On this day in 1837/ Meeting held in the Sunday School rooms and chaired by Patrick Bronte to repeal the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, sometimes abbreviated to PLAA,^[1] was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed by the Whig government of Lord Melbourne that reformed the country's poverty relief system (with the exception of Scotland, which reformed their poor law in 1845). It was an Amendment Act that completely replaced earlier legislation based on the Poor Law of 1601. With reference to this earlier Act the 1834 Act is also known as the New Poor Law.^[2]

Read more on: wikipedia

Patrick Brontë (1777–1861)

Born into poverty in Ireland, he won a scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, and was ordained into the Church of England. He was perpetual curate of Haworth in Yorkshire for forty-one years, bringing up four children, founding a school and campaigning for a proper water supply.
Although often portrayed as a somewhat fobidding figure, he was an opponent of capital punishment and the Poor Law Amendment Act, a supporter of limited Catholic emancipation and a writer of poetry.
.kleurrijkbrontesisters/1834-poor-law-amendment-act

In February 1837 Patrick chaired a meeting in Haworth so large it eventually had to take place in the open, calling for the Act to be repealed. Two months later he wrote a powerful letter to the Leeds Intelligencer pleading that the Act could not be tinkered with but must be repealed:

“It is a monster of iniquity, a horrid and cruel deformity”

 he wrote, and followed Dickens in his indignation at the starvation diet prescribed for paupers:

 “ We will not live on their water gruel, and on their two ounces of cheese, and their fourteen ounces of bread per day”

 He imagined them saying. blackwellreference