Literature and Poverty

From the Hebrew Bible to the Second World War

David Aberbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367132736
• eBook ISBN: 9780429655357
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literature and Poverty offers an engaging overview of changes in literary perceptions of poverty and the poor. Part I of the book, from the Hebrew Bible to the French Revolution, provides essential background information. It introduces the Scriptural ideal of the 'holy poor' and the process by which biblical love of the poor came to be contested and undermined in European legislation and public opinion as capitalism grew and the state took over from the Church; Part II, from the French Revolution to World War II, shows how post-1789 problems of industrialization, population growth, war, and urbanization came to dominate much European literature, as poverty and the poor became central concerns of major writers such as Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Hugo.

David Aberbach uses literature – from the Bible, through Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Zola, Pushkin, and Orwell – to show how poverty changed from being an endemic and unavoidable fact of life, to a challenge for equality that might be attainable through a moral and rational society. As a literary and social history of poverty, this book argues for the vital importance of literature and the arts in understanding current problems in International Development.

PART I

The ‘holy poor’ and its desecrations: from the Hebrew Bible to the French Revolution

1

The Bible and the poor

Law and literature

The Hebrew Bible is the main influence on Western literature on poverty and the poor.¹ No extant literature from the ancient world – in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Far East, or the Greco-Roman empire – placed more importance upon social welfare and the duty of the better-off toward the poor. The Bible subverts the social order: it is ‘a highly incendiary document’ – ‘political dynamite’.² It turns the social structure on its head, creating a champagne glass of salvation of which the pious poor have the most and the impious rich have the least, the first are last and the last first. The Bible reverses the generally low status of the poor in the ancient world by associating poverty with holiness. In the Bible, the poor are never blamed for their poverty or linked with crime and deceit.³ The Bible has no ‘wicked poor’ (mauvais pauvre), as in Hugo’s Les Misérables, no fake or ‘sturdy’ beggars or ‘welfare scroungers’, not even the ghost of a suspicion of fraud and law-breaking among the poor, of the poor as sociopaths, malingerers, and parasites who attach themselves selfishly to a community and drain it. Which historical circumstances made such an outlook possible?

Biblical law and poetry seek to help the poor: the agricultural laws and customs – the wisdom of centuries of practical experience – were continually germane to largely agricultural European societies until the Industrial Revolution, and even to some extent after; and biblical poetry too, the Psalms above all, inspired a daily struggle to limit distress of the poor. Much of the Bible sees life through the eyes of the poor. The biblical Hebrew word tzedakah, in its combined meaning of ‘charity’ and ‘justice’, itself implies empathy with the poor. The popular appeal of the Bible in largely impoverished societies lies in its persistent relevance to and support of the poor.

The Bible, when it had authority in all social strata and all periods in life, was often exploited by the ruling powers to instill subservience. Yet its content – especially once made clear in the explosion of vernacular translations after the invention of printing in the 15th century – teaches equality, charity, and love for one’s neighbor, and the questioning of human authority, Church and state. Biblical influence spread in the 16th century as the Reformation spread, when prolonged European warfare and population growth increased the numbers of the poor, and the rise of capitalism widened the gap between rich and poor.⁴ Even as secular education grew as part of the modern state after 1789, the Bible and its humanitarian poor laws remained for most Europeans the blueprint of life.

Yet, in many ways, biblical teachings were incompatible with social and political circumstances centuries and millennia later. The Bible was created by a people often threatened and overrun, exiled and pauperized; their aristocracy and priesthood defeated and destroyed; their lives hung in doubt. The Bible was edited with the perspective of an exiled people that sees its exile as a divinely inflicted national punishment, among other things, for injustice against the poor, and its hope of return in justice for the poor: ‘Jerusalem shall be redeemed in justice’ (Isaiah 1: 27). This was not the perspective of most European countries that accepted the authority of the Bible. The Bible preserved the residual faith and solidarity of a broken, exiled people. Yet it was adopted by many nations with power and territory, two thousand years later. The Bible insists upon unqualified sympathy for the poor; Poor Law legislation of the late-medieval world of emerging European secular states tends to abandon this sympathy by insultingly challenging the needs of the poor, to weed out the lazy. It ignores the biblical view that the poor are blessed as they are closer to God. In the Bible, charity is an absolute good, the yardstick of a Godly society. The Bible nowhere justifies the underlying premise of parliamentary Poor Law: that charity is easily abused, encouraging laziness among the working classes and an anti-work mentality, demoralizing them and making them useless to society, chronically dependent on aid, welfare scroungers. The Bible idealizes and dignifies the poor and elevates the act of giving into a divine act. Poor Law, in contrast, reacts to the poor as a political threat: as their distress increases, they form a potential menace to society. Biblical poor law is consecration; parliamentary Poor Law is rationalization and regulation. Uniquely in ancient literature, in the Bible the poor are loved.

Vernacular Scripture, the Reformation, and the poor

As the Hebrew Bible was a turning point in the history of the poor in the ancient land of Israel and in the Jewish diaspora, the Bible in a host of vernacular translations was a turning point in the literary depiction of the European poor from the Renaissance on. Translation and publication of the vernacular Bible was at first an act of heresy, a crime like witchcraft, punishable by death. As soon as translation made clear the content of the Bible to the common people, it undermined traditional Church authority. The medieval Church treated Scripture as being in its control. The Latin Vulgate, with supreme religious authority, blinded the ignorant masses who could not read it. The vernacular, not the classical languages, was theirs. As dissent grew among impoverished Europeans in the early 16th century, vernacular Bible translation spread among the common people, particularly Tyndale’s English and Luther’s German translation. The Reformation, with its ideology of ‘Scripture alone’, spurred further vernacular Bible translations accessible to all. European languages were transformed, leading to a generally higher literary standard than previously, and affecting the depiction of the lower classes in European literature. The Reformation encouraged people to think for themselves – ‘To stand enquiring right’, as John Donne put it – and spurred popular literacy. They could now read (or hear read) the translated Bible on their own and make up their own minds about it, and they could judge their own lives by it. Vernacular Bibles encouraged literacy in Catholic as well as Protestant countries, stimulating the growth of schools and encouraging literacy in a broad cross-section of society, reaching, as Erasmus enthused, ‘the farmer, the tailor, the stonemason, prostitutes, pimps, and Turks’.⁵

Vernacular translations of the Hebrew Bible had consequences far beyond what was imagined at the time. Translation stimulated debate not just over theological issues but also over political and social questions, including government authority, social stratification, and rights of the poor. The common people could now understand without clerical intermediaries that the Bible does not unconditionally sanction the ‘divine right of kings’, and that it is committed to helping the poor; perhaps most important is that the Bible has faith in the abilities of the poor, for even slaves are capable of gaining freedom, accepting their own laws, and creating and governing their own independent state. The Bible encouraged the poor to struggle for a better world, and the rich to help them in this aim. At the same time, the non-biblical association of the poor with immorality and vagabondage was not without advantage to them: for example, trade schools were established to make good and useful Christians out of poor children, teaching them to read and write and preparing them for a trade.⁶

As a vital part of a humanist education, the vernacular Bible was open to critical study. Resultant theological debate leading to comparative critical Bible editions helped create a climate for secular scientific investigation – including theories of nation-building and social reform – and for secular education. The vernacular Bible hastened the advent of the secular state. It transformed European attitudes toward poverty as well as the self-image of the poor. The growth of rational thinking based on empirical proof encouraged new secular perspectives on poverty and Poor Law legislation. Sixteenth-century Poor Law can be seen on one level as part of the process of desacralization of poverty and almsgiving anticipating the secular welfare state – and an increasingly secular literature. The Reformation gave these socio-economic changes theological justification. The notion of capitalist development as freedom⁷ might be applied to the revolutionary literary creativity that accompanied these socio-political, economic, and religious upheavals as capitalist Europe expanded in the 16th century. The Reformation, led by Martin Luther, riding the new technology of printing, changed the lives of the poor and the social perception of the poor and charity. Lutheranism contested biblical reverence for poverty and the poor, presenting instead a split view: (1) a traditional positive image of the poor as equal to the rich in God’s eyes and, through faith, masters of their own fate; (2) a negative image of the poor as being deficient in faith – as their poverty testified they were – and subject to divine punishment. To the Hebrew prophets, faith was personal: ‘The righteous shall live by his faith’ (Habakkuk 2: 4). Luther revived this idea of per solam fidem and rejected the hierarchical Catholic Church and the notion that without the sacraments and the priesthood salvation was beyond reach. He restored the biblical ideals of the equality of all, from popes to paupers, in the eyes of God; and that salvation was based on faith alone. The ‘Priesthood of all Believers’ included rich and poor, high and low, educated and illiterate. Faith alone, and God’s grace, determined success and failure in life.

The revolutionary shift to the vernacular – in the German states, in Luther’s powerful translation of the Five Books of Moses – meant that the individual, rich or poor, could experience Scripture directly. The vernacular Bible empowered the poor, giving them a rich literary picture of a world in which slaves, the poorest of the poor, emerge from slavery, accept their own divinely granted laws, and create an independent state. The same social forces behind capitalism and free enterprise could empower the poor to change their lives. Yet, Luther’s doctrine of Justification by Faith, and the Calvinist valuation of the economic virtues – and even of usury – favored the prosperous. The poverty of the poor could be seen as a punitive withholding of God’s grace. The poor made themselves poor by failing to control their vices, such as laziness, gambling, or drunkenness. They were consequently to be judged harshly.⁸ The Reformation thus created, as Max Weber famously observed, a powerful incentive for capitalist success, to signify divine grac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Biblical ideals to secular realities
• Part I: The ‘holy poor’ and its desecrations: from the Hebrew Bible to the French Revolution
• Part II: Poverty in the West and the failure of ideologies, 1789–1939
• Appendix: The ‘holy poor’ in the literature of developing countries, 1945–
• Bibliography
• Index