ABSTRACT
In 1986 John Veit-Wilson launched a fierce attack on what he regarded as the misrepresentation of Seebohm Rowntree's original conception of the meaning of poverty. He argued that Rowntree' s critics had labelled him unfairly as the architect of an 'absolute' conception of poverty, and that Rowntree's own conception of poverty was far more 'relative' than his critics allowed (V eit-Wilson, 1986a). This view has rapidly assumed the status of a new orthodoxy. When David Englander and Rosemary O'Day reprinted Veit-Wilson's essay in 1995, they explained that 'Veit-Wilson's contribution shows that Rowntree's early views and methods have been widely misunderstood ... and ... necessitates a reconsideration ofRowntree's position, which would show Townsend's achievement as a paradigmatic shift ... from relativistic models based on standards prescribed by expert observers to relativistic models based on standards derived from the whole population by social surveys (Englander andO'Day, 1995, p. 36). In 1996, when Pat Thane published the revised edition of Foundations of the Welfare State, she said that '[Rowntree] perceived poverty as not simply lack of income but as possessing insufficient means "for decent independent life", i.e. he saw poverty as a relative concept not, as is sometimes thought, as absolute' (Thane 1996, p.8). 1
This paper seeks to reopen some of the questions raised by V eit-Wilson in his 1986 paper. It begins by examining the historical evolution of attitudes to the definition and measurement of poverty during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Section 2 discusses the new approaches to poverty pioneered by Charles Booth and SeebohmRowntree between 1886 and 1902. Section 3 seeks to highlight those aspects ofRowntree' s approach which were particularly radical by comparing contemporary reactions to his own and Booth's surveys. Section 4 discusses the evolution of Rowntree' s own conception of poverty between 1902 and 1951.
