Insights from the Historical Lived Experience of a Fragmented Economy of Welfare in Britain: Poverty, Precarity and the Peck Family 1928–1950
1
Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
2
Social Sciences, University of Westminster, London W1T 3UW, UK
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Genealogy 2020, 4(1), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4010020
Received: 24 November 2019 / Revised: 29 January 2020 / Accepted: 12 February 2020 / Published: 19 February 2020
We draw upon a ‘small history’ of one family to throw light on lived experience of welfare in the past, and consider how it may provide some glimpses into what Britain’s current economy of welfare trajectory could mean, where the state welfare safety net has holes and an ad hoc charitable safety net is being constructed beneath them. Using archived case notes from the Charity Organisation Society across the interwar period to the comprehensive welfare state, we discuss one family’s negotiation of poverty and the fragmented economy of welfare involving nascent state provision and a safety net of myriad charitable bodies, and the need to be judged as respectable and worthy. While lived experience of inequalities of assessment criteria, provision and distribution provide some indication for the potential trajectory of contemporary welfare in Britain, towards fragmented localised settlements, the small history also reveals a muted story of alternatives and reliability.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
poverty; Charity Organisation Society; small history; economy of welfare; lived experience; welfare safety net
▼
Show Figures
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Edwards, R.; Gillies, V. Insights from the Historical Lived Experience of a Fragmented Economy of Welfare in Britain: Poverty, Precarity and the Peck Family 1928–1950. Genealogy 2020, 4, 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4010020
AMA Style
Edwards R, Gillies V. Insights from the Historical Lived Experience of a Fragmented Economy of Welfare in Britain: Poverty, Precarity and the Peck Family 1928–1950. Genealogy. 2020; 4(1):20. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4010020
Chicago/Turabian StyleEdwards, Rosalind; Gillies, Val. 2020. "Insights from the Historical Lived Experience of a Fragmented Economy of Welfare in Britain: Poverty, Precarity and the Peck Family 1928–1950" Genealogy 4, no. 1: 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4010020
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.