Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain

Abstract

What can the case files of the Charity Organization Societies (cos) and similar groups tell us about the treatment of the poor and the attitudes of charity workers and their “clients”? The societies were private groups in many cities in the English-speaking world, whose goals were to substitute “scientific charity” for “indiscriminate giving” to distinguish the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor. Mark Peel starts his book with a discussion of the possibilities and problems in using these sources, then goes on to a nuanced, “trans-national” (rather, he insists, than comparative), detailed examination of case files in Melbourne, Australia; London, England; and selected cities in the United States. He has looked at some two thousand files, with about half from Australia (his home at the time he began the project). He focuses on the interwar years, with an occasional glance backward or forward. Peel starts each section with a dramatized version of a case file that he thinks illustrates an attitude in that particular country. In the file he picks from Australia, Miss Cutler investigates a request for aid from a client because his horse had died. She visits the home, and in the yard she discovers a living horse. She and her colleagues tended to regard themselves as detectives, revealing chicanery among the applicants.