Volume 38, Number 18 · November 7, 1991
Do-Gooders
By Alan Ryan
Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians
by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Knopf, 475 pp., $30.00
Like the twentieth-century United States, Victorian England was a society that combined an average level of prosperity far above anything the world had ever seen with pockets of poverty and misery that periodically became the occurrence of a high level of moral, intellectual, and political anxiety. In neither case was it the bare fact of inequality that provoked the anxiety. The middle- and upper-class academics, investigators, and social workers who debated the issue of poverty and its resolution in Victorian England did not think Christ had meant them to ignore the inhabitants of London's East End slums when he said, 'The poor you have always with you,' but they rarely doubted that there would always be a social, economic, and political hierarchy of some kind.
Review, 4449 words
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