ABSTRACT
The conference to mark the centenary of Seebohm Rowntree's first study of poverty in York has resulted in three volumes of proceedings. This first volume Getting the measure of poverty is devoted to papers which explore the early legacy ofRowntree' s work before the Second World War and, in some papers, into the post-war period. The second and third volumes Researching Poverty (Bradshaw and Sainsbury, 2000a) and Experiencing Poverty (Bradshaw and Sainsbury, 2000b) represent a picture of the state of poverty research in the late 1990s, after a period of 20 years when Britain had a government not particularly concerned with poverty and not much interested in funding research into it. That a conference commemorating one man and one book has been held nearly 100 years after the book's publication is testament to Rowntree's enduring influence and, less welcome, to the enduring problem of poverty.
