Jamie Hanley Articles

It was at the very end of the 19th century that one of Yorkshire’s
greatest social reformers, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, carried out his
survey, looking at the living conditions of 45,000 York residents.
Results of the survey, designed to test household income against a
poverty line, were published in his 1901 book, ‘Poverty, A Study of
Town Life’, and showed that almost 10% of York’s population were living
in primary poverty. The main cause of this poverty was that although
people were in work, ‘wages (were) insufficient to maintain a moderate
family in a state of physical efficiency’. Rowntree exposed the concept
of the ‘idle poor’ to be a myth – the poor were working, but inadequate
wages meant poverty.