Poverty and Poetry: Representations of the Poor in Augustan Literature

Representations of the Poor in Augustan LiteratureYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Irv in E h re n p re is Po v e r t y WAS ONCE a natural condition, an enduring ether into which some were born and others plunged but from which few emerged. It was the essentially static and therefore dull condi­ tion of those who could barely support themselves even by hard and constant toil, and whom, at any moment, illness, famine, or hard times might thrust into a state of dependence. It held by definition those more wretched families who either would not secure the neces­ sities of life or could not—even when laboring desperately for them—without the voluntary support of strangers. But for most eighteenth-century moralists it did not include yeomen, artisans, or small shopkeepers, who had special skills or capital resources and might hope to rise. In the order of a Christian society the poor had a clear role, but it was as instruments, not as ends. Hideous and depressing specta­ cles, they did not invite pleasurable scrutiny. To look at them head on, directly and respectfully, to think oneself into their minds, to find them interesting or complicated or even wonderful, as one found princes and conquerors, was eccentric. The need to shield one’s eyes from disagreeable sights early pro­ duced the literary habit of substituting more malleable articles for the actual poor. Instead of looking at the monuments around him, the poet looked at poetry, at the reader, at a sensitive observer, or at himself. If he looked at poetry, he found Arcadia, complete with two ideal prototypes, the deserving poor and the vicious beggar. These I shall label, after their remote, Homeric ancestors, as the tribe of Eumaeus and the tribe of Irus. Eumaeus may be a lowly Copyright © 1971 by Irvin Ehrenpreis. 3 Th e Mo d e r n it y o f t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y swineherd, but he was born the son of a princely ruler and was kid­ napped into servitude when a child. Now employed by an apprecia­ tive master, he is a loyal and industrious worker. Hospitably, he shares his small blessings with the unfortunate wanderer who hap­ pens to visit his house. Irus, however, is a brazen, professional men­ dicant, corrupted by the thoughtless liberality of wicked men. When a wanderer comes to the house where he himself finds shel­ ter, Irus tries to drive him away. It is not misleading to interpret the hospitality of Eumaeus as his form of piety and the lack of it in Irus as a lack of religion. I take these cliches from the YXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA O d y sse y to suggest that the religious doctrines and economic theories of the eighteenth century were not the source of such fantasies but their clothing. As inferior objects, to be spiritualized, ridiculed, or deplored, as convenient receptacles for the alms of the rich, the c a n a ille had existed from the beginning. As identifiable fellow creatures, who provoked awe, respect, or af­ fectionate indignation, without regard to their moral character, they were less familiar. Wordsworth’s sympathetic, even rapt interest in common people for their own sake is hard to discover in the verse or prose of an earlier writer. His awed attention to their real appear­ ance, his insight into their psychology, his indifference to the gap between Eumaeus and Irus, can be a threefold test exposing the fragility of humanitarian rhetoric in the eighteenth century. By these standards, the boldest leaders of the Enlightenment in France, for all their loathing of slavery and oppression, are not so different from the more cautious writers of Augustan England. For the tenderest understanding of poverty one naturally looks to homiletic tradition, or the doctrine of brotherly love expounded in sermons blossoming with beatitudes. During the eighteenth cen­ tury, as now, Scripture provided texts to nourish every species of charity. If a preacher desired his listeners to care for all the wretched, regardless of their morals, he could invoke the par­ able of the great supper (Luke xiv.16-24). Wordsworth himself might have...