Books, Arts & Manners: The Poor in Perspective

The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Knopf, 596 pp., $25 Many years from now, when some new Macaulay begins to set down the history of our age, what will he take to be twentieth-century man’s view of poverty? Relying on contemporary sources, he would absorb a variety of impressions: that Ronald Reagan is in favor of it, that businessmen are indifferent to it, that social workers cynically make a living off it, and that no one (with the possible exception of Mother Teresa) actually is doing anything about it. The question of just what ought to be done is subject to even more confusion.

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William McGurn

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Alexis de Tocqueville

Edmund Burke

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The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Knopf, 596 pp., $25 Many years from now, when some new Macaulay begins to set down the history of our age, what will he take to be twentieth-century man’s view of poverty? Relying on contemporary sources, he would absorb a variety of impressions: that Ronald Reagan is in favor of it, that businessmen are indifferent to it, that social workers cynically make a living off it, and that no one (with the possible exception of Mother Teresa) actually is doing anything about it. The question of just what ought to be done is subject to even more confusion.