Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain (review)

Investigate, diagnose, advise, and monitor—these activities formed the core of one of the most effective social technologies of modern states, the casework method that developed out of charity organization work. A rich literature in social history has documented the consistent tendency of social work to presume and reinforce distinctions of class, gender, race, and religion, thereby strengthening lines of inequality at the same time that social workers sought to rescue and rehabilitate the poor. In his comparative study of social work with the poor in Australia, Britain, and America, however, Peel looks beyond this robust pattern in order to document telling differences in the stories that social workers have told about the poor. Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse traces variations across countries, between male and female social workers, and throughout the eventful time of the early twentieth century, Great Depression, and World War II.

Peel’s distinctive contribution is to engage social work case files as literary texts, as both objects of critical analysis and evidence of the everyday narratives by which the social workers who wrote them organized their practice. The book’s title underscores the central insight. The files in Melbourne reveal case workers who understood themselves as doing a kind of detective work, looking for clues that would distinguish those who deserved and would benefit from assistance from the dissemblers, frauds, and incorrigibles. Reading deeply in selected files from five cities, Peel identifies characteristic ways of “dramatizing” poverty and its possible remedies: a distanced sense of the poor as categorically different in London, a potentially hopeful focus on Americanization as transformative in Boston, an emphasis on “wise planning” as the path to prosperity in Minneapolis, and fears of racial decline and decay in Portland, Oregon.

Each of these characteristic narratives was subject to modification with the flow of events. Across different locales, the experience of the Great Depression led social workers to express a greater emphasis on events and environment rather than individual character as sources of poverty. In London, where the economic effects of the Depression were relatively muted, this shift in emphasis was produced later, as prosperous and poor alike experienced sudden devastation during the Blitz and the rocket bombing of the city. Ironically, this greater openness to structural or environmental causes of poverty was often accompanied by a loss of faith in the transformative power of case work itself. If the poor were no longer held consistently responsible for their own poverty, they were also less likely to be approached with a diagnosis linked to economic recovery and social uplift.

Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse also advances its own textual innovations. Ever attentive to the places where the voices and strategies of the poor emerge within the files, Peel creatively reconstructs a handful of cases, grounding his reconstruction of the extended interactions of clients and social workers in a deep reading of this sample from the archive. Carefully set off from the analytical chapter and richly supported by case materials, these “docu-dramatic” interludes effectively open a conversation about that which is “read into” versus “read in” the archived files. Most importantly, they remind readers about the importance, and the proper methods, of recovering evidence about those who were disadvantaged in files compiled by those with greater authority.