In the late nineteenth century anyone traveling on foot in an American city was likely to be accosted by a beggar asking for alms. Beggars had long been a familiar metropolitan sight, even in the New World. But, according to contemporaries, they were more commonplace in the years after the Civil War than ever before. With hands outstretched, they lined the streets, roved the parks, lingered on stoops.

By all accounts, the most vexing specimen was the sturdy beggar, a man in the prime of life telling a pitiful tale of need. He would be likely to say that he had no work and his family was starving. Should he be believed? Would alms help him or sink him deeper in pauperism by teaching him that he need not labor to live? Puzzling over the subject, the writer William Dean Howells described his own encounter with a street beggar in New York City. In the urban sketch, “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver,” he recounted being torn between the pulls of “conscience” and of “political economy.” In the “presence of want,” Howells observed, “there is something that says to me ‘Give to him that asketh.’ ” But the question of alms was not so simple:

In the end, Howells confessed, he gave the beggar fifteen cents without getting so much as a lead pencil in exchange.