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Mary Macaulay, the grand-daughter of the abolitionist reformer Zachary Macaulay, married the shipowner and social reformer Charles Booth in 1871. She was a significant contributor to Charles Booth’s landmark 17-volume study of Life and Labour of the People in London. She also brought up 7 children, managed the Booths’ domestic and social lives, and sponsored a range of welfare projects in the community.

The 1880s were the pivotal years in Victorian moral thought. A new wave of awareness of the plight of the urban poor was expressed in a range of both practical and intellectual activities. Some, such as Charles Booth, committed themselves to a vast project of social-scientific surveying and classifying of the urban poor. The 1880s was also the decade that saw the flourishing of respectable unbelief. The atheist Charles Bradlaugh took his seat in Parliament, and the agnostic Thomas Huxley became president of the Royal Society. The best-selling novel of the decade, Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), told the story of an Anglican clergyman losing his faith and founding a new religious brotherhood in the East End of London based on a humanistic reinterpretation of Christianity.

Researchers and policymakers became increasingly interested in improving the lives of older Britons over the course of the twentieth century. Expert attention was first drawn to the particular poverty of the elderly during the late nineteenth century. Charles Booth both surveyed elderly paupers and argued for state pensions (introduced in Britain in 1908) in order to alleviate their poverty. Subsequently, the growing popularity of psychology encouraged greater attention to the private lives of the aged. Postwar reformers contributed to the expansion of welfare services for older Britons after 1945 and aimed to improve their inner lives. Yet many researchers still omitted the testimony of the old from their studies. Postwar research became skewed towards problems that the state welfare system could solve.

The penultimate chapter demonstrates a key theme in the history of Victorian statistics: the central and continuing role played by arguments over living standards and the extent of poverty. It concerns the Industrial Remuneration Conference, held in London in January 1885. This brought together leading representatives from politics, intellectual life, business, and working-class organizations, to discuss the maldistribution of wealth and the proceeds of industry in Britain. It also considered the reforms required to give working people higher incomes and better life-chances. The statistics of daily life and working-class consumption dominated discussion. The recent Presidential Address to the Statistical Society of London by the civil servant Robert Giffen on ‘The Progress of the Working Class’ was roundly condemned for its roseate and optimistic views of material progress over the past half-century in Britain. Many delegates contested Giffen’s statistics on wage rates and prices. The Conference reached no consensus and conclusions. It was a further example of the so-called ‘re-discovery of poverty’ in the 1880s, however, and an important context for the origins of Charles Booth’s great inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London, one of the most important of all British social investigations, which began in the following year.

This chapter explores a key theme in the history of Victorian social investigation and social contestation: the centrality of arguments over living standards and the extent of poverty. It concerns the Industrial Remuneration Conference, held in London in January 1885. This brought together leading representatives from politics, intellectual life, business, trade unions and other working-class organizations, to discuss the maldistribution of wealth and the proceeds of industry in Britain. It also considered the reforms required to give working people higher incomes and better life-chances. The statistics of daily life and working-class consumption dominated discussion. The recent Presidential Address to the Statistical Society of London by the civil servant Robert Giffen on ‘The Progress of the Working Class’, delivered in 1883, was roundly condemned for its roseate and optimistic views of material progress over the past half-century in Britain. Many delegates contested Giffen’s statistics on wage rates and prices. The Conference reached no consensus and conclusions. It is a further example, however, of the so-called ‘re-discovery of poverty’ in the 1880s and an important context for the origins of Charles Booth’s great inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London, one of the most significant of all British social investigations, which began in the following year.

Welfare policy has a long and distinguished history of being informed by research evidence. This chapter shows that the most influential studies were landmarks in social policy research – from Charles Booth and Seebolm Rowntree, through to Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend. It shows that research on welfare has had to be both eclectic and inventive in order to provide policy-relevant findings. Even so, frustration arises from the almost complete inability to mount experimental studies in this field, as well as from the speed with which carefully designed research can be overtaken by political imperatives.