Spot The Difference Attitudes towards people onwelfare benefit in the 19th and 21st centuries

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Spot The Difference Attitudes towards people on welfare benefit in the 19th and 21st centuries

Welfare benefits are given by the UK government to help certain people with low income or to meet certain needs.

To be clear on the people who receive welfare benefits, it is necessary to divide everyone into classes. Even if people refuse to admit they are in a ‘class’ there are clear characteristics of what class they belong to. This division that is still active now, was even more operational in the 19th century. It was a way of life that the higher you were in the social class and hierarchy, then the more successful and prosperous you were to become in life.

        It was also some times a case of where you lived. It was Charles Booth that marked on maps of London where each social class lived. Places like Mile End Road and Orsman Road contained the ‘vicious poor’, the people at the bottom of the hierarchy. They were labelled as; ‘The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink.’

Although this may seem that Booth is being ‘snobbish’, it was noted that Booth had sympathy for the poor. He worked with the lower class, and reported that it wasn’t always necessary to have money to be happy. He described that although the poor were more likely to die of disease and less likely to survive, he thought that they seemed to be happier, without nurses and servants etc. That the rich are more likely to suffer from being spoiled than from harshness, ‘that the simple natural lives of working-class people tend to their own and their children's happiness more than the artificial complicated existence of the risk.’

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        Now in the 21st century, these locational divides are still in place, although the locations of the ‘vicious’ poor have changed. While it is more noticeable in the 19th century maps, the upper class and lower class virtually side by side, it is possible that people were more willing to tolerate each other, nowadays there are more clear divisions. This change could be due to people’s tolerance and attitude towards different classes.

        However, it seems more apparent that there are different attitudes towards social classes. Usually, people aren’t willing to live near people of a lower class, places like council estates ...

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