Module Information

This course will survey the history of poverty and social welfare in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and will consider efforts to eradicate the five ‘giant evils’ of Want, Ignorance, Disease, Squalor and Idleness. It will focus on these developments in their social, 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 welfare providers. The state, the voluntary sector, the family and the market were all involved in providing welfare services. The course will examine the ‘moving frontier’ between the state and these other providers of 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 individual welfare; welfare provision as a result of political conflict and consensus; the gendered nature of welfare; 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.Housing in Victorian Britain
5.Voluntarism and Philanthropy
6.Self-Help and Mutual Aid
7.The Crusade Against Out-Relief
8. The Discovery of Poverty: Social Surveys and Poverty Lines
9.Eugenics and the Deterioration of the Race
10. The New Philanthropy
11. Edwardian Social Reform
12. The First World War
13. A Land Fit For Heroes?: Post-War Reconstruction
14. Interwar Economic Depression and Mass Unemployment
15. The Home Front during the Second World War
16. The Attlee Administration
17. Health Services, 1900-48
18. Conclusion

Seminars
1. The ‘Mixed Economy of Care’ and the ‘Moving Frontier of Welfare’
2. The Poor Law
3. Welfare and the Working Class
4. Welfare and gender
5. Welfare and party politics
6. The ‘Classic’ Welfare State, 1945-51.