Homelessness is now a much greater problem than twenty years ago. In Britain today around half-a-million homeless people form a regrettable permanent 'underclass'. This book spells out their similarities with the spurned vagrant of bygone days. It traces how for centuries emergent laws have combated alleged threats from unruly vagrants while largely ignoring causal factors like economic fluctuation, bad harvests, disease and war. It is argued that only educational and social reform will alleviate the homeless plight.

An interdisciplinary study of the rich Victorian taxonomy of vagrancy, and the concepts of poverty, mobility and homelessness it expressed.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Notes on contributors -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Trevor O. Lloyd as teacher, scholar, mentor and friend -- 2 Introduction -- 3 A party for 'peers and parsons?' The social composition of the Irish Conservative party and its electoral consequences, 1852-68 -- 4 Florence Nightingale reconsidered as the founder of modern nursing -- 5 Britain, muckraking and transnational exchanges -- 6 Politics and the social sphere: the Primrose League during the First World War -- 7 Baldwin's Empire: Canada 1927 -- 8 Experiences of British prisoners of war in the Far East: death and their relatives at home from 1942 -- A bibliography: Trevor O. Lloyd -- Index

In many ways, the European welfare state constituted a response to the new forms of social fracture and economic turbulence that were born out of industrialization—challenges that were particularly acute for groups whose integration into society seemed the most tenuous. Covering a range of national cases, this volume explores the relationship of weak social ties to poverty and how ideas about this relationship informed welfare policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on three representative populations—neglected children, the homeless, and the unemployed—it provides a rich, comparative consideration of the shifting perceptions, representations, and lived experiences of social vulnerability in modern Europe.

A new perspective on the place of the workhouse in the history and geography of nineteenth-century society and social policy.

This collection of essaysexplores how Progressivism was the historical catalyst for reforms across the social and political spectrum in Britain for over half a century.