1 A good young man in a shiny top hat
In mid-February 1893, at the tail end of a London winter, the aspiring writer Henry Nevinson visited a new London County Council (LCC) lodging-house near Camden Town for Charles Boothâs poverty survey. His guide, evidently a supervisor there and unimpressed by the expensive electric lights and thermal heating, âthought the place was much too good, and complained very much that it was impossible to get the men up in the morningâ. Nevinson was intrigued to see that the new doss-house catered to metaphysical needs, too. Its sitting room had a fresco above the fireplace in the style of Walter Crane, âsmiths and carpenters and ploughmen ideally dressed and employedâ, evoking truth, beauty, moral dignity and social well-being. But as he wrote in his diary that night,
it would have been impossible to find a subject of which the occupants who crowded round the fire knew less. Seedy, demi-semi respectable cadgers and literary hacks with relics of top hats they looked. On a platform at one end stood a good new piano, [a] gift of Earl Compton, on which a good young man in a very shiny top hat, perhaps Compton himself, was playing tiny bits from Beethoven and Chopin to the indifferent dossers.1
We might agree with Nevinson that the scene, and by extension the reforming aspirations it embodied, is little short of bizarre. Yet the recital was not an unusual event at the artistic doss-house; at least thirty-five musical concerts and recitals were given there between 1893 and 1895.2 Most were delivered by volunteers, but the relevant LCC sub-committee received a letter in January 1895 from a Mr J. A. Wieppart requesting payment âfor playing the piano and accompanying singers at the lodging-houseâ. Around this time the committee decided to purchase three oil lamps to illuminate the fresco Nevinson had found so strangely misplaced.
This book explains the strand of late-Victorian social work embodied by the doss-house fresco, by Lord Comptonâs piano, and by the good young man in the shiny top hat playing fragments from Beethoven and Chopin to homeless men. We might see little evidence of it now, but at the end of Queen Victoriaâs reign, in the restless, troubled twilight of the nineteenth century, hundreds of social workers devoted countless hours and enormous energy to supply cultural opportunities and experiences to Britainâs urban poor. This activism was especially pronounced in London, and resulted in symbolically-charged settings such as the frescoed sitting room at Parker Street and contrived events such as the good young manâs piano recital. It prompted educated, affluent men and women to mount classical music concerts in impoverished neighbourhoods, and to show and explain fine art through philanthropic loan exhibitions. Their efforts were much more widespread and sustained than we might think, embedded in local voluntary action and historically obscure as a consequence. Their cultural philanthropy encompassed art exhibitions, musical concerts, reading groups in poetry and drama, evening lectures, debating clubs and subscriber libraries, social occasions like dinner dances, conversaziones and soirĂ©es, excursions and educational day trips, social interactions and opportunities intended to refine and improve.3
Considered in isolation as âmissionary aestheticismâ this mode of reforming activism is easily misunderstood or caricatured.4 We find it easy to marvel at the apparent naivety of these social workers and their quixotic mission. But a clearer sense of late-Victorian cultural philanthropy emerges if we appreciate its extent, its sources and context. To that end, this book introduces this work of cultural provision broadly, but then concentrates on several centres of philanthropic social work in late-nineteenth century London. North of the Thames, in the East End, we consider the Anglican parish of St Judeâs, Whitechapel and its pioneering university settlement Toynbee Hall established in 1884, comparing it to the Beaumont Trustâs flamboyant scheme to build a Peopleâs Palace three years later further out on Mile End Road. Across the river in South London, we examine the Bermondsey Settlement established by Methodist interests in 1891 and Octavia Hillâs Red Cross Hall in Southwark.
Taking a broad purview, but with a closer look at these telling examples, we explore the ideas, strategies and outlook of the men and women who laboured in these vineyards as we consider the motives that inspired them, the schemes they implemented, the activities they hosted. Rather than treating individual enterprises in isolation, and rather than highlighting their cosmetic differences, we explore underlying patterns of late-Victorian improving moralism, grounded in an urban imaginary of social crisis, that help us to grasp cultural philanthropy as a distinct mode of late-Victorian urban reform and social work. No matter how delusional, elitist or self-serving they might appear at first glance, this book contends that the late-century philanthropic efforts to educate the urban poor through cultural opportunity demand closer attention. To contemporaries they were not necessarily far-fetched or marginal, and many found their schemes entirely worthy and practical. The cultural philanthropists were easily mocked by critics, then and now, but they also called out great numbers of energetic, capable, intelligent men and women who willingly put their shoulders to the wheel. This book aims to re-capture and re-comprehend that practical effort, in order to draw out its underlying coherence and develop a better appreciation of its circumstances and logic.
* * *
We begin with the bland but necessary observation that cultural philanthropy was part of the broad âmoralising missionâ directed at the urban poor by social workers and active reformers, male and female, from largely middle-class backgrounds. Charity work and voluntary philanthropy were everywhere in nineteenth-century Britain, most of it undertaken by the ârespectableâ and well-to-do in partnership with churches, reform societies, charities and benevolent agencies of all kinds. âFor every public gestureâ, James Walvin writes, âthere were thousands of hours of modest but practical work, as Victorians sought to put right the wrongs of the world around themâ.
Not all their efforts were directed at obvious physical human needs. They helped animal welfare (think of the surviving drinking fountains for horses), they built libraries, large numbers of which still stand, they staffed the thousands of classes in local Sunday and ragged schools. There were few aspects of contemporary social life which failed to lure Victorians to their charitable stations.5
The fault-lines of social class were particularly evident as Britainâs labouring poor âwere subjected to a package deal from those above them; inspired principally by members of middle class minority groups, with occasional noble or gentry participationâ.6 By the mid-1870s this activity was reaching a crescendo in the generation which asked, as Anthony Wohl puts it, ânot what is to be done, but what can I doâ about widespread, visible and troubling urban poverty.7
The first historians to assess nineteenth-century social work were preoccupied by the gradual evolution of state-sponsored welfare and a shift from individualist to collective solutions to poverty and its circumstances.8 But clearly, as Frank Prochaska observes, âthe tendency to see [modern British philanthropy] as a stage in the development of the statutory social services has not been helpful to our appreciation of its persistence and variety. The provision of welfare is central to philanthropy, but it is far from being its sole concern.â9 The flawed teleology of the old approach has spurred an academic rediscovery of a âmixed economy of welfareâ (in both contemporary and historical terms) with renewed attention to the voluntary sector in Britain and its history.10 The older scholarship also failed to supply a sense of how philanthropic impulses and relationships suffused Victorian life and society, a theme that has now been treated abundantly.11 The resulting picture is rich and complex. âHumanitarian impulses were certainly a characteristic of charitable activistsâ, Prochaska writes, âbut in a culture so profoundly voluntarist, philanthropy was an essential sphere of politics and social relations, an expression of local democracy and civic pride, of individual hope and aspirationâ.12 Landmark studies highlight key women as primary agents of charity work in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, and clarify important points of intersection with organised religion.13 Scholars have demonstrated the extent to which philanthropic duties were central to middle class identity, particularly in provincial centres,14 while urban historians have measured philanthropyâs impact on the evolution of public space and amenity.15 Problems of urban representation and the languages of social description favoured by social workers have also drawn attention.16 These themes â gender, religion, civic identity, public space and urban consciousness â recur as focal points in the following chapters.
As might be expected, scholars have been particularly concerned with class, and with philanthropy as an element âin the ongoing dialectic between the English middle class and its urban poorâ.17 The possessive note sounded here is deliberate: a perpetual theme in studies of nineteenth-century charity and social work has been the intrusion by middle-class reformers into the homes, lives and habits of the âlower ordersâ. The early historians tended to argue, in Bernard Harrisâ summary, âthat the very nature of Victorian philanthropy was rooted in the characteristics of a deeply unequal society, and that it was designed primarily to salve the consciences of the rich and reinforce their control over the poorâ.18 Attempts to encourage associations among working men and women through the Club and Institute Union, for example, have been dismissed as patronising efforts at social control, despite the very real advantages and benefits they fostered.19 This book seeks a better, more nuanced understanding of the active business of reform undertaken by social workers than is supplied by such a reductive approach. We take a fresh look at the perceptions, attitudes and actions of members of the educated professional sector of the middle class, those men and women âresponsible for the dominant discourse on charity and social policy in the periodâ.20 Exploring the scope, character and purposes of middle-class social activism through the pregnant statements and actions of cultural philanthropists themselves, we continue the recent scholarly interest in âthe moral imperatives which lay behind Victorian philanthropyâ.21 As with the third part of Gareth Stedman Jonesâ magisterial Outcast London, then, the focus here is often on matters not as they actually existed, but as the reform-minded and socially active element of the middle and upper classes conceived them to exist.22
This is not to assume that charity was entirely the work of middle-class social workers and agencies. Prochaska urges attention to working-class benevolence, in part to complicate the standard picture of the poor as victims and passive recipients, and suggests that neighbourly giving was a major factor for social stability.23 Perceptive observers of urban life were acutely aware of the informal benevolence that kept despair at bay and dignity intact. Samuel Barnett, for instance, noted âa kind of communismâ amid scenes of metropolitan poverty: âThey easily borrow and easily lendâ, he wrote of East Londoners. âThe women spend much time in gossiping, know intimately one anotherâs affairs, and in times of trouble help willingly.â24 Educational provision, too, was something that could be supplied in an autonomous and independent spirit by working people themselves.25 Social historians have pursued the individual subjective experience of nineteenth-century poverty by real men, women and children in concrete historical circumstances, through the charity they received, the places they occupied and even the clothes they wore.26 They are also keen to emphasise that charitable provision and its moral strictures were often resisted or defied.27 After all, âthe poor were not statistics devoid of form and feeling. They were people, and they need to be seen from within their own communities as much as from without.â28
But the sources are frustratingly silent when we try to access plebeian experiences on the particular occasions discussed in this book. We have no accounts originating directly from working men and women that might illuminate the response of a dock labourer to the opening of the Peopleâs Palace, for example, a seamstressâ experiences at a Toynbee Hall conversazione, or an evening Shakespeare class at the Bermondsey Settlement attended (or shunned) by the local unemployed. Despite the many thousands of visits made by ordinary working-class Londoners to libraries, art shows, evening classes and music concerts supplied by the cultural reformers, few accounts of these occasions give us any direct access to their responses. Those accounts that do exist, as we discuss below, emanate almost without exception from the self-improving, self-consciously educated stratum of skilled workers and the respectable working poor, and so tend to endorse the cultural and educational opportunities on offer.
Accordingly, this study does not follow recent scholarly attempts to re-construct the history of late-Victorian philanthropy as it was experienced âfrom belowâ. But it is worth noting h...