by Koven, Seth
As Edwardian policy makers embraced collectivist visions of social welfare and called for increased state intervention in the lives of poor women and children, female social workers across the political spectrum remained committed to humanizing welfare through direct knowledge of and friendships with the poor. Their tasks were to serve as the bridge between the supposedly impersonal, male-controlled welfare bureaucracies and the homes of the poor and to gather information about the habits and eligibility of the poor for welfare benefits. The increasing institutionalization of female friendly visiting as an essential component of early-twentieth century social welfare legislation, such as the Education (Feeding of Necessitous School Children) Act of 1906 and the Medical Inspection of School Children of 1907, grew out of women’s attempts in late Victorian London to know and sympathize with their poor sisters.141 Some official committees of female visitors to the poor, such as the Care Committees created by the London County Council, literally co-opted their members from preexisting private committees of philanthropic (mostly female) workers. These acts redefined the status of the “army of workers dealing with the life of the child” by making them the official agents of public welfare.142 Activities that began as forms of charitable slumming now became essential components of the state’s apparatus to care for poor citizens. But transforming philanthropic women’s legal relationship to local government did not change the cultural values they brought to their work among the poor. It was the women of the Care Committees, not male civil servants, who knocked on the doors of the local poor to talk with mothers about helping them meet the basic needs of their children: getting glasses for nearsightedness, medical treatment for adenoids, and free breakfasts for the undernourished. But lady visitors knew that friendship with poor women should not get in the way of passing judgments about their moral fitness and eligibility to receive benefits. We will never reach an accurate accounting of whether elite women’s acts of loving sympathy to their poor sisters outnumbered those of petty tyranny. We are much better off acknowledging that gender solidarity and class difference shaped in ways both profound and subtle the daily encounters between female friendly visitors and their poor clients and the sources by which we can reconstruct them.
“Rolling in the muck,” Aldous Huxley explained, “is not the best way of getting clean.”143 This may pass for an incontrovertible truth among parents of young children, but history suggests that many well-to-do Victorian and Edwardian women believed that “going dirty” was the only way to get society clean. In so doing, they built dense networks of female benevolence that allowed them unprecedented freedoms to move through urban space and to deepen the passionate friendships of their schoolgirl and college years. They used their freedom to construct an impressive array of private-sector programs and institutions for the London poor, some of which later served as models for male state welfare experts. The erotics of dirt underwrote elite women’s social welfare initiatives and their deepest wish for true sisterhood with each other and their poor sisters. Such fantasies provide important insights into the Victorians’ moral imagination and their discursive structuring of class relations and sexuality. However, they cannot whitewash the thorny social realities of their unequal relationships with laboring women. Dirt and sisterhood drew women together. It also profoundly divided them from one another and produced markedly differing visions of women’s emancipation, social welfare, and social policy well into the twentieth century.
Nothing captures more poignantly the ambivalent implications of dirt and cross-class sisterhood than a story Muriel Wragge included in her recollections of her fifty years of social work in Hoxton, the easternmost of East London’s slums. A titled aristocratic woman, Lady A., travelled weekly from her posh West End home to Hoxton to help out Wragge and the other educated single women who lived together at the Maurice Hostel. Lady A. had lost a family member to tuberculosis and felt special sympathy for the suffering of others. One of her duties was to count the pence the settlement women collected from their various club members’ weekly fee. “She was a little spoilt, though much loved by everyone,” Wragge acknowledged.
I see her sitting at the table, erect and amazed as she gazed at the pile of dirty Hoxton pennies. She turns, and from a bag draws out a pair of white gloves and puts them on; there is a little silver too, and one coin catches in her sleeve and rolls away: “The money is wrong,” she says severely, “I’m short of 6d.” The assembled company gets onto its knees and scrambles on the floor; at last a 6d is produced and held up. “Now I think it will balance.” I say, “Well that was your fault!” She replies with great dignity, “I should not expect to find 6d on the floor.”144
The “dirty Hoxton pennies” and Lady A’s “white gloves” are almost too perfect as evidence. It is difficult not to imagine the dirty hands and bodies somewhere, someplace, that must have produced the wealth allowing Lady A. the leisure and the luxury of her weekly philanthropic errand in the slums. Surely, Wragge’s story can have only one interpretation: Lady A. went slumming but never entered into meaningful relationships with the poor women and children of Hoxton whom she came to serve. Even their pennies are untouchably dirty. While such an interpretation may be true, it is not the only one Wragge’s gentle narrative—and the arguments of this chapter—authorize. It misses out on at least two things: first, the genuine affection Lady A. inspired among the women of Hoxton. Second, the fact that she went to Hoxton at all, week after week, to provide distinctly unglamorous services and skills that were crucial to the functioning of one of East London’s most effective grassroots social service agencies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lady A. may have been an old-fashioned snob whose vision of the world was blinkered by her class privilege, but that does not give us license either to belittle her commitment or to sneer at her small contribution to bettering the lives of the poor of Hoxton.
Chapter Five
THE “NEW MAN” IN THE SLUMS: RELIGION, MASCULINITY, AND THE MEN’S SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT
CLUTCHING IN HIS hand the newly published exposé of overcrowding and immorality in the slums, “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” Rev. Montagu Butler enjoined his Oxford audience in October 1883 to “love the brotherhood.” In a stark reversal of the social roles dictated by unrestricted competition, Butler claimed that the strong must live and work for the weak, “the rich for the poor, the educated for the ignorant.” Butler was no revolutionary, but he clearly felt the dangers of civil discord pressing around him as laboring men clamored for the right to vote, higher wages, and better living conditions. He abhorred those who ignorantly idolized but did not understand the meanings of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” The task of interpreting these words and applying them to “complicated social problems” should naturally fall to Oxford men who “have learned the fair beauty of brotherhood and comradeship” in their youth.1 Fraternity needed to be wrested out of its familiar place in the French Revolution’s trinity and put to work to serve a domesticated English vision of comradeship across class lines.
Male reformers in late Victorian England sought to balance their faith in the healing power of brotherhood with a sober grasp of the deep resentment that the poor harbored against the rich. They returned time and again to the vexed history of the fraternal twins of Genesis, Esau and Jacob, as an allegory for class estrangement. If commentators invoked the loving ties of brotherhood to accentuate the bonds of kinship and obligation connecting “all sorts and conditions of men,” the trope of Jacob and Esau also underscored the perils of fraternity. Although Esau and Jacob were the offspring of Isaac and Rebecca, they were also progenitors of two warring nations, the Edomites and the Israelites. When Rev. Brooke Lambert asked readers of the Contemporary Review to heed the plaintive call of Esau and play the part of Jacob in bettering the lot of their slum brethren, he warned that Esau’s cry “may soon become a howl—the howl of a crowd of injured brothers.” The East London Esau, unlike his Biblical counterpart, would advance not with four
hundred but with “400,000 men to meet us.”2 Samuel Barnett, the gentle rector of St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, one of East London’s poorest parishes, admonished the rich, “before they go to deal with their poor, disinherited brother” to wrestle, as Jacob had, “with the spirit which haunts their path.”3
What did it mean to liken the affluent men of London to the patriarch Jacob? What “spirit” haunted the path of Jacob and his would-be imitators in the 1880s? For champions of popular rights and privileges, this “spirit” could only have been the legacy of Jacob’s ill-gotten gains. Jacob, the man of learning and peace, was also a thief and usurper who used his intelligence to steal Esau’s birthright and his paternal blessing. Since the late eighteenth century, radicals had frequently likened the despoliation of the prerogatives of laboring men to the starving Esau’s bartering his birthright for “a mess of pottage.” As Lambert insisted, the men who raise the cry of outcast London “have lost their birthright and have no blessing.”
If brotherhood seemed to promise a way to escape the horrors of urban class warfare, it was also linked to the sex wars and gender anxieties of the fin-de-siècle. The language of fraternity was unabashedly male and framed the major problems and the solutions confronting modern Britain—poverty, class conflict, and debates about citizenship—in wholly masculine terms. The popularity of fraternal ideologies in the 1880s must be set against the backdrop of women’s increasingly vociferous attempts to wrest control of their destinies from fathers, brothers, and husbands. Men had no choice but to reconsider what it meant to be a man in response to women’s experiments with new public and private roles. As male reformers set about putting their visions of cross-class fraternity into concrete form through missions, settlement houses, clubs, and classes for the poor, they necessarily found themselves promoting particular visions of relations between men and men, men and women, rich and poor. Remaking men and redefining masculinity were explicit aims of many of their class-bridging projects in the slums and grew out of their need to understand their own gender and sexual identities.
The first all-male settlement houses established in the slums of East London in the 1880s, high Anglican Oxford House and pan-denominational Toynbee Hall, were late Victorian Britain’s most celebrated experiments in cross-class brotherhood. Their intertwined histories are the subject of this chapter.4 As residential colonies of young bachelor graduates of Oxford and Cambridge that were established in the heart of slum districts, Oxford House and Toynbee Hall were, I argue, sites for testing out both innovative solutions to urban poverty and distinctly heterodox conceptions of masculinity and male sexuality.5 This chapter examines the impact of male settlers’ religious beliefs and practices on their ideas about social reform, gender, and sexuality. It assesses the consequences of their attempt to extend the all-male Edens of their Oxford and Cambridge colleges into the turbulent spaces of the metropolitan slums. Situating the men’s settlement movement within the broader context of growing public concerns in the mid-1890s about homosexuality and intimate friendships among men, I examine the sexed codes of self-expression prevailing at Toynbee Hall and Oxford House. Finally, I turn to the politics of brotherly love in two institutions attached to these two places: C. R. Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft and the Oxford House Club for Working Men. The micro-politics of these two institutions make it possible to evaluate the relationship between the optimistic rhetoric of fraternity and the contentious realities of social practice.
I structure my comparisons between the first settlements by focusing on two seemingly opposed ways in which the first generations of male settlers responded to the slums and came to understand their own masculinity and sexuality: asceticism and aestheticism. A few definitions and caveats are in order here, since I return repeatedly to these two terms. By asceticism, I mean the impulse to renounce material pleasures and luxury voluntarily as a way to purify the individual and society. Asceticism was not only a bodily regime by which some men chose to regulate their daily lives. It was also essential to how they saw themselves as men and to their sense of what was wrong with the industrial capitalist metropolis as a center for the profligate consumption of goods and services.
Defining aestheticism is a more difficult matter because my usage must necessarily compete with its frequent invocation by men and women in the nineteenth century and subsequently by art historians, literary critics, and historians. By aestheticism, I refer to the assertion of the centrality and power of art and beauty in modern life. The men I examine in this essay, as admiring readers of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris, all believed that true beauty was at once the handmaiden and expression of goodness and necessary to social well-being. At the same time, there were many other devotees of Victorian aestheticism such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, for whom beauty did not necessarily serve any social or moral function. Aestheticism was never a single well-defined movement. Men and women could pay allegiance to aesthetic ideals through the decoration of their homes and the clothes they wore or by writing essays proclaiming the moral virtues of the arts and crafts and joining organizations devoted to bringing beauty into the lives of the poor.6 Aestheticism generated many different signs and symbols that individual men and women freely appropriated in their self-fashioning. Male settlers mobilized aestheticism not only as a personal style and creed—as a way to define themselves—but to help them formulate approaches to urban poverty.7 They were determined to eradicate the oppressive ugliness of the slums, which they believed trapped its denizens within a spiritual and cultural wasteland. As such, they participated in a much broader, pan-European tendency in the late nineteenth century to filter their vision of the city through aesthetic lenses.8
From the 1880s until the 1920s, male settlers at Oxford House and Toynbee Hall distinguished themselves as leading members of Parliament, civil servants within municipal and state bureaucracies, bishops and archbishops of the Church of England, and expert policy makers within the London County Council who expanded the role of government in the daily lives of Londoners.9 Apart from the public schools and ancient universities themselves, London’s male settlement houses arguably had more success than any other institution in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain in launching their residents and associates into positions that allowed them to define not only what was or was not a “social problem,” but also to influence official church, governmental, and private voluntary responses to these problems. The experiences of these young men in the London slums and its formative impact on their perceptions of urban poverty and of themselves as men constitute an important chapter in the making of modern British social and sexual politics.
THE SOURCES OF “BROTHERHOOD” IN LATE VICTORIAN ENGLAND
Men in late Victorian Britain had an enormous range of sources to draw upon—some ideological, but many others personal and institutional—in articulating their ideas of fraternity. While we can find scattered remarks about brotherhood in the writings of English radicals such as Godwin and the Owenites, it was Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872) who rehabilitated “fraternity” in clothing that suited the tastes and temper of Victorian society. To a remarkable extent, the men who couched their demands for social reform in the rhetoric of brotherhood acknowledged Maurice as their inspiration.10 A Unitarian turned Anglican clergyman, scholar, and polemicist, Maurice was arguably the most influential theologian in nineteenth-century Britain. He constructed his Christian socialist theology out of the fact of the fatherhood of God, which, he insisted, necessarily implied the brotherhood of mankind. Maurice’s universal claims for brotherhood, his belief that it encompassed and bound together all of humanity, differed markedly from the formulations of brotherhood that were associated with the rites and mysteries of societies organized along fraternal lines, such as the Freemasons, and with nationalist movements in the nineteenth century, such as the Fenians. Fraternity, understood in these latter terms, emphasized not only the connections between those who claimed to belong to the nation or organizati
on, but also the exclusion of those who did not. The challenge for Maurice and his followers in the slums of London was to resolve the tension between social cohesion and exclusivity, democracy and brotherhood.11
Maurice’s ideas about brotherhood clashed with the theology and the aesthetics of masculinity of the Oxford movement whose adherents were attracted to John Henry Newman’s charismatic personality and his claims on behalf of the apostolic origins of the Church of England. The leaders of the Oxford movement including Newman, Richard Hurrell Froude, and John Keble, struck alarmed observers (Maurice among them) in the 1840s as a band of brothers devoted to dangerously papist rituals and to an unnatural fascination with celibacy and ascetic denial.12 Nor was Maurice any more sympathetic to the influence of Evangelicals, whose spirituality, politics, and social ministry among the poor grew out of an abiding sense of their own sinfulness and the doctrine of atonement.13 Maurice’s God was loving and compassionate, less focused on judging the ultimate fate of men’s souls than bettering their earthly lot. The life on earth of the incarnate Jesus and His sympathy for the physical needs of the poor and the fallen animated Maurice’s conviction that the mighty and the powerful had far-reaching obligations toward their less fortunate brethren. In Maurice’s theology and social politics, fraternity was the basis of association both within and across social classes.14