Meacham, Standish. The American Historical Review 97, no. 4. 1992.

Abstract:

Like E. P. Thompson, a historian for whom she has little use, Gertrude Himmelfarb is an enemy of historical condescension. Thompson, in The Making of The English Working Class (1963), asked his readers to take the radicals and visionaries he discussed with the seriousness their convictions deserved and to take them on their own terms. So with Himmelfarb. She insists, in this work, that late-Victorian philanthropists and social theorists had important things to say and that their deeds produced ameliorative social change of considerable magnitude.

Read online on Jstor: Review: Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians by Gertrude Himmelfarb