During the recent pandemic, when children were going hungry because their parents were destitute, it took the moral authority of a 23-year-old footballer to get them fed. In earlier times it was the job of poets to summon our better angels, in the face of such obvious need.
Coleridge campaigned for the Factory Act of 1819, the first legal limit on child labour. Swift's "Modest Proposal" - that Irish babies be reared for the rich man's table - was a protest against restrictions on Irish trade. Walter Scott saved the Scottish banking system, on which fledgling Highland industries depended - his image has adorned the Scottish pound ever since. John Ruskin and William Morris, from different ends of the political spectrum, tore into the complacent nostrums of a "common sense" that saw poverty as part of the natural order.
