Reshaping the Gift Relationship

Abstract
SUMMARY: As English urban society overhauled its systems of policing, poor relief and labour discipline in the early nineteenth century, one form of interaction between classes to become problematical was the act of giving to beggars. While economic ideology endorsed a more calculating approach to the relief of distress, social and religious ideology preached the necessity of expanded personal concern for the distressed. Among the commercial and professional middle classes a variety of volunteer activists attempted a solution to this dilemma by professionalizing relations between giver and receiver, thus anticipating the methods of later Victorian “charity organization” by a full half-century.

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