For their help or advice with various parts of this book, I am most grateful to Rod Ambler, John Barrell, Mandy de Belin, Liz Bellamy, Bob Bushaway, Alasdair Crockett, Nick Cull, Ros Davies, Ian Dyck, Christopher Dyer, Angie Edmunds, Paul Ell, David Feldman, Harold Fox, Ian Gregory, Harriet Guest, George Harrison, Cyril Hart, David Hey, Derek Hirst, Jane Humphries, Anna Huppert, Joanna Innes, Prashant Kidambi, Robert Lee, Alan Macfarlane, Dennis Mills, John Morrill, Avner Offer, Brian Outhwaite, David Parry, Charles Phythian-Adams, Sylvia Pinches, Sidney Pollard, Dave Postles, Eileen Power, Barry Reay, Ruth Richardson, Richard Rodger, Julie Rugg, Richard Smith, Peter Solar, Julie-Marie Strange, Rosemary Sweet, Simon Szreter, Sarah Tarlow, James Stephen Taylor, Pat Thane, Mike Thompson, Hiroko Tomida, Margery Tranter, Christine Vialls, Tom Williamson, Sir Tony Wrigley, and to many students at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester. I am particularly grateful to Steve Hindle and Steve King, in their capacity as outstanding historians of welfare, for the stimulus of their own writing, and for their comments on some of these chapters. Robert Colls has advised me at many points and I am most thankful for his persistently thoughtful and probing comments. I also acknowledge with gratitude a grant from the British Academy, allowing the Clergy List for 1896 to be computerised. Earlier versions of chapters 2, 4 and 8 were respectively published in Social History, the Economic History Review, and Past and Present, and I am most grateful to the editors and referees of those journals for their excellent advice.