ABSTRACT
The visiting mode and its consequences endured well beyond the end of the Victorian period, visible in a range of twentieth-century health and social services. However, challenges to its pre-eminence as a source of social knowledge are visible from the 1870s, in the expansion of the statistical endeavours of the central state and in the more varied modes associated with the practices of ‘slumming’ and the settlement movement. Into the 1890s, social reform movements in the localities continued to focus on housing. The ‘visiting’ mode approaches discussed operated alongside an extensive and extending system of quantitative information generation propagated locally by individuals such as David Chadwick, perhaps the only local statistician operating consistently outside the visiting mode in the mid-Victorian decades, and nationally by figures such as William Farr, John Simon and the activities of the General Registry Office, which often aligned closely with massifying notions.
