When Henry George observed in 1879 that the ‘association of poverty with progress’ was the ‘the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world’, he was naming the historical conditions that motivated the development of modern economic and philanthropic discourses while also providing the terms for the aesthetic revision that was literary realism. What George believed to be a paradox – industrial capitalism's simultaneous production of new extremes of wealth and deprivation – he also believed could best be addressed by political economy to the exclusion of private philanthropy or the state. But within a generation prevailing opinion would pursue another direction. By century's end some Americans would once again be looking to Europe for direction in how to meet the needs of their underprivileged citizenry. Washington Gladden would speculate in Social Facts and Forces (1897) whether the demonstration of a ‘wonderfully kind’ heart in the great European cities did not portend the ‘civic corporation … in the new millennium’ becoming ‘the almoner of all the charities’. Gladden's anticipation of a European-style welfare state suggests the direction that American liberalism was heading, if not the whole story of America's ongoing vexed relationship to European statism.

Philanthropy and realism reveal the circuitous route that Anglo-American culture took as a result of its ambivalent response to the consequences – good and ill – of industrial capitalism. During the nineteenth century, fiction was the most influential site for the expression of public morals.