Philanthropy in Victorian Scotland, Olive Checkland: Hardback: First Edition

This book is a study in the supply responses of a society. It is concerned with the welfare provision made in Victorian Scotland to meet social need. It is an investigation of the operation of the voluntarist principle as it responded to those who, under the market system of emerging and maturing capitalism, required assistance. It is the first real attempt to take a comprehensive view of what was provided and the circumstances that evoked it. It may therefore be read as a history of the social services in Scotland to 1914 and it throws a good deal of light on the social history of Scotland.

The centrepiece of the book is the complex range of of organisations which were created by Victorian and Edwardian philanthropists for the care of their social inferiors, extending from self-improving clerks and skilled artisans to the human derelicts of the great cities. The generated hospitals, dispensaries, asylums, orphanages, model lodging houses, homes for prostitutes, reformatories, training ships, youth organisations, libraries, art galleries and public parks, providing the pioneer base of much of our social welfare capital, Though they could not meet the ever growing need for social provision they provided the state with demonstrations in most fields of what could be done.