Absolute poverty among working households in Britain was nearly eliminated well before the Welfare State.

See Bonus Quotation of the Day from Cafe Hayek. 

"from page 47 of the newly published final volume – Bourgeois Equality – of Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s soaring trilogy on the essence and role of bourgeois values in modern life (link added):

As the economic historians Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell concluded in their 2010 study of “the reduction, almost to elimination, of absolute poverty among working households in Britain between 1904 and 1937”: “The elimination of grinding poverty among working families was almost complete by the late thirties, well before the Welfare State.”"