Poverty Preachers

The strange gospel of poverty's gatekeepers.

Chop Suey — Edward Hopper (1929)

‘You call that ‘poverty’? When I was a boy, we ate barbed-wire sausages whilst trekking nineteen miles to school, uphill—in both directions. It didn’t do me any harm!’

Such is the rosy rhetoric of the semi-modern curiosity known as the Poverty Preacher. Denied the rigours of the eighteenth-century poorhouse, the Poverty Pr…