The causes of poverty

The causes of poverty revealed by the early poverty surveys were as surprising and disturbing to most contemporaries as the calculations of its extent. The common belief was that poverty was caused by idleness, drinking and other personal shortcomings, a belief that was used to justify the stigmatic nature of the Poor Law. Booth found that only a quarter of his 'submerged one-tenth' was impoverished chiefly by drink, idleness and 'excessive children'. More than half were in poverty as a result of insufficient earnings and a further 10 per cent due to sickness and infirmity. The crucial point was that a very considerable part of poverty was not 'self-inflicted' but derived from low wages and other circumstances over which the poor had little control.

1. Low wage rates and unemployment must have both been serious causes of poverty earlier in the century when real wages were lower, when more men and women were engaged in declining domestic industries, in arable farming with its erratic labour requirements, and at casual work and occupations liable to be disrupted by poor weather, by uncertain transport or loss of power. In these circumstances slumps were accompanied by high food prices and fewer workers had made provisions against unemployment. However, the workings of the trade cycle was still a major source of poverty in 1900: school medical reports show significant variety in the height and health of school children that reflect the amount of work available in their vulnerable early years. The only unemployment figures historians have for the second half of the nineteenth century are those for trade unionists and they show a long-term average rate of between 4.5 and 5.5 per cent. These figures hide localised slumps such as the Lancashire 'cotton famine' during the American Civil War and that which impoverished Coventry when the silk trade was opened to foreign competition in 1860 and the effects of major strikes and lock-outs after 1890.
2. Old age was not as important a cause of poverty as low wages in 1900 but it was much more important than Booth and Rowntree at first suggested. Booth did not pay sufficient attention to families in which the chief wage earner was elderly and as a result ascribed only 10 per cent of poverty to illness or infirmity. Rowntree said that only 5 per cent of primary poverty resulted from old age or illness but he omitted the numerous elderly inmates of workhouses and poor law infirmaries. In 1890 well over a third of the working class population aged 65 or over were paupers and in 1906 almost half of all paupers were aged 60 and above. This is not surprising since state pensions were not paid until 1909.
3. Sickness was still among the important causes of poverty in 1900 and was probably even more important earlier in the century. Chadwick and early public health campaigners pointed to the enormous economic cost of preventable disease and emphasised how poor rates were swollen by the deaths of working men and by the vicious circle of sickness, loss of strength and reduced earnings that delayed economic recovery. Rising wages after 1850 reduced the amount of poverty directly attributable to ill health. This was aided by the increasing number of working men who joined friendly societies that provided sickness insurance.
4. Women were the chief sufferers from most of the causes of poverty. They were prominent by a ratio of two to one among elderly paupers largely because of their outliving their husbands. Widows and spinsters also suffered from wage rates that reflected the assumption that all females were dependent. Working class wives deserted by their husbands and the majority of unmarried mothers almost invariably became paupers. Women were also affected by hardships often hidden from investigators. The male breadwinner was almost always also the meat eater and there is ample evidence of the uneven distribution of income within the family that was to the detriment to the health of wives and children. Uncertain and fluctuating earnings made budgeting difficult and led too easily to dependence on pawnbrokers and retail credit to smooth economic fluctuations.
5. Drinking was the greatest single cause of secondary poverty in York in 1899 and an average working class family spent a sum equivalent to a third of a labourer's earnings on it. Heavy drinkers claimed that beer was necessary to their strength but drink was an extremely expensive way of obtaining nutrition. Some men could not easily avoid drinking. Wages were often paid in public houses. Drinking was obviously a consequence of poverty as well as one of its causes. The public house was often warm and cheerful and full of friends and was certainly more attractive that squalid and overcrowded homes. One sign of the importance of drink among the causes of working class poverty was extensive temperance activity[1]. The temperance movement has been characterised as overwhelmingly middle class concerned to impose bourgeois value on a degenerate workforce. However, the middle class had not monopoly of the Victorian virtues and temperance was as much a working class trait as drunkenness.
6. Large families were also shown by Booth and Rowntree to be less important among the causes of poverty than many had believed. Nevertheless they were important and, like drink, were indirectly responsible for some of the poverty ascribed to low wages and other causes. Rowntree calculated that almost a quarter of those in primary poverty in York would have escaped had they not been burdened by five or more children.

Low earnings, irregular employment, large families, sickness and old age were the root causes of poverty in the nineteenth century rather than intemperance or idleness. By 1900 new levels of poverty were discovered showing clearly that official statistics for pauperism revealed only the tip of the iceberg and that comfortable assumptions based on the belief that poverty would melt away in the warm climate of economic prosperity must be considerably modified.

---

[1] Brian Harrison Drink and the Victorians, Faber, 1971, revised edition, Keele University Press, 1995 is a work of major importance on the 'drink question' between the 1830s and the 1870s. It should be supplemented with the study by W.R.Lambert Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales, University of Wales Press, 1984.

The Meaning of Poverty

Between 1830 and 1914 there were two period when state intervention in British social policy significantly increased. The first of these was in the 1830s and 1840s, and the second in the Edwardian years at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fundamental in the first burst of reforming activity was the New Poor Law of 1834, which centred round the workhouse system. It gave conditional welfare for a minority, with public assistance at the price of social stigma and loss of voting rights. Some Edwardian reforms still retained conditions on take-up, as in the first old-age pensions in 1908, where tests of means and character eligibility were reminiscent of the Poor Law. Three years later, in 1911, there was a radical departure in the national scheme for insurance against ill health and unemployment that conferred benefits as a result of contributions. It was still a selective scheme in that it was limited to a section of the male population and entirely left out dependent women and children.

The nineteenth century had inherited the attitude that such a state of affairs was both right and proper. Many contemporary writers regarded poverty as a necessary element in society, since only by feeling its pinch could the labouring poor be inspired to work. Thus it was not poverty by pauperism[1] or destitution that was regarded as a social problem. Many early Victorians adopted the attitude that combined fatalism, 'the poor ye have always with you' and moralism: destitution was the result of individual weakness of character. Fraser's Magazine in 1849 commented that: 'So far from rags and filth being the indications of poverty, they are in the large majority of cases, signs of gin drinking, carelessness and recklessness.'

Such cases if congregated together in large numbers seemed to constitute a social menace[2]. It was thinking of this sort that provided the impetus to poor law reform in 1834. Relief continued to be offered but only in the workhouse where the paupers would be regulated and made less comfortable than those of their fellows who chose to stay outside and fend for themselves -- this scheme was known as 'less-eligibility'. Those who were genuinely in dire need would accept the workhouse rather than starve. Those who were not in such straits would prefer to remain independent and thus avoid contracting the morally wasting disease of pauperism. The Poor Law of 1834 provided an important administrative model for future generations -- central policy-making and supervision, local administration -- but the workings of this model were often profoundly disappointing to the advocates of 'less-eligibility' as a final solution to the problem of pauperism. But the issue was not one of pauperism, the issue on which contemporaries focused, but poverty itself.

Poverty is a term that is notoriously difficult to define. In simple terms the failure to provide the basic necessities of life --- food, clothes and shelter -- results in a state of poverty[3]. Put diagrammatically

 

POVERTY OR LACK OF FOOD, CLOTHES,	OR SHELTER
POSSIBLY CAUSED BY	MAY LEAD TO
UNEMPLOYMENT [LAZINESS OR ECONOMIC RECESSION]	MISERY
OLD AGE	DEMORALISATION, RESENTMENT, APATHY
SICKNESS	VIOLENCE
LOW WAGES	CRIME
HIGH PRICES	SQUALOR

 

British society in the nineteenth century was poor by modern standards. The net national income per head at 1900 prices has been estimated as £18 in 1855 and £42 in 1900. Even the higher paid artisan might find himself at a time of depression unable to get work even if willing and anxious to do so. Most members of the working class experienced poverty at some period of their lives and, compared to the middle classes, their experience of poverty was likely to be a far more frequent, if not permanent one.

It was not until near the end of the nineteenth century that poverty was first measured in any systematic fashion and most of the evidence of the extent and causes of poverty is from around 1900. The number of paupers had long been known: they amounted to about 9 per cent of the population in the 1830s and fell to less than 3 per cent by 1900. But far more suffered from poverty than ever applied for workhouse relief. In 1883 Andrew Mearns in his Bitter Cry of Outcast London claimed than as much as a quarter of the population of London received insufficient income to maintain physical health. Impressionistic claims like this led to scientific investigation, encouraged by Charles Booth to begin his survey of the London poor in 1886. He found that as much as 30 per cent of the population of London and 38 per cent of the working class lived below the poverty line.

Many people criticised Booth's conclusions and pointed to the unique position of London. However, B. Seebohm Rowntree did a similar survey of his native York and in 1899 published conclusions that mirrored those of Booth. He distinguished between 'primary poverty' and 'secondary poverty'. Primary poverty was a condition where income was insufficient even if every penny was spent wisely. Secondary poverty occurred when those whose incomes were theoretically sufficient to maintain physical efficiency suffered poverty as a consequence of 'insufficient spending'. 10 per cent of York's population and 15 per cent of its working classes were found to be in primary poverty. A further 18 per cent of the whole population and 28 per cent of the working classes were living in secondary poverty. Rowntree also emphasised the changing incidence of poverty at different stages of working class life -- the 'poverty cycle' with its alternating periods of want and comparative plenty.

Other surveys followed the work of Booth and Rowntree. The most notable was the investigation in 1912-13 of poverty in Stanley [County Durham], Northampton, Warrington and Reading by A.L.Bowley and A.R.Burnett-Hurst. They found that the levels of poverty reflected different economic conditions and that among the working class population primary poverty accounted for 6 per cent, 9 per cent, 15 per cent and 29 per cent in the respective towns. These conclusions undermined the assumption made by both Booth and Rowntree that similar levels of poverty might be found in most British towns. In fact, the diversity of labour market conditions was reflected by great variety in the levels and causes of poverty. It is important to examine the reliance that can be placed on the results of early poverty surveys.

Few of the results can be accepted with complete confidence:

1. Booth relied heavily on data from school attendance officers and families with children of school age -- itself a cause of poverty -- were over-represented in what he supposed to be a cross section of the population.
2. Rowntree's estimates of food requirements were later regarded as over-generous by nutritionists and he later conceded that his 1899 poverty lines were 'too rough to give reliable results'.
3. Working class respondents, confronted by middle class investigators were notoriously liable to underestimate income. Most poor law and charity assistance was means tested and the poorer respondents, suspecting that investigators might have some influence in the disposal of relief, took steps not to jeopardise this. Income acquired illegally was particularly likely to remain hidden.

It is difficult to compare these levels with poverty at other times. Recent attempts by historians to assess approximate numbers that lives below Rowntree's poverty line in mid-nineteenth century Preston, York and Oldham all suggest poverty levels higher than those at the time of the 1899 survey. This is not surprising as between 1850 and 1900 money wages rose considerably and many more insured themselves against sickness and other contingencies.

---

[1] A 'pauper' can simply be defined as an individual who was in receipt of benefits from the state. A labourer who was out of work was termed an able-bodied pauper, whereas the sick and elderly were called impotent paupers. Relief was given in a variety of ways. Outdoor relief was when the poor received help either in money or in kind. Indoor relief was when the poor entered a workhouse or house of correction to receive help. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 said that paupers should all receive indoor relief.

[2] It is very important to remember the 'revolutionary psychosis' that afflicted many during the first half of the nineteenth century. Poverty was seen in this revolutionary light.

[3] On this subject the best and briefest introduction is M.E. Rose The Relief of Poverty 1834-1914, Macmillan, 2^nd. ed., 1986.