Philanthropy and Early Twentieth-Century British Literature

Milena Radeva-Costello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138066496
• eBook ISBN: 9781351658652
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Philanthropy and Early Twentieth-Century British Literature explores the relationship between British literature and philanthropy at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the works of E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, W. B. Yeats, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West. This book considers how writers in the modernist period drew on the liberal welfare reforms, the adoption of scientific methods in charity, the Cambridge tradition of public service, the Irish nationalist movement, and the influence of the Victorian woman philanthropist in order to advocate for an individualist art, revolutionize their aesthetics, redefine ideals of hospitality and beneficence, and affirm the national, social, and economic liberation of the modern subject.

Contrary to popular interpretations presenting modernism as a break with Victorian values, Dr. Radeva-Costello argues philanthropic engagements are at the heart of early twentieth-century literature. The writers discussed in this book had a sophisticated knowledge of the philanthropy debates and of their power to transform twentieth-century notions about how to govern, how to conceive of national, class, and gender boundaries, and how to market the work of the professional artist in the real world. In keeping with the strong archival and historicizing approach of the "New Modernist Studies" of recent years, this book also analyses the rich contextual detail of early modernist magazines, contemporary and archival periodicals, and government publications.

1 Empire and Welfare in Britain

In 1901, Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman, a journalist and a Liberal MP who worked with Lloyd George and Winston Churchill to engineer the Liberal welfare reforms of 1906–1914, and head of the British War Propaganda Bureau during World War I, edited a collection of essays by eminent British writers, entitled The Heart of Empire. Discussions of Problems of Modern City Life in England. The book expressed his sentiment that the modern age had fallen short of the humanitarian purpose of the Victorians and that empire was harming progress on domestic issues:

it is the day of other and noisier enthusiasms—the lust of dominion, the pride in magnitude of Empire; delight in rule over alien nations, commercial aggrandisement, and dissatisfaction with anything short of predominance in the councils of the world. (4)

In his essay “Realities at Home,” Masterman depicted the ghettos of London as masses of grey and stunted life:

The first impression obtained is the utter ugliness of it all. Here is a life from which the apprehension of beauty has visibly departed. Whatever may be the pleasures, existence here is set in grey—grey streets, grey people, a drab monotony, which after a time gets on one’s nerves with a sense of personal injury… Here are lives not even kindled by the resourcefulness, subtlety, and individual enterprise of the avowed criminal; but in incredible multitude, shabby, ineffective, battered into futility by the ceaseless struggle of life. (The Heart of Empire 16–17)

By projecting imperial stereotypes upon the English slums, Masterman constructed a powerful argument that roused public opinion to a discussion of domestic and international policy, and drew attention to the condition of urban England. He invited his readers to change their priorities and explore the “terra incognita” that is at the heart of London, to take up not the “white man’s burden,” but the “Burden of London” (16). In 1907, Masterman and W.B. Hodgson coedited another book, To Colonise England: A Plea for a Policy.¹ The contributors were other Liberal MPs who advocated a return to the land and debated ways in which they could make it work. On the first page, Masterman included a quotation by the then Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who declared in 1905 that “There is no task to which we are called more urgently by every consideration of national well-being than that of colonizing our own country” (v).

Masterman’s publications show that philanthropy, welfare, and empire in the beginning of the twentieth century were closely intertwined. If the last of the British Empire largely disappeared under Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister between 1957 and 1963 (Binn 93), the beginning of its end was being felt before in the first decades of the twentieth century, the period of modernist ascendancy. At the same time, as historians Geoffrey Finlayson, Brian Harrison, and Edward Royle have shown, the disintegration of empire promoted an expanding social service sector within the United Kingdom. The pioneering social surveys of Charles Booth and Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, the Free Shelters and the Labour Colonies of the Salvation Army, the detailed examination of the Victorian Poor Law by the Royal Commission (1909), and the Liberal welfare reforms of 1906–1914 represented some aspects of this expansion.

A number of critics have addressed the modernists’ engagement with questions of empire. Theorists such as Terry Eagleton, Frederick Jameson, and Edward Said have discussed modernism and imperialism in their essays Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (1990). More recently, another collection, Modernism and Empire (2000), edited by Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby, furthered the same debate. Critics have noted the connection between modernism and primitivism and claimed the interdependence between modernity and empire, between the colonies and the metropolis, and between imperialism and modernism. Other scholars, such as Anne McClintock and Matthew McKean, have noted how intertwined the subjects of class, race, gender, and philanthropy had become in the slum novel from the late nineteenth century. According to Matthew McKean, “slum novelists identified the crowd with customs of violence and lunacy, with metaphors of bestiality, degeneration, and darkness” and “implied that travelling into the crowd was akin to travelling backward in primeval and hellish times and places” (50). These tendencies were not isolated to writers of a particular political perspective: “writers as politically diverse as Beasant (a Liberal reformer), Harkness (a socialist), Morrison and Gissing (idealists turned pessimistic determinists) resorted to the same sort of imperial tropes to describe the lives of the poor” (McKean 29).

Similarly, Ann McClintock traces the epistemological problems of later modernist writings to late nineteenth-century depictions of urban slums and colonial landscapes. She compares the writings of William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army and author of In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), to Henry Morton Stanley’s narrative of exploration and conquest In Darkest Africa (1890) to prove that the structures of discipline and power permeate not only the far extensions of empire but also the heart of its metropolis. McClintock argues that in parliamentary reports, and in the writings of journalists and philanthropists, “the urban slums were depicted as epistemological problems—as anachronistic worlds of deprivation and unreality, zones without language, history of reason that could be described only by negative analogy, in terms of what they were not” (McClintock 120). Thus, they were very much “like colonial landscapes” that the reader encounters in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or in Forster’s A Passage to India (McClintock 120).² However, few literary critics and theorists have discussed modernist writing in the context of imperial philanthropy overseas and domestic welfare reform, such as the Liberal welfare reforms of 1906–1914.

While modernist and early twentieth-century writers were often implicated in the structures of institutional power that constructed “others” as spectacle, they often addressed these questions in the context of the philanthropy debates that shaped early twentieth-century discussions of empire, the revision and repeal of the punishing 1834 Poor Law, and the emerging state welfare practices of the Liberal reforms of 1906–1914. Last but not least, these changing cultural practices gave rise to a proliferation of ideas about character, independence, egoism, and benevolence, ideas that intersected with and spurred the development of the emerging modernist sensibility.

This chapter explores the connections between philanthropy, empire, and modernism in two of Edward Morgan Forster’s novels, Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), and in Rebecca West’s The Judge (1922). It also discusses the Salvation Army, the Poor Law reform in England, the Labour Colonies, the Small Holdings Act of 1908 and the land reform of the Liberal Party, women’s rights and national welfare, Indian philanthropy, and British philanthropy in India. Howards End (1910) questions whether it is possible to ameliorate the social question in England and if personal relationships or gifts can overcome class barriers and build a common home. A Passage to India (1924) represents the failure of British philanthropy in India as a symptom of the failure of British rule but suggests that philanthropy is still the key to Indian self-determination. In The Judge, Rebecca West places women’s rights and especially women’s roles as mothers at the center of the debate over national welfare, and in opposition to a hypocritical and feeble charity. While Forster’s novels acknowledge, like West’s The Judge, the limitations of philanthropy conceived along the model of British imperialism, they also uphold the ideal of hospitality and of the nation in a particularly original way and for an important purpose—namely, to affirm the social, sexual, and economic liberation of the modern subject.

“To succour not the well-conducted and respectable alone, but even the undeserving, the outcast, the weak, the fallen”

The late nineteenth century saw the development of ethnographic and statistical methods that could be applied to study the poorer classes at home as well as exotic customs and people overseas. Pioneering social studies such as Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty, a Study of Town Life (1903) provided persuasive evidence of the alarming living conditions, death rate, and general health of the population of big cities, such as York. In his detailed review, which used modern statistical methods and exhaustive research, Rowntree concluded that “nearly 30 percent of the population are living in poverty and are ill-housed, ill-clothed, and underfed” (216). Especially pitiable was the condition of children in the poorest section of town, since “more than half of the children in the poorest section are classed as ‘bad’,” that is in poor health (Rowntree 214). As he vividly described them,

These ‘bad’ children presented a pathetic spectacle; all bore some mark of the hard conditions against which they were struggling. Puny and feeble bodies, dirty and often sadly insufficient clothing, sore eyes, in many cases acutely inflamed through continued want of attention, filthy heads, cases of hip disease, swollen glands—all these and other signs told the same tale of privation and neglect. (Rowntree 214)

These children grew up to be stunted, ill adults, which was bound to affect the recruiting efforts of the British Army at home. In the next section, Rowntree determined that

the health and physical development of one-half of the recruits who applied for enlistment in the British Army during 1900 was below the comparatively low standard required by the army authorities, and it must be remembered that even this does not adequately measure the low standard of health amongst the working classes generally (Rowntree 220)

because only those who had a good chance of passing the examination of the army doctors were encouraged to apply.

B. Seebohm Rowntree’s conclusions corroborated the work by social reformer Charles Booth between 1889 and 1897, published in multiple volumes as Life and Labour of the Poor in London. The two stated that they were “faced by the startling probability that from 25 to 30 per cent of the town populations of the United Kingdom are living in poverty” (Rowntree 301), a fact especially shocking since according to the census seventy-seven percent of the population of the Kingdom was urban in 1901. These social reformers sounded their distress about their findings: “That in this land of abounding wealth, during a time of perhaps unexampled prosperity, probably more than one-fourth of the population are living in poverty, is a fact which may well cause great searching of heart” for “no civilization can be sound or stable which has at its base this mass of stunted human life” (Rowntree 304). These concerns were exacerbated around the time of the second Boer Wars (1899–1902) and the large territorial expansion of the British Empire at the turn of the century. The ailing empire needed fast and effective remedies and capable and healthy soldiers and administrators, and such concerns colored both the imperial and philanthropy debates.

The breakup of the nineteenth-century Poor Law contributed to concerns about the nature and place of charity in national life. The 1909 Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress added significantly to the examination of poverty in England and questioned the responsibility of the state to the poor. Detailed, exhaustive, and well documented, running to over 1,200 pages, the report found that Workhouses did not have the desired effect in providing relief, deterring malingering, or in building character that they were designed to have. The authors included experts such as the philanthropists Mrs. Bosanquet and Miss Octavia Hill, the secretary of the Charity Organisation Society C. Steward Loch, and Fabian socialists such as Beatrice Webb. The Labour Yard or Test house, which was designed to put the able-bodied to harder labor than they would experience in prison, and on more meagre rations, had such an evil reputation “that men ‘would rather starve’ than enter the Labour Yard” (1055). Even though this nominally reduced indigence, it resulted in increase in the number of homeless individuals in cities like London; “in 1887 comfortable London was momentarily impressed by the news that hundreds, if not thousands of persons were always to be found ‘sleeping out’ in Trafalgar Square, along the Thames Embankment, and in every sheltered corner” (105).

Philanthropic organizations such as General Booth’s Salvation Army filled the gap that state relief had left so wide open; “to the fervent Christian came the impulse to succour not the well-conducted and respectable alone, but even the undeserving, the outcast, the weak, the fallen” (105). In 1887, General Booth opened the first of his “Food and Shelter Depots,” followed in 1889 by the Church Army “Labour Homes.” Like the Salvation Army “Elevator,” the Labour Home offered work as well as shelter, “at which [the men] were able to earn nearly the cost of the small subsistence of a single man” (107). The third innovation coming out of private philanthropy were the Labour or Rural Colonies, “such as Hadleigh, near Southend, run by the Salvation Army, Lingfield (Surrey) run by the Christian Social Service Union, Hempstead (Essex), run by the Church Army; and the German Industrial Farm Colony at Libury Hall, near Ware” (108). These colonies trained the poorest and the most desperate of the unemployed and tried to provide them with jobs, often by helping them to emigrate. Like the poor law commissioners, private philanthropists sought to “redeem” and reform the poor to solve the social problem.

If the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress deplored the demoralizing influence of the Workhouse on a population that had already lost courage and hope, or was “destitute of will-power” (109), the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, headed by the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb, concluded that “personal character … does not seem to us to be of significance with regard to the existence or the amount of Unemployment” (Minority Report 253). This report dismissed the moral implications of poverty and called for a larger role for the state in managing unemployment in particular. The authors of the Minority Report connected the fluctuations of unemployment to the market and not to personal faults:

the aggregate number of the Unemployed in the nation, are in no way related to the existence of drunkenness or misconduct among the workmen, and the fluctuations would certainly not be any the less … if all the men were teetotallers and as thrifty as could be desired. (Minority Report 254)

In this, they agreed with the efforts of General Booth to provide work for the unemployed, the underemployed, and the casual laborer, work, which, however imperfect, recognized that before dealing with the spiritual needs of the destitute, the philanthropist needs to provide for his and her material necessities. As General Booth declared,

what is the use of preaching the gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive? You might as well give a tract to a shipwrecked sailor who is battling with the surf. (Quoted in Minority Report 105)

Also in marked contrast with the precepts of the Poor Law, William Booth insisted, “No one will ever make even a visible dent in the morass of squalor who does not deal with the improvident, the lazy, the vicious, and the criminal” (quoted in Minority Report 240). In turning their attention to the tangible necessities of the poor and insisting upon the inclusion of the undeserving poor in their charity, voluntary agencies and the Fabian socialists alike paved the way toward removing the stigma of being “on the dole.” Their actions influenced public opinion away from the idea of the “wicked” poor, and the penal Victorian attitudes toward them.

“Husbanding the resources of empire” at home: E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910)

Howards End is particularly emblematic of the importance of the welfare debates in Edwardian literature and culture because it was published in 1910, the year before the British Parliament passed the National Insurance Bill, and only a year after the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress was published in 1909. The progressive and redistributory taxation of Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” of 1909 finally overcame the opposition of the House of Lords in 1911 (Finlayson 165). The Budget was the first one to propose a redistribution of wealth to fund social programs for the English poor. In a speech to Parliament, and as if echoing the language of Salvationism, Lloyd George declared it to be a “war budget … to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.”³ The description of the war on poverty as such provided a link between the conquest of distant territories and the righting of social wrongs at home. In its concern about the responsibility of wealth, the possibility of philanthropy, the welfare of workers, and its mystical ideal of a nation rooted in the English countryside, E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End reverberates with the issues from these philanthropy debates and from the Liberal welfare reforms of 1906–1914.

The novel explores the relationships of the idealist Schlegel sisters with two different types: the “imperial” and the underprivileged. Margaret and Helen alternately fall in love or form instant attachments to members of the powerful and prosperous Wilcox family and to the impoverished but ambitious clerk Leonard Bast. The male Wilcoxes have “the colonial spirit” (172): virility, a commanding presence, practicality, and a solidity that borders on obtuseness. Mr. Henry Wilcox “had carved money out of Greece and Africa, and bought forests from the natives for a few bottles of gin” (242). He and his sons own the Imperial and West African Rubber Company, while his younger son Paul Wilcox, with whom Helen shares a brief romance, is sent “out to his duty” in Nigeria; it is “beastly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Empire and Welfare in Britain
• 2 Yeats, Charity, and the Irish Question
• 3 Bloomsbury, the Spirit of Cambridge, and the Patronage of the Arts
• 4 Wyndham Lewis, Violence, and the Individual in the Welfare State
• 5 Women Writers, Altruism, and Philanthropy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
• Conclusion
• Index