ABSTRACT
In the development of English society in the twentieth century the two world wars mark the boundaries between three stages on the way to a more professional society. The First World War, along with the crisis of class society which straddled it, marked the end of Victorian society in its most pronounced form, a class society in which, as we have seen, social segregation and inequality reached their zenith. The Second World War, along with the demand for a brave new post-war world which accompanied it, marked the tentative beginnings of a new society in which citizenship, as T. H.Marshall observed in 1949 in his Cambridge lectures on Citizenship and Social Class, of itself granted claims to security of income, shelter, health and education without the humiliation which had attached to Victorian poor relief. Between these two landmarks inter-war society was in a transitional stage, a sort of halfway house in which remnants of Victorianism, such as the lingering poor law, the means test, and an intensified form of class politics, co-existed with harbingers of the future.
