From the NS archive: Rudyard Kipling 25 January 1936: The writer of empire in changing times.
In this piece, written a week after the death of Rudyard Kipling, Rebecca West, one of the magazine’s most incisive critics, took a hard look at the great fabulist and poet’s career. “Some of his work was gold; and the rest was faery gold,” she writes. Kim was a great work but by no means all his novels succeeded: “… all his life long Kipling was a better poet than he was a prose writer, though an unequal one”. The reason for Kipling’s fame was that his work was “superbly relevant to its time”, notably “the emphasis on colour in his style, and the vast geographical scope of his subject matter, which made his work just the nourishment the English-speaking world required in the period surrounding the Jubilee and the Diamond Jubilee”. But there were numerous character faults too, thought West, including his blithe patronising of the working man and his rages against c
Published:
April 25, 2021 at 9:02 am
For many, the word ‘workhouse’ conjures up the image of an orphaned Oliver Twist begging for food from a cruel master. The reality, however, was somewhat different, and Britain’s system of poor relief arguably saved thousands of people from starvation over the course of its 300-year history.
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The provision of state-provided poor relief was crystallised in the 1601 Poor Relief Act, which gave parish officials the legal ability to collect money from rate payers to spend on poor relief for the sick, elderly and infirm – the ‘deserving’ poor. Labelled ‘out relief’, handouts usually took the form of bread, clothing, fuel or money.