SOURCE: Porter, Roy. “Charitable Contributions.” New Republic 205, no. 4010 (25 November 1991): 34-7.

[In the following review, Porter asserts that Himmelfarb's Poverty and Compassion lacks a cohesive, unifying argument, and that it fails to live up to the high standard of scholarship established in The Idea of Poverty.]

Since the 1950s Gertrude Himmelfarb has built a formidable reputation as an explorer of the nineteenth-century mind. A ruthless debunker of shoddy reasoning and double-speak, past and present, Himmelfarb has made it her mission to lay bare the prejudices of the founding fathers of modernity; her forte is exploding their pretensions with deadly elegance. The shallow, rationalist materialism of Jeremy Bentham and his haunted house of Utility; the vaunted liberalism of John Stuart Mill, which turns out to be exceedingly illiberal; the soulless scientism of Darwinian evolution, a creed that, for all its emancipatory boasts, left its author emotionally desiccated and mankind adrift: time and again Himmelfarb has delighted in showing that the prized systems of progressives were jerry-built, their grand truths crudely self-serving, too frequently the work of decidedly queer ideologues.

Always wary of trendy intellectual agendas, as in her The New History and the Old (1987), Himmelfarb became the scourge of the smug, liberal intelligentsia so sure of its emancipatory destiny in Victorian times, and, by implication, in the Kennedy era. She never suffered fools gladly, especially those of the left-leaning historical establishment, and became the doyenne of the trenchant essay or the heftier demolition job, as in her Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) and On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (1974). But would she produce something more ambitious and permanent? These doubts were dispelled by The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, published in 1984, a profound and provoking analysis of social change, public policy, and economic philosophy spanning the years from Adam Smith, through Malthus and Ricardo, to the mid-nineteenth century.

Himmelfarb attacked the whole herd of sacred cows, received opinions, and half-truths tethered in the largely leftish pastures of British academe. Despite authorities such as Eric Hobsbawm, the “pessimist view” that saw working-class living standards declining, even plummeting, as a consequence of the rise of industrial capitalism was (she declared) largely rhetoric, buoyed up by deft factual sleight of hand, Marxist dogma, and a weird schadenfreude; the unseemly eagerness of Marxists to maximize the miseries of the masses has long perplexed Himmelfarb. (On the standard-of-living debate, her intuitions are borne out by recent contributions, such as the magisterial anthropometric investigation by Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health, and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750-1980, which appeared last year.)

The poor, Himmelfarb insisted, were not the creation of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, classical political economists may have been right to contend that poverty was the side effect of a traditional parish welfare system that encouraged profligacy and dependency by extending automatic rights of relief to the idle. Strange indeed, Himmelfarb observed, to find sentimental socialists, in this century and the last, championing the entitlement of the poor to their poverty, rather than showing sympathy for the earnest attempts of bourgeois economists to eradicate indigence, as in the New Poor Law of 1834. By universalizing the workhouse with its “less eligibility” sanction, the new legislation, flinty-hearted no doubt, shrewdly aimed to drive a wedge between “paupers,” regarded as the mainly “undeserving” indigent, ripe for institutional segregation, and the “laboring poor,” active in the labor market, who would thereby be delivered from the shame of indigence. Hankering after an outmoded “moral economy,” and fixated upon “revolution” as the true destiny of the proletariat, self-styled people's historians have all too often shown condescension toward those workers, the “aristocracy of labor,” who were at last achieving some dignity within the industrial economy and its self-help politics. In their doctrinaire manner, they interpreted gradual, partial, and pragmatic improvements as social control or selling out.

Himmelfarb's readings of the ideologies of poverty in early industrialism were a little tendentious, but she demonstrated, beyond any shadow of doubt, that poverty could not blithely be treated as some monster-brood of the new factory system and its “dismal science,” destined to be destroyed only by the purifying blood of revolution in the socialist millennium. It was, rather, a knotty problem, demanding arduous intellectual explication. A companion volume was promised, which would explore late Victorian poverty in theory and practice; and we have been eagerly awaiting Himmelfarb's findings, certain that they would be framed to serve at the same time as verdicts on the mythologies of the left today, or rather—in a decade in which the conservative cause carried all before it in the West and in which, farther East, Marxism has finally dug its own grave—as their funeral orations.

In the event, that follow-up volume (Himmelfarb admits to some changes of plan in the interim) is a damp squib. Though one might cross swords with its thesis, its details, or its agenda, The Idea of Poverty possessed tremendous intellectual power, with its insistence on the intractability of the problem of poverty, and its luminous analyses of the self-defeating nature of well-meaning attempts to resolve it. Poverty and Compassion, by contrast, is altogether more lightweight, a rather haphazard assemblage of brief and occasionally hackneyed essays loosely strung together.

We are taken on guided tours of the Salvation Army, the Charity Organization Society, and Toynbee Hall. We meet the saintly Canon Barnett and the suspicious Dr. Barnardo, who did a touch too well out of the orphans' homes that bear his name. We encounter Positivism, Christian Socialism, and Fabianism; Henry George (of “single tax” fame) and the Oxford Idealist T. H. Green; Octavia Hill and her bevy of improving rent-collectors, Stewart Headlam, the defrocked “sacramental socialist,” and H. M. Hyndmann, the frock-coated, top-hatted revolutionist; even John Stuart Mill makes a guest appearance. It is a colorful cast, but most of the portraits are familiar, and flashing by at great speed they leave one in some doubt about the raison d'être of the enterprise as a whole.

Only Charles Booth, author of the monumental seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People in London (1889-1903), and to a lesser extent his younger contemporary Seebohm Rowntree, the northern chocolate manufacturer, receive sustained and engaged attention. Himmelfarb rightly regards Booth as engineering a key shift in the conceptualization of wealth and its distribution in the late nineteenth century. The old problem of the “poor,” Booth perceived—and Himmelfarb endorses his perception—had at long last been solved, though not, of course, in the sense that everyone was now rolling in money. But for the bulk of the laboring classes, Booth argued, standards of living were substantially and steadily rising (more Hobsbawm-hammering here).

In other words, the working classes were ceasing to be the laboring poor. Despite shock-horror publications like Andrew Mearn's The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, dire destitution had become localized. Among the eight grades of society he tabulated, Booth singled out Class A (loafers, ruffians, the semi-criminal) and Class B (hopelessly feckless casual workers) as the “leisure class of the poor.” In many cases suffering some hereditary taint, such rabble only served to depress Class C, the other major group subsisting beneath the “line of poverty,” honest folk in casual employments (dock laborers, porters, and so on). The most practical policy would therefore be to raise Class C workers above the poverty line, which could be achieved by removing the A and B dregs to labor colonies as “servants of the state” under a system of “state slavery.” In their salutary absence, the respectable working classes could continue to climb in self-esteem in a generally thriving capitalist economy.

Booth is a Himmelfarbian hero: a realist possessed of authentic social discernment derived from a vast labor of empirical social science, his “arithmetic of woe.” It was his merit, she argues, to comprehend that poverty was the product not of capitalism but of the poor. “While the problem of 1834 was the problem of pauperism,” the great economist Alfred Marshall aptly observed, “the problem of 1893 is the problem of poverty.” But Booth is also a crucial figure for Himmelfarb in another, and possibly more equivocal, way. She is fascinated by Booth's “compassion.”

Like so many of his opulent, educated, dynamic peers, Booth, the owner of a shipping line, did not take the easy road of power and glory, but directed his energies, sympathies, and finances to social issues. He mingled and even lodged with the populace. Investigate, analyze, help: these were Booth's directives, and similar drives galvanized scores of Victorian men and women of conscience, Christian and secular, activists and analysts, builders of model dwellings or systems of social science.

Their motives were complicated, their targets sometimes rather tortured. Arnold Toynbee, social prophet and disciple of the moral evangelical T. H. Green, slummed it, in part to expiate class guilt. “We—the middle classes, I mean, not merely the rich—we have neglected you,” he confessed to the working men who attended his East End lectures:

Instead of justice we have offered you charity and instead of sympathy, we have offered you hard and unreal advice; but I think we are changing. … I think that many of us would spend our lives in your service. You have—I say it clearly and advisedly—you have to forgive us, for we have wronged you; we have sinned against you grievously—not knowing always; but still we have sinned, and let us confess it; but if you will forgive us—nay, whether you will forgive us or not—we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service, and we cannot do more.

If this makes us squirm—especially when we hear the quid pro quo that Toynbee went on to demand: his sacrifices would be wasted, he insisted, unless his audience raised the tone of their lives!—Himmelfarb is careful to resist the temptation to reduce elite altruism to guilt, to projections of Oedipal hatred, or, following certain left-wing formulations, to strategies of social control.

And yet aristocratic philanthropy poses questions. Himmelfarb's worthies invested vast intellectual and emotional energies in researching and improving the lot of the poor—and, Himmelfarb stresses, it never occurred to these earnest Victorians that facts and feelings, moral concerns and mathematical calculations, ought to be kept apart. (It is our notion of “value-free social science” that is peculiar.) But why they devoted themselves to the poor remains problematic. And so, too, do Himmelfarb's attitudes.

For in some of her figures such bourgeoisie oblige tends to be presented by Himmelfarb as precious, self-indulgent, and faintly ludicrous. Toynbee Hall's founders were confident that a mission settlement in darkest Whitechapel would serve to civilize the natives, thanks to the conspicuous gentility of the Oxford toffs slumming it there. Perhaps it was also morbidly self-destructive. The sentimental socialism of the salon possibly provided cement for an otherwise hyperindividualistic, atomized society. But such “heart burning of the aristocrat” (the formula is Marx's) may also have been a kind of class treason, a failure of nerve among the Olympians, and it may have contributed to Britain's decline.

In general, Himmelfarb is not dogmatic. Not so, however, about the Fabians, that unbearably superior elite, who, according to their leading light Sidney Webb, comprised “the Society of Jesus of Socialism.” Himmelfarb has no difficulty sketching a wholly negative portrait of these latter-day benevolent despots, offspring of Comtian positivists, bourgeois, bohemian, and opinionated, never doubting their own rectitude and omniscience, believing in government of the people, for the people, but preferably not by the people. (By the Fabians instead, of course.) Snobbishly disdainful toward the masses (the poor were hateful, George Bernard Shaw insisted, which is why they had to be abolished), they make almost too easy a target.

And they provide a convenient opportunity for Himmelfarb, at long last, twenty pages before the close of her book, to reveal her hand. The Fabians, she assures us, were the “architects” of welfare socialism: “the welfare state is inexplicable without Fabianism.” In other words, so Himmelfarb seems to be arguing, the flirtation with socialism, that potentially dangerous treason within the ranks of the Victorian elite, finally prepared the ground for a tiny core of genuinely dangerous ideologues, from whose deplorable designs the British Welfare State emerged.

The supposed evils of the “nanny state” are thus explained in terms of their origin. But this reading hardly holds water. The welfare state in Britain owes its rise to a multitude of sources—some intellectual and institutional (including liberalism and trade unionism, not just Fabianism), but largely practical and political: the auctioneering of party politics and electioneering; the effects, crippling yet centralizing, of two world wars; the growing crisis of the late-industrial economy. There is something willful in singling out Fabianism to explain the welfare state and its imputed evils. To grant them such influence is to take them wholly at their own evaluation.

“The welfare state did not abolish poverty,” Himmelfarb declares—hence its need to reintroduce supplementary benefits, or, as she puts it, to revert to the outdoor relief of the old poor law. This is, however, an intemperate judgment. How rapidly, how comprehensively, could the Welfare State, inaugurated in 1945, be expected to resolve an age-old problem? What did happen after 1945, though Himmelfarb does not mention this, is that the differentials between rich and poor became narrower. By contrast, during the twelve years since Thatcher began dismantling that Welfare State in the name of “Victorian values”—an admiration for market economics and a repudiation not just of socialism but of society itself (“There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families”)—cardboard cities of the destitute of a kind familiar to Mayhew have mushroomed in the metropolis, and poverty has once more increased. Between 1979 and 1989, the poorest 20 percent in Britain lost £160 per year in disposable income while the richest 20 percent gained £7,986. This followed Thatcher's “less eligibility” principles. On cutting unemployment benefits, she declared, “I believe it is right to have a larger difference between those in work and those out of work.”

Only left-wing ideologues, past and present, are the targets of Himmelfarb's waspish wit. Right-wing pundits of poverty escape censure. Yet it would be equally easy to demolish the fantasies about the indigent advanced by late Victorian reactionaries. Many of them were howling eugenicists convinced that the poor were degenerate stock threatening the nation with imminent racial suicide, and sure that improvement in working-class wages would sound the death knell of morals and civilization. Poverty and Compassion is not only a perceptive book, it is also a slightly annoying one, because of its blind spots, which are most extravagantly displayed in its concluding polemic, where Himmelfarb crassly aims to discredit welfare politics by crudely fathering them onto an obnoxious band of ideologues.

Still, it is also a work of genuine penetration, thanks to the powerful moral imagination that Himmelfarb trains on Victorian minds confronting contemporary ills. They had the perspicacity to recognize that problems were complex: personal but also structural, material but also moral. Poverty had much to do with the economy, but it also had something to do with the poor. Money was part of the solution, but so too was moralization. Here the Victorians have not a little to teach us. And so does Himmelfarb's general avoidance of easy moral judgments on eminent Victorians. After reading her brace of books, no one can any longer pretend that poverty is a simple fact in itself, or that it is ripe for ready solutions.