Progress and Poverty

Three very different aspects of the late nineteenth-century debate on poverty.

In this volume three very different aspects of the late nineteenth-century debate on poverty are bound together: the American Henry George's Progress and Poverty, a response by a British businessman, Isaac B. Cooke, and a description by Andrew Mearns of the reality of poverty in the world's richest city.Henry George (1839–97) was an American journalist and newspaper editor. In Progress and Poverty, his most famous work (1879), he seeks to explain the apparent paradox that the gulf between rich and poor in a developed city (or nation) is much less that that in a less developed community: 'Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege.' His economic ideas were widely debated, and this volume also contains a response to the 1881 English edition of the book from Isaac B. Cooke, a cotton broker from Liverpool, and Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), a short but telling description of the reality of the poverty then to be found in the world's richest city.