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“... This book is based on one of the most thorough of 19th-century government inquiries, the six volumes of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law (Scotland) of 1844. The Commission had, the year before, put out an elaborate questionnaire to the 906 parishes of Scotland, usually to the minister, with 70 questions on it, most of which were answered for almost all the parishes ...”

“... difficult to sustain in the better living conditions which came to obtain in the period covered by Levitt’s book. In the 1890s poor relief in Scotland became welded onto ordinary local government: its management was no longer the preserve of groups carefully structured to keep out the sort of people who might fall into its ministrations. Democracy had got ...”

“... bring out a comparison or illustrate a point but set out in such a way that the point is missed. Ian Levitt claims that ‘lagging health indicators show poverty,’ but the only figures he advances, the number of hospital in-patients per year, expanding from 1890 to 1960, are mainly a sign of the increase in hospital provision. There is a failure to ...”