ABSTRACT
Anyone over fifty can remember Queen Victoria’s funeral. Yet the forty years which separate the Boer War from the Nazi War have been so crowded with changes—scientific, industrial, social, intellectual, moral— that even elderly people find it difficult to recapture the mental atmosphere and social attitudes of the closing years of the Victorian age. The effort to think back is worth making. In those days the worker was expected to fend for himself in all the contingencies of life—he could apply for charity or poor relief if all else failed. The genuine friendly societies had increasingly relinquished the provision of burial expenses and petty life insurance to agencies specialising in “industrial assurance” In place of mutual associations built up by the workers for themselves, large-scale “collecting societies” organised for the workers by sharp-witted agents had emerged.
