ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how the Polish-speaking popular press in Warsaw discussed the topic of urban poverty. As a consequence of the rapid urbanization and industrialization in the Russian partition, urban poverty emerged during the 1880s as a central issue, and contributed to Warsaw’s image of a modern city. The popular weekly magazines were important actors in this process, contrasting Warsaw’s urban space with those of other European cities. In this context, the issue of urban poverty played a highly ambivalent role. On the one hand, new forms of social hardship reinforced the self-perception of national “backwardness” and of the Polish delay vis-à-vis European “progress.” On the other hand, they were pivotal elements in fashioning Warsaw as a modern metropolitan landscape and constructing the magazine’s target-public as a modern Western bourgeoisie. Through this analysis, the chapter aims at showing the relevance of poverty as central experience of the city that, in the Eastern European imperial context, was framed in the terms both of national peripheriality and the desire to form part of a shared European urban modernity.
