ABSTRACT
The history of British social policy between 1830 and 1914 is a history of changing attitudes to the role of the State in regulating, guiding and, in a limited sense, controlling the destinies of its people. As such it is of central importance in understanding the predominance of government in the 1970s when more than half of the nation’s wage and salary bill is met by rate- and tax-payers. This being so, it is surprising that the subject has until recently been rather neglected. Perhaps it is because its study lends itself to the proliferation of unhelpful and confusing ‘isms’; possibly administrative, political, social and economic historians have kept too rigidly to their own patches and hindered the emergence of a unified view. At all events, too many students regard the subject as ‘difficult’ and, given the chance, skip it altogether in search of topics from the essay list between Peel and the Parliament Act which seem to reveal themselves more readily. This is a shame, since it leaves them ill-prepared to consider arguably the prime historical question of the nineteenth century: why did the State adopt increasingly interventionist positions in society and the economy? I hope that the ensuing collection of documents and attendant commentary will provide some of the raw material from which that question may be answered.
