ABSTRACT
When Queen Victoria died at the very outset of the twentieth century one Londoner in five could expect to come to this, a solitary burial from the workhouse, the poor-law hospital, the lunatic asylum. On the whole the second year of our century, 1901, was a prosperous time for the English, one of the twenty good years not marked by depression or by war to the death which they were to have in the fifty which followed. The Marquis of Salisbury was still Prime Minister, and had been on and off since 1885. There was a war going on, it is true, the South African War, which, if men had but known it, was the beginning of the end of the English as a people of commanding world-wide power, but its social effects at the time did not go very deep. The huge coalfields of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the great shipbuilding towns, the acres and acres of factory floor given over to textiles, were made busier by the demand for armaments and uniforms and machinery. Nevertheless something like a quarter of the whole population was in poverty.
