During the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of interest in the urban past was one of the most prominent developments in historical studies in the United Kingdom. In part, this was due to the work of the late H. J. Dyos. This book brings together some of Dyos's most important and influential essays, written over nearly thirty years.

A study of expression of grief among the working class in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

This is a collection of primary materials on the metropolitan poor. It includes the writings of urban travellers and social reformers, and contains writings from the last five years of the 18th century, that is, from the time when the poor were first discovered as endemic to the nation.

This previously unexamined history of open-air treatment in English coastal resorts demonstrates how contrasting meanings were assigned to tuberculosis along lines of class. It assesses the shifting inter-relation of medical, political and social forces in determining responses to this devastating disease, and analyses the relationship between scientific ideas, in particular social evolution and germ theory, and attitudes to poverty and chronic disease. In Folkestone and Sandgate these conflicting perceptions of the disease were highlighted in a clash of interests between reformist public health officials in overcrowded London Boroughs and a provincial plutocracy with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo in an elite health resort. This local controversy precipitated calls for state treatment of the disease and throws light on the ways in which doctors, politicians and academics have tended to frame the issue of tuberculosis according to their own political perspectives and values. Medical approaches to tuberculosis varied between viewing it as a disease of poverty that could most efficiently be eradicated through addressing problems of poor housing and overcrowding to a focus on the isolation and sterilisation of those deemed to possess an hereditary taint. Conflicts between an infection model of the disease and a focus on social reform still characterise approaches to tuberculosis treatment today.

Henry George (1839–1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) captures the ravages of privileged monopolies and the woes of industrialization in a language of eloquent indignation. His reform agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and his impassioned prose and compelling thought inspired such diverse figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of The Annotated Works of Henry George assembles all his major works for the first time with new introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material, and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for scholars and reformers. Volume IV of this series presents the unabridged text of Protection or Free Trade (1886). Read into the U.S. Congressional Record in its entirety in 1892, Protection or Free Trade is one of the most well articulated defenses in the nineteenth century for the free exchange of goods, services, and labor. By exposing the monopolistic practices and the privileging of special interests in the trade policies of his time, George constructed a monumental theoretical bulwark against the apologists for protective tariffs and diverse trade preferences. Free trade today is often associated with a neo-liberal agenda that oppresses working people. In Protection or Free Trade George argues that free trade, when linked with land value taxation or the systematic collection of economic rent, reduces wealth and income inequality. True free trade elevates the condition of labor to a degree far greater than any form of trade protectionism. The full and original text of Protection or Free Trade presented in Volume IV of The Annotated Works of Henry George is supplemented by annotations which explain George’s many references to the trade policies and disputes of his day. A new index augments accessibility to the text, the annotations, and their key terms. The introductory essay by Professor William S. Peirce, “Henry George and the Theory and Politics of Trade,” provides the historical, political, and conceptual context for George’s debates with the prominent political economists and trade experts of his time. Trade barriers typically serve the interests of a few and impede the overall economic progress of society. Protectionism fosters poverty and animates global conflict. The development of trade policy cannot be pursued in isolation from the broader principles of sound economics and a radical tax reform that benefits labor.

Charity and Condescension explores how condescension, a traditional English virtue, went sour in the nineteenth century, and considers how the failure of condescension influenced Victorian efforts to reform philanthropy and to construct new narrative models of social conciliation. In the literary work of authors like Dickens, Eliot, and Tennyson, and in the writing of reformers like Octavia Hill and Samuel Barnett, condescension—once a sign of the power and value of charity—became an emblem of charity’s limitations. This book argues that, despite Victorian charity’s reputation for idealistic self-assurance, it frequently doubted its own operations and was driven by creative self-critique. Through sophisticated and original close readings of important Victorian texts, Daniel Siegel shows how these important ideas developed even as England struggled to deal with its growing underclass and an expanding notion of the state’s responsibility to its poor.