Public Revenue 1870–1939

While Victorian Britain enjoyed the benefits of economic progress, the distribution of those benefits amongst its citizens was extremely unequal and highly skewed. For this reason it seems highly likely that newly enfranchised voters, added to the electoral roll by successive pieces of parliamentary legislation between 1868 and 1930, would have been favourably disposed towards income redistribution to the benefit of poorer members of society. It is also highly probable that the population trend towards a more elderly population increased support for welfare spending. [Daunton, 2001, p.148] At the apex of the social structure in Victorian Britain stood the landed interest, often aristocratic families who owned large estates, and just below them came the small but expanding middle class of professional people. But the great majority of people were working-class manual workers, some unskilled, some semi-skilled and some skilled craftsmen, all of whom lived close to economic disaster which could be triggered by a period of difficult economic conditions and was often manifest in periods of high unemployment. The great bulk of the prosperity generated by the Victorian economy was enjoyed by the wealthy landowners and the rising middle class, while the working class relied on employment that was often uncertain and intermittent and paid wages that were often insufficient to keep them much above the subsistence level.