Poverty and Compassion
McWilliams, Wilson Carey
WHEN EVERYONE WAS A LIBERAL POVERTY AND COMPASSION The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians Gertrude Himmelfarb Knopf, $30, 475 pp. Wilson Carey McWilliams For centuries, the poor...
...Gertrude Himmelfarb has her own ideas, heaven knows, about the proper approach to poverty, and—a good fighter—she brings a special zest to her criticism of various Marxists and partisans of "value free" social science...
...Events added their own impetus...
...The prime concern of the reformers was for those among the poor who possessed at least the foundation of the decencies and who suffered, not from irregular habits, but from irregular and inadequate work...
...Himmelfarb's subjects are a gorgeously diverse lot Charles Booth, a businessman turned researcher and reformer...
...Economic growth weakened the plea of scarcity, while science pushed back the boundary of the conceivable...
...Green and John Stuart Mill, theorists who reformulated liberal political philosophy...
...It goes without saying that there was also foolishness and error in late Victorian thought, but contemporary liberals—disoriented and not a little demoralized themselves— can benefit from the encounter with their more confident predecessors...
...she lets us hear them speak in their own voices and on their own terms, and in her writing intel lectual history becomes a dialogue between the times...
...Possibility made duty incandescent: laissez-faire lost moral authority, and reformers hoped for a social science which could add to compassion the discipline, prestige, and force of research and method...
...The late Victorian reformers, however, never let form swallow substance: they saw human excellence as the goal of policy, and while they hoped to reduce material want, their higher aim was to secure for the poor a dignified place in civil life...
...And, seeking those necessary supports for moral freedom, the late Victorians came to look toward the state...
...to the Left at least as much as to the Right, all the more because the working class shared in the regard for those common decencies we sometimes call "bourgeois...
...the Fabians, Henry George, and the Salvation Army—mostly middle class, all answering to very Victorian consciences and united by an essentially moral sensibility and by faith in the power of ideas...
...In the logic of laissezfaire, poverty marks some defect of character or ability...
...No one has a better ear for the late Victorians...
...Wilson Carey McWilliams For centuries, the poor were always with us, a normal and expected feature of the political landscape, until late nineteenthcentury reformers redefined poverty as a problem to be ameliorated or solved...
...Most reformers agreed with some version of T.H...
...We are still at it, fitfully, and the controversies of the late Victorians are family arguments for us, very much at issue in our political life...
...And in exploring that past, any reader will be fortunate to have Himmel farb for a guide...
...Green's argument that liberty is "positive," no mere absence of restraint but the ability to develop one's best self, a teaching that provided a cornerstone for modern liberalism...
...The grace of Himmelfarb's Poverty and Compassion, however, proceeds from her conviction that the past has something to teach the present...
...This underclass— Booth called it the "very poor"—would likely be permanently dependent, and the late Victorians generally followed Booth in arguing that it be given relief only under close supervision...
...Yet the reformers recognized that, in addition to steady jobs at living wages, the decent poor (and even the comfortable working class) need to be protected against the economic competition and moral laxity of the underclass...
...q Commonweal 14 February /992: 25...
...But liberalism—and, as Himmelfarb indicates, most of the late Victorians were liberals, whatever they called themselves —is not at ease with judgments about the soul...
...the late Victorian reformers, by contrast, saw poverty as the arena of a desperate, often defeated, struggle for propriety, and by so doing, they "remoralized" the poor...
...As Himmelfarb observes, the language of morality and the soul belonged (as it still naturally belongs...
...Alfred Marshall, who aspired to an "economics of chivalry...
...It was a time of general improvement, as Himmelfarb shows, and although the poor benefited, progress also chipped away at society's excuses for the existence of poverty...
...In a similar way, the American "War on Poverty" slipped into an emphasis on income transfers rather than employment, forgetting Michael Harrington's warning 24: 14 February 1992 Commonweal that conspires with degradation as it inspires rage...
...The very "methodism" of social science, so attractive to Himmelfarb's reformers, encouraged the tendency to follow Seebohm Rowntree in defining poverty in terms of income, distinctions of quantity displacing Booth's hierarchy of qualities...
...Some of the poor, Charles Booth acknowledged, did suffer from moral "irregularities," and others, victimized by shattered or brutal families, were probably damaged beyond repair...
...Dignity involves giving as well as getting, and it includes being held to standards and responsibilities which are within reach but stretch the muscles...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 3
