When Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote about the abyss that was consuming the intellectual and moral traditions of her own time, she was one of the first to recognize how seductive was its appeal and how depraved its outcome. In her book On Looking into the Abyss, she attributed the original insight to the critic Lionel Trilling, who detected it in the early 1960s in the underbelly of the modernist movement that had dominated literature and the arts since the early twentieth century. Himmelfarb, however, came to her own recognition from another direction entirely, partly from her study of the history of ideas in Britain’s Victorian era, but also from the apparently unlikely field of the history of social policy and of the ideas that led the Victorians to define poverty as a social problem. As she produced insightful books and essays, almost until her death on December 30 last year, aged ninety-seven, those who knew her work came to regard her as not only one of the great American historians of her time, but also one of this nation’s most compelling moral critics.
