SOURCE: Bailey, Victor. Review of Poverty and Compassion, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Journal of Social History 27, no. 1 (fall 1993): 194.

In the following review, Bailey asserts that, while Himmelfarb's The Idea of Poverty was “original, striking, and challenging,” Poverty and Compassion is “derivative, fragmentary, and predictable.”

With Poverty and Compassion, Professor Himmelfarb concludes her remarkable two-volume assessment of the Victorian responses to poverty. The entire project now ranges from Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus in the 1780s to T. H. Green, Alfred Marshall and Charles Booth in the 1880s. The first volume, The Idea of Poverty (1983), was rightfully acclaimed as an original, challenging and sympathetic reconstruction of the history of those who thought about poverty in the early industrial age. In what essentially was a series of individual biographies, introduced by an intriguing re-appraisal of the economist Adam Smith, Himmelfarb insisted that what led Victorian writers and thinkers to perceive poverty...