During the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of interest in the urban past was one of the most prominent developments in historical studies in the United Kingdom. In part, this was due to the work of the late H. J. Dyos. This book brings together some of Dyos's most important and influential essays, written over nearly thirty years.

This is a collection of primary materials on the metropolitan poor. It includes the writings of urban travellers and social reformers, and contains writings from the last five years of the 18th century, that is, from the time when the poor were first discovered as endemic to the nation.

The problem of how, where, and on what terms to house the urban masses in an industrial society remains unresolved to this day. In nineteenth-century Victorian England, overcrowding was the most obvious characteristic of urban housing and, despite constant agitation, it remained widespread and persistent in London and other great cities such as Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool well into the twentieth century. The Eternal Slum is the first full-length examination of working-class housing issues in a British town. The city investigated not only provided the context for the development of a national policy but also, in scale and variety of response, stood in the vanguard of housing reform. The failure of traditional methods of social amelioration in mid-century, the mounting storm of public protest, the efforts of individual philanthropists, and then the gradual formulation and application of new remedies, constituted a major theme: the need for municipal enterprise and state intervention. Meanwhile, the concept of overcrowding, never precisely defined in law but based on middle-class notions of decency and privacy, slowly gave way to the positive idea of adequate living space, with comfort, as much as health or morals, the criterion.Not just dwellings but people were at issue. There is little evidence in this period of the attitude of the worker himself to his housing. Wohl has extensively researched local archives and, in particular, drawn on the vestry reports which have been relatively neglected. Profusely illustrated with contemporary photographs and drawings, this book is the definitive study of the housing reform movement in Victorian and Edwardian London and suggests what it was really like to live under such appalling conditions. This important study will be of interest to social historians, British historians, urban planners, and those interested in how social policies developed in previous eras.

A study of expression of grief among the working class in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

Richard Tames describes how London has been chronicled, described, celebrated, named, and mapped over the twenty centuries of its existence to become a city treasured even by those who have never set foot in it as a byword for innovation and diversity. This book has been written for those who, knowing London, know that it is too vast, too complex, too elusive ever to be fully known but yet would like to know it better still.

This volume explores the idea of unemployment, as nineteenth-century economists constructed the category ‘unemployment’, referring to a structural problem that caused ‘genuine workmen’ to be temporarily unemployed through no fault of their own. Sources examine how social thinkers and politicians put forward a range of arguments about the reasons for unemployment, the increasingly detailed categorization of people without work, and the growing movement to represent ‘labour’ both inside and outside Parliament, in large part to address the problem of unemployment. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this volume will be of great interest to students of British History.

A study of the lives of Britain’s children who were looked after by the government during the main period of the Poor Law Amendment Act from 1834 to 1929. For centuries, there have been children who have not lived with their birth parents for a range of reasons and have been taken into the care of the state, voluntary societies, other families or employers, temporarily or permanently. The origins of this book lie in Rosemary Steer’s study of the lives of over 300 children who came into the care of a charity in the village of Dickleburgh in Norfolk started in the 1870s by the Rector’s wife, Mrs. Louisa Brandreth. This book extends the study of children in care across the country to cover the main period of the Poor Law Amendment Act (the “new poor law”) from 1834 to 1929. Using a wide range of sources including contemporary social commentaries and inquiries, poor law records, charity case files, court records, newspapers, parliamentary inquiries, census returns, parish records and personal accounts, Rosemary Steer details the range of provision and explores the lives of some of these children, before, during and after their time in care. Research into the care of pauper children has usually been anonymized, but Children in Care includes examples of named children, and through numerous case studies, we hear these children’s stories, sometimes in their own words or those of the adults who had charge of them. It is unlikely that many of these pauper children would feature in any other study, other than individually within the context of family history, so this book also has the benefit of highlighting the lives of some of the least regarded of society. Praise for Children in Care, 1834–1929 “This is a very interesting book indeed, the work, effort and research that has gone into this by the author is incredible and I say that as someone who has had to trawl through these types of records before. It is the work of the author, Steer that makes it the success it should be. . . . I would highly recommend this book to anyone, but in particular I would invite all students who are learning about history, social history and even law to read this book because of its reliance on source material is fantastic which is why rate 5 stars and it will probably make my top ten books of the year.” —UK Historian

Annie Wood Besant (1847-1933) was a problematic and notorious figure in Victorian England, questioning and then breaking from the Anglican Church to become an atheist, women’s rights advocate, and Freethinker. As editor of her own journal, Our Corner, she responded to inquiries about her life experiences by serializing her life story, which was published in 1885. After providing a vivid account of her trial, along with Charles Bradlaugh, for the right to publish birth control literature, Besant recounts her heartbreaking trial for custody of her daughter. With a critical and historical introduction by Carol Hanbery MacKay, this Broadview Edition includes comparative passages from An Autobiography, written in 1893 after Besant’s conversion to Theosophy. Contemporary reviews, excerpts from publications about issues such as Socialism and trade unionism, and additional examples of Besant’s writing about secularism and labour reform are also included.

Henry George (1839–1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) captures the ravages of privileged monopolies and the woes of industrialization in a language of eloquent indignation. His reform agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and his impassioned prose and compelling thought inspired such diverse figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of The Annotated Works of Henry George assembles all his major works for the first time with new introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material, and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for scholars and reformers. Volume IV of this series presents the unabridged text of Protection or Free Trade (1886). Read into the U.S. Congressional Record in its entirety in 1892, Protection or Free Trade is one of the most well articulated defenses in the nineteenth century for the free exchange of goods, services, and labor. By exposing the monopolistic practices and the privileging of special interests in the trade policies of his time, George constructed a monumental theoretical bulwark against the apologists for protective tariffs and diverse trade preferences. Free trade today is often associated with a neo-liberal agenda that oppresses working people. In Protection or Free Trade George argues that free trade, when linked with land value taxation or the systematic collection of economic rent, reduces wealth and income inequality. True free trade elevates the condition of labor to a degree far greater than any form of trade protectionism. The full and original text of Protection or Free Trade presented in Volume IV of The Annotated Works of Henry George is supplemented by annotations which explain George’s many references to the trade policies and disputes of his day. A new index augments accessibility to the text, the annotations, and their key terms. The introductory essay by Professor William S. Peirce, “Henry George and the Theory and Politics of Trade,” provides the historical, political, and conceptual context for George’s debates with the prominent political economists and trade experts of his time. Trade barriers typically serve the interests of a few and impede the overall economic progress of society. Protectionism fosters poverty and animates global conflict. The development of trade policy cannot be pursued in isolation from the broader principles of sound economics and a radical tax reform that benefits labor.