Late-Victorian and Edwardian England saw a great increase in social distress, including a ten-fold rise in the homeless population. Reaction to this was mixed and included more punitive legislation intended to discourage recourse to public charity. At the same time, there was considerable interest in polite society in the living conditions of the vagrant and undercover explorations of workhouses, casual wards, and other resorts of the dispossessed were reported regularly. Some ten such accounts are reprinted here, most for the first time since they were originally published.

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