Poverty in Edwardian Britain

This paper introduces a newly-discovered household budget data set for the early 1900s. We use these data to estimate urban poverty among working families in the British Isles in 1904. Applying Bowleys poverty line we estimate that about 23 percent of people in urban working households had income insufficient to meet minimum needs. This is well above Rowntrees estimate of primary poverty for York 1899 and high in the range that Bowley found in 1912-3. Among labourers households, the poverty rates are close to fifty percent. Depth of poverty measures are relatively low in the data, suggesting that poor working households were mostly close to meeting Bowleys New Standard.