This chapter discusses the ways that poverty was represented in the 1860s from a variety of standpoints, analysing examples of newspaper-published Cotton Famine poetry alongside popular or canonical literature to illuminate influences, similarities, and differences. The first section, “The Politics of Labouring-Class Poetry in the 1860s,” discusses how interclass discourses enabled poetry’s role in maintaining social equilibrium during years of extreme hardship. The second section, “Women Poets and Social Deprivation,” focusses on the interventions of predominantly middle-class women writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, also noting the charitable efforts of Isa Craig’s Victoria Press raising funds for unemployed Lancashire textile workers. The third section, “Canonical Fiction and Cultural Attitudes to Poverty” considers how the prose works of writers Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell influenced cultural attitudes to poverty in the mid-nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the industrial working classes.