Poverty in the Mind

At the very beginning of this meticulous essay in intellectual history, Gertrude Himmelfarb employs Samuel Johnson and R. H. Tawney to make a point of importance, that attitudes toward the poor in England have changed less in the last two centuries than the remaining adherents to the Whig conception of history as a record of spreading enlightenment and social progress might be willing to concede. In 1770 that stalwart Tory Samuel Johnson, who after all knew something about poverty from first-...