IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pru/wpaper/3807.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Poverty In Britain In 1904: An Early Social Survey Rediscovered

Author

Listed:
  • Ian Gazeley
  • Andrew Newell

    (Poverty Research Unit at Sussex, Department of Economics, University of Sussex)

Abstract

Until now there have been no national estimates of the extent of poverty in Britain at the turn of the 20th century. This paper introduces a newly-discovered household budget data set for the early 1900s that is more representative of urban working households in Britain in the period than any other existing record, although not without deficiencies. We use these data to estimate urban poverty among working families in the British Isles in 1904. Applying Bowley’s poverty line we find that about fifteen percent of people in urban working class households had income insufficient to meet minimum needs. This is close to Rowntree’s estimate of primary poverty for York 1899 and in the range that Bowley found in Northern towns in 1912-3. This average masks a heavy concentration of poverty among the unskilled and those with large families.

Suggested Citation

  • Ian Gazeley & Andrew Newell, 2007. "Poverty In Britain In 1904: An Early Social Survey Rediscovered," PRUS Working Papers 38, Poverty Research Unit at Sussex, University of Sussex.
    • Handle: RePEc:pru:wpaper:3807
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/PRU/wps/wp38.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pru:wpaper:3807. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: University of Sussex Business School Communications Team (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ecsusuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.