Amazing his associates, who often showed a callous intolerance for the poverty-stricken, Cameron proclaimed, “I would like to bear testimony to the wonderful kindness which the poor show to those who are still poorer and more helpless than themselves.” This not only challenged a popular conception of the poor as lazy and indifferent, but it also extolled to the surprised members of his own class the virtue Cameron had found among the poor. This was exactly what Charles Dickens had attempted to do in his novels, but it was an unexpected perspective coming from a man of Cameron’s position.
