Hard and Unreal Advice: Mothers, Social Science and the Victorian Poverty Experts (review)

Hard and Unreal Advice is an interesting but problematic account of poverty research in Victorian Britain. Kathleen Callanan Martin argues that behavioural explanations of poverty persisted throughout the period between the two great Poor Law Commissions of 1832 and 1905–09 and that this persistence is explained by the role of "social science," which was intimately linked to the Poor Law, and which, because of the attitudes and methodological weaknesses of those who practised it, was largely unable to abandon its emphasis on the responsibility of the poor for their own poverty. Her main villain is Helen Bosanquet, the influential spokeswoman for the Charity Organization Society, who was particularly unwilling to countenance environmental explanations of poverty, and who most enthusiastically advanced what Martin calls the "personal defects theory." However, Martin also identifies aspects of this theory in most of the other "poverty experts" whom she examines, especially Beatrice Webb, Charles Booth, Seebohm Rowntree, and Octavia Hill, as well as, in early chapters, Thomas Malthus, Edwin Chadwick, and Nassau Senior.

Martin concentrates on poverty experts' attitudes towards working-class mothers, who were seen as prone to idleness, neglect, domestic mismanagement, and even in some cases to murder. Martin argues, with justification, that much of the published work on poverty in this period rested on a priori assumptions, was supported by anecdote and stereotype, and unjustifiably adopted the language and styles of social science in order to convey a sense of authority. As a result, the personal defects theory retained a place at the centre of Edwardian poverty research and had a powerful influence on both the majority and minority reports of the 1905–09 Poor Law Commission. Indeed, Martin argues, the legacy of this period remains in much of today's poverty research, particularly in concepts such as the "culture of poverty." Martin provides many useful examples of "pseudoscience" and "a priori social science," which enhance our understanding of how poverty investigators approached the social problems of the era.

The book's most valuable aspect is its careful description of the poverty experts' religious inheritances and particularly the importance of the Nonconformist tradition in shaping the ways in which the personal defects theory of poverty became a key aspect—Martin would argue, the defining aspect—of Victorian social science. She points to the Unitarian background of a number of her key players, particularly Bosanquet and Hill, and shows how the precepts of Unitarianism shaped even those who detached themselves from formal religion before embarking on their social research: these included Booth and Webb, who were also both from Unitarian families. Martin shows how the poverty experts' religious backgrounds and social scientific aspirations "worked well together" to shape the landscape of the period's social investigation (179).

Martin is highly selective, however, both in the poverty experts she chooses to examine and in the secondary literature on which she draws. The choice of poverty experts is predictable. As a result, her accounts of some aspects of Victorian social science have little to add to those already in print. For example, the discussion of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science does not refer to the detailed work carried out by Lawrence Goldman and by Eileen Janes Yeo. Moreover, although Martin draws attention to some contemporaneous opposition to the personal defects theory, there is little indication of the intense methodological and conceptual contestation that, as Yeo and others have shown, characterised much of the social research of the period on which Martin concentrates. Even the debates between Bosanquet and Rowntree, which other historians have seen as epitomising the battle between behavioural and environmentalist explanations of poverty, are overlooked. In addition, although contemporary (mostly American) parallels are repeatedly invoked in the book, there is little sense of how the personal defects theory has been transmitted to today's generation of poverty experts. Surprisingly, given the importance of the Poor Law to the...