The Treatment of Poverty

Abstract

THE increasing investigation of poverty in the second half of the nineteenth century and the changing attitudes towards the poor which were ever more apparent from the 1880s on, brought the two main nineteenth-century agencies for poor relief, private charity and the poor law system, under increasing scrutiny and criticism. The Charity Organisation Society cast a coldly critical eye over much of the charitable activity of Victorian England. They attacked indiscriminate almsgiving which failed to discover the needs of the recipient and which laid itself open to the incessant claims of the fraudulent. They criticised impertinent interference in the lives of the poor by well-meaning but ignorant philanthropists, particularly of the female variety. A part of their work was devoted to the investigation and exposure of fraudulent charities, with even such a respectable institution as Dr Barnardo’s Homes attracting their attention at one stage in its career.