Introduction

Abstract

‘Do not trouble your head with social problems; what is wrong with the poor is poverty,’ or so wrote George Bernard Shaw.¹ It has also been observed that ‘there is no “true” measure of poverty’, so it is important to be clear what is being addressed in this book.² It is concerned with the material conditions of poor people in Britain in the first 60 years of the twentieth century. It focuses on the period of British history when investigations of poverty were carried out on the basis of determining people’s ability to meet a set of defined basic needs. Often, these surveys and their most famous proponents, Booth, Rowntree and Bowley, are seen as trying to measure something called ‘absolute poverty’. But this is not the case.³ The standards of basic needs used to define the poverty-line income are not absolute in any scientific sense. only the food necessary to avoid starvation, and ultimately death, can be determined in this way.⁴ Not only is the food component of these poverty lines above starvation levels, but they also incorporate allowances for non-food consumption for which there are no extrinsic minimum standards.⁵