Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky Discuss 19th Century Mass Unemploymemt

Something which may not be clear: at that time, the poor law defined the local parish as the agent with an obligation to provide charity to indigents. There was a version of what we see today: bodyshopping the poor to other places, because you wanted to sell off the burden. The parish's funds came from tithes, and from local authority taxes. There was constant pressure to keep this low. Nobody wanted to pay for the poor law.

The poor were placed in workhouses. They were divested of virtually all private posessions. They had to show all assets had been sold. They had to separate men from women, children from parents. They were deliberately given significantly substandard food and clothing to discourage "shirking" and were pretty much made to do the most menial work, comparable to what prisoners did in hard labour in some cases.

This was not "universal credit" in modern terms. We're not talking the relative poverty of an old color tv rather than a flat screen: Oliver Twist is only light handed fiction in some senses.

"down and out in paris and london" by Orwell discusses some of this. It was carried into the modern era before the Beveridge report completely replaced the poor laws with the welfare state. Prior to this Unions had often collected funds to provide union-backed assistance during the depression, and there were various forms of pre-welfare state pension funds and insurance funds.

"the warden" by Anthony Trollope is a more rosy-eyed take on parishoner care. Very few had this level of care. Similarly, Chelsea Pensioners were the royalty of the indigent.