Class law in Victorian England | Past & Present | Find Articles at BNET.com

Class law in Victorian England | Past & Present | Find Articles at BNET.com: "Restrictive legislation, institutional structures and operational practices in Victorian thrift institutions all worked to enshrine a particular view of the immaturity and potential viciousness of working-class savers. These middle-class value judgements prompted the discriminatory regulation of the thrift activities of the working population. Neutral market relationships were adjusted and constrained not in accordance with any pre-industrial 'moral economy' tradition that the poverty of the poor justified compassion, but in a new tradition, a creation of the Victorian period, that the poverty of the poor necessarily justified suspicion, and often implied guilt."