Poverty: A Study of Town Life did much to help those who went on to build the foundations of the welfare state in Britain. It may also have helped, through its argument for slow incremental and patient change, to have helped to prolong certain values that allowed poverty to continue to this day to ‘destroy the higher parts’ of the nature of many people living in Britain. In a cynical sense this book was chocolate for the well-meaning well-healed classes of the time—it tasted sweet and its recommendations did not cost too much in terms of upsetting the social order. The survey it was based on, remember, was paid for by profits from the sale of chocolate and cocoa to a working class who were progressively winning the right to have a little more money to live on. At the dawn of the last century chocolate was often sold for its supposed medicinal purposes. It made you feel better.

From a book review by Danny Dorling