POVERTY IN 19th CENTURY SCOTLAND This engraving from the 1830s shows the Town's Hospital and Poorhouse, built in 1733 on Great Clyde Street The economic and social changes ushered in by industrialisation dramatised the problem of poverty in Scotland by concentrating it in large pockets within the rapidly growing urban centres. The boom and bust economics of the free market added to the problem as it brought with it periodic mass unemployment which in a pre-welfare society left thousands of workers in poverty. The extent of the social devastation of mass unemployment in Victorian Scotland can be grasped from a comment by the Provost of Paisley made at the height of the 1842 depression: "Unemployment was the rule .... few workmen of Paisley were employed: they were broken up and found to be wandering about in every town in the country, begging for bread, independent of those thousands whom they had at home supported by charity". Obviously the periodic occurrence of m