Introduction

Whereas the previous chapter focused on the drafting and content of the cycle speech, this chapter attempts to explain its longer-term and more immediate origins. Earlier work has focused on the cycle of deprivation as a stepping stone in the longer-term history of the underclass. Among the most notable of these antecedents were the Charles Booth survey of London in the 1880s; studies of families such as the Jukes and the Kallikaks; the emphasis in the Wood Report (Board of Education and Board of Control, 1929) on a ‘social problem group’; the investigations of E. J. Lidbetter in the East End of London (Lidbetter, 1933); Eugenics Society-sponsored surveys of problem families in the late 1940s; and the culture of poverty theory elaborated by Oscar Lewis in the US in the 1960s (Wootton, 1959, pp 51-62; Rutter and Madge, 1976, pp 246-8; Coffield, 1983, pp 11-36; Macnicol, 1987; Welshman, 2006a). Overall, the cycle hypothesis illustrates important continuities in late 19th- and 20th-century thought on poverty. Joseph's language of this period, emphasising the rescue of mothers in inner-city areas, is reminiscent of that of 19th-century evangelical reformers.

Other work has focused on Joseph's own background, and life with his family (Denham and Garnett, 2001a, 2002), or on contemporary policy developments in Britain and the US (Macnicol, 1987). Martin Loney (1983), for example, in his study of the Community Development Programme, has argued of the late 1960s that social work was attractive to the then Labour government because it could ameliorate social problems in a non-punitive fashion, it was cheap, and it involved limited social change. The same climate that facilitated the Seebohm Report (Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Services, 1968) helped the Community Development Projects (CDPs), along with interest in community work funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation. Moreover, Loney has written that:

The creation of the CDPs further reflected the emergence of Labour attitudes to delinquency, with the centrality of the family and the idea that there was an identifiable core of problem families that were both materially deprived and socially inadequate.