ABSTRACT
Altruistic motives are evident in the rise of rational welfare policies in early Victorian England. Welfare reform was the outcome of a contest between three sets of reformers - charitable upper-class patricians, utilitarian technocrats who were also paternalistically minded but who believed in scientific methods, and social reformers such as the Chartists who accepted technocratic administration but rejected paternalism in favour of greater
al· and d emocracy.·}c, As Espmg-A d erson Hi pre IctS, someequ' Ity . n d' 0 f these social reformers were motivated by self-interest. Often survival was at stake in the early stages of the industrial revolution, with the newly urbanized poor housed in filthy slums and employed in death-trap factories. But there was also a clear altruistic component in aristocratic attempts to aid the poor, and the Chartists were joined by middle-class factory reformers and physicians in agitating for improved sanitation and nutrition for the new urban working class. These upper-class welfare activists, some agitating for fundamental social change, appear to have been motivated by altruism rather than selfinterest.
