Module Information

This course will consider the history of poverty and the responses to poverty in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, and will focus on these developments in their social, cultural, economic and political contexts. The development of centrally provided welfare services and the corresponding extension of the state into various aspects of people’s lives was an important feature of this period and yet central government was, for much of the period, merely one among a number of social welfare providers. The state, the voluntary sector (including both philanthropy and working-class mutualism), the family and the market were all involved in responses to poverty. The course will examine the ‘moving frontier’ between the state and these other providers of social welfare and will consider the practical, social and political implications of increasing state intervention.

Themes to be studied include: the expansion of state responsibility for the relief of poverty; social welfare provision as a result of political conflict and consensus; the gendered nature of poverty; the attitudes and responses of the working class to social welfare; the impact of war on official and popular attitudes to social reform; the significance of welfare policies for changing standards of living. An integral aspect of the course will be the examination of primary sources including official papers, social surveys and social policy tracts.

Lecture syllabus

1. Introduction
2. The ‘Old’ Poor Law
3. The ‘New’ Poor Law
4. Voluntarism and Philanthropy
5. Self-help and Mutual Aid
6. The Late-Victorian Poor Law
7. Eugenics and Poverty
8. Social Surveys and Investigations
9. The New Philanthropy
10. Edwardian Social Reform
11. Interwar Unemployment and Poverty
12. Voluntary Work Among the Unemployed
13. Interwar Social Surveys and Investigations
14. Poverty and Protest
15. The Second World War
16. A New Jerusalem?: Poverty and the Welfare State
17. The Re-discovery of Poverty in the 1960s
18. Conclusion

Seminar syllabus
1. The Poor Law from below: Pauper Letters
2. The Workhouse
3. Poverty, Working-Class Respectability, and Mutualism
4. Social Welfare, the State and the Working Class
5. The Meaning of Poverty in Interwar Britain
6. Poverty in the Welfare State.