Poverty and Social Welfare Key 19th Century Journal Sources in Social Wefare

The Poor Law occupies a distinctive place in the history of English social welfare. Developed in successive Acts of Parliament enacted by the Tudor governments of the sixteenth century, it persisted for three and a half centuries, from its codification in Acts of 1598 and 1601 until its demise was formally acknowledged in the opening sentence of the National Assistance Act of 1948 passed by the post-Second World War Labour government as part of the creation of Britain’s Welfare State. It thus operated as an integral part of the social welfare system from the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth until just four years before Queen Elizabeth the Second came to the throne.

It is the city that perhaps best symbolizes Victorian Britain: the bustling, vibrant commercial city, centre of civic pride and municipal improvement. But there was another side to city life in nineteenth-century Britain: ‘overcrowding, malnutrition, raggedness, ignorance, ill health, the stench of the great unwashed and of sewerage suppurating in the courtyards and running in the streets’ (Thompson 1990: 57). It was that aspect of city life which shocked investigators from the middle classes and provided graphic material for a succession of reports, inquiries and articles on the public health condition of Britain’s industrializing population. Asa Briggs (1968: 22, 85) trenchantly juxtaposed these two aspects of the nineteenth century urban experience. On the one hand, ‘Victorian … cities were often focal points of affection and loyalty’. But, on the other, ‘Victorian cities were places where problems often overwhelmed people’.

The notions of class and gender are indispensable to any understanding of schooling in nineteenth-century England. While the differences between them are important, so too is the pattern of their interrelationship. Equally, they need to be set within the context not only of tradition and continuity but also of change. In this way it becomes possible to appreciate the emerging differences within as well as between sectors of schooling.

The growth of government is one of the striking features of British society in the nineteenth century. Earlier volumes in this series have highlighted some of the processes by which this occurred in relation to specific sectors of British national life: poor relief, public health and education. In each of these sectors, as in a variety of others, government – both national and local – was playing a more decisive and directive role by the end of the nineteenth century than it had at its beginning. The encroaching state was by no means uncontentious in the political and ideological discourse of the period. Equally, it has provided the basis for much controversy among more recent historians. There can be little doubt, however, of the implications of the change which it represented.