The ‘Self-Conscious Evolution of Humanity’

During the final decades of the nineteenth century and into the Edwardian years, the East End and other areas of poverty in London and the provincial industrial cities became the focus of detailed investigation, much of which was statistical, and the problem of poverty came to be seen as the fundamental problem of modern society: ‘the social problem’, as it was called. These were the decades of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889), George Sims’s How the Poor Live and Horrible London (1889), William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), a host of East End narratives from Walter Besant, Clarence Rook, Arthur Morrison and others, and various social analyses of the poor, such as Charles Masterman’s From the Abyss (1902), Jack London’s People of the Abyss (1903) and Margaret Loane’s From Their Point of View (1908); the era of what we now would call investigative journalism, such as W. T. Stead’s exposure of the selling of children in ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ (1888); and the setting up of Settlements such as Toynbee Hall and the establishment of the People’s Palace.1