Social Class and Social Observation in Edwardian England

1978/12/01 by Ross McKibbin · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

paper · doi:10.2307/3679207

openalex publication_date 1978/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21

Abstract

In 1887 Charles Booth addressed the Royal Statistical Society on the condition and occupations of the inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets, after which Leone Levi, a well-known statistician of the hard school, posed a testing question: ‘Who was a poor man? … The author [Andrew Mearns, writer of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London ] had not mentioned the causes of poverty … His own impression was that poverty proper in the district which had been described was more frequently produced by vice, extravagance and waste, or by unfitness for work, the result in many cases of immoral habits, than by real want of employment or low wages.’

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