Free Republic

It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that Gertrude Himmelfarb, the preeminent historian of intellectual life in Victorian England, has become one of the most influential writers on civil society in turn-of-the-millennium America. The renewed interest in alternatives to the welfare state owes much of its inspiration to professor Himmelfarb’s monumental histories of 19th-century social policy. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians described the Victorians’ moral seriousness as they developed public policies and forged private character-building institutions that lifted millions out of pauperism. If...