Sir Frederick Eden, 2nd Baronet

He explained the circumstances that led him to do the research: The difficulties which the labouring classes experienced, from the high price of grain, and of provisions in general, as well as of cloathing [sic] and fuel, during the years 1794 and 1795, induced me, from motives both of benevolence and personal curiosity, to investigate their conditions in various parts of the kingdom.

Eden wrote at the beginning of the book: These and many similar questions [relating to the poor laws] cannot, as it seems to me, be fully and satisfactorily answered, unless many minute circumstances are previously stated, which have been rarely sufficiently attended to in the plausible and ingenious but unsolid speculations of several merely theoretic reasoners.

With a large appendix; containing a comparative and chronological table of the prices of labour, of provisions, and of other commodities; an account of the poor in Scotland; and many original documents on subjects of national importance.

In The Literature of Political Economy McCulloch wrote of Eden's work "Altogether, this is the grand storehouse of information respecting the labouring classes of England, and should have a prominent place in every library."

In Capital, Marx cites Eden: "It may, perhaps be worthy the attention of the public to consider, whether any manufacture, which, in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages and workhouses should be ransacked for poor children; that they should be employed by turns during the greater part of the night and robbed of that rest which, though indispensable to all, is most required by the young; and that numbers of both sexes, of different ages and dispositions, should be collected together in such a manner that the contagion of example cannot but lead to profligacy and debauchery; will add to the sum of individual or national felicity?