On the Present System of Rating for the Relief of the Poor in the Metropolis is a pamphlet published in 1857 by the English naval surgeon and writer William Gilbert (1804–1890). It addresses how the poor rate was levied across London’s parishes. The author is chiefly remembered today as the father of the dramatist W. S. Gilbert. The pamphlet is one of his earliest published pieces, and it anticipates the concern with poverty and social inequality that runs through his later fiction and essays.
Author
The pamphlet’s author is not the Elizabethan physicist William Gilbert of De Magnete, nor Thomas Gilbert, the eighteenth-century reformer behind “Gilbert’s Act” of 1782. He is William Gilbert, an English writer and Royal Navy surgeon, born at Bishopstoke, Hampshire, in 1804. He was orphaned young and raised in London by an aunt and uncle. Both his parents died of tuberculosis by the time he was seven.
His early career was varied. In 1818 he became a midshipman in the East India Company’s service, but he quit the service in 1821. He returned to England about 1825, studied at Guy’s Hospital, and for a time served as an assistant surgeon in the navy, afterwards doing varied journalistic work. He later gave up medicine after inheriting a competent fortune from his father.
His son W. S. Gilbert, later the librettist of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, illustrated some of his father’s novels and short stories. The elder Gilbert became a prolific author late in life. He wrote a considerable number of novels, biographies, histories, essays (especially about the dangers of alcohol and the plight of the poor) and popular fantasy stories, mostly in the 1860s and 1870s.
The pamphlet
One of the elder Gilbert’s first pieces was a pamphlet entitled “On the Present System of Rating for the Relief of the Poor in the Metropolis” (1857). It predates his first novel. When he published his first book in 1858 he was in his fifties. It was Dives and Lazarus, a study of London slum life that dealt with the deepening contrast between the lots of rich and poor and, like many of his books, bore no author’s name. The pamphlet therefore stands near the start of Gilbert’s public writing on social questions. In it he addressed poor-law finance rather than fiction or narrative.
Historical context: the metropolitan rating question
The subject belonged to a live political problem of the 1850s. Under the poor law, relief was funded by a locally assessed rate, so each London parish bore the cost of its own poor. The poor rate was originally a form of local income tax, but over time it evolved into a rating system, a property tax based on the value of real estate. Because the rate was set parish by parish, the burden fell very unevenly across the capital. Poorer districts tended to have the heaviest need and the weakest tax base.
The inequality was debated in Parliament in the same year as Gilbert’s pamphlet. On 16 June 1857 the House of Commons took up a motion for a committee on Metropolis poor rates. In that debate, fourteen rich parishes rated at £172,000 were said to pay £6,950 in poor rates, while fourteen poor parishes rated at £62,000 paid £11,350. The speaker called this “an extravagant extent of inequality”. He also argued that the Elizabethan Act had intended the rich to be chargeable for the relief of the poor, and that the inhabitants of houses and occupiers of land, not property alone, should be chargeable. He noted that in 1847 a Committee had sat to investigate the whole question. Gilbert’s title places his pamphlet within this debate over equalising the cost of poor relief across the metropolis.
Place in Gilbert’s work
The pamphlet’s concern with how society distributes the burden of poverty carried into his later writing. His interest in the poor is evident in his writing, and one of his recurring themes was that poverty and alcohol, not genealogy, was the major cause of crime and the main factor in one’s later fortunes. His early novels developed the same social preoccupations in fictional form. Dives and Lazarus (1858) was a fictional account focusing on what Gilbert saw as the increasing disparity in the lives of the rich and the poor. A similar theme pervades another early novel, The Weaver’s Family (1860).
The works that followed include Shirley Hall Asylum: or, The Memoirs of a Monomaniac (1863) and De Profundis: A Tale of Social Deposits (1864). Shirley Hall Asylum became the best known of his later novels. In his later years he lived with his married daughter Jane and her husband in the Close at Salisbury and continued to write. He died at the age of 85 on 3 January 1890.
The 1857 pamphlet is a minor work in Victorian poor-law literature. It is of interest chiefly for what it shows about the early concerns of a writer who later gave those concerns literary form.
