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Themes
Browse by subject to discover a wide variety of primary and critical materials on our key topics: Class and Work, Agencies and Institutions, Crime and Punishment, States of Mind, Health and Welfare, Family and Demography, Recreation and Consumption, Rural and Urban Life, Race and Empire and Gender and Sexuality. These short introductions offer a concise overview of ten key areas within British society and have been written by our academic editors, Professor Martin Hewitt and Susie Steinbach.. Click on a subject tile to read an overview of the category and view the relevant primary source documents, secondary source book chapters, journal articles and thematic essays.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind
Questions of health and welfare in this period are inextricably linked to the once controversial ‘standard of living’ question: when and how far did incomes and standards of life improve? Information on many key considerations, such as diet, is scarce. At best it can be said that in the eighteenth century much of the population was ‘poor’, with often limited and nutritionally insufficient food consumption, and vulnerability to periods of acute deprivation. The industrial revolution and urbanisation eventually brought improvement. However, especially from 1790 to 1850, large numbers experienced hardship from economic slumps, from structural unemployment associated with mechanisation, and as a result of old age, Per capita income levels in 1914 were far behind those achieved by the end of the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, late-Victorian surveys identified large numbers still living in ‘absolute’ poverty.
With poverty came poor health (‘morbidity’) and high mortality. Often chronic morbidity was so normal that it is hidden from the historical record. Rickets, a weakening of the bones caused by vitamin-D deficiency was widespread. Tuberculosis, often called phthisis, a bacterial infection of the lungs whose symptoms were strongly associated with malnutrition, was a major contributor both to ill-health and mortality throughout the period. More visible were the acute diseases, including measles and scarlet fever, and especially those which occurred periodically as epidemics, such as cholera, of which there were several destructive outbreaks during the nineteenth century.
Cholera, because it was a water-borne disease (as was eventually discovered), highlights the problems of sanitation and clean water created by rapid population growth and urbanisation. For much of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century water supplies were so contaminated that beer was drunk instead. During the mid-nineteenth century provision improved, and vaccination programmes reduced the incidence of diseases such as measles; but problems with the disposal of sewage, limited domestic sanitation, and pollution remained widespread.
Although health provision improved during the period, the underlying structures remained very similar, and the effect medicine had on improving health was small. Medical knowledge remained rudimentary: the causes of infectious diseases were mostly unknown. Access to general practitioners was limited, and their treatment often ineffective. A system of general and then specialist hospitals developed from the mid-eighteenth century, but these were charitable institutions; access could be unpredictable and treatment uneven. Before the first world war, only the Poor Law Hospitals offered any sort of state-provided medical care.
The Poor Law was the organising structure of state welfare throughout this period, with a major break in 1834 when the ‘New Poor Law’ replaced earlier arrangements with the more punitive regime of the workhouse. The Act attempted to deter applications for assistance by applying the principle of ‘less eligibility’ – which meant conditions in the workhouse were intended to be harsher than the conditions experienced by the poorest of those who continued to live outside the workhouse without the assistance of the Poor Law. Contemporaries distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’, and for the first group, a large number of charitable organisations developed to offer support from clothing for families to housing for the aged and infirm. [522]
To read more on Health and Welfare, see: James H. Treble, Urban Poverty in Britain 1830-1914 (1979), David Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 1834-1914. From Chadwick to Booth (1998), Steve Sturdy, ed, Doctors and Their Patients. A Social History, Medicine, Health and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1600-2000 (2002), Joan Lane, A Social History of Medicine. Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750-1950 (2001), and the primary source collection Poverty and Social Welfare.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind