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Poverty and Compassion

The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians

Author Gertrude Himmelfarb
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Paperback
$23.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Oct 27, 1992 | 492 Pages | 9780679741732
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Poverty and Compassion chronicles the moment in which an entire society--late Victorian England--discovered poverty and attacked it with the same combination of scientific rigor and moral fervor that characterized so much of the age.  Himmelfarb shows how the public spirit of that age became the public policy of our own. It is a story of reforms and ideas, of the Salvation Army and the Fabian Society, of high idealism and moral chivalry coupled with naïveté and roaring eccentricity.
Gertrude Himmelfarb taught for 23 years at Brooklyn College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where she was named distinguished professor of history in 1978. Now professor emeritus, she lives with her husband, Irving Kristol, in Washington, DC. Her books include The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values; On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society; Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians; The New History and the Old; Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians; The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age; On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill; Victorian Minds (nominated for a National Book Award); Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution; and Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics. View titles by Gertrude Himmelfarb

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Poverty and Compassion chronicles the moment in which an entire society--late Victorian England--discovered poverty and attacked it with the same combination of scientific rigor and moral fervor that characterized so much of the age.  Himmelfarb shows how the public spirit of that age became the public policy of our own. It is a story of reforms and ideas, of the Salvation Army and the Fabian Society, of high idealism and moral chivalry coupled with naïveté and roaring eccentricity.

Author

Gertrude Himmelfarb taught for 23 years at Brooklyn College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where she was named distinguished professor of history in 1978. Now professor emeritus, she lives with her husband, Irving Kristol, in Washington, DC. Her books include The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values; On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society; Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians; The New History and the Old; Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians; The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age; On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill; Victorian Minds (nominated for a National Book Award); Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution; and Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics. View titles by Gertrude Himmelfarb

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