poor
poor. ‘A decent provision for the poor’, declared Samuel Johnson, ‘is the true test of civilization.’ But identifying the poor with any precision has proved difficult for those wishing to help them and for historians wishing to study them. Poverty is clearly a relative and approximate term.
Efforts to identify the poor using systematic measurements were attempted from the later 18th cent. onwards and were part of the debate about the extent of poverty in Britain. The destitution of orphans, the aged, and the sick was accepted as a reasonable claim for public support, but the extent of poverty among physically fit adults was disputed. Sir Frederick Eden attempted in 1797 to document the lives of the poor in terms of expenditure on food, fuel, clothing, and shelter, but his studies were criticized as unsystematic and unrelated to the basic minima needed to maintain a healthy life. Similar shortcomings were found in the anecdotal account London Labour and the London Poor published by Henry Mayhew in 1851. Investigators of the London Statistical Society (later the Royal Statistical Society of London) and the Manchester Statistical Society attempted to be more scientific by initiating studies of intakes per head of various commodities of food and drink, but it was not until 1886 that a survey of the budgets and consumption of necessities of a large sample of the London poor was undertaken by Charles Booth.
Booth's calculations rested on assumptions about the level of expenditure needed to maintain a healthy life. He allowed no expenditure for entertainments or pleasure. Even with disciplined expenditure on necessities only, his survey showed that almost 30 per cent of the population of London lived below ‘the poverty line’. Using similar criteria to Booth's, Seebohm Rowntree undertook a survey of the poor in York in 1900 and identified a similar proportion of the population living in poverty. Medical examinations of the men volunteering for military service in the Boer War and those serving in the two world wars provided evidence of the effects of long-term poverty. Many of them were rejected as unfit, probably because they had suffered from inadequate diet and care during their childhood and youth. Such evidence was used to support the arguments in favour of comprehensive social welfare and of the ‘welfare state’ established during the 1940s.
Debates about the extent and condition of the poor and the limits of state welfare continue. However, in spite of popular hostility to scroungers, the evidence suggests that the proportion of the poor in modern Britain is similar to that of the past.
Efforts to identify the poor using systematic measurements were attempted from the later 18th cent. onwards and were part of the debate about the extent of poverty in Britain. The destitution of orphans, the aged, and the sick was accepted as a reasonable claim for public support, but the extent of poverty among physically fit adults was disputed. Sir Frederick Eden attempted in 1797 to document the lives of the poor in terms of expenditure on food, fuel, clothing, and shelter, but his studies were criticized as unsystematic and unrelated to the basic minima needed to maintain a healthy life. Similar shortcomings were found in the anecdotal account London Labour and the London Poor published by Henry Mayhew in 1851. Investigators of the London Statistical Society (later the Royal Statistical Society of London) and the Manchester Statistical Society attempted to be more scientific by initiating studies of intakes per head of various commodities of food and drink, but it was not until 1886 that a survey of the budgets and consumption of necessities of a large sample of the London poor was undertaken by Charles Booth.
Booth's calculations rested on assumptions about the level of expenditure needed to maintain a healthy life. He allowed no expenditure for entertainments or pleasure. Even with disciplined expenditure on necessities only, his survey showed that almost 30 per cent of the population of London lived below ‘the poverty line’. Using similar criteria to Booth's, Seebohm Rowntree undertook a survey of the poor in York in 1900 and identified a similar proportion of the population living in poverty. Medical examinations of the men volunteering for military service in the Boer War and those serving in the two world wars provided evidence of the effects of long-term poverty. Many of them were rejected as unfit, probably because they had suffered from inadequate diet and care during their childhood and youth. Such evidence was used to support the arguments in favour of comprehensive social welfare and of the ‘welfare state’ established during the 1940s.
Debates about the extent and condition of the poor and the limits of state welfare continue. However, in spite of popular hostility to scroungers, the evidence suggests that the proportion of the poor in modern Britain is similar to that of the past.
Ian John Ernest Keil
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