Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Victorian London was convulsed by fear of its own poor. How did that fear reshape charity, social policy, and the relationship between the classes? First published in 1971 and never superseded, Gareth Stedman Jones’s landmark study traces the origins of social welfare, and the anxieties that drove it, with a precision and depth that still has no equal.
At the height of the Victorian boom, London was simultaneously the wealthiest and the most unequal city in the world. Alongside its prosperous middle classes and its great philanthropic institutions, it harboured a vast population of casual workers (dockers, street traders, seamstresses, general labourers) whose precarious employment made them permanently vulnerable to destitution. In the 1880s, as a succession of economic crises pushed these “outcast” Londoners into desperate visibility, the respectable classes were gripped by a fear that reached into the deepest anxieties of the age: fear of disease, of moral contagion, of revolution.
Gareth Stedman Jones, then a young historian at Oxford, later a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge and Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London, set out in Outcast London to understand that fear and what it produced.
Drawing on a vast body of statistical and documentary evidence, he analyses the structure of the London labour market and its characteristic pattern of casual employment; traces the housing crisis that concentrated the poor in overcrowded inner-city districts; and examines in forensic detail the failure of Victorian philanthropy to address the structural causes of poverty.
That last dimension is the one most directly relevant to today’s fundraisers and charity leaders. Stedman Jones shows how Victorian charitable organisations (well-funded, energetically managed, and morally earnest) consistently misunderstood the poverty they were trying to address, because their intellectual framework led them to locate its causes in individual moral failure rather than in the structure of the labour market.
The Charity Organisation Society, the settlement movement, the great Victorian hospitals and workhouses – all are examined in this light, and all are found to have been shaped, in ways their founders rarely acknowledged, by the class anxieties of their donors as much as by the needs of the poor.
This Verso reissue makes one of the essential works in the history of British philanthropy and social policy available to a new generation of readers. It belongs alongside Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship and Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle as a book that every serious student of the history of giving should read.
About Gareth Stedman Jones
Gareth Stedman Jones is Emeritus Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London, and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished historians of the nineteenth century. His other books include Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982, An End to Poverty?: A Historical Debate, and Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
The book was originally published in 1971 by OUP in hardback. The Penguin paperback was published in 1992 and this Verso reissue in 2013.
Related books on UK Fundraising
- The Gift Relationship (Titmuss) for the twentieth-century continuation of the argument about welfare and altruism
- Mayhew’s London Underworld for a primary source account of the same Victorian poor
- Through the Eye of a Needle (Brown) for the deeper history of wealth, obligation, and the poor
- Private Lives, Public Spirit (José Harris) for the social history of the period immediately following.
