Acknowledgments
‘I do not believe that any of us’, declared John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address as President of the United States in 1961, ‘would exchange places with any other people or any other generation’. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1960s, a time and place of rare prosperity and freedom from extreme poverty; yet I experienced America in a European cocoon, as a port shadowed with human misery past, into which the flotsam and jetsam of a shattered Europe had flowed, to be remade as part of America, buoyant, optimistic, and fabulously successful. Daily, I encountered men and woman who in previous lives knew the universal extremes of poverty: hunger, cold, disease, homelessness, high mortality, in European societies whose normal functioning had totally broken down amid economic collapse and war. There were still elderly men and women who had come in steerage and passed through Ellis Island prior to 1914, mostly from Tsarist Russia; they remembered high levels of hunger and unemployment in Europe and in their early years in America, particularly during the Depression of the 1930s. From my Viennese grandmother I heard of the astronomical inflation in the early 1920s, when her savings, slowly earned over many years, could not even buy a loaf of bread. There were penniless refugees from Nazism, hunted like animals, or prisoners of war; and there were also Sephardic Jews who lost everything when escaping persecution in Arab lands. American Jewry in the 1960s, unlike any other society in history, seemed to reach into the past like a Grand Canyon, with layer after open layer of poverty and suffering, with a small, anomalous, not always convincing topsoil of peace, freedom, and prosperity. The American Jewish writers of that period – Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow – had their roots among the European poor and shared the belief of many of the writers in this book that poverty is a disgrace and should be fought.
My father, Viennese-born and British by nationality, was a Roman Jewish historian by training but, as curator of the Jewish Historical Society of Maryland, helped to record and preserve the history of the Baltimore Jewish community. Many Holocaust survivors had come to Baltimore, as to other cities of refuge, with a special knowledge of extreme poverty: as a calculated station of dehumanization toward mass murder, and a level of suffering amid evil which in the 1960s they were not yet encouraged to talk about publicly. In synagogue on the Ninth of Av, the poetry of starvation in the book of Lamentations spoke to the survivors across a span of 3,000 years:
They beg for bread but no one gives.
Those who once fed on fine food
lie stunned in the streets…
skin shrunk on their bones, dry as wood…
Those killed by the sword were luckier
than the ones who starved…
(1: 11; 4: 5, 9)
This book has had a long apprenticeship in history and literature alike. To my father I am indebted for the approach to poverty in an historical perspective. To my teachers in London and Oxford, above all Frank Kermode and Richard Ellmann, I am thankful for kindling some of the literary interests which entered this book. The range of this book broadened over the years through a course on poverty and literature which I taught at McGill University, Montreal, from 2003 to 2019; and by a series of talks I gave as a visiting fellow at Harvard University and the London School of Economics in 2012–18. I am grateful to a number of people who over the years in various ways helped move a difficult book forward: Tim Allen, Ken Shadlen, John A. Hall, Ricardo Hausmann, Ian Malcolm, and especially Steven Bloomfield who, as Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, invited me to give a series of talks on ‘Poverty and Ideological Failure’, which became the nucleus of this book. This book follows earlier books of mine, on loss and separation, imperialism, charisma, and nationalism, in arguing for greater integration of the Arts and Social Sciences: the understanding of poverty, too, is enriched through the combination of disciplines, and literature has levels of insight and compassion which ‘scientific’ studies often lack.
Parts of the book were published in changed form in Comparative Literary Studies, Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement; in working papers published by the Weatherhead Center, Harvard University, and by the Department of International Development, LSE; in Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook (ed. Michael Satlow); and Chapter 7 derives largely from my book, Realism, Caricature and Bias: The Fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim. The Bibliography gives details of these publications. In its latter phases two parts of the book broke off and were published separately: The Bible and the ‘Holy Poor’ and Nationalism, War, and Jewish Education, the first showing how the Hebrew Bible influenced the idealized image of the poor in monotheist cultures, the second how mass Jewish education emerged in the land of Israel between the 2nd century bce and the 3rd century ce, and proved to be instrumental in the post-1789 emergence from poverty. The Acknowledgments for these books apply here, too: particularly my students at McGill, with whom I had the privilege over many years of discussing most of the texts and the issues raised in this book; and the LSE Department of International Development, where much of the book was written.
I thank the librarians of the various libraries I have used: the university libraries at McGill, Harvard, and London (particularly those at the LSE, Senate House, and University College), and above all the British Library.
To my editors at Routledge – Polly Dodson, Zoë Meyer, Louise Peterken and Gail Welsh – thanks for the customary high standards with which they brought the work to publication.
My main debt, as always, is to my family, my beloved wife, Mimi, and children, Gabriella, Shulamit, and Jessica, though this book, unusually, owes much to silence. My mother, Rose Firsht, never spoke about her memories of poverty in the East End of London in the 1920s and 1930s, except to say they were too painful to talk about. This book is in her memory.
Prior to the French Revolution, literature tells little about the poor. Joseph Conrad reckoned that the life of human beings since time immemorial could be summed up on a scrap of cigarette paper – birth, suffering, death. This book aims to show how this changed. It sketches a literary history of poverty, starting from the Hebrew Bible and touching on medieval and early modern literature, including Chaucer and Shakespeare, but focusing on the main period of change, 1789–1939. Prior to 1789, the illiterate poor, always the vast majority of the population, were mostly ignored in written literature. Literature was by its nature the creation of a tiny literate minority, in an aristocratic fortress separating rich from poor. Chapter 1 presents the Hebrew Bible as a great exception in pre-1789 poetry and narrative: it stands out in its sympathy and love for the poor, its insistence on justice and its reforming zeal. The image of the poor in the Hebrew Bible is the ancestor of modern ideologies which tried (or professed) to solve the problem of poverty, however it is defined, and failed, some more than others; yet, whether because of or despite these ideologies, there is progress at every stage.1 The literature on the poor, though of great artistic and historical importance, is underappreciated for its relevance to the present. It is an essential part of the history of development and the moral imperative from the Hebrew Bible on, to narrow the gap between rich and poor and create a better world.
Much pre-1789 literature, as seen in Chapters 2–4, represents a betrayal of biblical love for the poor as capitalism grew and the state took over from the Church primary responsibility for the poor. Medieval Christian Europe accepted the authority of Scripture but broke with the spirit and practice of biblical laws on the poor, by humiliating and persecuting them. Chapter 5 shows that the Industrial Revolution was, to begin with, a disaster for the poor, as indicated in much European literature from Blake to Zola. Yet, after 1789, the European peasantry increasingly figured, sympathetically for the most part, in European literature: the peasant in literature is the subject of Chapter 6. Chapter 7 considers the impoverished Jews in Eastern Europe who become the central concern in late 19th-century Yiddish and Hebrew literature, which continues, mostly in English, among the early 20th-century immigrant communities in England and America.
Landmarks in literary portrayals of the poor, from the Bible to modern times, tend to coincide with major upheavals caused by war and other crises, and accompanying changes in policy toward and public perceptions of the poor. Reforms affecting the poor often seem to accompany war, when the poor are seen as an asset in the defense of the realm: the Elizabethan laws of 1598 and 1601 at the time of war with Spain, the Speenhamland poor relief system during the Napoleonic wars, the Education Act of 1918, and Beveridge’s report of 1942. ‘A revolutionary moment in the world’s history’, writes Beveridge, ‘is a time for revolutions’.2 The main antecedent for these transformations is the Hebrew Bible, mostly edited after the 6th century bce destruction of the Judean state, and the impoverishment and exile of its surviving inhabitants: in these conditions, when the entire nation was affected, the idea of the ‘holy poor’ took root, and it has lasted to the present day in the literature of developing countries.3 In 16th- and 17th-century England, similarly, the growth of nationalism promoted in part by Bible translation found expression in the commercial egalitarianism of Shakespeare’s plays: King Lear, its vagrant noblemen thrust together at night with the homeless on the stormy heath, was written as much for illiterate groundlings as for aristocrats in ermine, and they could understand it as well – if not better.
Much literature discussed in this book – for example, Wordsworth’s ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, Turgenev’s Notes of a Huntsman, Zola’s Germinal, Silone’s Fontamara, the writings of Blake, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Gaskell, Hugo, Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, Orwell, and the two great early 19th-century peasant poets, Clare and Shevchenko – points to huge social, political, and educational change triggered off in large part by the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution, cutting across class differences, stimulating unconventional views on human identity and society. Blake, the most original English poet of the late 18th century (some would say, of modern times), was more in touch with his inner world and the turmoil of his age than most men of formal education, Oxbridge graduates. The Industrial Revolution was itself chiefly the brainchild of low-born men of ideas unhindered by formal education, such as John Wilkinson and Thomas Telford, James Watt and Richard Trevithick. After 1789, the poor and low-born, their natural intelligence and imagination kindled by the great changes in modern life, could see the world fresh; some made it new. The new appreciation of the creative potential of the poor is evident from the mid-19th century also in the ‘hunger artist’, explored in Chapter 8: the character (or even the writer) who welcomes poverty and hunger, somewhat like religious saints and ascetics, in search of higher truth. Writers from Tolstoy to Hemingway seek the illumination of poverty. Among the insights of literature on the poor is the extent of environmental damage caused by industry, which mainly harms the poor, as discussed in Chapter 9. Still, literature of the interwar period – the subject of Chapter 10 – shows that extreme poverty was largely conquerable by the early 20th century. There were no more excuses for children dying of hunger.
The radicalism of post-1789 literature
Pre-1789 writers on the poor often fall in line with Poor Law in distinguishing between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’. After 1789, writers are generally (though not always) repulsed by Poor Law, at times violently.4 In England, writers from Blake to Orwell attack ‘enlightened’ government legislation on the poor; in Tsarist Russia, writers from Gogol to Chekhov implicitly blame totalitarianism and the Russian Orthodox Church for holding back progress in a population consisting mostly (until 1861) of illiterate serfs, yet educational reform and socialism had relatively little effect in alleviating mass poverty; in France, Hugo and Zola are among those who question the ideology of the Revolution, with detailed eyewitness observations of the degradation of the French poor, nominally free but still enslaved by poverty; in Italy, Silone and Carlo Levi show how the fascist Mussolini government willfully exposed the peasantry to neglect and exploitation; and in America, novelists of the proletariat such as Steinbeck denounce the cruelty of capitalism: even in America, writes Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), children die of hunger.5
Post-1789 literature on the poor becomes a catalogue of failures, an instrument of social criticism and change as the Industrial Revolution drove large numbers in rural areas to the expanding cities and their factories, where diet, water and air, health and life expectancy were worse and rapidly worsening compared to life in the country. The status of the poor in Christian society, challenged for centuries, fell as industry rose. Until the late 19th century, the changes brought by industry and secular government mostly benefited the wealthy and middle classes. Factories and mines gave employment, but rarely in European history were women and children so cruelly exploited. Nineteenth-century writers on poverty – Wordsworth and Dickens in England, Hugo and Zola in France, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky in Russia – are outraged by injustice but share the certainty that in the modern world based on reason, science, and progress, extreme poverty is an evil that can and must be uprooted; the state, however flawed, is as capable of radical change in social policy as in science, technology, and medicine. Nineteenth-century literature gives increasing attention to the physical condition of the poor, especially children, their growth stunted by malnutrition, their poor living conditions and education, wan faces scarred by sickness and anxiety. Maltreatment of the peasants is no longer passed over in silence. Often it is attacked as an injustice needing correction.6 Many leading writers after 1789 cried out for reform, though few stood for violent revolution, as the state moved toward the elimination of extreme poverty. The American and French revolutions proclaimed from the rooftops the ideology of the modern secular state with equal rights and opportunities for all citizens – including in theory the poor. State failure to end or alleviate poverty was consequently all the more painful and infuriating.
Approaches and structure of this book
This book has two parts, pre-1789 (Chapters 1–4) and 1789–1939 (Chapters 5–10): Part I is on the Hebrew Bible, its influences and betrayers from the 12th to the 18th century, in which works such as the late 14th-century Piers Plowman and the early 17th-century King Lear stand out in their sympathy for the poor. Part II is chiefly on literature of five countries between 1789 and 1939: England, France, Russia, Italy, and the United States. The chapters on the Bible and on the Middle Ages sketch the background for the book’s main focus: the period from the French Revolution until World War II, when emerging, increasingly industrialized secular modern states overcame extreme poverty, and the literature exploding from this upheaval shows how the perception of poverty changed from being a fact of life, endemic and unavoidable, into what seemed at various times a challenge for equality attainable in a moral and rational society, or a moral crisis symptomatic of global failure of collective will.
Literature on poverty in the 1789–1939 period is chronically skeptical: Christianity is found lacking, but so is every ideology claiming to create a better world, from the 18th-century Enlightenment to Mussolini’s fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, pretending to eradicate poverty.7 The very idea of Christian charity was challenged as a symptom of inequality: did it not prop up the status quo by stifling initiative and protest? Post-1789 writers chart the vicissitudes in the lives of the poor as one by one each ideology, strategy, and institution aiming to make poverty history failed to do so: science and industrial progress (Wordsworth), fact-based economics (Dickens), Poor Law (Gaskell), revolutionary Enlightenment, with its penal system (Hugo), humanistic protest against totalitarianism (Turgenev), education (Dostoyevsky, Chekhov), socialism (Zola), ‘enlightened’ government legislation (Orwell), fascism (Carlo Levi), and capitalism (Steinbeck). Most of these writers express zeal to improve the lives of the poor that is often closer to the spirit of the Bible than to most European Poor Law legislation from the 14th century onward. Who wouldn’t want a Paradise on earth, writes Brecht in The Threepenny Opera (1928), but how can the human condition allow it?
Wer woll’t auf Erden nicht ein Paradies?
Doch die Verhältnisse, gestatten sie’s?8
Through a combination of approaches – literary, historical, theological, sociological, economic – this book considers the act of writing about poverty in fiction and poetry as itself symptomatic of change. In the 19th century, the poor found a voice as never before, both among prominent upper- and middle-class writers such as Hugo, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, and also among literate peasants, notably Clare and Shevchenko.9 These poets, from opposite ends of Europe, portray the daily lives and feelings of the poor, even and especially peasants, as a serious subject for literature. Pre-1939 Western literature on poverty has stark and bitter relevance to post-1945 global poverty.10 Contemporary thinkers on poverty are concerned mainly with current problems of developing countries. Yet, these problems are not new. They recur throughout the history and literature of the West, especially in the 150 years after the French Revolution. By the mid-19th century, writers and thinkers began to recognize that poverty could in theory become history. At this point, anger fills the literature on the poor,11 from Zola’s visions of ‘a black and avenging army of men’ in the concluding lines of Germinal, to Steinbeck’s exploited workers in whose souls ‘the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage’ (ch. 25).12
Here are some of the literary works discussed in this book, with their historical contexts:
· William Langland, Piers Plowman, written after the Black Death, in a time of economic upheaval in the late 14th century and major changes in Poor Law.
· William Shakespeare, King Lear (c. 1606), first staged at a time of widespread hunger and vagrancy, in the years after the codification of English Poor Law.
· William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798), written at a time of increasing hardship for the European poor during the Napoleonic wars and heated parliamentary debate over Poor Law.
· Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837–8), in reaction to the New Poor Law of 1834, showing how poverty leads to crime, and that children are especially vulnerable.
· Ivan Turgenev, Sketches from a Huntsman’s Album (1852), a series of stories radical in seeing the Russia peasants as human beings, and anticipating the freeing of Russian serfs in 1861.
· Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), on the failed ideology of the French Revolution and the poor, particularly as reflected in the cruel Penal Code.
· Mendele Mocher Sefarim, The Beggar-Book (Yiddish version 1888, Hebrew version 1909), an exposé of the degrading poverty of the Eastern European Jews in the late 19th century and early 20th century, driving about two million to emigrate.
· Knut Hamsun, Hunger (1890), describing a kind of ‘hunger-artist’, a man capable of work and self-support who chooses to live a life of poverty in search of inspiration through privation and hardship.
· Ignazio Silone, Fontamara (1930), a novel set in a village in southern Italy in the Mussolini era, documenting the exploitation and persecution of the peasantry, in which the fascist government was complicit.
· John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a novel of the ‘Okies’, Midwestern migrants to California during the Depression and drought of the 1930s.
The literature of social change
In which ways did poverty and the poor become central concerns in literature? How did literature portray the radically new 19th-century challenges and changes, both bad and good, and itself form part of these changes, stimulating reform? In the period 1789–1939, the eradication of extreme poverty became possible. In advanced countries by the end of the 19th century the main indicators of poverty – hunger, illness, infant mortality, low life expectancy, poor educational levels – went down steeply. In the 19th century, changing perceptions of poverty and the poor are reflected in literature following major scientific discoveries, new sociological approaches, and a new spirit of reform in legislation. Breakthroughs in literature were as remarkable as those in science and technology, as enfranchisement and education spread: in literature written by the poor for the better-off (Clare, Shevchenko) and by aristocrats about the poor (Byron, Turgenev), the depiction of poor, often orphaned children and women (Dickens, Hardy) as well as the world of urban slums and crime (Oliver Twist, Les Misérables, Crime and Punishment), the emergence of a group of outstanding women writers (Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot),13 literature of social consciousness and criticism, reflecting the growing radicalism of the economically troubled post-1815 period (e.g. the ‘Condition of England’ novel, the Russian novel of social protest), and the first literature aimed specifically at a largely impoverished working-class readership, among pre-1939 Jews in Eastern Europe and America, whose Yiddish and Hebrew were languages and literatures of a migrating people. Post-1789 literature reacted to forces which transformed Europe, some of which began centuries earlier: growth of international trade and population, social mobility and urbanization, enfranchisement, expansion of the press, education of girls as well as boys, a growing literary market, free enterprise, improved public health and welfare systems. Mercantile protectionist principles dominating European trade from about 1500 gave way to free trade, following the 18th-century French physiocrat economists and Adam Smith and other classical economists in England. Economic enterprise had literary and artistic parallels and offshoots in the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement, with a new emphasis in the ‘I’, in works such as Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and on childhood; a view of human nature which influenced the depiction of the poor as individuals. French revolutionary ideology penetrated literature and the arts: the poor should have the same rights as the rich, they could change their economic and social position and, indeed, change the world as they had changed France. Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron saw the danger of growing industrialization, with its power to enslave the poor and make their lives a hell. The Romantics sympathized with the French Revolution and the secular state which made obsolete the medieval theological view of social strata fixed by God’s will. The poor needed not Christian charity and pity but education and opportunity, and a just system of government.
The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution gave a powerful thrust to the literary imagination, as writers shared with scientists the goal of a better material life; Nature gave industry and poetry alike the eternal delight of liberating energy, toward spiritual and social enrichment.14 The new study of economics, too, was part of the revolutionary change in the late 18th century. As seen in Chapter 5, literature, outstandingly in England, followed the Western European transition from agriculture to industry between the time of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) and Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848): from Wordsworth, writing in a still largely rural world in the late 18th century, to Dickens, writing of cities, mainly London, at a time when England became (by about 1850) the first country whose urban population exceeded its rural population. Russian literature is unusual in this political-cultural context as its great writers are mostly middle- or upper-class liberals inspired by the values of the French and German Enlightenment but writing in a totalitarian, largely rural, feudal (until 1861), industrially undeveloped country.
The world of the poor proved a rich mine of art. It was also a world which writers fought against. Characters such as Gaskell’s John Barton, Dickens’ Tiny Tim, Turgenev’s Stepushka, Zola’s Alzire, give the reader a sense of seeing the poor, particularly children, for the first time: in Turgenev’s story ‘Bailiff’ (1847), for example, we see the injustice as the brutal landowner punishes his servant for not warming the wine for breakfast; Hugo, in Les Misérables (1862), gives us the feelings of an ex-convict denied a bed for the night; Hardy allows us to understand what it is like for a working-class man to look for work and realize that his better-off contemporaries ‘did not even see him, or hear him, rather saw through him as through a pane of glass’.15 Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1st edition, 1851), records in fascinating detail, harrowing, repulsive, comic, and tragic, the voices of the London poor in all their occupations, the ‘heroism of the unknown poor’.16 Many characters in Mayhew’s book come alive in their own words, as never before in the annals of the poor. In a parallel development in 19th-century painting, artists such as Goya, Millais, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Renoir began to paint peasants close-up at their occupations in their villages or in the fields, with new psychological realism and feeling. Literature, especially fiction, often exposed the reality of poverty, and the fictions upon which much Poor Law was based: that the poor were rogues, idlers, and shirkers, themselves to blame for their poverty, and that the solution to their poverty was to force them to work.
No economist could match Dickens in Bleak House, in the portrayal of Jo, the child street-sweeper, aware of his own degradation, hustled and jostled through life, virtually an object of his own sweeping; or Hugo’s heartrending portrait of Cosette, the image of a ragged, shivering, emaciated, bruised, and frightened child-slave, in Les Misérables; or Chekhov’s coarse, dishonest, and drunk peasants, whom he observed and treated for years, when he was working as a doctor; or Wilkie Collins’ blunt description of the lives of the 19th-century working class – ‘dirty work, small wages, hard words, no holidays, no social station, no future’;17 or Conrad’s unforgettable one-sentence portrait of a Soho charwoman in the late Victorian age: ‘Red-armed, and aproned in coarse sacking up to the arm-pits, she exhaled the anguish of the poor in a breath of soap-suds and rum, in the uproar of scrubbing, in the clatter of tin pails.’18 There are frequent juxtapositions of poor and rich, deprivation and plenty, struggle and exploitation, hunger and waste: Chekhov, in ‘My Wife’ (1892), describes Russian aristocrats eating a sumptuous meal as peasants die of hunger a short distance away.19
Changing definitions of poverty in literature
From the time of the Hebrew Bible until the modern period, poverty in literature appears mostly in its extreme form: vulnerability to starvation, whether because of drought, crop failure, disease, or war, when it was not uncommon for a third or a quarter of the entire population of a town to vanish within days. Solutions to poverty – scientific agriculture, food and educational technology, effective medicine, hygiene, health care and birth control – did not exist. The rich minority were as helpless as the poor in time of drought, famine, plague, war, despoliation, and exile, and could be ruined at any time. For most human history, the struggle with the elements was an unwinnable struggle against poverty. The Hebrew Bible is unusual in pre-modern literature in its hope that poverty might end: ‘There shall be no needy person among you’ (Deuteronomy 15: 4) – then, almost as if the reality comes crashing down, a few lines later: ‘the poor shall never cease from the land’ (verse 11). Hunger and neglect, homelessness and disease, were relentlessly normal prior to the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps partly for this reason, pre-modern written depictions of extreme poverty, in the book of Job for example, or Piers Plowman, or King Lear, are rare. In particular, the scene on the heath in King Lear, though it has many biblical echoes, is unique in literature in its power to enable its audiences to grasp for a moment what it means to live a life of despair, homeless, hungry, cold, abandoned. Shakespeare’s audiences belonged to a country at war, torn by religious conflict, with periodic crop failure, famine, plague, and food riots.20
Nursery rhymes and folk tales, preserved in oral traditions throughout Europe, often give glimpses of poverty as it was experienced, of desperate hunger, inadequate shelter, beggary and vagrancy, child abuse, exposure and abandonment: ‘To eat one’s fill, eat until the exhaustion of the appetite (manger à sa faim), was the principle pleasure that the peasantry dangled before their imaginations, and one that they rarely realized in their lives.’21 Stories such as ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Aladdin’, or ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, with variants in different cultures and languages, mix elements of recognizable and difficult realities with fantasy. Many children who sang the Mother Goose rhymes were normally hungry and cold:
Pease porridge hot,
Pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot
Nine days old.
When I was a little girl,
About seven years old,
I hadn’t got a petticoat,
To keep me from the cold.22
Until the late 18th century, a 50% mortality rate by age five was not unusual: ‘to be born into the world of the poor was a hazardous adventure’.23 By the latter part of the 1789–1939 period, extreme poverty in the West was no longer a normal condition. Writers respond to changes in perspectives on the poor after the French Revolution, for example in portraits of the rural poor by Wordsworth, Turgenev, and Zola compared with the urban poor in novels such as Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The post-1815 economic crisis stirred up radicalism, culminating in the 1848–9 revolutions and leaving its mark on literature. Reform was vital for the future of Western European cities, with their overwhelming numbers of newly arrived poor; but even in Eastern Europe, as the works of Turgenev and Chekhov show, rural poverty was becoming intolerable. Writers who elevated the working class contested the belief that the lower class should be economically badly off; indeed, the middle classes would have been ‘shocked and appalled if the workers had actually asked for the sort of life they themselves took for granted, and even more if they looked like achieving it. Inequality of life and expectations was built into the system’.24 Writers increasingly try to see poverty from viewpoints of the poor. Major works, such as Dickens’ Little Dorrit or Hugo’s Les Misérables, are set among the poor in the great cities of Western Europe, where enormous wealth coexisted with infinite human misery. A new literature of the urban poor was created in the early 19th century: for example, the low-level bureaucrat in Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’; urban gangs in Oliver Twist and Les Misérables; and child labor in the writings of Dickens and Marx, Hugo and Zola, all of whom are outraged by the exploitation of children. Elizabeth Gaskell, in Mary Barton, published at the time of the Public Health Act of 1848 – inspired by Edwin Chadwick’s ground-breaking 1842 report on sanitation – describes the starving poor in Manchester literally living in shit, the smell of which, she writes, could knock a man over; they are driven to gin palaces, opium addiction, violent crime, and prostitution; Gaskell condemns sexual exploitation of working women by the wealthier classes. Growing public awareness of links between poverty and crime is reflected in a new kind of literature on crime, in which criminals are seen as victims of poverty and injustice, capable of achievement and respectability – if given a chance.25
In European literature of 1789–1939, urban poverty is often out of control, even if potentially masterable. Industry polluted and disfigured the landscape, ruining entire communities and threatening the middle classes with pauperism. The English Pastoral genre, idealizing the life of the rural poor, became darker, more realistic and socially conscious, notably in the poetry of Goldsmith, Crabbe, and Clare.26 In the late 18th-century rural world of Wordsworth’s poetry, communal responsibility for the poor was still strong; in the cities, in which much of the fiction of Dickens, Hugo, and Dostoyevsky is set, communal feeling for the poor eroded. English literature records the giant leap from agriculture to industry, and the late 19th-century novels of Thomas Hardy catch the final moments of the traditional impoverished countryside in southern England, before it was swallowed in the surge of modernity. The dignified humanity of the poor in this literature contends with their parasitic image in Poor Law. A literary revolution came about through the act of walking through cities and observing the poor: Dickens in London, Gaskell in Manchester, Hugo in Paris, Dostoyevsky in St. Petersburg. In Dickens’ London, capital of the industrial world and of the greatest empire in history, the effects of poverty and the inequality between rich and poor were most obvious – as was the need for radical change.
Literature explores both the trap of poverty and new capitalistic opportunities for escape from poverty: Dickens’ Great Expectations and Hugo’s Les Misérables appeared in the 1860s, at a time of economic boom and upward social mobility in which, it seemed, even an ex-convict could succeed through hard work and become a rich gentlemen and a philanthropist. By implication, there is no natural social stratification: give a low-born but enterprising pauper a chance and he might overcome the disadvantages of his birth. Literature after 1789 has striking evidence of increased social mobility,27 as social stratification weakened after the French Revolution. Many fictional characters are orphans, foundlings, or adopted as children: set in a social trajectory involving struggle, chance, and mishap, their stories have far greater tension than those of the socially secure. Writers observe the intellectual gifts of workers wasted on the treadmill of labor. Literature on the poor is filled with potential artists, thinkers, and scientists – men, women and children with immense sensitivity and worldly insight, with no outlet. The world of the struggling poor offered in some respects more profound artistic scope than the world of the idle rich. In the course of the 19th century, writers such as Dickens and Hugo gave the middle and upper classes a much better understanding of the lives of the poor. At times, too, the views of the lower classes are also subject to change. In The Cherry Orchard, Lopakhin’s triumph in purchasing the estate where his father and grandfather were slaves – they were not even allowed to set foot in the kitchen – is tempered by his tears when he sees the sorrow the loss of the cherry orchard has brought to Lyudov Andreyena, who has loved the orchard since childhood.
Definitions of poverty of Booth and Rowntree in the Victorian era, and proposed solutions, are not the same as those of Sen and Sachs over a century later.28 When Victoria came to the throne in 1837, infant mortality – the chief marker of poverty in post-1945 development studies – was still about 50% in London, affecting rich and poor alike, ignorant of hygiene and sanitation.29 As industry spread in Western Europe, air and water pollution reduced life expectancy – in the worst parts of English industrial towns such as Manchester, there were years when life expectancy was under 20. By 1900, the quality of life in Eastern Europe was similarly poisoned, with the benefits of industry slower to come.30 Literature reflects the reality of multiple infant deaths, for example Dickens’ Great Expectations or Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. By the time of Victoria’s death in 1901, infant mortality in London had dropped by two-thirds. From 1871 to 1939 the change for the better was overwhelming.31 In 1871 life expectancy in England was 41 – no better than in Shakespeare’s time; by 1939 it had gone up to about 65. In England and Wales from 1900 to 1939 – despite the Depression of the 1930s – infant mortality dropped by another two-thirds, from 150/1,000 to 50/1,000.32 By 1939, infant mortality in England was ten times less than in 1789. As the statistics improved, infant mortality became less an act of God than a tragedy avoidable through better hygiene, medicine, and food: it became, in short, a crime.
From the mid-19th century, literature shifted focus to emotional poverty: Scrooge, for example, in A Christmas Carol; Javert in Les Misérables, Casaubon in Middlemarch, or Nora in A Doll’s House. The ‘hunger-artist’, the subject of Chapter 8, enters literature: an individual who is not poor, or does not have to be poor, choosing to live as the poor lived, not like saints such as Simon Stylites, Francis of Assisi, or Teresa of Avila, for the glory of God, but for insight and authenticity in art: poverty is no longer a physical challenge to survive but a desired social or psychological state, often expressed in moral or aesthetic conflict. The pangs of social inferiority and financial anxiety felt by the impoverished Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, of Eugène de Rastignac in Balzac’s Père Goriot, or of Kate Croy in Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove, contrast with the pangs of hunger suffered by Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. The poverty of the prostitute Fantine in Hugo’s Les Misérables, which kills her, differs from the poverty of the writer in Hamsun’s novel, Hunger, who seeks illumination in a chosen life of deprivation. An unhappy marriage might bring the rich to jealousy of the poor: the wealthy mine manager, Hennebeau, in Zola’s Germinal sees the atrocious conditions of his workers, who slave crammed together half-naked in the mines of Normandy and, though starving, still lust for one another, and he wishes he were starving and lusting along with them: ‘What idiot would measure happiness in this world by the distribution of wealth?’33 Nathalie, the wealthy landowner’s wife in Chekhov’s story, ‘My Wife’, organizes famine relief and is jealous of the starving and sick women as they are not tormented by an odious husband, as she is.34 The wealth of feeling among the poor in Dickens’ Great Expectations might be contrasted with Wallace Stevens’ exploration of the impoverished imagination in his poetry. Loneliness and lovelessness are often described as forms of poverty, or of being ‘in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’; there is intellectual or spiritual poverty, and poverty in health which gold cannot buy, as in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain,35 set in a Swiss sanatorium in the early 20th century, in which mostly rich patients seek futilely for a cure as-yet undiscovered. In literature, the rich may be beggars within, a king may find his heaven in a ‘wall’d prison’, while a poor poet, in sweet remembered love, can be rich beyond the wealth of kings.
Literature is a mouthpiece for the poor and a record of injustice to the poor, to children above all; and literature connects the failures of government – often resulting from war, corruption, or incompetence – and blame of the poor. By the second half of the 19th century, despite the objections of manufacturers, child labor was seen as proof of a social malaise, ‘a flagrant human abuse’.36 Working conditions were targeted: the starvation wages of factory workers, in Gaskell’s Mary Barton, for example, or penal wrongs in Hugo’s Les Misérables or Dickens’ Great Expectations; or in a number of works, such as Zola’s Germinal, Sinclair’s The Jungle, Silone’s Fontamara, or Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, detailing the tricks, frauds, and deceits ‘legally’ perpetrated against the poor by landowners and tradesmen supported by the legal profession, the banks, police, and government.37 These works convey the crushing humiliation of poverty, ignorance, and powerlessness, leading to rage, often channeled into revolutionary activism.
As the lives of the poor improved, poverty became more respectable, being amenable to official legislative help; but welfare itself did not eradicate poverty. The proximity of poverty and great wealth meant that those on the border of respectability viewed the abyss with horror.38 The Boer War and the two world wars hastened the fight against poverty as medical examinations exposed widespread malnutrition and poor physical condition among the recruits. This scandal argued for comprehensive postwar social welfare: men who fought for their country deserved to be decently fed and housed; and it was in the country’s interest to have a fit population. There were other major improvements. In a sign of change by the early 20th century, the poor became more aware of their poverty. Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), tells of visiting a community of miners in the north of England. He asked a miner when the housing shortage had become acute in his district. The reply: ‘When we were told about it.’39
The years 1918–39 were the final moment of extreme poverty in parts of the West where, as seen in Chapter 10, hunger and disease were still common, especially in rural areas: writers were often eyewitnesses. Water-shortage is a key theme. In Italian literature on the peasantry in the rural south under Mussolini’s fascist regime, water is a constant worry. In Silone’s Fontamara (1930), the diversion of a stream by a wealthy landowner is a disaster for the local peasants. Water dominates Marcel Pagnol’s L’Eau des Collines (1962), set in Provençe after World War I. Even at this relatively late date, over a century after the Revolution, lack of rainfall could ruin farmers in the south of France, for despite their proximity to Marseilles they had no piped water. Drought in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) forces mass migration from the American Midwest to California.
What do writers know of poverty?
Most of the writers discussed in this book were shielded from the hot struggles of the poor. Some, by accident or choice, experienced poverty or observed it at close hand. There are exceptions, such as the peasant-poets, Taras Shevchenko and John Clare, both outspoken in their attacks on injustice to the poor.40 Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, was a freed serf; Clare, a farmworker, became a major English nature poet, his formal schooling no higher than Dame school, the rest on his own. Yet, middle-class writers are often no less outraged by injustice and committed to improving the lives of the poor, however limited their experience of poverty. Such experiences, especially in childhood, might fuel the outrage because they are limited and therefore stand out. Wordsworth, after losing both parents, was cheated for many years of his inheritance by his father’s former employer.41 In the 1790s, when Wordsworth began writing poetry about his daily encounters with the poor in the West Country and the Lake District, there was already a deep-rooted empathy. De Quincey, having lost his father and two beloved sisters, went through a time of instability and emotional impoverishment when, at 17, he cut himself off from his well-to-do family and family allowance and drifted into vagrancy. Out of this experience came the passages in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) describing his time as a down and out in Wales and London, often sleeping out of doors, hungry, cold, and sick. Dickens’ passion for reform was driven by memories of being a London child laborer after his bankrupt father was imprisoned for debt and his family lived in a debtors’ prison in 1824.42 There was an ingrained sympathy for the underdog when, 30 years later, preparing to write Hard Times (1854), Dickens visited Preston during a strike and saw how factory workers lived. Balzac was a bankrupt who wrote to keep his creditors at bay. He looked into the world of the poor as into a steep precipice into which he might fall at any time. The poor of Paris fill his Human Comedy. In the story ‘Facino Cane’ (1836), for example, the narrator obsessively follows impoverished Parisian men and women for snatches of their conversation: ‘As I listened to these people I was able to live their lives; I felt their rags on my back, and walked with their worn-out shoes on my feet. Their wants, their needs, all passed into my soul, or perhaps it was my soul which passed into theirs.’43 Elizabeth Gaskell knew poverty in Manchester as a minister’s wife visiting her parishioners. Marx, who came from a wealthy family, spent years of largely self-inflicted poverty as a political exile in London in the 1840s and 1850s, his education in poverty in Dean Street, Soho, his sense of alienation as a converted Jew to some extent projected onto the persecuted workers, with whom he had little in common.44 Hugo, observing poverty as a flâneur on the streets of Paris, felt that the French Revolution had betrayed the poor. Turgenev, a nobleman raised among serfs, married a serf whom he freed, circumstances reflected in his empathy toward serfs as human beings; while his contemporary, Dostoyevsky, encountered the Russian peasantry for the first time, he relates movingly in The House of the Dead (1860), as a political prisoner in Siberia in the 1850s. Zola endured years of poverty as a struggling writer; in preparation for writing Germinal (1885), he visited the mining town of Anzin in 1884 and observed closely the poverty there. Hardy’s mother had been a servant in Dorset; earlier, as a child of a pauper family, she had lived on parish relief. Joseph Conrad as a child in the 1860s shared with his parents, Polish revolutionaries, the hardships of political exile in Tsarist Russia and could see the world from the point of view of the poor and even, at times, of violent revolutionaries: ‘Which is really more criminal?’ he asked John Galsworthy in 1906, conflating a recent terrorist attack in Madrid with the scandalous working conditions of the Chicago meatpacking factories exposed by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906): ‘the Bomb of Madrid or the Meat of Chicago?’45 Chekhov’s empathy with the poor came from a difficult childhood and years of work as a provincial doctor treating the poor in late 19th-century Russia. Orwell was a voluntary down and out in Paris and London in the late 1920s; his guilt over colonialism carried over to the poor in his determination to bring reform. Carlo Levi, a Jew hiding in Florence during the Holocaust and alienated from the Italian state that passed anti-Semitic laws, felt kinship with the traditionally alienated and persecuted Italian peasants of the south, among whom he had lived as a political exile in 1935–6. Steinbeck began The Grapes of Wrath (1939) during the American Depression by visiting camps of migrant workers in California and writing newspaper reports on them. Steinbeck and other writers describe America as unjust in its treatment of the poor and question American ideals of equality and fairness.46
Few of these writers experienced extreme poverty for long periods. ‘Where penury is felt’, writes Cowper in The Task (1785), ‘thought is chained’. Poverty, like sickness and trauma, often levels and limits life. Those who endure absolute poverty – historically, the vast majority of the world’s population – rarely tell their own stories. How could they? Historically, outside Scripture, the poor seldom have a voice. The poor are mostly hidden in a sea of history: ‘Glacier-like, the rural masses of most nations before the nineteenth century remain anonymous and concealed, even from contemporaries, beneath the surface.’47 In the early 20th century, D.H. Lawrence was a new kind of writer, son of a Nottinghamshire miner, taunting poverty as a ‘hard old hag, and a monster’ (‘Poverty’). In literature, those with personal experience of starvation, such as Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898), are rare: ‘Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity? Well I do.’48 Yet, thousands of Europeans normally died each year of starvation.
Writers are sometimes driven to ask, as Turgenev does through his nihilist hero, Bazarov, in Fathers and Sons (1861): what is the point of literature when ‘the real question is getting daily bread to eat’?49 In Anna Karenina (1874–6), Tolstoy (who had opened many schools for peasant children on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana) questions the value of education in a land mired in poverty: ‘Why schools should cure the ills of poverty and ignorance is as incomprehensible as the idea that hens on their perches cause convulsions. You must first remedy the cause of their poverty.’50
Writers with a strong social conscience cannot always escape class-based interests. Jane Austen, in Sense and Sensibility (1811) refers to enclosures – the forced privatization of public land – mainly from the viewpoint of the landed gentry to which she belonged, who benefited from this legalized theft. The same enclosures appear in the poems of Austen’s contemporary, John Clare (e.g. ‘Helpstone’, ‘The Fallen Elm’, and ‘The Moors’), with the embittered viewpoint of the peasant class into which the poet was born, aware that ‘the prosperity of one class was founded on the adversity and distress of the other’;51 or, as an impoverished factory worker says in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), ‘we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows’ (ch. 1).52 John Ruskin, in the soaring conclusion of Unto this Last (1862), condemns luxury as tainted so long as there is one impoverished person on earth;53 yet, the visitor to Ruskin’s impressive house in the Lake District sees that the man lived in comfort, beauty, and style.
The lives of the truly poor are largely alien to the educated, better-off classes. Men and women seek economic security, and in finding it are often cut off, or cut themselves off, knowingly or not, from the sufferings of the poor. Chekhov, in the story, ‘Gooseberries’ (1898), writes that every rich man should have someone ready with a stick to beat him over the head whenever he forgets the world’s misery.
George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), makes the charge of ignorance broadly: ‘what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?’54 Literature often illustrates the need for what the biblical prophets call the ‘circumcision of the heart’. The well-off in the writings of Gaskell, Zola, Chekhov, Levi, and others, are unfeeling to the cruel realities they have the power to ameliorate. Help, when offered, comes too late, or is inadequate or wrong: money when hospital care is needed; clothes when money is needed, or shoes for the lame; a useless $100 bill to a starving unemployed Chicago laborer c. 1900 (no one will change it); a cup of tea and Christian prayer, when what is needed is effective help in escaping hunger and unemployment; radio speeches of Mussolini broadcast in the public square and a solitary public toilet (unused) when children are suffering from trachoma and malaria.55
Literature, poverty, and Christianity
After 1789, the secular state aimed to achieve what Christianity had failed to do in all the centuries of its existence: to eradicate poverty and its causes, by means of government policy and legislation. Yet, not all Victorian writers questioned and rejected traditional faith and values. Some, such as Dickens in A Christmas Carol (1845) saw the value of tradition, and indeed helped re-invent it. Hugo, in Les Misérables (1862), presents Christian values as an inspirational beacon in a France whose revolutionary ideals had become diluted and corrupted. Elizabeth Gaskell, wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester, shared with Hugo (in her novel Mary Barton) an appreciation of the virtues of Christianity (and capitalism) in overcoming poverty. Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’, influenced by Anderson’s ‘The Little Match Girl’, is a story of Christian salvation through charity. Alone, high on a pedestal after death, the statue of the prince can see all the ugliness and misery of the city he once ruled from his palace, where he saw nothing. The Swallow becomes his messenger, removing with its beak the jewels encrusted in the prince’s body and carrying them to the poor, earning for itself and for the prince a place in heaven.56
Christianity also animates Dostoyevsky’s view of the poor, in Crime and Punishment (1865). Dostoyevsky towers among the great 19th-century novelists as a believing Russian Orthodox Christian, finding in Christianity answers to contemporary problems, including urban poverty: in Poor Folk and Crime and Punishment, a man follows the spirit of Scripture in giving his last pennies to people who are even poorer than himself, and in greater need.57 These works anticipate literature of developing countries and the vast influence of liberation theology which finds in the Bible constant inspiration in the fight against social injustice.58
For the most part, however, European writers and thinkers after 1789 see Christianity as largely impotent in dealing with poverty. The Church in all its denominations tended to follow government policy; the Church of England, for example, did not fight Poor Law legislation but complied with Enclosure Acts, though parish officials and priests were eyewitnesses to the suffering these Acts caused the poor, the closure of biblical compassion. Among reasons for working-class hostility or indifference to the Church was ‘lack of sympathy among Christians for the social burdens of the poor’; the English were to an extent ‘trained’ to see poverty as ‘morally tolerable’.59 In Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), a good man is driven by his poverty to murder; he is ‘sadly put about to make great riches and great poverty square with Christ’s Gospel’ (ch. 37). To many Victorians, the credibility of Christianity was fatally undermined by science and progress. For some, Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) marked a point of no return, after which a fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture was no longer possible. Some of the great 19th-century writers attack Church institutions, even if they defend Christianity, as Hugo does in Les Misérables. Hugo portrays the saintly bishop who saves Jean Valjean from imprisonment as an exception to allegedly widespread corruption in the French Catholic Church.60 In their different ways, Hugo and Zola accuse France, its government and religion, for failing to live up to the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution. In Russian literature from Gogol to Chekhov – when the Orthodox Church was part of the state and dominated Russian society at all levels – the Church is of scant use in bettering the lives of the poor. Even Dostoyevsky, whose passionate adherence to Orthodox Christianity could be seen as a reactionary stance for a 19th-century European novelist, had little to say about practical Church support for the poor. In English literature from Dickens to Orwell, the Church often does more harm than good, in its corruption, its squalid and inadequate care, and its degradation of the poor. Dickens’ novels teem with charitable people and acts; in David Copperfield alone, examples abound – Peggoty, Micawber, Betsey Trotwood, and Dr. Stone, who is so kind-hearted that beggars must be kept away from him as he will give them everything he has (including his gaiters); but clergymen in Dickens’ fiction rarely embody the notion of Christian love and charity.61
In Hamsun’s novel Hunger (1890), the Norwegian Church has no significant role in the life of the poor; elsewhere, too, religious institutions are useless or harmful, for example, in Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837), Zola’s Germinal (1885), Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry, The Jungle, (1906), and in Orwell’s autobiographical studies of poverty in Paris, London, and the north of England in the late 1920s and 1930s, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Bernard Shaw rejects the traditional view of the Church as defender of the poor; and at the climax of Major Barbara (1907), Shaw ironically speaks through the arms manufacturer Undershaft in condemning poverty as ‘worst of crimes’.62 Joseph Conrad, in his vivid account of the impoverished, degraded Verloc household in The Secret Agent (1907: ch. 8), alludes to the common fear of Church charity as of death, for the poorhouse ‘might well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still more straitened circumstances of the grave’.
In some major early 20th-century American novels of social protest, including Sinclair’s, The Jungle, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Richard Wright’s novel of Black poverty, racism, and crime in 1930s Chicago, Native Son (1940), Christian aid is practically invisible; and the synagogue and rabbinate are similarly ineffectual in fictional portrayals of the American Jewish poor, in works such as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of Abraham Levinsky (1917) and Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930). Carlo Levi’s memoir of his exile among the peasants of southern Italy in 1936, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), portrays a sclerotic Catholic Church, enthralled to Pope and Duce, helpless in the face of corrupt government and vast poverty, whose capital is Naples. The Church is characterized above all by failure, incompetence, corruption, insensitivity, or by its absence when most needed. At times, it seems its only redeeming feature is that the state is worse.63
* * * *
Disappointment in ideological solutions, both religious and secular, pervades the literature on poverty and the poor, as we shall see in exploring writers as diverse as Clare in England, Chekhov in Russia, Zola in France, Shevchenko in Ukraine, Hamsun in Norway, Silone in Italy, and Steinbeck in America. The literary conscience of the West, expressed in often-passionate opposition to inequality, has many striking biblical precedents; yet, the intense attention given by 19th- and early 20th-century writers to the poor, often from their own viewpoint, and including children and women, is mostly new. It was part of a broad social change, brought about by the rise of science, industry and cities, and the post-1789 secular state, with its reformist political momentum, an environment of social change through education, and a modern enthusiasm to understand and solve social problems. In the literature on the poor, we encounter a world of poverty which the West largely escaped by the latter half of the 20th century, but from which the majority of the world’s population has still not escaped.
Notes
1 For changing views on inequality and meanings of poverty, see Milanovic (2015), Wallerstein (2013), Scott (2012), Sachs (2005, 2009), Hazell (2009), Beier and Ocobock (2008), Chari and Corbridge (2008), Frohman (2008), Grusky and Kanbur (2006), Allen and Thomas (2000), Sen (1980, 1999), Slack (1988, 1998), Jütte (1994), Mollat (1986), Himmelfarb (1984), and Price (1981). On literature and poverty in individual countries, see for example Jones (2008), Howden-Chapman and Kawachi (2006), Herman (2001), Carroll (1996), and Smith (1980); further bibliography appears later, in discussions of poverty and the poor in literature of various countries and periods. The present study follows the UNICEF definition of poverty in its annual State of the World’s Children, in which infant mortality is the primary category and extreme poverty is defined largely by the rate of mortality through avoidable starvation and disease.
2 Beveridge (1942: 6).
3 On the Bible and the ‘holy poor’, see Aberbach (2018). On post-1945 literary expressions of the ‘holy poor’, see the Appendix.
4 On the interconnection of Poor Law and literature, see for example pp. 28–30, 42ff., 67ff., 76ff., 85, 97ff.
5 On Steinbeck’s outrage over American children dying of hunger, see p. 211.
6 The vulnerability of the poor to injustice, and the failure of the law to protect them, are motifs familiar in the Bible and recurrent in literature: for example, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and Hugo’s Les Misérables, which give many examples of injustices suffered particularly by the poor, because they are poor. Perhaps the most remarkable work of fiction in this category is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, ‘The voice of the poor, demanding that poverty shall cease!’ (ch. 28): an unremitting catalogue of the legal perversions, frauds, swindles and obstructions to which the poor in Chicago, mostly new immigrants, were subjected daily, c. 1900. The nauseating exposé of meat processing and packing led within a few weeks of publication to the American Food and Drug Act of 1906.
7 On Mussolini’s policies toward the Italian peasantry, see pp. 201–3.
8 In The Threepenny Opera (1928), Brecht has the gangster, Macheath, declare that inequality and oppression keep humanity alive. The tradesman, Peachum, whose daughter marries Macheath, agrees that the world is corrupt: what is bank robbery compared to banking? Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank; give a man a bank and he can rob the world.
9 A parallel development occurred in 19th-century painting and science: among the great English painters were men from the working class, such as Turner and Constable; and scientists included men of humble origin such as Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday.
10 On literature on poverty in post-1945 developing countries, see Aberbach (2017).
11 On 19th-century literary outrage at poverty, see Aberbach (2018a).
12 On Germinal, see pp. 142–5; on The Grapes of Wrath, pp. 195–7. Precedents to the anger of the poor expressed in these novels are rare in pre-1789 literature. An exception is Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’. See p. 54.
13 Studies of inequality have consistently pointed out the close relationship between the education of women and improved living standards. Women writers such as Jane Austen implicitly promoted an expanding role for women in modern society; and women writers also contributed to the emerging book market for children as literacy grew. Writers such as Harriet Martineau and Hesba Stretton wrote books for children describing the conditions of the poor, at times from a non-religious, even revolutionary, standpoint. Many of the most important English parliamentary Acts pertaining to welfare, health and education were passed during the reigns of Elizabeth I and Victoria, who together ruled for over a century.
14 See Bronowski (1973: ch. 8) on the combined importance of science and art in the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, to writers such as Blake, Goethe and Mary Shelley, science is a force to be feared.
15 In Jude the Obscure (1895: Part 2, ch. 2). On the invisibility of the working class, see Smith (1980: 33f.).
16 There is growing appreciation from the time of Wordsworth to Steinbeck of the richness of the language of the poor; many writers, including Turgenev, Gaskell, Zola and Silone, reproduce their dialects. Accent, too, the mark of class, becomes less a barrier to social mobility, as seen in works such as Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which an ignorant Cockney proves a match for a professor.
17 Quoted by Smith (1980: 34).
18 On the children in Dickens, see pp. 101–5; on Chekhov’s view of peasants, see pp. 133–5; the Conrad quote is from The Secret Agent, end ch. 8. In Victorian fiction more than previously, the poor see themselves in their degradation. The chimney-sweep in Kingsley’s The Water Babies (ch. 2) sees himself for the first time in a mirror in a fine house, ‘a little, ugly, black ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth’, and thinks he is looking at a little black ape before he realizes that it is himself. On Jo, the street-sweeper in Dickens’ Bleak House, see pp. 103–4.
19 For other works in which often-extreme poverty and wealth are juxtaposed, see Aberbach (2018: 6–7).
20 On poverty in Shakespeare’s age, see Chapter 3.
21 Darnton (1984: 34). See also Calvino (1980) and Tatar (2003).
22 Darnton (1984: 40).
23 White (1968: 41). European infant mortality rates of rich and poor alike remained astronomically high by post-1945 Western standards until the 19th century. In the time of Shakespeare, for example, an estimated 40% of children born to royalty and the aristocracy survived (Hill 1980: 46).
24 Hobsbawm (1989: 256, 257).
25 For examples of 19th-century novels depicting sexual exploitation of vulnerable women, see for example, Les Misérables, Crime and Punishment, and Germinal. Balzac, Dickens, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, and Zola are among writers who see a clear link between poverty and crime.
26 On the Pastoral genre, see Barrell and Bull (1982).
27 These include Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, John Halifax in Mulock’s John Halifax, Gentleman, Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations, Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Jean Valjean in Hugo’s Les Misérables, Michael Henchard in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Solness in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, Lopakhin in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Paul Morel in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Levinsky in Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, and Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
28 For bibliography relating to changing definitions and meanings of poverty, and its solutions, in different countries and times, see 17 note 1.
29 On improved sanitation in 19th-century Europe, see p. 187f.
30 Compare Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) with Chekhov’s ‘In the Ravine’ (1900) for descriptions of 19th-century industrial pollution in Western and Eastern Europe. See pp. 188–9, 194.
31 For the statistics contrasting 1871 and 1939, see Bosanquet (2009: 73). The organization of the poor for self-improvement, economically, politically, and culturally, came with the rise of industry and urbanization. Concentration in cities increased squalor and disease but it also made it easier to help the poor, through charitable institutions and hospitals; and cities also facilitated the collection of the statistical data that made legislative reform imperative. Among working-class people who lived through the Industrial Revolution and wrote about it, emphasis is often on changes for the better (Griffin 2013). By the early 20th century, the material improvements were huge, with phenomenal increase in trade union membership (Boyer 2004: 312, 313; Eichengreen 2004: 321). See pp. 187–193.
32 See Hobsbawm (1969: 327; Diagram 3).
33 Zola (1998: 353). In Germinal, Zola depicts the perverse relationship between the impoverished miners and their wealthy masters in terms of sexual aberration, notably Madame Levaque who shares a bed with her husband by night and a boarder, Bouteloup, by day; and Madame Hennebeau, who has an affair with her nephew, Paul Négrel, under her hapless husband’s nose. Zola relates the sexual behavior of the miners – the unselfconsciousness due to lack of privacy, the snatched pleasures in the local ruins or fields, the early pregnancies – as symptomatic of their poverty.
34 On Zola’s Germinal and Chekhov’s ‘My Wife’, see pp. 133–34, 142–45. In 19th-century literature – in Mary Barton and Germinal, for example – desperate poor people are depicted coming for aid to local homes of the rich, where there is lack of comprehension of their plight.
35 ‘Rich men, trust not in wealth./ Gold cannot buy you health’ (Thomas Nashe, In Time of Pestilence). To Keats, foragers in garbage heaps were luckier than those who, like himself, were chronically sick: ‘Nothing is so bad as want of health – it makes one envy Scavengers and Cindershifters’ (Letter to Fanny Brawne, 23 August 1820).
36 Marcus (1974: 218).
37 On the change in the perception of the poor in the mid-19th century, see p. 99ff.
38 On the fear of poverty among the lower middle classes, see Lodge (2002).
39 Orwell insists that his 1930s portrait of the poor in The Road to Wigan Pier is not all bleak: he is drawn to the warmth of the miners’ homes, their stoicism and cheerful hospitality. D.H. Lawrence warmly recalled, likewise, the mining community in which he was born, in late 19th-century Nottinghamshire, and the general contentedness of the miners, including his father, when they were in work.
40 On Clare, see pp. 123–5. On Shevchenko, see pp. 125–6.
41 To his brother, Christopher, Wordsworth wrote on 24 June 1802: ‘What success was a poor man ever known to have against a very rich one in a Law suit – especially of a complex kind?’ (Barker 2007: 72). It may be that writers who have known severe financial difficulties, such as Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Ibsen and Strindberg, Chekhov and Sholom Aleichem, are particularly inclined to depict the poor sympathetically.
42 Dickens recalls this trauma in Little Dorrit, in which, in a Dickensian twist, the debt collector, Panicks, does the detective work by which the imprisoned family is ultimately freed from debtors’ prison.
43 Balzac (1977: 236).
44 On psychological factors underlying Marx’s identification with the poor, see Aberbach (2003). In The Secret Agent (1907), Joseph Conrad claims that ‘The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds’ (ch. 5).
45 Conrad (1988: 333).
46 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic novel of American slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), gives a grim picture of Black poverty; in Black American literature (e.g. Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison) poverty is central, but there was much White poverty, too, as seen in the writings of Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Theodor Dreiser, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. Among immigrant Jewish writers, too, including Abraham Cahan, Michael Gold, and Henry Roth, poverty is a major theme. On poverty in American literature, see Jones (2008).
47 Cobban (1977: 154). ‘As for the standard of living of the peasantry, we know next to nothing about it’ (Braudel 1994: 454). The Anglo-Saxon historian, James Campbell, would illustrate the extent to which ancient records were lost by pointing out that of an estimated 18 million discharge certificates given to soldiers of the Roman empire, only seven have been found.
48 Conrad (1995: 71).
49 Turgenev (1965: 126). Bertholt Brecht in The Threepenny Opera (1928) puts it pithily: ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.’ In Preston Sturges’ film, Sullivan’s Travels (1941), the butler of the Hollywood film director, John Sullivan, tries to dissuade his master from putting on tramp’s clothes to see how the poor live and, with this knowledge, to make a film with a social message: ‘The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous.’
50 Tolstoy (1968: 362). Chekhov resumes the Russian literary critique of the ineffectuality of the wealthier classes in The Cherry Orchard (1903): the struggling landowner, Lyubov Andreyevna, is offended by the boldness of the better off, particularly the young, as they have never experienced anything dreadful; and they propose to settle all important problems, not having suffered for them. Lyubov’s cry that without the cherry orchard her life has no meaning, though heartfelt and deeply moving, is comically absurd in the context of Russia’s wider social afflictions. There are similar implications in Kafka’s works, in which the psychological suffering of the protagonist is occasionally seen against the grind of daily life, the ‘real’ suffering, experienced by the poor. See pp. 178–9, 182 note 17.
51 Clare (1984: 490n). On enclosures and their effects on the poor, see pp. 68, 95, 115, 120. On Clare, see pp. 123–35.
52 In Silone’s Fontamara (1934: ch. 6), the peasant leader, Berardo, alludes to the same biblical source, ironically, when he says that he works for others with the sweat of his brow. See p. 214 note 17.
53 Unto this Last, with its powerful biblical echoes, influenced Gandhi, born into the Indian governing aristocracy, who chose a life of ascetic simplicity. To Ruskin, the only proper relationship between factory owner and worker is like that of father and son, or captain and his men. The owner must give his workers the concern due to a beloved child, and must bear a risk proportionate to his wealth: the captain must be ready to go down with his ship.
54 Orwell (1933: ch. 22). The Victorian scholar and social critic, Walter Bagehot, remarked in 1858 on the alleged incapacity of the well-off to understand the poor: why, when they wanted dinner, did they not ring the bell? (Bagehot 1965: ii 56). In the novel, Howard’s End (1910), E.M. Forster describes the bumbling efforts of a well-born lady to help a poor clerk, culminating when a bookcase falls on him during a quarrel: he is killed by ‘culture’. On Orwell and poverty, see pp. 179–81. Social and economic theorists are, perhaps, less likely than novelists to admit failings: ‘complete ignorance of human nature will not necessarily prevent a man from becoming an acknowledged expert upon it’ (Pollard 1970: 27).
55 The examples of objectionable ‘charity’ are, respectively, from Mary Barton, Germinal, The Jungle, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Christ Stopped at Eboli.
56 In contrast with the goodness and suffering of the individual in ‘The Happy Prince’ is the wickedness of the government, which evidently has no concern for the poor.
57 On Dostoyevsky’s experience of charity as a political prisoner in Siberia, see p. 148 note 58.
58 Examples of post-1945 literature on the poor in developing countries (Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, and Brazil) are discussed in the Appendix. Also, see the writings of the leading liberation theologist, Gustavo Gutiérrez (1987, 1988), which have had much influence in developing countries.
59 Inglis (1963: 20, 251).
60 On the bishop as the pivotal figure in Les Misérables, see p. 37.
61 Loss of belief in Christian principles – ‘love thy neighbor’ being abandoned as modern society acknowledges no neighbor – is observed by Disraeli in Sybil (1847) as symptomatic of the ‘two nations’, of rich and poor. The Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, in The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857), raises awkward questions about Church finances and the attraction to the Church of the mercenary, the incompetent, and the flawed and corrupt in character.
62 Dostoyevsky makes the same point in the opening chapters of Crime and Punishment (1865–6), when he has the dissolute Marmeladov say to the future murderer, Raskolnikov, ‘chronic destitution is a crime’.
63 As well as clergymen, doctors of the poor often seem to come off badly, in Zola’s Germinal, for instance, or Chekhov’s ‘Peasants’, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli. Much sickness among the poor was related to malnutrition, which doctors could do little to alleviate.