Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians

National Review, Oct 21, 1991 by James Bowman

THE trouble with socialism, T. S. Eliot said, is that it's an attempt "to design a system so perfect that no one will have to be good." Whatever may be the strictly economic and practical shortcomings of the various systems designed with that end in view, Eliot points us in the direction of their common conceptual flaw. It is a kind of intellectual hubris (even if it were not also folly) to suppose that moral responsibility is so readily derivable from the proper material conditions.

But it is important to recognize that Eliot, the modernist, was reacting against a peculiarly modernist version of socialism. Gertrude Himmelfarb's lucidly written, exhaustively researched follow-up to The Idea of Poverty shows that the Victorians, with whom Eliot had such ambivalent relations, understood the term very differently. For then the word "socialist" was commonly used to mean little more than vaguely reformist. And the one thing that nearly all socialists had in common both with each other and with the "individualists" who opposed them was that their thought was very firmly rooted in ideas of morality and individual responsibility.

This must be borne in mind to understand Sir William Harcourt's famous assertion in 19888 that "We are all socialists now." That, it could be said, was another way of referring to what Beatrice Webb called "the time spirit"--in which social problems were seen from both sides of the political arena as calling forth science and morality in combination. Such was the consensus in the 1880s--the time of the great "rediscovery" of the problem of poverty when, paradoxically, the condition of the poor themselves was undergoing steady improvement. What we now understand as socialism, though it was foreshadowed by Marx and others, was not influential until the present century.

If this book has a hero it is Charles Booth of the Booth Steamship Company of Liverpool, who dominates the first half of it. His philanthropic activities were devoted to a massive study of the London poor, Life and Labor of the People in London, published in 17 volumes between 1889 and 1902. Like so many other Victorian worthies, Booth seems to have been capable of prodigies of intellectual effort--in spite of ill health and full-time employment with the family firm. Miss Himmelfarb is full of admiration for his industry but more for his achievement in "the creation of a new typology, as it were, of poverty."

He was the first, that is, to produce reliable statistics about poverty which could be used to differentiate between different classes of the poor. He discerned in late Victorian London eight economic classes, to which he assigned the letters A through H. The "comfortable" working classes, E and F, together with the middle and upper classes, G and H, made up something over 69 per cent of the population. "The poor" in classes A through D made up the rest. Thus did Booth acquire the reputation, first, of having said that 30 per cent of Londoners lived in poverty and, second, of having invented the "powerty line." Miss Himmelfarb shows that both of these perceptions about what Booth said and did are mistaken.

The crucial classes C and D, which made up well over half of that 30 per cent classified as "the poor," though they were more subject to the vagaries of the trade cycle than those higher up in the scale, were not as a general rule either badly clothed or badly fed. Those to any degree in real need were the criminals and "barbarians" in class A (less than 1 per cent of the population) and the mainly casual laborers in Class B (7.5 per cent). The latter were "the leisure class of the poor"; many of then worked no more than they had to in order to keep out of Class A.

As for the "poverty line," it is true that at least one of Booth's collaborators on the project used what Miss Himmelfarb regards as the less theoretical term, "line of poverty," but he himself was too much aware of the variability of individual moral circumstance to make such a crude division based on a money amount. It was extremely important, he said, not to lump together those in distress with those of "the true working classes, whose desire for a larger share of wealth is of a different character.... To confound these essentially distinct problems is to make the solution of both impossible; it is not by welding distress and aspirations that any good can be done."

Miss Himmelfarb is too much the scholar to say so, but those words ought to be carved above the entrance to every welfare office in the land. The trouble is that, to make the kind of distinctions that Booth does, there must be recourse to the language of morality. His use of terms like "barbarians"--as well as "idle," "shiftless," "improvident," "decent," and "respectable"--was, says Miss Himmelfarb, "not for purposes of judgment (although that was implicit as well) but for objective analysis."

It was only by means of such categories, for example, that he was able to show what an unexpectedly small proportion of the poor were mainly victims of bad habits like idleness or drunkenness instead of economic or personal circumstances (18 per cent in classes A and B, 13 per cent in classes C and D). Likewise, it is reasonable to insist that measures to help the poor should depend upon moral judgments: