Poverty In To Kill A Mockingbird

Sleepy Maycomb, like other Southern towns, suffers considerably during the Great Depression. Poverty reaches from the privileged families, like the Finches, to the Negroes and “white trash” Ewells, who live on the outskirts of town. Harper Lee paints a vivid picture of life in this humid Alabama town where tempers and bigotry explode into conflict. To Kill a Mockingbird has three main themes throughout which includes racism, poverty, and domestic violence. There is a variety of people in this novel that gives a valid picture on how these three themes have any relation to the book. Racism is one of the more predominant themes out of the three in this story. Racism is a main factor in this book. Most white and black people do not get

This book takes place during the Great Depression, where everyone lost their money. Two families that got hit vastly hard were the Cunninghams, and the Ewells-both farm families. Poverty influences these characters because they have no money to buy things and don’t accept money from anyone because they don’t have the money to pay them back. "Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it....People moved slowly then...There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself." (Lee 6). Also, Calpurnia’s church was a poor church. It had no ceiling, it wasn’t painted, and overall it was just an old rundown place. This church was attended with all black people, except for the day Jem and Scout went with Calpurnia. The First Purchase African M.E. Church was “an ancient paint-peeled frame building, the only church in Maycomb with a steeple and bell, called First Purchase because it was paid for from the first earnings of freed slaves” (Lee 157). So the church was made and ran by poor African Americans. Domestic violence was another occurrence in