
participation but for profit. The ‘man from the Pru’ became part of urban,
working-class neighbourhoods. Also, as urban neighbourhoods developed the
number of pawn shops kept pace, providing weekly sums integral to the
economy of many families. Pawnbroking differed between small towns and large
cities; in the former a pawnbroker could exert pressure on customers to redeem
parcels, while in larger cities, such as Leeds, with many pawnbrokers, any pres-
sure to redeem goods would merely drive customers to a competitor.
53
For those
who could afford it, orthodox and unorthodox medical practitioners provided
medical care. In Huddersfield, Wakefield and elsewhere self-medication – with
patent medicines whose sale made fortunes for still familiar names such as Boot,
Wellcome, Holloway and Beecham – was the source of much health care.
54
During the mid-nineteenth century voluntarism, with its three sectors, often
overlapping, provided a considerable network of welfare. Despite its variety,
there were several pervasive characteristics. Voluntarism depended on personal
initiative with individuals making active contributions to their own welfare; it
featured strong attachments to separate societies, valuing independence and
often resistant to affiliation; it was prone to overlap, competition, lack of unifor-
mity and inconsistency; and it was designed to instil habits of self-reliance and
sobriety in an urban setting, encouraging and sustaining independence and self-
maintenance.
The statutory sector was broadly complementary to voluntarism with much
legislation designed to enable and reinforce voluntarist practice. It remained small:
a minimal, localised state set the framework within which individual effort and
voluntary and local initiative could go forward. At the same time it also adopted
a paternalist, protective role, providing safeguards through factory legislation for
those who could not indulge in such pursuits and remained vulnerable.
55
Free trade policies promoted commercial prosperity and economic growth
enabling the urban able-bodied poor in theory to provide their own welfare by
mutual aid or self-help, while the permissive public health acts attempted to
enable cities and towns to remove other hindrances – dirt and disease – to the
urban population. At the same time, legislation attempted to encourage the activ-
ities of mutual aid and voluntary societies. Although the friendly societies were
ambivalent about any interference with their independence, the Friendly Society
Acts were intended to assist the societies to work efficiently and effectively, avoid-
ing bankruptcy and fraud. They embodied the absence of central compulsion
and discretion left to individual initiative which matched the emphasis on par-
ticipation and freedom of action so characteristic of voluntarism.
56
The provision of social services
53
Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare, pp. –; M. Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet (Leicester,
), pp. –; D. Vincent, Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in Twentieth-Century Britain
(London, ), pp. –.
54
Marland, Medicine and Society, pp. –; A. Digby, Making a Medical Living (Cambridge, ).
55
Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare, p. .
56
Ibid., p. .
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