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which despite improving living standards demoralized many of the
working classes and bestowed on even the respectable and indepen–
dent poor the stigma of paupers. For her as for Disraeli, to whom she
devotes a well-argued chapter, the issue was more than material
poverty, it was one of "disposition as well as condition, of moral
rights and duties, [and of] social obligations" - the making of "con–
nections" between the rich and the poor so as to provide a sense of
community. Guilt and fear no less than hardhearted neglect are the
basis for separation and antagonism, not for connections. Moreover,
like Egremont, the hero of Disraeli's novel
Sybil-
and like Adam
Smith - she clearly believes that the condition of the poor can be
bettered, in Egremont's words, "not by levelling the Few, but by
elevating the Many."
Himmelfarb displays the complexities of the problems facing
historians of the poor and of the working classes as well as the short–
comings and biases of the practitioners of the new model. She
describes the chief phases of development of English poverty policy
between 1750 and 1850: the unique system of parish relief for the
poor initiated in the first decade of the seventeenth century; its trans–
formation in the 1790s, the Speenhamland plan which sought to pro–
vide wage supplements, but resulted in the unforeseen consequences
of support for idleness and illegitimacy; and the act of 1834 that at–
tempted to rectify these defects, and in so doing aroused the sym–
pathy and sense of guilt which transformed itself into the age of com–
passion in which the liberal West lives today.
Himmelfarb uncovers what contemporaries (who include Tom
Paine and Edmund Burke, Carlyle, Cobbett, and the Chartists
among others) actually meant by poverty, who the various classes of
the poor really were, and what people of the time believed ought to
be done to relieve them.
In
so doing, she demonstrates, to scholars
and readers who are not doctrinally committed to the presuppositions
of the new model history, its ambiguities and inadequacies, its shift–
ing definitions, arbitrary selection of evidence, and far from impar–
tial shaping of results.
Himmelfarb examines the rival visions of the political
economists Adam Smith and T. R. Malthus which in the nineteenth
century, as now, inform, and perhaps dominate, the debate on
poverty. Smith saw the poor as an order of responsible persons, in
exchange for whose labor a progressive economy would make possi–
ble both material and moral improvement. For Malthus, distrustful
of the new industrial system, such progress was suspect: the produc-
