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“Charity Properly Understood”: Changing Ideas about Poor Relief in Liberal Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Anrian Shubert
Anrian Shubert
Affiliation:
York University
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Extract

When the English cleric Joseph Townsend visited Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, he was impressed by the apparent tolerance with which beggars were treated and by what he called the “excessively generous” way in which charity was distributed. He cited, with both surprise and disapproval, the Bishop of Cordoba, who daily fed some 7,000 people by distributing 1,000 kilograms of bread.1 This image of Spain as a paradise for the poor persisted until well into the nineteenth century. George Borrow, who travelled through the country in the 1830s trying to sell Bibles without much luck, remarked approvingly that poverty was not despised in Spain as it was in other countries:

Yet to the honour of Spain be it spoken, it is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is never insulted nor looked upon with contempt.…In Spain the very beggar does not feel himself a degraded being for he kisses no one's feet and knows not what it is to be cuffed or spitten upon.

Type
Belief Systems and Political Behavior
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , January 1991 , pp. 36 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1991

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