The Idea Of Poverty: England In The Early Industrial Age
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In an age when industrialisation was reshaping the fabric of English society, The Idea of Poverty confronts one of the most urgent and contentious questions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: what does it mean to be poor, and what — if anything — should be done about it? Gertrude Himmelfarb chronicles the evolving moral, economic, and political attitudes toward the poor across a sweeping historical canvas, tracing how writers, statesmen, and reformers from Defoe and Malthus to Dickens and Engels grappled with the human consequences of industrial capitalism. With meticulous scholarship and commanding prose, she argues that poverty was not merely a social condition but a cultural and ideological battleground, shaped as much by perception and language as by material circumstance. Himmelfarb's magisterial study stands as a landmark in the historiography of modern Britain, illuminating how the idea of poverty carried within it assumptions about class, morality, and the proper ordering of society. Her writing is precise yet deeply humane, moving fluidly between high political theory and the lived realities of the labouring poor. A rigorous and absorbing work of intellectual history, The Idea of Poverty leaves the reader questioning whether the debates of the early industrial age have ever truly been resolved.
Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Format: Hardback
Published: 1984, Faber and Faber
Genre: British & Irish history
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In an age when industrialisation was reshaping the fabric of English society, The Idea of Poverty confronts one of the most urgent and contentious questions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: what does it mean to be poor, and what — if anything — should be done about it? Gertrude Himmelfarb chronicles the evolving moral, economic, and political attitudes toward the poor across a sweeping historical canvas, tracing how writers, statesmen, and reformers from Defoe and Malthus to Dickens and Engels grappled with the human consequences of industrial capitalism. With meticulous scholarship and commanding prose, she argues that poverty was not merely a social condition but a cultural and ideological battleground, shaped as much by perception and language as by material circumstance. Himmelfarb's magisterial study stands as a landmark in the historiography of modern Britain, illuminating how the idea of poverty carried within it assumptions about class, morality, and the proper ordering of society. Her writing is precise yet deeply humane, moving fluidly between high political theory and the lived realities of the labouring poor. A rigorous and absorbing work of intellectual history, The Idea of Poverty leaves the reader questioning whether the debates of the early industrial age have ever truly been resolved.