This is an individual-level and longitudinal dataset comprising the life histories of men and women aged 60 years and over who were recorded in source materials related to the New Poor Law regime in late-Victorian England. The New Poor Law was responsible for the overall administration of state-funded welfare for the poor, particularly to those who were deemed ‘not-able-bodied’, of which the ‘aged and infirm’ were a substantial subcategory. The majority of those applying for welfare (or what was then termed ‘poor relief’) would receive a weekly allowance paid in one’s household, or ‘outdoor relief’. On average, single applicants could receive between 2-3 shillings weekly, although married couples could receive up to 4 shillings (Lees, 1998). However, an application for outdoor relief could be rejected by the Board of Guardians, who were responsible for issuing poor relief in their respective Poor Law Union. There were approximately 650 Poor Law Unions in England and Wales, comprising a group of adjacent parishes, and were roughly coterminous with the registration districts used as boundaries when preparing a national census. The Board of Guardians could instead offer ‘indoor relief’, or accommodation and care inside a Poor Law Union workhouse. Historians have found that workhouse populations came to be dominated by older men and women, and the character of the workhouse gradually changed from punitive prison into an institution predominantly providing care for older people (Ritch, 2014; Boyer, 2016; Schurer et al., 2018). Studies have shown that older men over women were more likely to be offered indoor relief, owing to perceptions about the domesticated nature of women and their more adequate provision of child care at home (Goose, 2005). Others point to variations in age profile, where those in their seventies and eighties were more likely to be offered outdoor relief (Boyer, 2016). Their research has often been conducted without detailed reference to the life histories of actual individuals recorded in the census enumerators’ books (CEBs). Therefore, the objectives of this dataset are: 1. To reconcile the entries of those recorded in the New Poor Law source materials with their appearance in the CEBs. 2. To trace the appearance of these names across censuses to build a more comprehensive picture of the socio-economic profile of older indoor relief and outdoor relief recipients. 3. To investigate differences between older indoor relief and outdoor relief recipients. To do this, census entries of individuals that appear in the New Poor Law source materials at two periods of their life course are transcribed. The ‘later period’ of their life course involves their circumstances when they were recorded in the census as aged 53-92 years in the periods 1881-1891. Depending on their traceability, they are then traced back to the ‘earlier period’ of their life course, where the individuals were recorded in the census as aged between 21-68 years in the periods 1851-1861. This dataset was used in a paper written by the present author, which focused on an assessment of 489 individuals recorded as living in domestic households that were traceable in both the ‘later period’ 1881-1891 and the ‘earlier period’ 1851-1861. Descriptive and logistic regression techniques measured the likelihood of receiving indoor and outdoor relief via occupational structure, migration, and the extent of relatives in the household (Heritage, 2022). A copy of the paper, presented at the British Society for Population Studies Annual Conference, University of Winchester, 5-7 September 2022, is available on request at HeritageTomS@aol.com Note that when ‘names’ are mentioned, they were only transcribed as part of the initial data collection, and are not released to the UK Data Service. Instead, each individual is distinguished by an anonymized ID code.The study of old age in history has generally had a narrow focus on welfare needs. Specific studies of the extreme poverty, or pauperism, of older people in late nineteenth-century London by Victorian contemporary Charles Booth (1840-1916) have remained remarkably influential for historical research on old age (Booth, 1894; Boyer and Schmidle, 2009). Old age is also examined through institutional care, particularly workhouse accommodation (Lievers, 2009; Ritch, 2014), while the subgroup of the elderly population that were not poor has been underexplored. However, my PhD thesis shows that pauperism was not a universal experience of old age between 1851 and 1911. Using transcribed census data for five selected counties in England and Wales, I find that pauperism was contingent upon many socio-economic factors recorded in census datasets, such as the occupational structure of older people, their living arrangements and their capacity to voluntarily retire from work based on their savings, land and capital. I find that, in some districts of the northern counties of Cheshire and the Yorkshire West Riding, the proportion of men described in the census as 'retired' and the proportion of women 'living on their own means' was greater than the respective proportions of men and women on welfare. For elderly men in particular, there were regional differences in agrarian work, where those in northern England are more likely to run smallholding 'family farms' whereas, in southern England, elderly men generally participate as agricultural labourers. I find that these differences play an important part in the likelihood of becoming pauperised, and adds to the idea of a north-south divide in old age pauperism (King, 2000). Furthermore, pauperism was predicated on the events and circumstances of people throughout their life histories and approaching their old age. My fellowship will enable me to expand upon these findings through limited additional research that stresses an examination of the experiences of all older people in England and Wales. Old age has to be assessed more widely in relation to regional and geographical characteristics. In this way, we refine Booth's London-centric focus on the relationship between poverty and old age. My fellowship will achieve these objectives by systematically tracing the diversity of old age experiences. A pilot study will link welfare data recorded on 1 January 1891 from the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers archive with the socio-economic indicators contained in the 1891 census conducted on 5 April, all incorporated at the level of c. 650 registration districts in England and Wales. I will also visit record offices to extract data on the names of older people recorded as receiving welfare in materials related to the New Poor Law, thereby expanding on the PhD's examination of the life histories of older people. With the key findings from my PhD presented above, I will spend my time addressing a wider audience on my research. As I will argue in blogs and webinars addressed to Age UK, the International Longevity Centre UK and History and Policy, a monolithic narrative of old age as associated with welfare dependency and gradual decline has been constructed since Booth's research in the late nineteenth century. This narrative has remained fixed through the growth of our ageing population, and the development of both old age pensions and the modern welfare state. My research alternatively uses historical censuses that reveal the economic productivity of older people in a manner that is not satisfactorily captured in present day discourse. I will also receive training on how to address my PhD to local schools, through the presentation of maps that present variations in the proportions of older people receiving welfare, and in the application of transcribed census data.

Census entries of individuals that appear in the New Poor Law source materials at two periods of their life course are transcribed. The ‘later period’ of their life course involves their circumstances when they were recorded in the census as aged 53-92 years in the periods 1881-1891. Depending on their traceability, they are then traced back to the ‘earlier period’ of their life course, where the individuals were recorded in the census as aged between 21-68 years in the periods 1851-1861. Using 489 individuals recorded as living in domestic households that were traceable in both the ‘later period’ 1881-1891 and the ‘earlier period’ 1851-1861, descriptive and logistic regression techniques measured the likelihood of receiving indoor and outdoor relief via occupational structure, migration, and the extent of relatives in the household.