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In reading the title of this article, any reader at all familiar with the social history of late Victorian and Edwardian England is likely to think of the revelations at the time of the extent of urban poverty. Two major enquiries, one into London poverty, and the other into poverty in York, caused considerable stir and much discussion, leading ultimately to the Liberal social reforms of the period 1906 to 1914. Yet at the same time there was a general awareness that times were actually getting better for the bulk of the urban working classes, and their standard of living was rising. How then are these two historical phenomena to be reconciled? What balance can be struck between them? The aim of this essay is to examine the nature of each development, and to assess their relative importance. Each was real enough, and no figment of the historian's imagination.
THE IMPOVERISHED CLASSES
There was nothing new, of course, in the subject of urban poverty. Its existence had been acknowledged as early as the sixteenth century by the piecemeal construction of the Elizabethan Poor Law. During the nineteenth century, however, urban populations grew enormously, partly as a result of an unprecedented rise in the national population, and partly as a consequence of an extraordinary influx from the countryside as industry expanded in the cities and towns. The growth of London was phenomenal: already by the midnineteenth century this was being commented on. According to Lord Ashley, in 1848 there were about 30,000 shelterless street Arabs in London, out of a total population of 2.5m., most of them employed by their parents for begging or thieving.
Henry Mayhew in his famous London Labour and the London Poor (1861) provides plenty of examples of juvenile crime. The sheer numbers of an unruly, criminal element in London began to cause anxiety in the second half of the century. Matthew Arnold, in his Culture and Anarchy (1869) refers to `this vast residuum... marching where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes'. Arthur Mearns, a Congregational minister; sounded an alarming note in his pamphlet, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883):
...seething in the very centre of our great cities, concealed by the thinnest crust of civilisation and...