ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book explains the strand of late-Victorian social work embodied by the doss-house fresco, by Lord Compton's piano, and by the good young man in the shiny top hat playing fragments from Beethoven and Chopin to homeless men. It seeks a better, more nuanced understanding of the active business of reform undertaken by social workers than is supplied by a reductive approach. The book looks at the perceptions, attitudes and actions of members of the educated professional sector of the middle class, those men and women 'responsible for the dominant discourse on charity and social policy in the period'. It sets out to explain the diffuse, disjointed late-century effort to ameliorate urban poverty through cultural philanthropy in similar terms: as a pattern of activity grounded in a 'moral imagination' shared between liberal-minded social reformers, that was given scope and direction by a coherent language of urban diagnosis.
