ABSTRACT
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence of what was to be termed a ‘new liberalism’, a product of many contemporary developments and ideological currents.1 The work of social investigators such as Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth had raised public awareness of the scale of the problem of urban poverty. Works such as The bitter cry of outcast London, 1883, written for the London Congregational Union by the Revd W. C. Preston, provided further graphic commentary on the disease, poverty, filth and moral iniquities embedded in an overcrowded slum environment. The late nineteenth-century reports of medical officers of health also illuminated the obscenity of human misery and material deprivation that lay like a canker at the heart of the richest cities of the world’s most powerful empire. All suggested problems of a kind and of a magnitude that could not be solved through reliance upon individual initiative alone. In consequence there emerged a growing recognition on the part of some Liberals of the need to redefine liberalism in a manner that allowed it to address, by other than laissez-faire nostrums, the evils and deficiencies of an increasing complex, urban, industrial society and economy.
