ABSTRACT
The last twenty years have witnessed a significant change in the historiography of charity and philanthropy.1 During the 1970s, Gareth Stedman Jones highlighted the way in which organisations like the Charity Organisation Society attempted to use charity to “remoralise” the London poor, but in the 1980s and 1900s writers such as Geoffrey Finlayson and Frank Prochaska offered a much more sympathetic account of the contribution that charity was able to make to meeting social needs.2 As a result of this work, historians now have a much more nuanced view of the history of welfare provision. As Jane Lewis argued in 1995, “rather than seeing the story of the modern welfare state as a simple movement from individualism to collectivism . . . it is more accurate to see Britain as always having had a mixed economy of welfare, in which the state, the voluntary sector, the family and the market have played different parts at different points in time.”3
