Gary Howells’s research while affiliated with London Postgraduate Medical and Dental Education and other places

Nineteenth-century assisted emigration has long been associated with the phrase ‘shovelling out paupers’. This view is challenged by the actions and attitudes of the sponsors of parish-assisted emigration who invested considerable time and energy in supporting the emigration of their poor. Close investigation of the policy that was applied at the local level for the rural counties of Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Norfolk suggests that assisted emigration was seen as a policy in which rich and poor interacted to secure mutual benefits. Assisted emigration was conceived as a way of helping individual paupers while simultaneously displaying a continued concern for the labouring population. Faced with the challenges of the New Poor Law, the farming class viewed assisted emigration as part of an older tradition of paternalistic help for the ‘deserving poor’. Sponsors were well aware of the ambivalence of the subject and sought to develop a conscious ideology of assisted emigration, which focused on the hope of a better life, for those who left and for those who remained.

In 1836 under the auspices of section 62 of the New Poor Law, 3,069 poor people from Norfolk were assisted to emigrate to North America. Their passages, and various other requirements including spending money, travel to the port, equipment for the voyage and settling of debts, were paid for out of the poor rates. The rationale for this outflow of people revolved around the issue of surplus labour, which was believed to have a corrosive and unsettling effect upon the state of rural society. Emigration had long been seen as a potential safety valve for surplus labour. Clause 62 can be traced back to the vigorous debate about assisted emigration associated with Robert Wilmot Horton. For one emigration season, it looked as if parochial government were capable of rising to the challenge of solving its surplus labour problems and simultaneously satisfying the needs of the labour-hungry British colonies. This paper examines the Norfolk emigration fever by using a previously unused data set of nineteenth-century emigration (Ministry of Health files held at the Public Record Office). It argues that assisted emigration was the result of a concerted rational policy, applied by the parish officers aimed to benefit emigrants and those left behind. The policy was neither haphazard nor accidental and, though inspired by fear of the consequences of implementing the New Poor Law, was not a panicked response. It argues that the arrangements for assisted emigration resulted in a process of interchange and interaction between rich and poor which makes a mockery of the term ‘shovelling out paupers’. The poor emigrants who were targeted were assisted because they were good labourers, not useless indigents incapable of providing for themselves. The findings shed further light on the nature of emigrating populations, the emigratory process and the mindset of both rich and poor at the time of the introduction of the New Poor Law.

Poor people assisted to emigrate by their parish officers have long been associated with Charles Buller's memorable phrase 'shovelling out paupers'. Poor people were depicted as passive victims of the elite's schemes, thoughtlessly dumped into a new world. This paper challenges that view by stressing the resourcefulness of poor people who secured assistance to emigrate by detailing a wide number of strategies which poor emigrants employed to secure assistance. It is argued that poor emigrants often initiated the emigratory process as a consequence of receiving some information about the New World. It is further argued that their motivations and concerns were not far removed from those emigrants who received no assistance, and that the rich details available for assisted emigration can be used to exemplify the process, a notoriously slippery subject. Furthermore, the material generated by assisted emigration presents rare insights into the process of negotiation and interaction between rich and poor in rural England in the aftermath of the introduction of the new Poor Law.