ABSTRACT
The England of Victorian and Edwardian times exhibited very marked contrasts in incomes and living standards. Affluence and gracious living were contrasted with poverty and penny-pinching squalor. Poverty and unemployment were generally regarded as the natural consequences of fecklessness and drink, of personal moral failings rather than, at least in part, the result of impersonal economic forces, the trade cycle, the maldistribution of wealth, the limited view of the role of the state. Among the concerned there was always some awareness of the seriousness of poverty, disease, crime and immorality. Charles Dickens, Lord Shaftesbury and a number of other well-known figures had joined in Edwin Chadwick's public health campaign in the 1840s. An upper middle-class family occupied a substantial tenor twelve-room house in a superior residential district, often with enough ground to provide room for a croquet lawn and tennis court, and perhaps a paddock for the children's pony.
