[littlemanpoet]

It just seems to me that we shouldn't assume that because someone's poor they're unhappy. Maybe people these days who are poor (at least in First World countries) consider themselves to be entitled to more. This was not so when Tolkien was a child. Poverty was not necessarily a direct road to unhappiness. Maybe poverty was something that Ronald, Hilary and his mother were unhappy about, and so with many others. But the correlation isn't one to one. Not in Oxfordshire, not in The Shire.