ABSTRACT
The concept of a “mixed economy of welfare” is well established. It came to the fore as historians of welfare recognized that their work had too often focused exclusively on official provision of assistance through public sources. Christoph Sachße and Michael Katz edited a volume in 1996 that highlighted the coexistence of private and public sources of social provision in the European and American contexts from the 1870s to the 1930s. The interest in the relationship between voluntary and state assistance on the part of British historians echoed twentieth-century policy debates over the balance between these components of social provision.1 Investigation of the various forms, public and private, of welfare provision has received a further impetus from modern social historians seeking to write the history of welfare from the perspective of the recipient. Thus, the contributors to a collection of perspectives on poor relief in the nineteenth-century metropolis focused on the survival strategies of the poor themselves, highlighting the “agency” of the poor and their resourcefulness in contriving a patchwork quilt of social protection. Olwen Hufton had earlier coined the phrase “an economy of makeshifts,” in describing how the poor of eighteenth-century France combined meagre sources of public and private relief with other precarious sources of income.2
