You know the funny thing about the story of the poor family? The relativity of poverty!
My mother grew up in a most insecure family-- the Great Depression, her father being an unsuccessful con man-- and I was raised on stories from that context. (My father's family also suffered from the Great Depression, but they were steady peasant types, so the additional tipsiness of a particularly up-and-down earner was irrelevant-- also, while my maternal grandmother was too neurasthenic and aristocratic to work for pay, my paternal grandmother wasn't, and did, sewing. She helped to make a prototype for the first spacesuits when my brother was tiny.)
Our own family was quite radically thrifty compared with other faculty families, not that faculty families were well off, but we never lived precariously.
And I loved Little Women, and quite took it that the March family, with cook/maid Hannah [No surname?], was indeed poor. And so many things were so mysterious-- tin from the pickle factory? funds from the ragbag?--
And there were the servant-laden poor Bennets of Pride and Prejudice (what was loo? when the party was at loo I pictured small boats in a harbour-- and what was a ragout, and a plain dish? let alone shoe roses)....
So in fact, in relative terms, the poor family with poor servants has some traction-- within that child's context.
"Cannot we retrench? Is there no way in which we might retrench?" (memory, not lookup)
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You know the funny thing about the story of the poor family? The relativity of poverty!
My mother grew up in a most insecure family-- the Great Depression, her father being an unsuccessful con man-- and I was raised on stories from that context. (My father's family also suffered from the Great Depression, but they were steady peasant types, so the additional tipsiness of a particularly up-and-down earner was irrelevant-- also, while my maternal grandmother was too neurasthenic and aristocratic to work for pay, my paternal grandmother wasn't, and did, sewing. She helped to make a prototype for the first spacesuits when my brother was tiny.)
Our own family was quite radically thrifty compared with other faculty families, not that faculty families were well off, but we never lived precariously.
And I loved Little Women, and quite took it that the March family, with cook/maid Hannah [No surname?], was indeed poor. And so many things were so mysterious-- tin from the pickle factory? funds from the ragbag?--
And there were the servant-laden poor Bennets of Pride and Prejudice (what was loo? when the party was at loo I pictured small boats in a harbour-- and what was a ragout, and a plain dish? let alone shoe roses)....
So in fact, in relative terms, the poor family with poor servants has some traction-- within that child's context.
"Cannot we retrench? Is there no way in which we might retrench?" (memory, not lookup)