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The Discovery of Poverty
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20178 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,283 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
POVERTY AND COMPASSION
The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians
Gertrude Himmelfarb
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991
496 pp., $30.00
No one who has seen homeless men and women huddled in the doorways of our city streets, no one who has traveled the back roads of developing nations, no one who has stepped into the emergency room of an urban hospital has any need of enlightenment about the prevalence of poverty in our time or the magnitude of its effects on our social, political, and economic institutions. For many of us, poverty inspires feelings of compassion that lead us to contribute money and time to such organizations as United Way, CARE, or Save the Children. Yet few of us believe that even the most ardent efforts of philanthropists can alleviate the pervasive underlying causes of poverty. The poor have always been with us, the Bible tells us; and so, we think has the idea of poverty as a social problem.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, corrects that assumption. Only as recently as the nineteenth century, she concludes, did social reformers and critics come to identify poverty as a distinct social issue and devise a scientific approach to charity. Victorians wanted to organize the means of aiding poor people, to distinguish between those worthy of help and those who they believed were unredeemable. They wanted, in effect, "to infuse a sense of proportion into the sentiment of compassion, to make compassion proportionate to and compatible with the proper ends of social policy."
Late Victorians did not respond to suffering any more or less intensely than did their predecessors. But with their faith in progress, science, and the efficacy of social reform, they believed that they could engineer philanthropy in new ways. They understood that feelings of compassion gave satisfaction to the benefactor, but they wished instead that benefactors could be persuaded that "to do good to others" was more important than to feel good themselves. "Indeed," says Himmelfarb, "they were painfully aware that it was sometimes necessary to feel bad in order to do good--to curb their own compassion and restrain their benevolent impulses in the best interest of those they were trying to serve."
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