# Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/books/outcast-london-a-study-in-the-relationship-between-classes-in-victorian-society/
- Published: 2013-03-18T12:29:00+00:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**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 First published in 1971 and never superseded, 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.

 * [**Buy the book**](http://Buy link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1781680124?tag=219)

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](https://fundraising.co.uk/books/gift-relationship-human-blood-social-policy/)_(
   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.