George Davey Smith is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology in the Department of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol. He has published widely in the field of social epidemiology, particularly on the health effects of the accumulation of socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages over the lifecourse.Daniel Dorling is Professor of Quantitative Human Geography in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. His research interests include the visualisation of spatial social structure and the changing economic, political and medical geographies of Britain.Mary Shaw is an ESRC-funded Research Fellow in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. She researches various aspects of social and spatial inequalities in health and their implications for social policy.

• Introduction; Further reading; Timeline; Extracts from: Thomas Clarkson's An essay on the impolicy of the African slave trade (1788) and An essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the African (1785, 1817); Thomas Malthus' An essay on the principle of population (1798, 1985); Factory Inquiry Commission Report (1833); William Farr's Vital statistics: A memorial volume (1837, 1885, 1975); Edwin Chadwick's Report on the sanitary conditions of the labouring population of Gt Britain (1842, 1965); Friedrich Engels' The condition of the working class in England (1845, 1987); Henry Mayhew's London labour and the London poor (1851-52); Karl Marx's Inaugural address of the International Working Men's Association (1864, 1992); Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty: A study of town life (1901, 1971); Charles Booth's On the city: Physical pattern and social structure (1902-3, 1967); Maud Pember Reeves' Round about a pound a week (1913, 1988); Robert Tressell's The ragged trousered philanthropists (1914, 1955); Edgar L. Collis and Major Greenwood's The health of the industrial worker (1921); Frank W. White's 'Natural and social selection: a "Blue-Book" analysis' (1928); George C.M. M'Gonigle and J. Kirby's Poverty and public health (1936); John Boyd Orr's Food, health and income (1936, 1937); Wal Hannington's The problem of distressed areas (1937); Margery Spring Rice's Working-class wives: Their health and conditions (1939); William Beveridge's Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942); Richard Titmuss' Birth, poverty and wealth (1943); J.N. Morris' Health (1944); John Hewetson's Ill-health, poverty and the state (1946); Aneurin Bevan's In place of fear (1947); Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend's The poor and the poorest (1965); Robert Roberts' The classic slum: Salford life in the first quarter of the century (1971); Julian Tudor Hart's 'The inverse care law' (1971); Inequalities in health: Report of a Research Working Group chaired by Sir Douglas Black (The Black Report) (1980); Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health (The Acheson Report) (1998).

"The editors of this volume are to be congratulated on the quality of the selections from classics texts on poverty, inequality and health in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." International Journal of Epidemiology