This is a fascinating book which managed to combine rich historical data and information about poverty alongside of more contemporary material. Seabrook also offers his own take on what has gone before and the position we find ourselves in the contemporary period and also claims to offer ‘tentative’ answers to a series of questions pertaining to the place of poverty in society over time. In fact, the book does much more than this and offers an authoritative and challenging account of how the poor remain in a context of unprecedented wealth.

The book will appeal to a wide range of readers with an interest in poverty. General readers may find it a bit ‘dense’, but nonetheless cannot fail to find it a very interesting and entertaining read. Academic audiences will also find much in the book which will be of value and interest. For me, the book provided one of the most detailed and evocative accounts of poverty through history that I have come across in a very long time. The book starts with the Elizabethan Poor Laws and moves right up to the present day and there is particular emphases on poverty over time and place. The book is packed full of evidence on the experience of poverty set against the ways in which poverty has been defined, measured and managed through history. Some of the historical details are pretty sobering and serve as a timely reminder that, no matter how brutal or unforgiving the present context, some things have changed for the better. Accounts of the physical punishments administered to the poor, such as the ‘practice of stigmatising the unmeritorious poor: disfigurement, branding with V for vagabond, compulsion to wear the P of pauper’ (p. 45) make for uncomfortable and sometimes shocking reading. Such details serve as a timely reminder of the brutality which is often directed at the weakest and most vulnerable in society by those with the power to do so. The book is particularly good at drawing out the complexity of the relationship the powerful and more affluent have with the poor and how this has both remained constant and unchanged over time. What is particularly prominent is the way in which the poorest have often been used to generate wealth as well as to tend to the needs of the more affluent. What shines through in the book is that the poorest have often served important and vital roles in society, not least as creators of societal wealth. This is a fact which is as important today as it has been throughout history.

The book does a really good job of balancing the horrors and vulnerabilities of poverty with the strength and resilience shown by the poor in their endeavours simply to get by. As we travel through time to the contemporary period, we are made ever more aware of the ways in which those in poverty are increasingly and very deliberately locked out from a world of plenty, and additionally made poorer and more vulnerable by the shame of poverty itself and the response of others to it. The emotional and psychological damage caused by poverty, as well as the physical, is particularly apparent in these later chapters. The picture of poverty and the chaos which frequently accompanies it is described in some detail and it is a very bleak picture indeed. Although for me, the bleakness and the chaos wrought by poverty sometimes seemed to overshadow the stories of everyday survival and stoicism which were more apparent in the earlier chapters of the book. I would particularly have liked to see more attention in the later chapters devoted to the working poor as this is a theme which runs centrally through many of the earlier chapters and remains crucial in the current context. Indeed it struck me, somewhat depressingly, that the labour market insecurities of the Elizabethan labourers may hold more than passing similarities to the low pay, no pay cycles apparent in today's increasingly precarious labour markets.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book and I am sure in my own writing I will return to it again and again.