SOURCE: Malchow, H. L. “A Victorian Mind: Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty, and the Moral Imagination.” Victorian Studies 35, no. 3 (spring 1992): 309-15.

In the following review of Poverty and Compassion, Malchow comments that Himmelfarb's arguments are shrewdly observed and argued, but observes that they are marred by ideological stridency.

The publication of Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians is the culmination of a major endeavor in intellectual history—one that has spanned the 1980s, and is, to use a Germanism of which Beatrice Webb was fond, itself a monument to the “Time-Spirit” of that decade. With this substantial book, Gertrude Himmelfarb, perhaps the best-known, certainly the most combative historian of nineteenth-century ideas, closes a study of well over 1,000 pages. Poverty and Compassion follows and complements her earlier volume, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. This work attempts to take a major consequence of...