Terzian, Philip, "Gertrude Himmelfarb," Washington Examiner, January 2, 2020.

Excerpt:

Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died last week in Washington, D.C., at 97, was everywhere described as a “historian of ideas,” which is certainly true. But she was also a philosopher, essayist, and scholar who wrote about the past with one eye fixed resolutely on the present. She believed, as philosophers do, that ideas matter in life as well as in scholarship.

Scholars of ideas tend to be the great rehabilitators of history. Perry Miller of Harvard studied the Puritans during the early 20th century, when the founders of New England were in particularly bad odor among their descendants. Miller read the texts and annals of the Puritans, put his subjects in a broader perspective, and gave them new depth and relevance. A generation later, Himmelfarb did the same for the Victorians.

When, in the late 1940s, she began her studies of the intellectual life and work of Victorian England, the very term was an epithet. But she pondered the world the Victorians inhabited, grappled with the facts that shaped their ideas, and changed not only our modern perceptions but revealed that the virtues of the 19th century, including moral clarity, temperance, decency, duty, had much to teach the contemporary world.

Like the English of the mid-19th century, Himmelfarb’s 20th century Americans found themselves adrift amid political turmoil and material change. For Victorians, the political challenge was the poverty described in the novels of Charles Dickens, a glaring rebuke to the progress of industry and to progress itself. For Americans, the challenge was not dissimilar: poverty and social inequality in the midst of freedom and affluence. In The Idea of Poverty (1984) and Poverty and Compassion (1991), Himmelfarb described the ways in which Victorian reformers treated poverty not as a moral failing but social misfortune, demanding social responsibility and moral instruction. The message to America and its burgeoning welfare state was no accident.

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