INTRODUCTION

Historians of the provision of social services in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century no longer focus their accounts around an irreversible linear view of the ‘rise of the welfare state’ or the steady growth of collective and, especially, central government provision for social welfare which culminated in the legislation of the Labour government of the later 1940s. Instead, they emphasise the importance of other agencies in addition to the state in the provision of welfare. There has been a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ in which a variety of suppliers, or alternative sources of assistance, may be involved in the provision of individual welfare in addition to those designated by statute. The state was only one element, and, for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguably not the most important element. Especially significant was voluntarism or voluntary activity arising from ‘individual choice in individual, self-governing ways’, which recent analysts, following and modifying Richard Titmuss in his influential 1955 lecture on ‘The social division of welfare’, subdivide into voluntary, commercial and informal ‘sectors’. In Victorian Britain the expenditure and personnel of voluntarism far exceeded that of the central and local state, while that of the local state of poor law guardians and local authorities exceeded that of the central. The history of the provision of social welfare since the mid-nineteenth century is one, in part, of the changes and continuities within the different sectors.