Four nations poverty, 1870-1914: the view from the centre to the margins

This chapter examines poverty in Britain in the crucial late Victorian period through the lens of Four Nations History. It argues that a comparative exploration of both the meaning and experience of poverty across the four nations of the British Isles holds valuable insight for the social and cultural historian. It highlights how the lived experiences of the poor and the general reformist conception of what poverty was increasingly diverged across the period and that, by the start of the new century, a distinctly urban and English vision of poverty had emerged as the dominant discourse feeding into new discussions of social welfare and state intervention.