a combination of factors, including industrialization, population growth, and the blossoming of social science, Western governments, led Great Britain, began looking at poverty afresh and experimenting with new strategies for ameliorating the condi- tion of the poor.
As Gertrude Himmelfarb points out in The Idea of Poverty (Knopf, 1983), the half centuries on either side of 1800 were times of ferment in social theory. In the preindustrial England of 1750, poet Thomas Gray could speak of the "short...