What is Helens attitude about the poor in The Story of My Life?

feels great
compassion towards the poor. She loves the sunshine and fresh air of her country home, but has
also gone to visit the tenements of poor people crowded in the cities of her era. She
writes:

Several times I have visited the narrow, dirty
streets where the poor live, and I grow hot and indignant to think that good people should be
content to live in fine houses and become strong and beautiful, while others are condemned to
live in hideous, sunless tenements and grow ugly, withered and cringing.

She speaks too of the children of the poor, who she describes as
"half-clad" and hungry. She says they shrink away from her hand as if fearing they
will be hit by her. She wonders at the gnarled bodies of the poor she has touched. She says that
her experiences of encountering poverty haunt her and fill her with pain. She is angry that
people don't do more to help the poor. She wishes that all people could enjoy the beauty of
God's free gift of air and sun.

It's not surprising that Helen feels
compassion for the poor. It is something Anne Sullivan has taught her. It also arises from her
own experience of being blind and deaf, a poverty of the senses that has hampered her. As she is
aware in her essays of the privilege of getting nice gifts on Christmas, she must also have been
aware that without her parents having had the money to take her East to see specialists and hire
Anne Sullivan as a full-time companion, she would have been as lost as any poor person in a
tenement. Like most people who have felt gracedand Keller describes Miss Sullivan's arrival as a
miracle like the parting of the Red SeaKeller wishes to spread the bounty
around.