ABSTRACT
Poverty in urban society was much more a product of specifically economic forces and the social environment which those economic pressures helped to create, and much less the product of moral failings on the part of the individual, than the majority of early victorian thinkers were prepared to allow. While, therefore, the 'good wage' remained a highly desirable social objective at which the working classes should aim, it has to be abandoned as an analytical tool for drawing the parameters of the poverty problem in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. For those held so firmly in the grip of poverty it was scarcely surprising that they resented bitterly the cramping restraints placed upon their consumption of food, measured in terms of both quality and quantity. Yet escape from such poverty was rarely to be effected by entering the ranks of those who earned 'good wages'.
