SOURCE: Durbin, Elizabeth. Review of The Idea of Poverty, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. History of Political Economy 17, no. 4 (winter 1985): 657-59.

In the following review, Durbin asserts that Himmelfarb's The Idea of Poverty is an important contribution to the history of political economy on the subject of poverty.

In her projected two-part study, Gertrude Himmelfarb intends to trace the evolution of various conceptions of poverty in England from the Industrial Revolution, when the Elizabethan poor laws still held sway, to the modern welfare state. In this, the first volume [The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age], she takes her story from 1850 to 1950, a time of “intensive economic and social change” and of “social experiments, ideologies, and policies” designed to cope with the problems of the poor; she chose England because it served as a “social laboratory” for other countries. Rejecting a Whig interpretation of its history of...