‘The great enigma of our times’

Abstract

This introductory chapter takes a look at how Victorian and Edwardian Britain's century of prosperity has failed to solve the age-old problem of poverty. Indeed, the social and economic changes brought about during this period seem only to worsen the problem. Certainly, Britain's national wealth grew throughout the nineteenth century, but as political economists since Karl Marx have pointed out, it is possible for newly created wealth to become concentrated in the hands of the few, leaving the masses as impoverished as ever. In order to make sense of the rapidly changing social world of Victorian and Edwardian Britain the chapter thus puts women and families into the centre of this book's analyses. It posits a rethinking of Victorian and Edwardian Britain by looking through the lens of the family even as it traces the consequences of the Industrial Revolution's impact upon the British working class up until the First World War.