SOURCE: Meacham, Standish. Review of Poverty and Compassion, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. American Historical Review 97, no. 4 (October 1992): 1219.

In the following review, Meacham asserts that Poverty and Compassion is a worthwhile work, but comments that Himmelfarb oversimplifies the issues in order to support her own arguments.

Like E. P. Thompson, a historian for whom she has little use, Gertrude Himmelfarb is an enemy of historical condescension. Thompson, in The Making of The English Working Class (1963), asked his readers to take the radicals and visionaries he discussed with the seriousness their convictions deserved and to take them on their own terms. So with Himmelfarb. She insists, in this work [Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians], that late-Victorian philanthropists and social theorists had important things to say and that their deeds produced ameliorative social change of considerable magnitude.

Her quarrel with Marxists—Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Gareth Stedman-Jones, and...