5HUM0325 Peace, Power and Prosperity: Lecture 3

Social Reform and Charity

Structure of the lecture

• early understandings of poverty and society

• charity

• Social investigations

• ‘New’ Liberal reforms

Poster against the 1834 New Poor Law, 1837.National Archives, EXT 6/1.

The Journalists

Henry Mayhew W.T. Stead

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861-2), volume 1, ‘Of the filth, dishonesty

and immorality of low lodging houses’:

• …In the better lodging houses the shakedowns are small palliasses or mattresses; in the worst, they are bundles of rags of any kind; but loose straw is used only in the country for shakedowns…At some of the busiest periods, numbers sleep on the kitchen floor, all huddled together, men and women (when indecencies are common enough) and without bedding or anything but their scanty clothes to soften the hardness of the stone or brick floor…More than 200 have been accommodated in this way in a large house. The Irish, at harvest time, very often resort to this mode of passing the night.

The Evangelists

Andrew Mearns William Booth

The Investigators

Charles Booth Speech to the Royal Statistical

Society, 1887:

‘My only justification for taking up the subject in the way that I have done is, that this piece of London is supposed to contain the most destitute population in England, and to be, as it were, the focus of the problem of poverty in the midst of wealth, which is troubling the minds and hearts of so many people’.

Charles Booth, map of poverty in London, 1898-9

extract – Camberwell-Kennington areas

Link to online map

The Investigators

Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree

Punch, 8 November 1899, ‘Britannia Consolatrix’

Punch, 5 August 1908, ‘The Philanthropic Highwayman’