Orwell's Poor and Ours

The very rich are different from you and me,"
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. "Yes," Ernest Hemingway teased
Fitzgerald, in a short story of his own, "they have more money." To
Fitzgerald, the rich inhabited a world apart. To Hemingway, the rich were just
like the rest of us, only with nicer furniture.

Today's debates about poverty mirror the Fitzgerald-Hemingway exchange. "The
poor are different," some say. They live in a separate culture, bereft of
the values that could lift them out of poverty. Public policy reinforces their
lassitude by encouraging their morally and socially deviant tendencies. "They
just have less money," reply others. They are regular folks in a desperate
situation, and they behave as any of us would in the same circumstances. Provide
for their material needs, or change the incentives that confront them, offer
jobs that pay a living wage, and all will be well.

Something is amiss in these contending visions of the pooror, I should
say, of poverty, for these views of poor people don't have people in them, only
statistics and myths. These we have in abundancereams of tables and
figures displaying the extent of deprivation, and tall tales of "welfare
queens" and scam artists buying vodka with food stamps. But where are the
faces behind the statistics and the mythology, the lives of the poor themselves?
In the conservative caricature, the poor remain phantoms, ciphers; their
individual lives are concealed either by charts and graphs or by moralistic
categories of virtue and vice. But poverty is brutal and ugly, and it is
associated with many things Americans legitimately fearcrime, drugs, and
the apparent breakdown of social standards, especially in cities. Many liberals,
too, see poverty through a distorting lens, one that overlooks or explains away
these very real and often uncomfortable facts about poverty. Some of us posit a
false sameness; others see a dehumanizing degree of difference. What is missing
in both views is a willingness to look hard at the actual lives of the poor.


No writer has rendered these lives more vividly than George Orwell in The
Road to Wigan Pier
and Down and Out in Paris and London. In these
two remarkable books, Orwell addresses the very question that haunts discussions
of poverty todaywhat is it like to be poor? The foremost virtue of these
books is their insistent, compelling reporting of poverty from the inside. His
reports of the outward effects of povertythe decrepitude, the discomfort,
the filthare simultaneously gripping and repellent. But it is his account
of poverty's effect on the soul, effects observed from personal experience
coupled with keen self-knowledge, that makes Orwell unique. Orwell was also a
master prose stylist, and his writingvigorous, evocative, and utterly
devoid of sentimentalitycaptures with masterly economy the psychological
truth of poverty.

If the central image of life in poverty is dirtand squalor is
everywhere in Orwell, from the filth of poor Paris quarters and London lodging
houses to grim Lancashire slumsthe most vivid effect of poverty in
Orwell's world is psychological. Poverty means deprivation of such basic goods
as food, clothing, and shelter, to say nothing of such modest benefits as
comfort and cleanliness. Life becomes a constant struggle, not for the spiritual
or psychic rewards of worldly success or of a life well lived, but for survival,
pure and simple. Orwell's poor live in a stultifying world, where the basic
social and biological functions of lifeeating, sleeping, avoiding diseaseoccupy
so much attention that there is little time or energy left for more elevated
concerns. The overwhelming experience of poverty for Orwell is ennui. The
pursuit of petty vices such as drink and tobacco, the most readily available
sources of enjoyment or entertainment, takes on exaggerated importance. When
daily life is consumed with such concerns, they become the mind's only focus,
and staying alive requires all one's acuity and resourcefulness. "You
thought," he writes in Down and Out, "that [poverty] would be
quite simple; it is extraordinarily complex. You thought it would be terrible;

But in Orwell's eyes, even the most visibly distasteful of the poor become
sympathetic characters. Paddy Jaques, the narrator's "mate" in
tramping about London in Down and Out, would not be out of place in any
American city today. Jobless and homeless, he is lazy, filthy, ignorant, and
generally unappealing. He lives in the streets or in shelters, cadging food and
tobacco wherever he can. "He had," Orwell writes, "the regular
character of a trampabject, envious, a jackal's character."
Nevertheless, Orwell continues, "he was a good fellow, generous by nature
and capable of sharing his last crust with a friend." More generally,
Orwell argues that the only thing that separates beggars from "workers"
is society's perception of the value of their trade. "A navvy works by
bronchitis, etc." When he asks "Why are beggars despised?for
they are despised universally," his answer is simply that, "they fail
to earn a decent living." A beggar "is simply a business man, getting
his living, like other business men in the way that comes to hand. He has not,
choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich." Poverty is
ultimately humiliating and demoralizing. For Orwell, the detachment of the poor
from bourgeois virtueshard work, cleanliness, self-reliance, and so forthis
an effect of poverty rather than a cause.


In the 1930s, when Orwell wrote them, these books were more than simply
gripping collections of stories and images; they represented an antidote to
prevailing Victorian notions of poverty. Romantic and sentimental, the
Victorians viewed poverty as an individual failing. The virtues of Victorian
societyhard work, responsibility, independence, and the likewere
those that would ensure material success. As Fitzgerald believed of the rich, so
Victorians believed of the poor: They were different. Being poor was a sign of
moral weakness, of indolence and profligacy (the poor were, to paraphrase
Stephen Sondheim, "deprived on account they were depraved").

Oddly enough, all of this moral weakness vanished a decade later when the
postwar economic boom produced an era of full employment. The indolent poor of
the 1930s became the blue-collar middle class of the 1940s and 1950s. Evidently,
they were all-too-willing to work hard for decent wages. What was missing in the
1930s, it turned out, were not virtues but jobs.

This lesson, however, has been forgotten. Modern-day conservatives have once
again taken up the Victorian view. The poor are different. They are culturally
deficient and morally flawed, an "underclass" whose behavior and
values separate them from respectable society. "How does one cope with
people who seem unable to advance even their own interests, let alone society's?"
asks Lawrence Mead in The New Politics of Poverty.

The neo-Victorians have revived the crude moral certainties of Victorian
society. In Britain, the New Poor Law of 1834 distinguished between the honest
poor, those sincerely unable to support themselves, and paupers, those who were
able but unwilling. Work, independence, and responsibility were the
characteristic virtues of the new industrial economy in the nineteenth century,
virtues that paupers conspicuously lacked. The creators of the New Poor Law
wanted to punish those who shunned these virtues, and thus while the poor
received relief, paupers went to the workhouse, the only alternative to "honest"
work. In this way, Victorian social policy deliberately stigmatized poverty.
Never mind that the New Poor Law was a willful attempt to create a low-wage army
of labor to feed the mines and mills of England, the very mines that Orwell
famously describes in Wigan Pier. By making the alternative to work so
monstrous, the Victorians could claim that only those totally devoid of sense
and virtue would opt for the workhouse.

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In The De-Moralization of Society, Gertrude Himmelfarb celebrates
these Victorian virtues and decries the moral relativism of modern society.
Because we have lost the capacity to judge virtue and vice, right and wrong, we
have lost the ability to distinguish, as the Victorians did, between the honest
poor and the shirking paupers. The problem with welfare today, she suggests, is
that it does not sufficiently stigmatize the poor but instead encourages them to
engage in vices such as drug abuse, crime, and premarital childbearing.
Similarly, Ben Wattenberg's Values Matter Most (the book that provoked
his well-publicized chat with President Clinton) argues that poverty is
fundamentally a problem of personal virtue rather than social forces or economic
realities. The chief moralizer of the new virtue industry, of course, is the
modern McGuffey, William Bennett, whose Book of Virtuesan
overstuffed sampler of cautionary tales, parables, fables, and maximsresided
atop the bestseller list for months. These books and others have resuscitated
the idea that poverty is a sign of moral failure, and they effectively tap a
deep well of anxiety about moral decline.

The right thus reduces the problem of poverty to a dispute over the social
standards of the poor rather than the opportunities that society presents. As
Herbert Gans brilliantly relates in his new book, The War Against the Poor,
the "underclass" nomenclature perpetuates this view of the difference,
and hence the undeservingness, of the poor, allowing the rest of us to revel in
our "deservingness." The distinction between "us," the
deserving middle class, and "them," the undeserving poor, only
reinforces our appreciation of our own virtue.

The right also magnifies the vices of the poor, placing the onus of
society's problems on the poor rather than where it belongs, on those with money
and power, who set society's priorities and reap society's benefits. The poor,
it seems, are neither selfish enough to help themselves nor selfless enough to
protect the rest of us. This view of the poor feeds the common misperception
that the poor are reaping enormous benefits from government largess. To the
residents of Macomb County, Michigan, reports Stanley Greenberg in Middle
Class Dreams
, nearby Detroit is "just a big pit into which the state
and federal governments poured tax money, never to be heard from again: ?It's
all just being funneled into the Detroit area, and it's not overflowing into the
suburbs.'" For these archetypal Reagan Democrats, "Detroit"
equals "them"that is, the black, urban poor who are themselves
the source not only of their own misery but of broader social and political


If some conservative critics demonize the poor and emphasize their
differentness, others such as Charles Murray posit a false commonality. The
poor, for Murray, are at bottom just like us; they respond to economic
incentives, based on a cost-benefit calculus. And they would behave like the
rest of us, except that the welfare state has corrupted the poor with perverse "incentives
to fail" that subvert fundamental bourgeois values such as family, work,
education, and deferred gratification. Over time, perverse incentives harden
into perverse behaviors and values.

Tellingly, Murray illustrates this worry neither with accurate data (both
his arithmetic and his propositions about the effects of welfare on such
behavior have mostly been discredited) nor with careful ethnographic observation
but with a "thought experiment," namely Harold and Phyllis, his
hypothetical young couple in Losing Ground who maximize their income by
having a child while remaining unmarried and out of work. Murray is also
cavalier on the economic benefits to be derived from available work and
available wages. In the ghettos of this economy, even Victorian virtue yields
Victorian squalor.

In the process of rewarding indolence, Murray contends, social programs
dissolved the useful distinction between "deserving" and "undeserving"
poor, not by allaying the stigma of poverty but by dragging all the poor into "undeservingness."
Welfare, he claims, has made it not only economically feasible but also "socially
acceptable" to be unemployed and on the dole. Mickey Kaus similarly
implicates welfare in creating a "cultural catastrophe." AFDC, he
writes in The End of Equality, is "the underclass culture's life
support system." Whatever its origins, a cultural gap separates the poor,
the "underclass," from the rest of us. However they became poor, they
remain so because bad incentives have created bad values.


Orwell would be appalled, not only at the conclusion that the poor are
victims of their own deviance, but, more significantly, at the way in which the
contemporary right reaches these conclusions. These detached and distant
analyses reduce the world of the poor to a string of cultural, behavioral, and
political labels without so much as peeking around the corner, whether into the
ghetto or increasingly into the suburb left in the dust by the changing
international economy, to see whether their labels actually fit the poor people
they might find there. Recalling Orwell's clear-headed approach to exactly this
question can point us toward an antidote to such cant.

After Orwell, the Victorian view that poverty is simply the product of
individual moral frailty is utterly unsustainable. The modern twist, that blames
poverty on deviant values, and deviant values on the welfare state, also ignores
the bleak practical choices that confront actual people in poverty. Orwell
reminds us that the poor are not loafers or scammers, hoping to get something
for nothing, nor are they denizens of a subhuman culture, blissfully living out
their lives of deprivation unaware of the indignity of it all. In Wigan Pier,
Orwell tells of a train ride through Lancashire. From the window, he saw a woman
huddled over trying to unclog a drain pipe behind her house, "amid
of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs." As he sped by, she
looked up and he saw her face:

expression I have ever seen. It struck me that we are mistaken when we say that
"It isn't as bad for them as it would be for us," and that people bred
to herunderstood as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling
up a foul drain-pipe.

The lives of the poor may not look like our lives, but their souls are
certainly like our souls; anyone who thinks otherwise cannot have looked closely
enough. Orwell looked closely enough, closer than most of us could stomach.

As a critic of political rhetoric, Orwell was fearless in criticizing the
left as well as the right. What he saw and chronicled is that life among the
poor is different, though not in the ways that the Victorians claimedthat
is, poverty is not simply evidence of moral failure. But reading Orwell on
poverty should give pause to the left as well. Some on the left have tried to
dismiss the underclass label too sweepingly, ignoring a way of life that has
indeed become dysfunctionalepidemics of drugs, crime, teenage pregnancy,
multigenerational welfare dependence, compounded by racial segregation and
official indifference. As William Julius Wilson has argued, the left is still
recovering from its reaction to the Moynihan report on the Negro family thirty
years agoto sweep it under the rug, as if it were in bad taste to discuss
such sordid matters outside the family circle, so to speak. The litany of social
ills may have grown more sinister since Orwell's day, but his account of
despair, hopelessness, and ennui still rings true and, if anything, cries out
more urgently than ever for attention.

Fortunately, there has been in recent years a resurgence of vivid thinking
and writing about America's poorfrom the journalism of Jason DeParle of
the New York Times and Alex Kotlowitz to the stunning ethnographic
scholarship of anthropologist Elliot Liebow, sociologist Elijah Anderson, and
historian Carl Husemoller Nightingale that evokes the best in Orwell's
work. "Street wisdom," for example, the complex ghetto street culture
that Anderson describes, is a set of tools, strategems, and rules of thumb that
allows urban residents to negotiate inner-city streets and even to build some
semblance of a community on the ruins of urban civilization. For the children of
the Chicago projects that Kotlowitz chronicles, the overwhelming fear of
violence curtails the dreams of youth and replaces them tragically and
prematurely with intimations of mortality and despair. And as Nightingale
depicts his young African American friends in Philadelphia, they are hardly
alienated from mainstream American values; rather, they are entirely products of
those values, almost hyper-American, caught between ubiquitous cultural images
of law and order, crime and punishment, violence, and consumerism on one hand
and the painful, dissonant reality of their own lives on the other.

All of these writers have sought to approach poverty, particularly the
poverty of the urban ghetto, not as a distant and faceless phenomenon but as an
immediate and gripping reality that wreaks havoc and despair in the lives of
whole neighborhoods and generations. They fall prey neither to the conservative
temptation to assume the worst of the poor nor to the liberal instinct to evade
the apparent pathologies of poverty. Like Orwell, they do not shrink from
describing the ugly scenes of life in poor neighborhoods. Their writings are
full of the same characters who populate conservative demonologyjobless
men, teenage mothers, crack addicts, gang members, and fragile children. Their
portraits, however, are not of soulless cardboard cutouts but of real people
coping as best they can with the circumstances that society has dealt them.
Writing from a stance of empathy and understanding, they do not flinch from
describing the difference of life among the poor. But it is precisely their
empathetic stance that reveals these differences, the "pathologies" of
poverty, to be adaptiveways of struggling to make lives out of desperate
circumstances in ways that are unfathomable from the comfort of universities,
think tanks, or TV rooms. These writers reaffirm Orwell's conclusion that the
poor are ultimately human beings no different from you and me; that they are the
victims of complex economic and cultural circumstances not of their own making,
and the remedies will need to be complex as well. The new naturalistic
chroniclers of poverty put the lie to the banalities of the cultural

The clarity of Orwell's vision sets a task for progressives who recognize
the urgency of addressing the shameful crisis of abiding poverty in the United
States. More than at any time in the past sixty years, the American poor and
working and middle classes are at common risk. Barry Bluestone calculates that
the median working family, given its meager savings, is 3.6 months away from
poverty should a breadwinner become jobless. The blue-collar bulwarks of the
midcentury boom face increasingly the danger of losing the hard-won gains of
their parents and grandparents. Poverty looms for them and their children as it
has not in two generations. The time is ripe for a new New Deal coalition,
uniting the poor and the working middle class, whose common anxieties and
aspirations should be the basis for a powerful political message.

So long as the cultural conservatives set the imagery of the poverty debate
with arguments about pathologies of poverty and the moral difference of the
poor, they carry the day politically by dividing the sinking middle class from
the poor they are approaching. Instead of alliance there is only contempt,
relations poisoned by "us" vs. "them" rhetoric that pits
Macomb Counties against Detroits throughout the country. As in the 1930s, when
Orwell wrote, the poor and the working class share an interest in vigorous
government action to create economic opportunity, preserve the dignity and
rewards of work, and provide a cushion against what Franklin Roosevelt called "the
hazards and vicissitudes of life." But these common interests are obscured,
and the promise of liberal renewal is undermined, by the "underclass"
rhetoric that casts the poor as the enemy within, rather than as allies in a
common enterprise.

The task for liberals is to break down the "us" vs. "them"
mentality on both sides of the divide. As a political task, it will require
addressing the pernicious racial segregation that still poisons American life.
As an intellectual task, it will require recapturing Orwell's soul-searching
honesty in addressing the poor as neighbors and fellow citizens rather than as
dirty and dangerous scoundrels. For conservatives to call them soand for
liberals to accedeis positively Orwellian.

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