Income, Employment and Standards of Living

Abstract

HISTORIANS and contemporary sources are in agreement about the existence of dramatic contrasts in the economic experience and standard of living of different working class groups. One particularly telling measure of such contrasts is their impact on the physical development of children: Rowntree’s famous study of the York working class, Poverty: a Study in Town Life (1901), revealed that children in the more prosperous families were on average from two to three inches taller than those of the poorest group (see pp. 210 – 12); and information from a slightly later study by the Edinburgh Charity Organisation Society indicated similar differences within the working class [Gray, 1976, 84–5]. The extremely low living-standards of many workers — and, as Rowntree also pointed out, many more families could expect to pass through phases of poverty over the life-cycle than fell within the poverty bracket at any given moment — made the relative, and often petty, economic advantages of the better paid and more regularly employed all the more striking. The ability to buy an evening paper might, for example, be a mark of relative comfort by working-class standards.³ In a much-quoted passage that is nevertheless still worth citing, Rowntree conveyed vividly the significance of the subsistence standard against which he measured poverty:

And let us clearly understand what ‘merely physical efficiency’ means. A family living upon the scale allowed for in this estimate must never spend a penny on railway fare or omnibus. They must never go into the country unless they walk. They must never purchase a halfpenny newspaper or spend a penny to buy a ticket for a popular concert …. They cannot save, nor can they join sick club or Trade Union, because they cannot pay the necessary subscriptions (pp. 133–4).