ABSTRACT
Historians differ as to when economists and policy makers made a significant challenge to the classical economic view of the state, but they agree that by 1880, a novel vision of liberalism was beginning to take hold, which opened up the possibility of new responses for managing poverty and unemployment. New liberals drew even stricter lines between the respectable unemployed and the ‘residuum’, and reformers created novel classificatory schemes that went beyond the simple categories of deserving and unde-serving to help them approach the problems of unemployment and casual labour. These reformers and policy makers wanted to find ways to support the honest or ‘genuine unemployed’ while adopting actively deterrent policies toward the ‘residuum’. The categorization of poor and unemployed people was indispensable to the operations of the poor law and charitable societies. The poor law had detailed schemes for separating classes in the workhouse, but, fundamentally, charities and poor law officials divided their applicants.
