Seeing is Believing

Some poor people were shown as poor but deserving. This picture shows a hardworking, frugal, widowed mother of three. Once proud, misfortune has brought her down. The artist wants the viewer to be sympathetic to her plight.
Source: Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home or Principles of Domestic Science . . . (1869)

The second category of pictures shows poor people who, by the genteel standards of the day, do not deserve sympathy. This picture contains the signs of self-ruin -- dirt, drink, and laziness
Source: Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery (1854)

The FIVE POINTS video uses Illustrations of Immigrant working class life originally published In 19th Century books and news- papers. This visual record is rich but erratic. Most Illustrated publications were aimed not at working people, but at the genteel. The artists who created these Illustrations tended to portray poor people In one of two ways.

Though such pictures are useful in envisioning and understanding the past, we must examine them with a careful, critical eye. They portray one group's interpretation of reality and not another's. Imagine what it was like to be a poor Irish person confronted with only these types of images.

Harper's Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast depicts a riot in New York on St. Patrick's Day, 1867. Nast's portrayal of the Irish, baring their teeth along with other weaponry, was typical—nineteenth-century cartoonists gave each immigrant working-class group the physical traits supposedly characteristic of its "race" and place in the social hierarchy.

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