Traditional history of ideas dominates existing writing on the texts of social investigation by Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Seebohm Rowntree. This historiography is criticised for its obsession with precursors and anticipations of modernity which are fabricated by a violent abstraction of elements from texts. Traditional, narrative, descriptive history of institutions dominates the historiography on the poor law after 1834. This is critically rejected because, as the essay on the poor law after 1834 shows, such historiography is the prisoner of confused and incoherent received ideas. Historiography exists in and through language; it is a form of writing that presents readings of significations in resources, whether these resources be printed texts or the traces of an institution. The Booth and Rowntree texts have a reactionary academic value in that they use language to produce a world taken for granted. Booth sustained conventional late nineteenth-century identifications by retreating into an interpretative doxa about the nature of society.