Chapter 4: Poverty in an affluent society.

The article reports that Peter Townsend's poverty project is probably best understood as part of a tradition of research into social problems in Britain that goes back to the nineteenth century. Early and influential studies of poverty, most notably those in London by Henry Mayhew in 1862 and Charles Booth in 1887, and by Seebohm Rowntree in York in 1899 and 1936, helped shape a flow of social legislation which culminated, in the mid 1940s, in the creation of a comprehensive welfare system designed to combat the five 'giant evils' of want, idleness, disease, squalor and ignorance. The education system was reorganized in 1944, but the immediate postwar years also saw the establishment of the National Health Service (1946); enactment of Family Allowances, National Insurance and National Assistance legislation (1945 to 1948); and the passing of a new Children's Act in 1948. In the wake of these and other reforms, the popular perception among politicians, social commentators and the general public during the 1950s was that material poverty in Britain had finally been overcome. This view was given further credibility by the only major piece of research on poverty to be conducted during the 1940s and 1950s, Seebohm Rowntree's and G.R. Lavers's restudy of York, published in 1951.