The Poor

For traditional society, the words of Scripture, that the poor will always be with us, seem an adequate observation. Modern society, however, no longer describes itself in these terms. Indeed, the very expression welfare state signifies that the poor have been functionally integrated into society. This process took quite some time, when one considers that the poor in early modern England were first hung as vagabonds and then shunted into poorhouses. It was only with the emergence of an industrial proletariat and its political self-organization that the plight of the poor came to be thought as a social indictment and hence as a problem in need of redress. The classical nineteenth century novels were the literary representation of what sociological monographs described as the squalid conditions of the laboring poor; and it was the cause of the poor which could be said to have made the question of inequality the focus of class conflict and political reform that haunted modern society until the end of World War Two.