Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How the Other Half Lives, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Housing, Reform, and Improvement
Poverty and Morality
Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and Ethnic Prejudice
Corruption
Photography and Visual Language
The Progressive Era and Immigration
Summary
Analysis
The book begins with an excerpt from a religious poem entitled “A Parable” by James Russell Lowell, which contrasts the pomp and splendor of the rulers and kings that hosted Jesus with the poverty of those whom Jesus preferred.
The use of this poem as epigraph signals the author’s commitment to joining Christian morality with a social and economic understanding of poverty.
Themes
Jacob Riis’s preface describes his belief that there is something to be learned from anyone’s experience, even a lowly newspaper man like himself. He also thanks friends and colleagues who have helped him in his writing.
Riis’s appeal to the value of “anyone’s” experience prefigures his insistence on paying close attention to the lives of those often ignored by the more privileged.
Themes
Literary Devices
