From Daniel Johnson, in his defense of the great historian against the moronic charge that she is a “great doyenne of reactionary history”:

It was the concatenation of freedom, both political and economic, democratic representation, and the rule of law, together with the revival of Judaeo-Christian morality that made it possible for the “idea of poverty” to take hold of the “moral imagination” of Victorian society on a scale that previously did not exist. And the historian who has done most to teach us about this revolution in sensibility is actually an American: Gertrude Himmelfarb. (The New York Sun)