4
I love poverty because He loved it.
I love riches as I can use them
to help the poor.
(Pascal)1
The heath scene in King Lear stands out in literary depictions of the poor. Between the early 17th century and the late 18th century there is little as realistic and empathetic. From Shakespeare to Wordsworth, there were no prolonged national crises in England comparable to those during the wars with Spain and France starting in the late 16th and late 18th centuries, respectively. The poor appear to have suffered more during these periods of war than during the intervening, mostly peaceful time. Yet, Poor Law, though reasonably effective from 1603 to 1789, did little to improve the public image of the poor. In literature as in legislation, the poor continued to be tarnished as they were in the Middle Ages, in the writings of Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer, and Villon, for example.2 Cervantes’ picaresque novel, Don Quixote (1606) and John Gay’s satire, The Beggar’s Opera (1728) include notable portrayals of the poor as lazy vagrants, rogues, tricksters, and fakes. Seventeenth-century writers, including John Donne, and Thomas Hobbes, follow the denigratory thrust of Poor Law in distinguishing between the ‘deserving’ productive poor and the ‘undeserving’ idle poor.3 Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), contests with erudition and, at times, overwhelming passion the biblical defence of poverty and the poor. He draws mainly on classical sources (e.g. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal, Lucan) but also biblical ones to show ‘filthy poverty’ in the worst possible light.
Some took a more positive, at any rate different, view. Ben Jonson in Volpone (c. 1606) and Molière in The Miser (1668), pour biblical scorn upon wealth accumulated for its own sake. Volpone turns round popular scorn toward beggars as fakers and swindlers: is this not also true of the rich?4 Nonconformists such as John Bunyan, who came from a peasant background, follow the Bible in praise of charity and the poor, and denigration of getting wealth for its own sake, for moth and rust to corrupt. Yet others doubt the wisdom of charity as taught in the Bible. In the satiric allegory, Fable of the Bees (first published in 1705), Bernard Mandeville suggests wickedly, in a passage quoted by John Maynard Keynes,5 that a society keeping biblical morality and puritan principles of thrift was doomed to poverty. To Daniel Defoe, people should be self-sufficient, charity stultifies initiative. This is the virtue of Robinson Crusoe who takes care of himself, and is not reliant on others. Of course, most people do not struggle to survive alone on islands. Few societies, if any, totally avoid welfare dependence: Poor Law in England and elsewhere prevented mass starvation. Ireland, however, had a history of subjugation, persecution, and suffering. Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729) stands out as an exposé of the failure of Poor Law in Ireland, where famine was frequent. Later 18th-century writers, including Henry Fielding, William Cowper, Samuel Johnson, and Oliver Goldsmith, were notably sympathetic to the poor. As the Industrial Revolution took hold in the late 18th century, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars worsened the lives of the poor. At the time of the failed harvests, inflation, famine, and food riots of the 1790s, Wordsworth opened his heart to the poor as few poets have: as a young man inspired by the egalitarian, though violent, ideals of the Revolution, he favored radical solutions. Wordsworth in his poetry called for reform of antiquated Poor Law and of public attitudes to the poor associated with legislation.
European literatures reflected divergences in policy, or lack of policy, toward the poor.6 Differences of this nature are evident in a comparison of King Lear and Don Quixote, the first part of which came out in 1606, around the time King Lear was first staged. Enemies in nationality, Shakespeare and Cervantes were allies in human sympathy. Their depiction of common people reveals wider attitudes toward the poor at a time of rising vagrancy. Both writers, approaching old age, confront the degeneration of aging, madness, and transfiguration, Lear to a raving vagrant, Quixote to a knight errant tilting at windmills. In their ‘madness’, one tragic the other comic, the king and knight find wisdom. Both might both be described as latent social reformers, though Quixote’s ‘action’ in defending victims of injustice is comic, while Lear’s failure to act is tragic. Lear recognizes on the stormy heath that as king he failed in his responsibility to the poor: ‘I have ta’en too little care of this’ (III iv 32–3). There is evidently no such recognition in Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s tragedy is that his idealism is absurd, mad even. This crucial difference between Shakespeare and Cervantes suggests a broader national difference. Spanish Catholic views of the poor were governed by tradition. In Protestant England, however, the Poor Law of 1598/1601 was unique in its time, determined by new secular, parliamentary, capitalist forces, independent of the Church.7 Cervantes and Shakespeare both seek to fight poverty: to Cervantes the struggle is ludicrous; to Shakespeare, tragic. Lear’s greatness emerges as death approaches, when he finds in himself the power and determination, and the love, to change the world he has ruled. The tragedy when the play begins is that Lear is a purposeless king; the tragedy at the end is that he did not find his purpose sooner. The comedy in Don Quixote is the distance between one man’s illusions and the reality. Don Quixote hilariously lives up to his outmoded chivalric code and rectifies injustice personally wherever he finds it, but poverty remains fixed in the Spanish landscape.
What were the implications for the poor of these differences between Shakespeare and Cervantes, Lear and Don Quixote, England and Spain? In the 16th and early 17th centuries, both countries experienced economic upheaval, population growth, and inequality. The Age of Discovery increased wealth and the cost of living. There was a steep rise in the number of poor people and vagrants and an urgent need for reform. In Spain, however, the problem was debated, one might almost say quixotically, without producing legislative action and social reform.8 England, in contrast, broke out of the traditional theological framework for dealing with poverty. Its split with the Roman Church in the 1530s in effect forced its Parliament, with the monarch its head, to take responsibility for the poor – as Lear does. The result was a relatively effective secular Poor Law, codified by the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603 and lasting until 1834. To Shakespeare, who came to prominence in the 1590s, during the lengthy period when the codification of Poor Law was debated in Parliament, poverty was a problem for monarchs and governments: if they failed, the fault lay in themselves.9
From King Lear to lyrical ballads
Between the time of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, English legislative responsibility for the poor was in the hands of Parliament, but the Church of England still had its theological interest in the poor. Church action when effective brought it credit and when ineffective seemed to justify state control. Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), while giving the theological arguments in favor of poverty, describes a ruthless, hard-hearted world of the poor with no real Church protection. Poverty, writes Burton, is an insufferable yoke, chief source of melancholy, frustration, and despair: it is all very good to distinguish, as Poor Law did, between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, but what of those caught in the trap of poverty?
If once poor, we are metamorphosed in an instant, base slaves, villains and vile drudges; for to be poor is to be a knave, a fool, a wretch, a wicked, an odious fellow, a common eyesore … to empty jakes, fay [clean] channels, carry out dirt and dunghills, sweep chimneys, rub horse-heels … as so many footstools for rich men to tread on, blocks for them to get on horseback, or as walls for them to piss on.10
For all their labor, the poor remain unclothed and underfed; they would ‘forsake God, abjure Religion’ rather than endure the crucifixion that is poverty.11
More senior in the Church was Burton’s contemporary, John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, London, who conveys a view of the poor similarly split by the theological ideal and the quotidian reality, in a sermon of May 8, 1628: the poor, being the naked suffering image of Christ, are better than the rich; but Donne also gives the gist of Poor Law in language drawing on Scripture but having no shred of Scriptural justification: charity given to an able-bodied man dissipated in drink, idleness, and unbelief, is ‘to give the children’s bread to dogs’.12 Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), also accepts the distinction between the idle and the productive poor, and insists – this is during the time of the English civil war – that only civil war is worse than beggars. The solution to unemployment – emigration. In reply to the question – What will happen when the world fills up and resources are scarce? – Hobbes gives a characteristically grim answer: ‘the last remedy of all is war; which provideth for every man, by victory, or death’.13
John Bunyan, who fought on the parliamentarian side in the 1640s and worked as an itinerant tinker, was chronicler of a largely poor rural world. Bunyan’s writings after he became a nonconformist preacher are steeped in biblical empathy with the poor. Imprisoned for 12 years for preaching, he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) – after the Bible, the bestselling book in English until the 20th century – in prison. Bunyan accepts inequality – ‘I am content with what I have,/ little be it or much’ – and extols the virtues of contentment – ‘Here little, and hereafter bliss’; but although the poor might live in dunghills, they are princes beloved of God, charity is a manifestation of love for them, and their humility will be their salvation:
He that is down needs fear no fall.
He that is low no pride.
He that is humble ever shall
Have God to be his guide.
(‘Shepherd’s Boy’s Song’)
In his children’s poem, ‘Of Physick’, Bunyan writes of the beggar who pleads his poverty and ‘They within doors do him an alms deny’, and turns out to ‘resemble them that pray/ to God for mercy and will take no nay’. To Bunyan, low birth was a matter of pride, and the very lack of formal education meant that the poor were freer inwardly and more open to divine inspiration.14
Bernard Mandeville in his poetic allegorical satire on early 18th-century English society, Fable of the Bees (1705), took a God-less, jaundiced view of poverty and the poor, but one close to the modern economic theory associated with Keynes.15 Religion far from being a liberator is an enslaver, enforcing the status quo, keeping the poor in their place through Justice herself, ‘to secure the rich and great’ at the expense of the poor; necessarily so as their servitude enables society to function, as does immorality, for (using the analogy of bees) a society guilty of the Seven Deadly Sins and more has the energy and enterprise to gain wealth; honesty is a sure way to general impoverishment:
Bare virtue can’t make nations live
In splendour …
Daniel Defoe, too, has little sympathy for the poor. Christian love, Defoe implies in his pamphlet ‘The Poor Man’s Plea’ (1699), is wasted on the poor. He lays out their defects: drinking, gambling, criminality, and promiscuity, but blames the nobility for their bad example. The poor look to the rich for direction, yet the nobility go unpunished for their failings while the poor are punished – a criticism repeatedly made in the literature on the poor, in the writings of Robert Burton, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Henry Fielding, Thomas Paine, and Victor Hugo, among others: a drunk nobleman, for example, or a disorderly rich merchant was not brought to court, fined, and set in the stocks as a poor man was. Social position and the sumptuary laws determined one law for the rich, another for the poor. Yet Defoe, in another pamphlet, ‘Giving Alms, no Charity’ (1704), addressed to Parliament, saw charity as an encouragement to a life of vagrancy and dependence, creating a mass of ‘clamoring, unemployed, unprovided for poor people, who make the nation uneasy, burden the rich, clog our parishes’.16 Begging would last as long as it profited more than work. Solutions could not be imposed by Poor Law but came through good governance, peace, economic improvement, and, among the poor, temperance and enterprise.
Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels (1727), implies that the inequalities in English society are supported by a corrupt legal system. In the land of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver’s four-legged protector is ‘at a loss how it should come to pass, that the law which was intended for every man’s preservation, should be any man’s ruin’.17 Swift sums up the inequalities in English society: ‘the rich man enjoyed the fruit of the poor man’s labour, and the latter were a thousand to one in proportion to the former … the bulk of our people was forced to live miserably, by labouring every day for small wages, to make a few live plentifully’.18
The insoluble problems of 18th-century Poor Law were an increase in the number of people seeking relief as the poor rates climbed from about 400,000 pounds at the start of the century to about five million by its end.19 The parishes, not the central government, had an increasing burden of poor relief. About 7,000 of them had populations under 300 people and another 5,000 had under 800. They responded as governmental bodies under financial stress often do, by outsourcing the problem: in effect farming the poor out to workhouse contractors for a fixed sum, to feed and clothe them, and profit from whatever work they could be made to do. When economy came through the door, Christian love flew out the window. Highly sensitive problems involving troubled and vulnerable people were dealt with as with a sledgehammer by overseers who were often incompetent, negligent, and even criminal in their maltreatment of the poor; and who behaved, as do some more recent care home owners, as though the poor existed only to provide them with income.
Literature reflects conflicting views among overseers on the poor man seeking relief: to give him charity or find him work (and threaten him to make him cooperate)? The dominant view was that of Defoe, who opposed charitable employment of the poor as a source of dependence and unfairness. Defoe’s views on the poor are obliquely amplified in Robinson Crusoe (1719) which argues for individual adaptability and independence. In Robinson Crusoe, as in the fictional memoir, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Defoe presents the Bible as a guide, perhaps especially to the poor and downhearted, in life’s hardest trials. The Bible could give strength in crisis and inspire dissidence and revolt, as in the English Revolution. In A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe praises Church organization during the Great Plague of 1665, when many wealthy people fled London to country homes, abandoning their servants to their fate.20 Rich and poor died in their thousands, but the rich, usually having somewhere to escape to, had a higher survival rate.21 The local clerics, ignoring the danger, took charge of the needy poor. The Lord Mayor appointed doctors for the poor and, in a striking gesture whose futility could not be recognized for two centuries, ordered immediate publication of cheap remedies for the poor.22 Superstition was universal, there being no other explanations for the divine wrath.23 The narrator resolves to stay in plague-ridden London after opening his Bible at random to Psalm 91: ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness … there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.’24
The Bible continued to influence ‘secular’ Western political thought on poverty. Locke, in First Treatise on Government (1689), claims revolt as a God-given right of the hungry: ‘We know God hath not left one man so to the mercy of another, that he may starve him if he please’ (par. 42).25 The right of a starving man to rebel was largely theoretical by the 18th century, when there was ‘no nationwide politics of famine and panic, nor were hedgerows infested with beggars and bandits’;26 but it could apply to the Irish. In Ireland, Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729), the most infamous satire in English, purported to ‘solve’ Irish poverty and infant mortality. Swift’s answer to Irish poverty was a savage mockery of mercantile rationalization, devoid of Scriptural compassion. About a quarter of Irish pregnancies, Swift estimates, ended in miscarriage or in mortality within a year of birth. Vast numbers of the old, diseased, and maimed died each year of cold, famine, and filth, while many of the young laborers were unemployed and hungry. Estimating a total of 120,000 Irish ‘breeders’ unable to feed their children, Swift proposes that newborn Irish children, rather than die of hunger together with their parents, would be more profitably sold to the English and eaten.27 Swift’s satire was applicable to many parts of the early 18th-century ‘civilized’ world, including London, for in his time it was still normal for babies and children to be abandoned. Swift, a clergyman, saw how ruthlessness caused by poverty and unwanted pregnancies often overwhelmed Christian charity and compassion:
Unwanted babies were left out on the streets to die or were strangled and thrown on to dung heaps or into open drains. Those that survived were an irksome charge upon the parish and were put out to parish nurses, notorious as gin drinkers, who were known to maim or disfigure them so that when they were old enough to go out begging they might by exciting pity be the more successful. These nurses made further profit out of their charges by hiring them out to beggars at four pence a day; but if a baby appeared too sickly to survive and thus fail to become an ultimate source of profit to the nurse it was soon despatched by ‘the infernal monster’ who would ‘throw a spoonful of gin down the child’s throat which instantly strangles the babe. When the searchers come to inspect the body and enquire what distemper caused death, it is answered “convulsions”.’28
Swift was outraged, too, as was his younger contemporary Henry Fielding, by there being one law for the rich and another for the poor.29 In the 1720s, as crime spread in London and the arch-criminal, Jonathan Wild, thrived, Swift urged his friend, John Gay, to write a satire on crime, which he did in The Beggar’s Opera (1728). In this exposé of the London underworld, it is not impoverished conditions that drive men such as Wild to crime. Rather, there is a parallel between rich and poor – men and women prey on each other, rich and poor alike.
Like Pikes lank with Hunger, who miss of their Ends,
They bite their Companions and prey on their Friends.
(III ii)
The Beggar’s Opera is radical in implicitly questioning legislation which from the medieval period onward had singled out the poor for blame. Gay shares with Defoe the view that the vices of the poor are, in fact, no worse than those of the rich. Wild is no more criminal than the corrupt Walpole administration: the difference is that Wild is caught and hanged.30 Sympathy for the poor, the majority of the population of Bedlam, the lunatic asylum in south London (the building is today the Imperial War Museum, a monument to a different lunacy), is expressed also by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad (1743: line 34), in the reference to ‘The cave of Poverty and Poetry’.
Fielding, a Justice of the Peace, was similarly supportive of the poor both in his fiction, notably Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, and in polemical works which draw attention to their suffering.31 The poor, writes Fielding, gain little from their criminality, but neither do the rich gain from plundering them. Like Defoe, Fielding doubts the value of charity: London alone was swarming with beggars. The Poor Tax, a burden on property owners, hardly improved the lives of the poor, many of whom remained hungry, cold, disease-ridden, and tempted to crime. As a magistrate, Fielding was wearily familiar with the wiles of the law in dealing harshly with the poor, even when the law was nominally on their side. Some of his work is a variation on ‘let’s kill all the lawyers’ in Henry VI, Part 2 (IV ii 76). In Joseph Andrews, he draws on his experience in describing how the rich got rid of the undesirable poor: for example, by having them arrested for breaking a twig or treading on the grass. Fielding’s contemporary, Tobias Smollett, shared his cynicism toward English Law: goodness of heart and the legal profession were on opposite poles. Law, in his view, was a shameful profession as it used loopholes to trap the poor and help the rich.
In the pre-industrial age, the Pastoral genre idealized the English countryside and its impoverished inhabitants, in literature and painting.32 Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1750) contrasts strikingly with later poets such as Goldsmith, Crabbe, and Wordsworth in depicting a settled rural England in which the poor are to be admired and valued:
Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.33
Goldsmith, in The Deserted Village (1770), recalls a time, now gone, with a typical timeless English village preacher, ‘passing rich with forty pounds a year’, devoted as in his doctrine to the poor, giving them not just charity, but himself. He sits with them by the fire, listening to their stories, the vagrants, beggars, crippled soldiers, and bankrupts, delighting in their exotic company: ‘the good man learned to glow,/ And quite forgot their vices in their woe’. This is a hymn of praise not of the preacher alone but of all who serve a higher ideal, who work at the coalface of life: ‘He watched and wept, he prayed and felt, for all’, seeking to help the damaged earth-bound to fly again, comforting the dying and the bereaved, finding joy in doing good. But this world has passed. Crabbe’s poem The Village (1783) exposes darker truths of the conditions of the laborers, their hard lives and often-troubled relations with their employers. Crabbe’s sharp economic insights derive from his experience as a clergyman ministering to the rural poor: ‘The wealth around them makes them doubly poor.’
In the century after Gray’s Elegy, the population tripled, rising to 16.7 million by 1851, outstripping productivity gains.34 Food riots became common in the latter half of the 18th century.35 The cost of war with France and the American colonies was steep. From 1750 to 1803 the cost of poor relief increased five times. As industrial towns grew, families working in a variety of home trades were scattered among the mills, their freedom gone. The growth of British industry led to the migration of large numbers in search of work; workhouses were built to accommodate the poor, often with military-style regimentation and uniforms. There were those, such as the poet John Dyer in The Fleece (1757), who saw the workhouses, perhaps with a touch of irony, as shelters from life:
Ho, ye lame, ye blind;
Ye languid limbs, with real want oppress’d,
Who tread the rough highways, and mountains wild,
Through storms, and rains, and bitterness of heart;
Ye children of affliction, be compell’d
To happiness.
(II 243–8)
Yet, even before large-scale industrialization, it was clear that the working and living conditions of the poor needed reform. Edmund Burke anticipates Victorian reforms of workers’ conditions in A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), presenting the 18th-century British mining profession as a huge scandal. Over 100,000 people were virtually slaves in lead, tin, iron, and copper mines, buried in the dark, ill-fed, ruined in health, ‘tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of these mines’.36 In other parts of the world, Burke adds, working conditions were far worse;37 indeed, the universal phenomenon of the enslaved poor ministering to the idle rich, the irrational explosive mixture of villainy, blindness, and injustice corrupting ‘respectable’ society, made the entire world a Bedlam, Newgate, and Bridewell combined.
The French and Scottish Enlightenment conceived of government as a rational instrument for the improvement of society. As awareness grew, through better communications and trade, of the universal sufferings of the poor, the thinking and feeling men and women of the Enlightenment were driven to ask, as Adam Smith does in Theory of Moral Sentiments: what can we do? How can we enjoy our prosperity while so many are hungry and cold? Smith warns against commiseration with those remote from us whom we cannot help, ‘placed altogether out of the sphere of our activity’; as for those within the sphere of our aid, he postulates ‘an invisible hand’ by which the rich distribute the necessities of life to all.38 In a passage with striking echoes in English literature, Smith finds an equalizing humanity making kings and beggars fellow travellers: ‘the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for’.39 To Smith, good and just government and free trade work better than charity – regardless of Scriptural authority – to alleviate poverty. Economists have stressed the general validity of this observation; and even if free trade is ‘the gospel of the strong’40 – indeed, even though governments, as Smith alleges in The Wealth of Nations (1776), are in the business of draining money from the pockets of their citizens, and tradesmen rarely meet without conspiring against the public, likewise to drain their pockets – free trade can be a force for the improvement of the lives of the poor.
Yet, as industry and poverty spread, the ‘invisible hand’ as a natural regulatory mechanism, setting things right, seemed more plausible on a structural level than on a personal one; and writers tend to be more engaged by the personal debilitating effects of poverty than with structural solutions in the long term. Lack of personal contact with the poor, Wordsworth suggests in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, can promote ‘selfishness and cold oblivious cares’: charity not only provides for the poor but also humanizes the giver. As for the beggars filling late 18th-century European cities as the population grew, they could not wait for good government and free trade to give them food and shelter: they needed a real hand now, with the support of traditional biblical authority – ‘open your hand to your brother, to your poor in your land’ (Deuteronomy 15: 11) – not an invisible one later. Some writers and artists, including George Crabbe and Thomas Gainsborough, themselves dependent on patronage, made the case for the rich, that notwithstanding their political and business dealings, they were not inadvertently responsible for the increased hardships of the poor. Rather than accept responsibility, the rich often contented themselves with benevolent concern for the poor, as though this were enough. Poetry and painting were part of this benevolence, losing the name of action. Crabbe, protégé of aristocrats and prominent men such as Burke, has been attacked insofar as his poetic portraits of the poor, though realistic and at time deeply moving, give no more than sympathy as ‘moral compensation’:
The teachings of church and chapel combined at the end of the [18th] century with the rising science of political economy to reassure the rich that whatever responsibility they might feel to relieve the conditions of the deserving poor, they were in no way responsible for causing it: ‘the laws of commerce,’ says Burke ‘are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God’.41
By the second half of the 18th century, the concern of writers and artists with the poor was far greater than in the past. Samuel Johnson declared at a London social gathering in 1770, that ‘A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization’.42 In the same year, Oliver Goldsmith published The Deserted Village, with its dark scenes of an ill-fated land ‘Where wealth accumulates, and men decay’, where ‘Laws grind the poor, and rich men make the law’, a village abandoned by its impoverished inhabitants: ‘scourged by famine from the smiling land,/ the mournful peasant leads his humble band’.43
Crabbe, chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir, and later Vicar of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, describes from personal observation the typical parish poorhouse in late 18th-century England, in The Village (1783): a dump of human misery, loud and public, dilapidated and putrid, discouraging the ‘unworthy’, populated with unloved children, forsaken wives, unmarried mothers, dejected widows, parents bereaved of children, the abandoned old, the infirm and crippled, the idiots and the mad, and those dying alone. As a remarkable critique of the everyday suffering of the poor, this poem deserves to be quoted at length:
Thus groan the old, till, by disease oppressed,
They taste a final woe, and then they rest.
Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell, who know no parents’ care,
Parents, who know no childrens’ love, dwell there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood fears;
The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
The moping idiot and the madman gay.
Here, too, the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve,
Where the loud groans from some chamber flow,
Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below;
Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,
And the cold charities of man to man:
Whose laws indeed for ruined age provide,
And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;
But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,
And pride embitters what it can’t deny.
(Book 1)
Crabbe in his poetry conducts his readers ‘through the dingy and trivial to the gradually incandescent’.44 Crabbe’s dependence on aristocratic patronage might have inhibited him from blaming the rich for the plight of the poor. Yet as a clergyman, born into rural poverty and knowing the poor intimately through his ministry, he judges their conditions to be intolerable in a Christian society. In contrast, William Cowper, in The Task (1785), presents the conventional view of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor enshrined in Poor Law. The poet openly blames the ‘undeserving’ poor, allegedly the majority, for self-inflicted woe, ‘who whimper forth/ Their long complaints…/ The effect of laziness or sottish waste’ – and expresses admiration for the ‘deserving’ poor, who persist in dressing neatly and refuse help. They prefer the bread of affliction to
The rugged frowns and insolent rebukes
Of knaves in office partial in their work
Of distribution; liberal of their aid
To clamorous importunity in rags,
But ofttimes deaf to suppliants who would blush
To wear a tattered garb however coarse,
Whom famine cannot reconcile to filth.
(The Task, Book IV)45
The history of late 18th-century European countries is consistent in the picture of wages not keeping up with inflation: ‘a worsening standard of living for those obliged to sell their labour in order to enter the market for commodities’; in England, price volatility led to frequent food riots.46 In the poem Sympathy (1788), Samuel Jackson Pratt describes the clandestine movements of grain to avoid rioters and find profitable markets, leaving the local population to starve.47
By the end of the 18th century, when the Romantic movement began, writers increasingly sided with the poor, arguing that the spread of capitalism and industry was degrading to the poor. It led to a decline in living standards and to increased social problems such as crime, alcoholism, and prostitution. In 18th-century England, there was a drastic rise in the number of capital crimes and use of the death penalty, revealing a rising fear of the poor and recognition that their hardships were driving them to break the law. The observation that most executed criminals were poor drives Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1792): in Thetford, Norfolk, where he was born in 1737, Paine could see Gallows Hill from the window of his house.48
As England drove forward as the first industrial nation, legislation, notably the Enclosure Acts, increased the misery of the rural poor: threatened with starvation, many were forced off their land into factories. Their lives were disrupted further by war with France after the Revolution.49 The Romantic movement in art and literature responded to these changes, and Blake and Wordsworth, Clare and Shevchenko, emerged among the great poets of the poor, and the great transformation of the lives, and the literary depiction, of the poor began.
Notes
1 ‘J’aime la pauvreté parce qu’il la aimée./ J’aime les biens parce qu’ils me donnnent le moyen/ d’en assister les misérables.’
2 On negative views of the poor in medieval literature, see pp. 42–3.
3 On literature disparaging the poor, see for example, Geremek (1994), Freedman (1999), and Hitchcock (2004).
4 Similarly, Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn, satirizes the notion of aristocracy as a confidence trick.
5 Keynes (2007: 359f.). See pp. 78–9.
6 For examples of differences in the treatment of the poor in various countries in the period 1789–1939, see Chapter 6.
7 These differences were crucial factors in the colonial history of these countries, England in ultimately prosperous North America, Spain in South America, mired in poverty and corruption.
8 In The Wealth of Nations, Smith writes of the Iberian peninsula as the only part of Europe that had gone backward economically since the Middle Ages; by the late 18th century Spain and Portugal were ‘beggarly countries’ (IV vii).
9 Despite the differences between England and Spain, Shakespeare (in The Tempest) and Cervantes (in Don Quixote, Part 2) mock the low-born who seek or gain power. The poor have grievances, aristocrats have power.
10 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘Poverty and Want’ (Part 1, Section 2, Member 4: 6) (1621: 206). Quoted from the 1st edition, British Library, Rare Books. The six-volume modern edition (1989–2000) is based on all six authoritative 17th-century editions. Burton observes, as do later writers, including Bernard de Mandeville, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Henry Fielding, and Thomas Paine, among others, that the poor, more than the rich, feel the strong arm of the law: ‘they are commonly so preyed upon by polling officers for breaking the laws, by their tyrannizing landlords, so flayed and fleeced by perpetual exactions, that though they do drudge, fare hard, and starve their genius, they cannot live in some countries; but what they have is instantly taken from them’ (1621: 207); as for the rich, ‘They may freely trespass, and do as they please’ (ibid., 205). Gay, in The Beggar’s Opera (1728), similarly, satirizes the idea that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor; and Paine, in The Rights of Man (1792), points out that most executed criminals were poor. See p. 109 note 7.
11 Ibid., 203. Repeated as ‘forsake religion, abjure God’ (209).
12 Donne (1954: 76–7).
13 Leviathan, Part 2, ch. 30, par. 19.
14 Bunyan’s children’s writings were a new genre in English in the 17th century. On Bunyan, see Hill (1990).
15 Smith attacks Mandeville as pernicious, all the more as he ‘borders on the truth’ (The Theory of Moral Sentiments VII ii 4, 13), but Keynes (2007: 359f.) quotes Mandeville approvingly, in support of spending to stimulate the economy. Mandeville’s acknowledgment of vice as a driving force in human affairs, though seemingly anti-religious, is actually in keeping with the biblical view (Genesis 6: 5) that human nature is incorrigibly evil; rabbinic literature, similarly, treats evil as part of human nature, and uses the image of ‘the yeast in the dough’ to describe the Evil Inclination (e.g. Berakhot 17a). Émile Zola, in the late 19th-century Rougon-Macquart novels, depicts Paris, with its magnificent culture and beauty, as a product of deceit and violence, exploitation and corruption. Yet, Zola loved Paris aesthetically. For this reason, Marx preferred Balzac, the ‘reactionary’, for the economic realism of his portrayal of bourgeois Parisian society.
16 Defoe (1704: 9).
17 Gulliver’s Travels, Part 4, Chapter 5.
18 Ibid., ch. 6.
19 For a summary of the particular problems of poor relief in 18th-century Britain, see the Hammonds in Turberville (1967: 300f.).
20 Heine observed, similarly, of the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris, that the rich could escape, the poor could not (Hazan 2010: 250).
21 Defoe (1994: 17).
22 Ibid., 25–6, 31.
23 On the biblical association of disease with sin as an impediment to scientific progress and a justification for harsh treatment of the poor, see p. 185.
24 Defoe (1994: 13)
25 On Scripture and Dissenters, see Watts (1978, 1995), Skinner (1978), and Nelson (2010).
26 Porter (1990: 340).
27 In a later proposal, ‘for giving badges to the beggars in all the parishes of Dublin’, Swift attacked the ‘evil of foreign beggars’, given to theft and drunkenness, including many English beggars, exported to Ireland ‘gratis and duty-free’: ‘They are too lazy to work, they are not afraid to steal, nor ashamed to beg, and yet are too proud to be seen with a badge’ (Swift 1737: 11).
28 Hibbert (1988: 395). On poverty and infanticide, see Aberbach (2018). Public opinion toward the poor changed during the Victorian era as conditions improved. See Chapter 6. In particular, there was less tolerance toward familiar sights such as children living rough on the streets. The shift in public opinion is reflected in the remarkable growth of Dr. Barnardo homes for destitute children from the 1860s. Though reminiscent of the workhouse, these homes rescued thousands of children from the streets and constituted a remarkable act of philanthropy.
29 Fielding, translating Moliere’s The Miser (1733), included his own line, ‘he who is rich can have no Vice, and he that is poor can have no Virtue’ (Varey 1986: 17–18). On Fielding’s recommendations for helping the poor, see his ‘Proposal for Making an Effective Provision for the Poor’ (1753). The main characters in Fielding’s novels, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, are low-born. On poverty in 18th-century literature, see Perry (2005).
30 The Beggar’s Opera, in its claim that the poor are punished for their vices while the rich escape the law and its satire of ‘one law for the rich, another law for the poor’, became enduringly popular, in England and other countries, notably its 200th anniversary reincarnation by Brecht and Weill as The Threepenny Opera (1928) in Weimar Germany.
31 In ‘A Proposal for making an Effective Provision for the Poor’ (1753), Fielding writes: ‘The sufferings of the poor are less observed than their misdeeds … They starve and freeze and rot among themselves; but they beg and steal and rob among their betters’ (9, 10). Fielding, who had much experience of the poor in court, expresses a compassionate view similar to that of Thomas More in Utopia (1516), that hungry people steal. Poor Law, in contrast, tended to be accusatory, with little regard for causes, motives or long-term remedies. See pp. 26, 44, 50, 63. Characters in Fielding’s fiction, such as Tom Jones, illustrate his belief that the place of the poor in society is not fixed. The social mobility in Fielding anticipates later writers, including Jane Austen, Stendhal, Hugo, Dickens, Thackeray, and D.H. Lawrence. See p. 19 note 27.
32 See Barrell and Bull (1982).
33 On the laboring poor from the French Revolution until 1848, see Hobsbawm (1962: ch. 11). On literature and rural society, see Williams (in Higgins 2001).
34 On population statistics and the increase of the cost of poor relief in the late 18th century, see Lees (1998: 84).
35 For details of food riots and other forms of popular disturbance, see Gregory and Stevenson (2007: 178–91).
36 Burke (1758: 91–2). Burke’s feeling for the poor, like his Irish compatriot Jonathan Swift, is expressed satirically, in A Vindication of Natural Society. He admired the poetry of George Crabbe which, unlike most earlier pastoral poetry, shows that ‘in the eighteenth century the conditions of the labourers were unendurable’ (Barrell and Bull 1982: 379). Burke became Crabbe’s chief patron, helping him enter the clerical profession and obtain prestigious appointments, notably as chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, which freed him from poverty and allowed him to write. On Crabbe, see pp. 84–5.
37 Defoe’s A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) gives a picture of a generally prosperous country in the early 18th century. London had large numbers of paupers, but was able to deal with them, having ‘the largest number of charities of any city in the world’ (Defoe 1968: i 378). The foreign visitor to England in 1750 would have had a favorable impression of the working class: ‘Its common people, insular, conceited, competent, brutal and given to riot, appeared to be well-fed and prosperous, by the modest standards which were then applied to the poor’ (Hobsbawm 1969: 27). This positive impression was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution, which until the 1840s tended to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, leaving ‘the universal discontent of men who felt themselves hungry in a society reeking with wealth, enslaved in a country which prided itself on its freedom, seeking bread and hope, and receiving in return stones and despair’ (ibid., 95). Cobbett, in Rural Rides (1830), summed up the inequality in early 19th-century English society: ‘rich land and poor labourers’ (2001: 287).
38 Theory of Moral Sentiments (III iii 9; IV i 10). In Dickens’ Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind, a Utilitarian disciple of Adam Smith – he goes so far as to name one of his children after Smith, and another after Malthus – sums up Smith’s alleged view of charity: ‘The Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist’ (Book 2, ch. 12). That there is too much suffering in the world for any one person to overcome is frequently expressed in literature: in Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story (1926: ch. 3), for example, the Viennese doctor, Fridolin, seeing a tramp stretched on a bench late at night, calls to mind the thousands of people like him and the impossibility of helping them all.
39 Theory of Moral Sentiments (IV i 10). Compare ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ (Henry IV Part 2, III i 31); the description in Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy of St. Austin’s envy of the merry beggar; and Wordsworth’s ‘We have all of us one human heart’ (‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’) in describing a beggar with a rich existence:
… let him, where and when he will, sit down,
Beneath the trees, or by the grassy bank
Of highway side, and with the little birds
Share his chance-gathered meal …
Beggary is usually seen as a disadvantage rather than an advantage, but there are exceptions, notably W.H. Davies’ Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908). In the 1930s Depression, when the enormous increase in the number of poor, unemployed people made communism seem preferable to democracy, René Clair made A Nous la Liberté (1931) and Chaplin, Modern Times (1936): both films idealize the life of a tramp. Chaplin’s tramp was the first internationally recognized character in film.
40 Tawney (1941: 22).
41 Barrell (1980: 85). The quote from Burke is from ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’ (1795), reprinted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1907: 22). On Adam Smith’s influence on Burke, see p. 96.
42 Boswell (1970: 446). Johnson was skeptical about the alleged idleness of beggars: ‘You meet a man begging; you charge him with idleness: he says, “I am willing to labour. Will you give me work?” “I cannot.” “Why, then you have no right to charge me with idleness”’ (Boswell 1970: 1031). Chekhov presents a similar viewpoint in his story, ‘A Beggar’ (1886).
43 Lonsdale (2003: 530). Goldsmith’s idyllic portrait of life in the village prior to its desertion, ‘Where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain’, is attacked by Crabbe in The Village: ‘Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy Swains,/ Because the Muses never knew their pains.’ Yet, Goldsmith does not ignore the plight of the rural poor. In The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), for example, he refers to rent-distress, increasingly frequent in the 18th century as the poor were unable to pay rent and were threatened with eviction.
44 Haddakin (1955: 169).
45 Cowper, in The Task, emphasizes the undeserving poor as not just noisome but noisy, in contrast with Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, in which impoverishment is signified by deathly silence (Denney 2012).
46 Blanning (2007: 184).
47 Ibid., 185.
48 On Paine’s background of Quaker dissent, see Kaye (2005).
49 In France, as in England, public land was increasingly privatized in the late 18th century; despite the Revolution, ‘it became harder than ever to pasture animals on common land or gather fuel from the open woods’ (Schama 1989: 855).