7. The Continuing Problem of Poverty: Welfare after the Industrial Revolution

INTRODUCTION We saw above the substantial increase in output per person that occurred in Britain in the Industrial Revolution, and the rapid spread of the new techniques of the Industrial Revolution to other countries in Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. We also saw that the increase in output led to at least modest gains in real wages by the 1840s. Yet one of the most acute social problems that occupied the attention of politicians and social reformers in England, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, and other western European countries in the mid-nineteenth centuries was the problem of the poor, and this problem continues to be a perennial issue in the politics of modern day western Europe (and indeed of the USA). Poverty existed in all preindustrial societies in Europe, but for some reason the problem came to be regarded as more desperate and intractable just as these countries were at long last experiencing significant economic growth. Poverty for centuries had been relieved in all these countries by a combination of private charity and some public assistance. But in the mid-nineteenth century