Skip to content
- Just a few years before leaving academia, Himmelfarb published the first of an intended two-volume opus that fused social and intellectual history together. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, released in 1984, offered a comprehensive study of what Himmelfarb ultimately characterized, in her careful way, as a victory of “the moral imagination”: the discursive recasting of poverty from an inevitable condition of human life to a moral problem demanding remediation.