Victorian Legacy

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain was easily still the richest country in Europe, as measured by per capita income, and wage earners’ income had been rising steadily for at least a generation.²⁵ Although historians have debated the impact of industrialisation on the well-being of the population at length during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, there has been relatively little disagreement about working-class living standards in the period between 1870 and 1914. It is tempting to believe that the explanation for the general consensus of opinion is simply that the quantitative indicators of workers’ living standards, and specifically the real wage series, suggest that there was unquestionable improvement in the standard of life for most people.