[In the following review, Meacham asserts that Poverty and Compassion is a worthwhile work, but comments that Himmelfarb oversimplifies the issues in order to support her own arguments.]

Like E. P. Thompson, a historian for whom she has little use, Gertrude Himmelfarb is an enemy of historical condescension. Thompson, in The Making of The English Working Class (1963), asked his readers to take the radicals and visionaries he discussed with the seriousness their convictions deserved and to take them on their own terms. So with Himmelfarb. She insists, in this work [Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians], that late-Victorian philanthropists and social theorists had important things to say and that their deeds produced ameliorative social change of considerable magnitude.

Her quarrel with Marxists—Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Gareth Stedman-Jones, and others—is that their dedication to the construct of class and class consciousness has compelled them to interpret her reformers as little more than the predetermined and reflexive voices of economic structure. Her equally serious quarrel with historians of the British welfare state—Bentley Gilbert, for example—is that their Whiggish fixation on the path from an individualist, moralistic past to a collectivist, value-free present has precluded them from an appreciation of the achievements of men like Charles Booth and T. H. Green, who thought it only right to link morality with social policy. Welfare statists and their historians, Himmelfarb contends, by devising and celebrating “value-free” reform, have condescended to those whose words and deeds have stood opposed to that goal.

Although she oversimplifies to make her case, Himmelfarb has written a book as worthy of attention as her equally provocative study of early nineteenth-century social reform, The Idea of Poverty (1984). She is at her best when linking the ideas of men like Green and Alfred Marshall with those of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith. Few can weave analysis of this sort as surely or as elegantly as she. Disappointingly, however, she has followed an urge to include short chapters on movements that seem no more than peripheral to her argument; her treatment of land nationalization and religious socialism are cases in point.

To prove her thesis, Himmelfarb rightly spends considerable time discussing the work of Charles Booth, whose seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People in London (1889-1903) has often been understood as the genesis of value-free scientific social analysis. She argues, however, that Booth never for a moment imagined that morality and social science ought not to be conjoined: “Nor would he have thought it scientific to ignore the objective, empirical, demonstrable facts about the poor—moral and religious facts as well as economic and social facts” (p. 149). It is because he thought in this way that Himmelfarb admires him.

She admires Booth as well—as she admires the all but universally disparaged Charity Organisation Society—for insisting that reformers could not address the needs of one monolithic working class but instead must design programs that would respond to the problems peculiar to each of the six categories into which Booth divided London's workers and their families. Here, according to Himmelfarb, “lies the essential ideological import of Booth's work” (p. 167), separating him from Marxists, who spoke of a working “class” and not “classes,” and from Welfare Statists, who insisted that class divisions mattered little since all citizens should together enjoy a universal system of social services. Yet how does one square Himmelfarb's assertion with the fact that Booth argued for old age pensions “to be given to everyone regardless of means or need” (p. 166)?

Himmelfarb thinks little of the Fabians. She points out, however, that far from advocating value-free social services—and hence far from being architects of the welfare state—they professed a morality as insistent as that of the Charity Organisation Society. They, too, wanted improved conduct in return for increased benefits. Himmelfarb, however, attacks the Fabians, and in particular Beatrice Webb, for arguing in the same fashion as those whom she admires. Indeed, her treatment of the Fabians smacks of a desire, echoing in its tone some of Margaret Thatcher's shriller pronouncements, to do little more than put them in their place. She belabors the Fabians for their aversion to democracy: “They were all in favor of government for the people but not necessarily government of or by the people” (p. 369). So, in fact, were men such as Green, unless the electorate was prepared to accept his prescriptive course for the attainment of Idealist “citizenship.”

Himmelfarb's heroes and heroines, despite their worthy intentions and despite the often impressive results of their thoughts and labors, did what she insists her readers must not do: they condescended. They assumed themselves “disinterested”—above class—and therefore particularly suited to the business of social reform, of deciding for others what was best for them. Yet they were no more disinterested than any other class of late Victorians. They belonged to one of the several middle classes that existed alongside the several working classes. And they spoke with the authoritative voice of their class, a voice that, despite its authority, nevertheless trembled when it pronounced the word “democracy.”