The smug complacency of Hannah More and her sisterhood was rudely disturbed by Ebenezer Elliott, who published his _Corn-Law Rhymer_, with its profound pity and its somewhat impotent wrath, in 1831. England woke up to the disturbing conviction that men and women were starving,--always a disagreeable thing to contemplate,--and the Corn Laws were repealed; but the 'Rhymes' were probably as little known to the laborer of 1831 as was _Piers Plowman_ to the laborer of 1392. Langland--to whom partial critics have for five hundred years ascribed this great poem of discontent--was keenly alive to the value of husbandry as a theme; and his ploughman came in time to be recognized as the people's suffering representative; but the poet, after the fashion of poets, wrote for 'lettered clerks,' of which class he was a shining example, his praiseworthy purpose in life being to avoid 'common men's work.' In the last century, _Les Misérables_ was called the 'Epic of the Poor'; but its readers were, for the most part, as comfortably remote from poverty as Victor Hugo himself, and as alive to the advantages of wealth.
In this age of print, the literature of poverty has swollen to an enormous bulk. Statistical books, explicit and contradictory. Hopeful books by social workers who see salvation in girls' clubs and refined dancing. Hopeless books by other social workers who believe--or, at least, who say--that the employed are enslaved by the employer, and that women and children are the prey of men. Highly colored books by adventurous young journalists who have masqueraded (for copy's sake) as mill and factory hands. Gray books by casual observers who are paralyzed by the mere sight of a slum. Furious books by rabid socialists who hold that the poor will never be uplifted while there is left in the world a man rich enough to pay them wages. Imaginative books by poets and novelists who deal in realism to the exclusion of reality. All this profusion and confusion of matter is thrust upon us month after month, while the working-man reads his newspaper, and the working-girl reads _A Coronet of Shame_, or _Lost in Fate's Fearful Abyss_.
It was Mr. George Gissing who, in his studies of the poor, first made popular the invective style; who hurled at London such epithets as 'pest-stricken,' 'city of the damned,' 'intimacies of abomination,' 'utmost limits of dread,'--phrases which have been faithfully copied by shuddering defamers of New York and Chicago. Mr. John Burns, for example, after a brief visit to the United States, said that Chicago was a pocket edition of hell; and subsequently, without, we hope, any personal experience to back him, said that hell was a pocket edition of Chicago.