by Koven, Seth
A transitory cabal of three groups of people led the assault on Barnardo’s character and institutions. George Reynolds, an obscure evangelical Baptist minister, brought the controversy into public view by publishing and personally distributing his scathing pamphlet about Barnardo entitled Dr. Barnardo’s Homes Containing Startling Revelations.10 He was soon joined by other evangelical slum workers, foremost among them the bachelor-brewery-heir-turned-purity-crusader, Frederick Charrington. Scion of East London’s wealthiest and most powerful family, Charrington believed he had an almost seigneurial right to act as the sole missionary among the poor who lived in the shadow of his family’s great brewery in Mile End.11 Once an admirer of Barnardo and a beneficiary of his public endorsement, Charrington felt that Barnardo’s schemes threatened the success of his own religious and benevolent projects.12 Perhaps the most eccentric star in London’s philanthropic firmament, Charrington possessed an almost instinctive genius for choreographing bizarre and well-publicized incidents that drew attention to his self-sacrificing moral rectitude and the immorality of others.13 Even his closest fellow workers found it difficult to accommodate his “hot tempered” and “unyielding” manner.14
Behind the scenes, Reynolds and Charrington were supported by the champions of scientific and secular approaches to poverty, the leaders of the Central Office of the Charity Organisation Society (COS), among them C. J. Ribton-Turner, Alsager Hay Hill, and Charles Loch.15 As I argued in the previous chapter, the workhouse scandals of 1865–66, along with an immense increase in the scope and variety of evangelical charities founded in the 1860s, had greatly stimulated charity workers, civil servants, and philanthropists to organize themselves along more rational and scientific lines.16 This movement culminated in the formation of the COS, which had begun its work in London only a few years after Barnardo’s arrival, and had quickly established district committees throughout London, whose activities were coordinated by a handful of paid professional agents at the Central Office. Without Barnardo’s knowledge, the COS had disapprovingly monitored his philanthropic activities—as well as many other evangelical initiatives, such as soup kitchens and night shelters—for three or four years before the beginning of the arbitration.17 The leaders and staff of the Central Office of the COS distrusted Barnardo’s methods of relief, which they believed perpetuated pauperism rather than deterred it.18 In the eyes of the COS, Barnardo violated the proper relationship established by the New Poor Law in 1834 between the state, the free market, and the benevolent institutions of civil society. By providing food and shelter for poor children, Barnardo undermined the principles of the New Poor Law by freeing parents from choosing between either supporting themselves and their children through paid labor or incarceration in workhouses. Finally, both Barnardo’s evangelical rivals and the leaders of the Central Office of the COS were abetted by a third group intent to sully Barnardo’s name. A handful of working-class employees at Barnardo’s homes for ragged children, whom he had fired for “gross misconduct” the year before, were secretly on the payroll of his enemies and anxious to exact revenge on their former boss. They would serve as star witnesses against Barnardo as they told their own versions of the inner workings of Barnardo’s institutions.
Dr. Barnardo’s ordeal in the summer of 1877 was the culmination of several years of misunderstandings and petty rivalries among a small circle of evangelical philanthropists, clergymen, and the poor in East London. As Gillian Wagner has shown, these local contexts and internecine struggles explain a great deal about how and why specific charges were leveled against Barnardo.19 Personalities clearly did matter a great deal throughout the controversy, both in setting it in motion and producing an atmosphere of vicious recrimination. Barnardo, Charrington, and Ribton-Turner (the COS leader in charge of the Barnardo case) were ambitious and determined men, each incapable of strategically backing down from a position. While the record of their disputes forms a sadly riveting tale, the arbitration’s wider significance is only apparent within the broader contexts in which it unfolded and which it so singularly illuminates: the histories of visual and literary representations of poor children, social welfare and voluntary philanthropy, metropolitan evangelicalism, and sexuality. Questions about the “truth” bind together these seemingly disparate histories and form one connecting thread in my analysis of them. At the most obvious level, the public needed to know the truth about Dr. Barnardo and his accusers. The enmity between Barnardo and the Charity Organisation Society was one skirmish in the ongoing struggle between empathic and scientific, religious and secular, approaches to poverty and over who should control the vast apparatus of metropolitan charity. As the controversy moved toward arbitration, the question of how philanthropists determined who was truly poor was turned on its head. People demanded to know who was a true philanthropist and what constituted true charity. This proved no simple matter because its answer depended upon the widely differing ways in which Evangelicals, members of other Christian denominations, and secularminded reformers understood the truth.
Doubts about Barnardo’s personal truthfulness cannot be separated from anxieties about his sexuality, the sexual conduct of his staff, and the supposedly sexual character of some of his photographs. Barnardo’s innovative use of photographs, what Reynolds decried as his “artistic fictions,” led contemporaries to ask themselves the broader philosophical question of what was (and was not) a truthful, legitimate, and decent representation of the poor. How could unwary readers distinguish between the conventions of truthfulness that governed journalistic exposés such as Greenwood’s “A Night in a Workhouse,” philanthropic reports, and the vast didactic literature produced by Evangelicals? Were photographs of ragged children objective and scientific documents of human misery, or were they subjective images meant to appeal to emotion more than reason? Barnardo’s use of photography also raised questions about truth in advertising: what were the boundaries separating the largely unregulated practice of commercial advertising and the documentation of social evils to raise money for benevolent schemes?
I tell the story of the arbitration, or perhaps more aptly explain why it happened and what it meant, from several different perspectives. First, I compare evangelical conceptions of truth and rationality with those of the COS to explain their conflict in terms of their differing notions about charity, welfare, and the role of the state. The next section explores those elements of the arbitration that threatened to, but never quite did, transform it into a major sexual scandal. The third section links together and mobilizes the arguments developed in the previous sections to analyze Barnardo’s representations of ragged children. I offer close readings of a few of Barnardo’s literary and visual texts to explain what Alan Tractenberg aptly described in 1974 as the “unsettling ambiguity” of Barnardo’s photographic images of ragged children, which “approach yet fall just short of an unbearable revelation.”20 The fourth section uses the lens of the Barnardo controversy to interpret one of the best-known stories in Victorian history: the discovery and rescue of Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man. I argue that Merrick was a Barnardo-boy manqué and that his history can and should be read as an episode in evangelical philanthropy, child rescue, and photography. The conclusion serves as both coda and postscript. It simultaneously takes stock of my analysis of Barnardo’s story while using a few examples to underscore its usefulness in making sense of the histories of child welfare, photography, and sexuality in the twentieth century.
This chapter is in no sense intended to besmirch the name of one of the Victorian age’s most luminous do-gooders. Dr. Barnardo did a tremendous amount of good for thousands of children, women, and men whose lives would have been much poorer but for his efforts. Even Charles Booth, not prone to hyperbole, commented that Barnardo’s organization in the 1890s “was beyond question the greatest charitable institution in London, or, I suppose, in the world, and its success has been deserved…. [T]here are few charities in favour of which so much, and against which so little
, can be said.”21 I have tried to keep such well-deserved judgments in mind. At the same time, my appreciation for Barnardo’s achievements is tempered by a keen sense of their costs. Barnardo’s history continues to capture the public’s interest because so much more was at stake than his reputation and so much continues to be at stake in the way we think about and represent the poor.
FACTS, FICTIONS, AND EPISTEMOLOGIES OF WELFARE
The spectacle of evangelical slum workers accusing one another of lying, defrauding the public and engaging in immoral sexual relations exposed all Evangelicals to public ridicule. The Barnardo scandal unfolded at a particularly inopportune moment for Evangelicals. Resources for domestic mission work were largely diverted toward aiding the Christian victims of Turkish atrocities in the Balkans, while atheists such as Charles Bradlaugh and ritualist slum priests such as Father Lowder were making substantial inroads among the London poor.22 Extremists and fundamentalists within evangelical ranks were eclipsing the influence of moderates, who had successfully mobilized large numbers of men and women to support their causes in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s. While William Gladstone’s rhetoric and politics remained saturated by evangelical theological and social ideas, the political clout of Evangelicals as a loose but once formidable coalition was unmistakably in decline.23 Perhaps most damningly, the arbitration confirmed the impression in the minds of some that Evangelicals were hypocrites, purveyors not of godly truths but of mere cant.
The concept of “cant” was closely bound up with questions of integrity, truthfulness, and religious enthusiasm. What “cant” meant—what it was, and was not—lay at the heart of the Barnardo affair. A founding father of the COS first demanded that the COS investigate Barnardo because one of Barnardo’s fundraising performances “gave an impression that there was a good deal of cant mixed up with it and that Dr. B. was a humbug.”24 A contributor to Temple Bar offered an acerbic portrait of the “representatives of cant”: “Let a man imagine himself called to be champion of a religious principle or truth and there is no absurdity, no eccentricity, of which he will not be guilty, and the wilder the absurdities, the larger will be his band of disciples.”25 Barnardo’s well-publicized midnight rambles in the back alleys of East London in search of homeless children and Charrington’s dramatic storming of brothels to rescue girls from the hands of pimps certainly struck some contemporaries as absurdities hiding behind the name of religious truth.
What their critics decried as cant, many Evangelicals cherished as truth. Evangelicals believed in what Barnardo called the “saving knowledge of the truth.”26 It is a phrase that requires some elucidation because it had considerable implications for Barnardo’s understanding of the truth and for his photographic practices; it also helps to explain what Evangelicals took to be appropriate and rational behavior in light of truth. Truth consisted of that which could lead a person to God’s saving grace. For Evangelicals, from Wesley’s followers in the eighteenth century to Barnardo, authentic religious experiences were signaled by a superfluity of emotion whose excesses threatened to overwhelm both the social and sexual order. The loving truths of God that pierced the heart of the believer existed in uneasy tension with the sober facts of reasoned experiences. For many Evangelicals, truth could be quite different from fact because facts, not animated by God’s love, in themselves lacked the power to save (figure 2.1).27
This gap between truth and fact was exacerbated by Evangelicals’ propensity to circulate narratives between fictional and nonfictional philanthropic writings—the same story might appear in a novel or a “true narrative” and then would appear verbatim later in a nonfictional article—and indicates a remarkable fluidity in the way they understood generic boundaries and conventions. Popular evangelical “novels,” such as Anna Shipton’s Following Fully (1872), were hybrid works combining elements of sermons and documentary reporting on social problems with narrative strategies derived from novels. “I cannot but regret,” Shipton averred, “that fiction should in any way mingle in this brief narrative, which I have endeavoured to use as an illustration of following the Lord fully.” She did not choose “imaginary characters or faultless models, but some whose mission has been accepted and blessed.”28 R. M. Ballantyne’s novel Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished (1884) offers a striking example of the license Evangelicals took with commonplace notions of fact and fiction in their determination to represent higher truths. Dusty Diamonds was one of many realistic novels written about the lives of street boys published from the 1860s onward that conveyed accurate and detailed information about London street life and child-rescue agencies.
FIGURE 2.1. Taken from the cover of Barnardo’s ninth annual report, for 1874–75 (but released in January 1876), entitled Rescue the Perishing, this image joins together God’s love with truth as the animating forces behind evangelical rescue work. The imperative for others to act on behalf of street waifs is accentuated by the passivity of the forlorn sleeping figure who clearly cannot act on her own behalf. Barnardo pioneered the use of photographs, but he remained devoted to graphic images long after it was technologically possible to reproduce printed words and photographs on the same page.
The plot was full of those surprising but also reassuringly predictable twists of fate that gave so much satisfaction to Victorian novelists and their readers. Ballantyne insisted that his tale was “founded on well authenticated facts” (figure 2.2),29 but it went beyond distilling facts and recasting them as fictions intended to represent social and spiritual truths. Entire chapters of the novel paraphrased the published reports of various evangelical agencies, in particular the Ragged School Union and Annie Macpherson’s Canadian Homes for London Wanderers. One of its many subplots was lifted almost verbatim from a case study in G. Holden Pike’s nonfictional Pity for the Perishing, The Power of the Bible in London, also published in 1884. Pike’s source, and perhaps also Ballantyne’s, was a report by the venerable George Holland, founder of the George Yard Ragged School in Whitechapel.30 Finally, the bulk of Pike’s chapter on Barnardo in Pity for the Perishing reproduced, almost word for word and without attribution, a series of articles Barnardo wrote and published in Night and Day in 1877.31 If the experience of finding the same story in a novel and in a philanthropic report made each narrative seem more authentic and true, it must also have destabilized expectations about the relationship of fact to fiction. This confusion was part of a much broader problem confronting readers in an age when many novelists, not just writers of evangelical tracts, drew on reports produced by social investigators whose authors, for their part, often deployed novelistic conventions in presenting their own “facts.”32
FIGURE 2.2. R. M. Ballantyne’s novel Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished (1884) drew heavily on nonfictional reports produced by various Evangelical child-rescue agencies. The novel and its frontispiece highlighted the power of Christian love to remake a homeless London street child (shown sleeping in a barrel with a drunken man strolling nearby) into a healthy agricultural laborer, who enjoys both his work and his new opportunities for invigorating play in the Canadian wilderness. In this way, Ballantyne supported emigration schemes as solutions to London poverty.
Evangelicals’ ideas about the saving power of truth went hand in hand with the logic underpinning both their conception of God’s role in sustaining their enterprises and their unwaveringly inclusive ideas about who was worthy of charitable relief. Evangelicals often insisted that their successes resulted entirely from God’s favor and redounded exclusively to His glory. Such convictions infuriated members of the COS Central Office, who believed it was irresponsible to rely on God’s favor, as Barnardo claimed he did, instead of prudent financial planning when the lives of poor children depended on Barnardo’s ability to raise money to feed and clothe them. For members of the COS, the words “NO DESTITUTE CHILD EVER REFUSED ADMISSION” emblazoned in large letters over Barnardo’s Central Offices and Boys’ Home in Stepney Causeway were a daily reminder of the evils of Christian charity untempered by
scientific principles (figure 2.3). How could parents be made to fulfil their duties toward their children if they knew that, regardless of their behavior, their children would be cared for by Dr. Barnardo? To leaders of the COS, Barnardo’s brand of evangelical philanthropy contradicted the laws of social relations that governed charity with the same immutable certainty with which the laws of the free market were meant to govern the economy.
What Evangelicals regarded as Christian duty, their critics condemned as indiscriminate relief. Scientific charity, according to the founders of the COS, was not inclusive but exclusive. Its task was to exclude as many people as possible from all forms of costly outdoor relief, which included cash, goods, and services offered to the poor outside the workhouse. Curtailing outdoor relief would force the poor to choose between self-help or incarceration in their local poorhouse under the stringent guidelines established by the New Poor Law of 1834. The COS aimed to work in concert with poor-law officials to reduce costs of local relief by coercing adults to undertake paid labor in the free market. Some leaders of the COS privately hoped that their well-publicized assault on Barnardo would convince Parliament to grant them sole statutory authority to regulate relations between private and public charity. From the perspective of the men who dominated the Central Office and Executive Committee of the COS, putting an end to Barnardo’s work was crucial to the success of their future plans.