ABSTRACT
Social investigation in Edwardian Britain had focused principally on pauperism and poverty. In the interwar period, this orientation changed. Increasingly, attention was given to the rising incidence of unemployment and to the social evils that might be ascribed to it. A variety of academics and journalists set out to experience, observe and record the sufferings of the unemployed. Diet, mental and physical health, social habits, political attitudes, all became grist to the mill of social enquiry. Recent historical scholarship has disputed the degree of suffering caused by unemployment in the interwar years and the threat the situation posed to social and political stability at the time. If the social commentators and nutritionists were right, the financial plight of the unemployed should have produced a less adequate diet and, given time, poorer health. In a reassessment of the ‘optimistic’ view, Charles Webster has exposed the fallacies in the official statistics and the political factors that influenced their composition.
