ABSTRACT
Charitable activity in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century England occupied a central place in the cultures both of its upper-class purveyors and of the needy people who were its objects. The commercial and industrial middle-classes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries claimed and maintained their place in Britain’s political sun in large measure through their voluntary charitable organizations, which also provided generations of middle-class men and women with pleasure, interest, and occupation. As for the poor, household survival was often postulated on charitable donations, offerings which, in one form or another, surely made up an element in the household budgets of a majority of Britain’s poor and near-poor households. The social status and personal fulfillment achieved by charity giving, of course, had only a tangential relationship to the recipients’ view of charity as one among many inadequate survival resources which, if pieced together carefully, could add up to security or even modest comfort.
