IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ehsrev/v64y2011i1p52-71.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Poverty in Edwardian Britain

Author

Listed:
  • IAN GAZELEY
  • ANDREW NEWELL

Abstract

This article introduces a newly discovered household budget data set for 1904. We use these data to estimate urban poverty among working families in the British Isles. Applying Bowley's poverty line, we estimate that at least 23 per cent of people in urban working households and 18 per cent of working households had income insufficient to meet minimum needs. This is well above Rowntree's estimate of primary poverty for York in 1899 and high in the range that Bowley found in northern towns in 1912–13. The skill gradient of poverty is steep; for instance, among labourers' households, the poverty rates are close to 50 per cent. Measures of the depth of poverty are relatively low in the data, suggesting that most poor male-headed working households were close to meeting Bowley's new standard.

Suggested Citation

  • Ian Gazeley & Andrew Newell, 2011. "Poverty in Edwardian Britain," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 64(1), pages 52-71, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ehsrev:v:64:y:2011:i:1:p:52-71
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2009.00523.x
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ian Gazeley, 1989. "The cost of living for urban workers in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 42(2), pages 207-221, May.
    2. Charles Feinstein, 1990. "What really happened to real wages?: trends in wages, prices, and productivity in the United Kingdom, 1880-1913," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 43(3), pages 329-355, August.
    3. Colin A. Linsley & Christine L. Linsley, 1993. "Booth, Rowntree, and Llewelyn Smith: a reassessment of interwar poverty," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 46(1), pages 88-104, February.
    4. Gazeley, Ian & Newell, Andrew, 2000. "Rowntree Revisited: Poverty in Britain, 1900," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 174-188, April.
    5. Humphrey R. Southall, 1988. "The origins of the depressed areas: unemployment growth, and regional economic structure in Britain before 1914," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 41(2), pages 236-258, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ian Gazeley & Andrew Newell, 2015. "Urban working-class food consumption and nutrition in Britain in 1904," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 68(1), pages 101-122, February.
    2. Francesco Olivanti, 2018. "Standard Budgets in Spanish Economic History: a User’s Guide to Sources and Methods," HHB Working Papers Series 10, The Historical Household Budgets Project.
    3. Ian Gazeley & Andrew Newell & Kevin Reynolds & Hector Rufrancos, 2022. "How hungry were the poor in late 1930s Britain?," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 75(1), pages 80-110, February.
    4. Rebecca Searle, 2015. "Is there anything real about real wages? A history of the official British cost of living index, 1914–62," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 68(1), pages 145-166, February.
    5. Damian Clarke & Manuel Llorca Jaña & Daniel Pailañir, 2023. "The use of quantile methods in economic history," Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 56(2), pages 115-132, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gazeley, Ian & Newell, Andrew, 2000. "Rowntree Revisited: Poverty in Britain, 1900," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 174-188, April.
    2. repec:pru:wpaper:38 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Frank Geary & Tom Stark, 2015. "Regional GDP in the UK, 1861–1911: new estimates," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 68(1), pages 123-144, February.
    4. Alves, C. & Guizzo, D., 2022. "Economic Theory and Policy Today: Lessons from Barbara Wootton and the Creation of the British Welfare State," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2246, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    5. Yang, Dennis Tao & Zhu, Xiaodong, 2013. "Modernization of agriculture and long-term growth," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(3), pages 367-382.
    6. Tim Rooth, 2006. "Revisiting the mature economy: Britain, 1860-1939," Business History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(1), pages 119-126.
    7. Meisenzahl, Ralf R., 2015. "Organization matters: Trade union behavior during peace and war," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(4), pages 919-937.
    8. Celso Nunes, 2008. "Poverty Measurement: The Development of Different Approaches and Its Techniques," Working Papers 93, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    9. Ian Gazeley & Sara Horrell, 2013. "Nutrition in the English agricultural labourer's household over the course of the long nineteenth century," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 66(3), pages 757-784, August.
    10. Gazeley, Ian & Verdon, Nicola, 2014. "The first poverty line? Davies' and Eden's investigation of rural poverty in the late 18th-century England," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 94-108.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ehsrev:v:64:y:2011:i:1:p:52-71. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ehsukea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.