The idea of poverty: England in the early industrial age.

MANY YEARS from now, when some new Macaulay begins to set down the history of our age, what will he take to be twentieth-century man's view of poverty? Relying on contemporary sources, he would absorb a variety of impressions: that Ronald Reagan is in favor of it, that businessmen are indifferent to it, that social workers cynically make a living off it, and that no one (with the possible exception of Mother Teresa) actually is doing anything about it. The question of just what ought to be done is subject to even more confusion.

That something ought to be done, however, this hypothetical historian would find almost universally acknowledged, even in the opposition of libertarians conscious of their minority status. So ingrained is this assumption today that it is easy to forget that such was not always the case, and that most of our attitudes have some root in the debates and social experiments that characterized early industrial England. In The Idea of Poverty, Gertrude Himmelfarb returns to the decades following the Industrial Revolution (roughly, 1760 to 1850), "extract[ing] from that milieu" what premises about poverty lay underneath all the debates, literature, and reforms of the period.

Miss Himmelfarb comes to the task eminently, if not uniquely, qualified. Her previous works on Acton, Mill, Darwin, and Malthus have established her as a historian of the first rank; her Victorian Minds was nominated for a National Book Award in 1969. Rolling up her sleeves, she labors here to present English poverty in the early industrial age as its contemporaries saw it, bringing to her effort the same deftness of style and command of subject evident in all her writing.

Beginning with pre-industrial England, she notes that poverty then was a moral, as opposed to a social, concern: While society accepted it as natural ("The poor always ye have with you") and expected the poor to bear it graciously, it was equally the obligation of the affluent to assist their less fortunate brethren. But with the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1601--which stood, with amendments, for three and a half centuries, until the advent of the Welfare State--the English recognized a new principle, that of government responsibility for the poor; the state becoming, in Miss Himmelfarb's words, "the repositor of the national conscience."

This new principle subsequently became the focus of heated national debate, with almost every great figure of the time having his say and drawing his own distinctions between the types of poor people. Against the temptation to read history backward, Miss Himmelfarb presents this debate through the eyes of those involved, attending "to the facts available to them and in the form they were available." Where these men and women were wrong they were not necessarily stupid, and Miss Himmelfarb demonstrates how they came to think as they did and what made their notions plausible.

The Idea of Poverty consists of four major sections. The first deals with England's transformation into a country "where compassion had become public policy," and what Adam Smith and Malthus made of it; the second with the reform of the Poor Laws and the distinction between paupers and the poor; the third with the frightening "culture of poverty" (what we might now call "the underclass"); and the fourth with how the poor were portrayed in fiction. Plates of cartoons, caricatures, and illustrations help fill out the general picture.

The problem of poverty (the phrasing indicates the new view) was given its most optimistic prescription by Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations delineated how an expanding, progressive economy would benefit all levels of society. "He was arguing, at least implicitly, against those of his contemporaries who denied the poor the capacity and opportunity to achieve those 'middle-class values,'" Miss Himmelfarb writes, noting that Smith, unlike Burke--who was much more laissezfaire on the matter--never attacked the Poor Laws themselves, opposing only certain restrictions associated with them.

Oddly enough it was a self-professed disciple of Smith, Thomas Malthus, who overturned Smith's optimism by introducing the "principle of population" (more people, less bread), which would set a gloomy tone for the next several decades. At least part of this anxiety derived from the strangeness of those new expressions of poverty engendered by industrialism: more things to be deprived of, a new concentration of the poor (i.e., slums), an increasingly sharp contrast with the wealthy. The inherent irony of a prospering nation is that the problem of the poor grows ever more pressing, intractable, even intolerable.

Malthus opposed the Poor Laws because he thought relief only encouraged the poor to breed and thus increased their deprivations, and even Tocqueville saw in any "permanent, regular administrative system" of public assistance the potential polarization of society, with the resentful rich supporting the sullen poor. Riots at the time gave some credence to these fears. Amid much controversy, therefore, the New Poor Laws were passed in 1934 to correct some of the flaws in the administration of the old, but, more important, to mark that "broad line of distinction between those who were merely poor and those for whom poverty was a way of life."

With this distinction the reformers hoped to save the poor from falling into the vicious trap of pauperism, by making the latter "so odious that no respectable poor man would be tempted by it." Around the pauper hovered the image of the workhouse, so feared and despised that it retains even today its loathsome connotations. Unfortunately, the taint of pauperism was so strong that it tarnished the poor as well; Disraeli said that the reform "announces to the world that in England poverty is a crime."

Indeed, there was no lack of opposition to the reform. A radical Tory like thomas Carlyle could write movingly about "the workers" and rail against the "pig philosophers" of materialism, while the populist William Cobbett's longings for a hearty Olde England took the form of anti-industrialism. In due course opposition gave birth to that loose association known as the Chartist Movement, whose "Six Points" called for enfranchisement of the people and proudly claimed to speak only on behalf of the worker.

Perhaps the book's most striking section is the one that deals with the myriad ways in which the poor were depicted in the literature of the day, both high and low. Here Miss Himmelfarb sets herself apart from the complacency of many a modern critic:

It is sometimes said that the novelists moralized the poor, saw them through the lens of their own middle-class morality. So they did. They moralized the poor just as they moralized the rich. If there were deserving poor, there were also deserving rich; if there were vicious, criminal poor, there were vicious, criminal rich; if the poor had their villains and heroes, and more who were something of both, so did the rich. To think it "middle-class" to ascribe to the poor a moral identity that made them, in this respect at least, the peers of the rich, is a measure of how far we have come from the Victorians, how radically we have redefined the terms of moral discourse--and redefined them, perhaps, not entirely in the interests or to the credit of the poor.

It is the only kind of judgment rendered in the book, her verdict on those who presume to judge the past against the standards of the present.

At times the temptation is to say, "Ah, but . . ."--but you will be pulled up short, because Miss Himmelfarb has not there first, putting forth what she does not mean as well as what she means. Her explanatory notes and anecdotes at the bottom of the page are delightful, for instance when she points out that by lowering the price of beer in 1830 the English hoped to keep the poor away from gin. The promise of a follow-up volume is a pleasant prospect.

"History," Miss Himmelfarb writes, "is full of discrepancies between what historians beleive to be fact and what contemporaries thought to be such." It is a measure of her competence that in The Idea of Poverty she has largely succeeded in the task of closing this gap. More significantly, it is a measure of the book's merit that a work so faithful to the past should find so many echoes in the present.