We estimate the reduction, almost to elimination, of absolute poverty among working households in urban Britain between 1904 and 1937. We exploit two recently-digitized data sets. The paper presents a statistical generalization, to working families in the whole of urban Britain, of the poverty...

We reassess the changes in British working-class diets through the First World War. The 1918 Sumner Committee's work on this was limited by a lack of consistency across household surveys. Our rediscovered 1904 data allow a cleaner comparison. Although calorie intake was maintained, we find a...

Two important and well-known surveys of the household budgets of the English rural labouring poor were produced by David Davies and Frederick Eden in the 1790s. We revisit these from the point of view of their original rationale — an investigation of the characteristics and extent of poverty...