol 43, no 3, 653-671, March 2006)

the link between evangelical and "classical political economy" ideas on charity - the comparison with immigrant charities would help highlight this, and it's interesting to see how they are affected by these ideas (eg Jewish Board of Guardian's use of language of the Poor Law) - and that all welfare (charity and Poor Law) was a gift and recipients should not expect to be entitled to it

refers to the idea of those applying for charitable help getting used to the "theatre of charity" and acting the right part (see Mandle, the Uses of Charity) though he doesn't explore the ways in which this might be internalised into day to day behaviour (check Goffman's Presentation of Self)

the role of friendly societies in creating and reinforcing a shared culture (rituals and tests for membership - Gorsky's fictive kin) and supportive social network but lower middle class distate for this and preference for chequebook style societies

role of women in financial management of household and "supportive and regulative" social networks

and he also says that welfare systems are a "cultural construct": discuss