Divine authority and empirical observation are, by definition, rarely in accord, but they do at least agree on this: that the poor are always with us. Chastity may have gone the way of all flesh, and obedience may have been banished from the marriage service, but poverty - grinding, inexorable, ineradicable - remains: not a state voluntarily embraced on the road to salvation, but a condition unavoidably endured with little prospect of relief. It may well be, as George Bernard Shaw once put it, that 'the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty,' but it is easier to express outrage at its existence than to raise hopes as to its eradication. The history of the world is the history of many things, but in most places, at most times, and for most people, it was and is as Thomas Gray described it in 1750: 'the short and simple annals of the poor'.

LRB 24 January 1985 | PDF Download