Savings bank depositors in a crisis: Glasgow 1847 and 1857

Savings banks were created as a means to encourage the newly created working class to save for the uncertainties of urban industrial life. This article explores the success of the Savings Bank of Glasgow, and pays particular attention to the response of savers to the financial and commercial crises of 1847 and 1857. The crisis of 1847 was shallower but longer lasting in Glasgow, while that of 1857 was greatly exacerbated by local conditions in the short term, but of little long-term importance to savers. It suggests that, in both crises, some elements of contagion may have been present but that those who panicked in 1857 were systematically different from those who did not

A Brave New World: The Left, Social Engineering, and Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Europe

Cities, Migration and Global Interdependenc

Exiles Of Erin: Irish Migrants In Victorian London

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Poor Relief and Charity, 1869 1945: The London Charity Organization Society. By Robert Humphreys. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xiv, 228. $65.00.

The theory that scientific methodology could solve the problem of poverty attracted many followers during the late nineteenth century. Investigating and classifying would reveal the exact dimensions of need, it was argued, permitting the separation of vice from virtue. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Charity Organization Society emerged as a powerful, self-proclaimed prophet in what it saw as a war over welfare policies. The stakes, it declared, were high: targeted, minimalist aid would lead the worthy poor into the promised land of independence, while denial and discipline could reform the undeserving. Defects of character remained the primary explanation of poverty through the lifetime of the organization. Moreover, a large section of the British upper classes espoused these ideas for decades, although in the longer run support for universal entitlements defeated the defense of tough love.