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Sitting up with a Corpse: Malthus according to Melville in ‘Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Beryl Rowland
Beryl Rowland
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
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Extract

‘Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs’ is generally regarded as a lacklustre comparison of poverty in rural America and metropolitan England, with the theme given by the author towards the end of the first episode:

The native American poor never lose their delicacy or pride; hence, though unreduced to the physical degradation of the European pauper, they yet suffer more in mind than the poor of any other people in the world. Those peculiar social sensibilities nourished by our own peculiar political principles, while diey enhance the true dignity of a prosperous American, do but minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate; first, by prohibiting their acceptance of what little random relief charity may offer; and, second, by furnishing them with the keenest appreciation of the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and dieir grindstone experience of the practical misery and infamy of poverty – a misery and infamy which is, ever has been, and ever will be, precisely the same in India, England, and America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , April 1972 , pp. 69 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

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38 The symbolism of love as a meal, as used, for example, in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, is too commonplace to require further documentation.

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42 p. 183.

43 Redburn: The Works of Herman Melville, Standard Edition (1922–1923; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), vol. V, p. 237.Google Scholar