“He wrote ‘A Night in a Workhouse,’ about the conditions in workhouses. Have you not read it?” “I don’t need to read about conditions in workhouses,” Justin said. “I was born in one.” That stopped Nathaniel. He read, agitated, voted, and wrote about the suffering of the poor; he cared about it; but it was not his world. It was a world he observed and felt pleased to know something about. It gave him satisfaction to make others understand a little more, or to offer support, financial or otherwise. He’d never lived it.
