NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
When considering the changes brought about in the social policy of Great Britain, in the decades immediately either side of 1900, one must look at the nation 's industrial history. The position as the world's premier industrial nation had been cemented by the mid nineteenth century, achieved in part, as it was the first nation to industrialism. However, the headlong embrace of laissez- faire capitalism ignored the social infrastructure, and the emigration from the depressed agricultural areas to the industrial areas caused immense strain on the poorly-planned towns and cities. At the dawn of industrialisation, there were those who expressed concern about the health and hygiene of the dense industrial areas, notably Freidrich Engels, whose study of Manchester and London in 1844 collated in Conditions of The Working Class in England painted a truly dismal picture of urban squalor and hopelessness. Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitable ness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants.
And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air - and such air! - he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. (Engels. F. 1844 p. 84) The publication, in 1842, of the Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain elicited, and perhaps foresaw, the protests of disbelief. Edwin Chadwick was responsible for the report and also invoked the image of the unknown country as Henry Mayhew later did to bring to public attention the abysmal conditions with which the labouring poor had to contend.
His principal concern appeared to be with the miasma emanating from decaying matter the poisonous exhalations which were the source of their physical, moral and mental deterioration. At the height of the cholera epidemic, the flushing of the sewers in order to dissipate the miasma, actually aggravated the problem by further contamination of the water supply, in the face of the advice which stated that the disease was spread by germs and infection. Engels took much of his material from Chadwick and other bourgeois reformers, critics and investigators, but went further in that his purpose was different. They wanted to arouse the consciousness and conscience (and perhaps the fears as well) of the middle classes in order to promote specific reforms. Engels wanted to portray the workers in that condition of destitution and degradation which was a prelude to not to reform but to revolution, a revolution to restore the humanity that the present system denied to them. (Himmelfarb 1984 p. 276) Himmelfarb points to a correlation with the work of Henry Mayhew in London Labour and London Poor and Chadwick's Sanitary Report. Not only because the Mayhewian poor lived and worked under the worst sanitary conditions, but they themselves were, in a sense, that sanitary condition.
It is significant that the same words- residuum, refuse, offal, - were used to denote the sewage waste that constituted the sanitary problem and the human waste that constituted the social problem. And it no accident that some of the characters in the Sanitary Report reappeared in London Labour. (Himmelfarb, 1984 p. 358) Henry Mayhew's background was originally in law, but he became a playwright and journalist, co-founding Punch Magazine. The outbreak of cholera in London prompted Mayhew to write an article concerning the effect of cholera in Bermondsey, extending the idea to the condition of the labouring classes in England and Wales. The talented writers, Reach, Mackay, and Brooks were assigned to various parts of the country whilst Mayhew concentrated on London, and the ensuing articles published in The Morning Chronicle caused quite a reaction. Mayhew's work was praised by Christian Socialists and Radicals alike and substantial extracts from the reports were published in their own newspapers. The reports were collected and published in 1851 as London Labour & London Poor which highlighted the plight of the unemployed and starving working class.
In 1856, Mayhew started a new series of articles about London 's street folk, but critics stated that Mayhew originally promised to become the chronicler of the working classes, and seemed to abandon that mission in favour of concentrating on the regressive street folk, probably to increase sales. His revelation was the existence of a barbaric tribe in the heart of the world's greatest metropolis. , which seemed even more regressive at the time (1850 s 1860 s as it was a period of relative well- being for the poor. ) If Mayhew's journalistic style lay him open to criticism, it was nothing compared to the caution with which the accounts of Charles Dickens were taken. The Westminster Review, in reviewing Our Mutual Friend in 1866, suggested that Dickens should write a pamphlet or go to Parliament, if he was so serious about the Poor Law, rather than use his novels as an instrument of reform. In fact, this avenue had greater effect, as his novels would have been more widely read than any political pamphlet.
Indeed, the short- hand term for Victorian squalor and deprivation is described as Dickensian. Although Dickens was now a very successful novelist, he continued to be interested in social reform. His unsuccessful investment in a new radical newspaper, The Daily News, did not diminish his determination to create a vehicle for his ideas, and in 1850 he began editing Household Words which included articles on politics, science and history. To boost sales, it also contained short stories, humorous pieces and serializations of novels that were concerned with social issues such as his own Hard Times (1854) and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and Cranford. During this time Dickens campaigned in favour of parliamentary reform and improvements in the education of the poor, and was extremely hostile to the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and wrote several articles on the workhouse system, public health and legal reform. Elizabeth Gaskell herself was a writer who came from a Unitarian background, and her marriage to William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, afforded her the opportunity to visit his parishioners, who were textile workers.
She was sufficiently moved by the poverty that she witnessed, to write novels sympathizing with the poor and advocating social reform. Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life attempted to address the issue of urban poverty, Chartism and the rise of the trade unions. Although a little melodramatic in places, its story- line of love, murder and wrongful arrest is gripping even to a modern readership, and the descriptive passages served only to confirm everything that Engels had written. The closing years of the nineteenth century brought about a change in the attitudes towards poverty, in that contemporary writers differentiated between the poor and the working classes. The major shift was from the blame of the feckless, to the blame in the actual structure of the economy, the move from advocating self- help, to governmental intervention, individualism to collectivism. The Public Health Acts of 1848 and 1875 were largely left to local authorities to uphold, as they were not compulsory.
It was only when the nation's industrial advantage over it's main competitors began to erode that questions of eugenics were asked. In the 1890 s and 1900 s there was much anxious discussion among doctors, education experts, nutritionists and criminologists of 'physical deterioration' and 'racial degeneracy'; and in all these fields expert opinion was deeply divided between a small but embattled minority who detected signs of irreversible organic decline in the British race, and a majority who thought that the symptoms of decay could be treated and cured by political intervention and environmental improvements. (Harris 1993 p 231 / 2) Despite the fact that the United States size alone accounted for it's eventual supremacy, and the British entrepreneur's lack of capital re-investment allowed Germany to gain ground, it was found that the foot-soldiers of the industrial machine were unfit and uneducated for battle against their rivals. The poor standard of potential recruits for the Boer War sparked the realisation that the defence and expansion of the Empire was at stake. Not only this, the rise of trade union membership and socialist ideas accounted for establishment fears of revolution, the Independent Labour Party was formed in 1893, and it became clear that a series of measures would have to be implemented to placate the populace. Reform movements began to take place within the major political parties, and the newly empowered middle classes began to feel uneasy. This was reflected in the literature of the time from writers such as Morris, Carlyle, and Ruskin who warned that traditional English freedoms were under threat from land -desecrating capitalists and that the dignity of labour must be re-affirmed.
There were those who were of middle class origin, that wished to see for themselves the problems faced by the poverty-stricken, in an attempt to alleviate their suffering. Charles Booth was such a man, made wealthy from his shipping interests, and dismissive of contemporary anecdotal literature of the time, as it conflicted with his own experiences in London. Dismissing the Social Democratic Federation's estimate that one in four Londoners were in great poverty, as socialist propaganda, he decided to carry out a survey for himself. Seventeen years and seventeen volumes forced him to come to the conclusion that the SDF had, in fact, underestimated the problem. Finding The 1881 Census inadequate, as he wished to find out the breakdown of occupations, income, and the distribution of wealth, Booth perused the London School Board records and went out and interviewed people. His helpers in this mammoth undertaking included Beatrice Potter, later Webb, who helped write the parts entitled The Trades which eventually was published under the title Life and Labour of the People in April 1889.
It featured detailed accounts, diagrams and tables of statistics as well as his 'poverty map', a colour coded map indicating occupations and incomes, general state of the environment in each street. Booth found himself asking how poverty could be quantified, and the 'poverty line' came into being. The figure of eighteen to twenty-one shillings per week for a moderate- sized family, encompassing Classes C & D (A being the lowest), could, Booth calculated, make ends meet with frugality and self-discipline. Booth's work presented the facts, but not the reasons, nor was there any comparison with other areas. However, the work was unprecedented in its descriptions and discoveries, as much as 85 % cited irregular employment and low pay, or large family and sickness.
The popular middle class myth of idleness accounted for a mere 15 %, thus despite himself, Booth lent support to the socialist view that poverty was a collective, not an individual, responsibility (Fried & Elman, 1969, xxviii) Booth's findings did little to revise his conservative views however, reassuring the public that despite his investigations, the threat of revolution was distant. His views appeared contradictory. Fearing that the people from Class B would drag those above them down, thus destroying the social structure, he advocated compulsory labour camps to train skills and discipline, under threat of the poor house. This contradicted his laissez-faire principles, but he saw these measures as state socialism in order to help those who could not help themselves, thus benefiting society as a whole. He reasoned that those with a stake in society and liable to rise up in revolution (Class E & F), would be pacified by the abolition of poverty, regain a sense of obedience and sense of duty, and industry would become more efficient in the face of foreign competition.
Booth's subsequent discovery of poverty in all areas of London, often in the same areas as the middle and upper classes, did not modify his original opinions and turning his attentions to the state of industry, the long hours and low pay and insecurity, he supported the rights of the entrepreneur. The 'socialist ' measures should, he explained, not hinder the creativity and wealth of industry and that education of the worker was the way forward. The influence of social and political institutions, religious bodies and philanthropic organisations was, he con...
Free research essays on topics related to: middle classes, nineteenth century, working classes, social reform, laissez faire
Research essay sample on Laissez Faire Nineteenth Century
