By Richard McKeever
If “the past is a foreign country” as L P Hartley has suggested, one of the things they “do differently there” is poverty. Leafing through this week’s listings magazine for TV, theatre and galleries around London you might be forgiven for thinking historical deprivation bears little relationship to the everyday experience of the capital, where 19% of children live in severe poverty.
The happy history of impoverished people makes good light entertainment. The long cold Sunday evenings of January are enlivened by the BBC costume drama “Lark Rise to Candleford“. It is always sunny and the poor are, in the main, content with their position in the stratified society while they strive nobly to care for their families and community. But this is all “boots and bonnets”, escapist drama – what of serious documentary? Jeremy Paxman on The Victorians perhaps, this week demonstrating the fear of dignified families falling into unprotected penury of the workhouse once they had become surplus to the requirements of the cruel capitalists.
If the TV is not to your taste why not get off the sofa and take in an exhibition? Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in photographs at The British Library has a stunning selection of images – amongst the wide ranging collection of photographs on view both rural and urban poverty are depicted. Agricultural workers on the Norfolk Broads and Children in the Glasgow Tenements – yet again the context presents the nobility and dignity of poor people struggling against a harsh system – doing their best with what little they have.
Image credits – Left: ‘Coming home from the marshes, Photographer: Peter Henry Emerson (1856 – 1936) Right: Shameless/C4 Photographer: Pete Dadds.
After the gallery how about a trip to the theatre - The National Theatre is hosting a revival of “The Pitman Painters” telling the story of a group of Durham miners who, after taking an adult education class, go on to make some remarkable and collectable works of art whilst continuing to do a regular, and poorly-paid, shift down the pit. Lee Hall the playwright (also writer of Billy Elliot) said in a Times interview this week. “I’m a well-off writer who makes money out of representing poor people. There are messy, difficult, perhaps unresolvable problems with that.”
Part of the writers conflict is at least resolved by the distance of time – we all know the cultural references to thirties-unemployment, Dickensian working conditions and seasonal shortage in agricultural communities. Yet today, as we crawl desperately out of the deepest recession ever known, what dignity or nobility is afforded to the biggest victims of the collapse? Our poorest communities are facing the prospect of generational unemployment yet are branded “toxic” by elite politicians or have their lifestyle ridiculed through programmes such as the new series of Channel 4’s Shameless.
Media representation of people living in poverty has a habit of viewing the poor of history as dignified, struggling to make progress, yet treat the contemporaneous poor as feckless, benefit-scroungers. It may well be an unresolvable problem – but it would be a start if those depicting poverty took a longer view.
[...] or antisocial – the ‘visible poor‘. Meanwhile poor people of the past are portrayed as nobly struggling, while those of the present are seen as feckless scroungers. And young people often get a [...]
Well, I think we start from a position that says life is complex. Everyone who finds themselves in a bad position is there because of a combination of a) bad choices and b) bad things happening to them.
So it is rare to find anyone who is entirely innocent (ie not done anything to get themselves in trouble) and also it is rare to find someone where outside circumstances have had absolutely no effect on them.
Hence, those of us fortunate enough not to face those problems should be able to see that given a bad choice or bad circumstances, we’d probably be in a very similar position. There is nothing inherently bad about being on benefit.
But clearly, for a significant proportion of people, benefit is something really hard to get off. And it isn’t just a matter of positive thinking, there are deeper underlying issues.
I think you might be right Joe. Nowadays it’s expressed in terms of ‘hard-working families’ or ‘those left unemployed by the recession’ vs ‘benefit scroungers’, the ‘underclass’ and the ‘feckless poor’. The question is, what can we do about it?
I was interested to read a book about a Victorian slum in the centre of London not so long back. What stuck me was the widespread notion of the ‘deserving’ versus the ‘undeserving’ poor – as if the moral status of the person determined whether they should be expected to be helped.
I think a form of this attitude still exists.