by Koven, Seth
Divided by an immense gulf in their views about God and sexuality, Ashbee and Winnington Ingram found ample common ground in their conviction of the necessity of forging ties of brotherly love across the class divide and in their cultivation of boyish hearts. More surprisingly, the bohemian socialist Ashbee and the cautiously conservative High Church Winnington Ingram also believed that they had the right and obligation to impose their will on the laboring men with whom they claimed fraternal equality.188 Two examples, one drawn from Ashbee’s management of the Guild and School of Handicraft and the other from Winnington Ingram’s oversight of the Oxford House Club for working men, demonstrate just how willing each was to forsake the leveling possibilities of cross-class fraternal love in favor of asserting the hierarchical politics of class difference.
Ashbee readily abandoned all pretension of being either a democrat or a socialist when one member of his Guild of Handicraft, John Pearson, privately sold custom-crafted metalwork to a better-established rival in 1890 or, more disastrously, when an unskilled member, William Flowers, produced on the guild’s premises metalwork that he insisted he had a right to sell for his exclusive profit. Ashbee obliged Pearson to restore his profit to the guild while he summarily demanded Flowers’s resignation.189 Ashbee’s high-handed assertion of authority throughout 1891 provoked his own shop steward, C. V. Adams, to remind Ashbee of the cooperative and socialistic principles of their scheme: no man, Adams explained, should “assume the position of proprietor or master.” Another demanded to know whether the guild “was a democratic or autocratic concern.”190 The minutes of the guild make clear that it was democratic in theory but autocratic in practice.
While Ashbee was locked in the struggle with his guildsmen, Winnington Ingram’s faith in the probity of the working men of Bethnal Green was put to the test. During his tenure as head of Oxford House, its flagship clubs for working men, the University Club and the Oxford House Club, were singled out for high praise by the sociologist Charles Booth and widely applauded in the press.191 Winnington Ingram believed that clubs were instruments well suited to kindling a spirit of brotherhood within Bethnal Green and reconciling East and West London.192 While drinking cocoa or playing billiards, club men would gain the independence of mind and character to equip them for their new roles as citizens in a democratic state. However, unlike dozens of rival political and social clubs in East London which working men managed entirely by and for themselves, democracy did not mean self-rule at Oxford House Club.193 When one enterprising senior member of the club’s rowing society, Mr. Welch, raised money from a local publican without first seeking approval from the club manager, Oxford House residents were appalled by his apparent violation of the temperance principles of the club. After weeks of heated debate and increasingly acrimonious negotiations, Winnington Ingram decided to quash the burgeoning rebellion. He insisted that accepting the tainted money “would imply the smash-up of the Club.” “As landlords of the premises,” Winnington Ingram declared, he and the Council of Oxford House “would probably consider it undesirable to allow their premises to be used by the Club.”194
Winnington Ingram must not have anticipated just how well club members had honed their skills in debate and learned their lessons in citizenship. A longtime and well-respected member, Mr. Price, distilled the essence of the entire debate over publican subsidies in a few sentences. His words, strikingly reminiscent of Ashbee’s guildsmen in 1891, reveal just how politically sophisticated at least some laboring men in late Victorian London were. Price “had always understood that this was a democratic Club,” he began. “But if it was entirely under the control” of its Oxford benefactors, Price reasoned, “this was evidently not the case.” He boldly asked the meeting whether they considered it “fair-dealing to threaten them with expulsion if they did not do exactly as the Council wished.” Price appealed in vain to fellow club members, whom Winnington Ingram had bullied into silence.195 In the years ahead, Winnington Ingram and Oxford House retained firm control over the club but not over the loyalty of club men, whose numbers declined sharply.
Did either Ashbee or Winnington Ingram ever reflect on their apparent failure to live up to their own fraternal principles? Or did they prefer to see themselves as upholders of principles too precious to compromise merely for the sake of democratic processes? Surviving sources provide no answers to these questions; however, the mere fact that they chose to preserve minute books filled with pages of detailed evidence of internal struggles between laboring men and their benefactors suggests that Ashbee and Winnington Ingram believed they had nothing to hide. These two intensely idealistic men apparently saw no contradiction between their commitment to promoting democratic habits among laboring men and their “autocratic” assertion of class-based power. Winnington Ingram’s confrontation with clubmen neither diminished his belief that “human brotherhood … is the great truth of this age”196 nor muted his voice in condemning business enterprises whose pursuit of profit harmed his beloved East Londoners.197
As these examples make all too clear, there was a world of difference between proclaiming the virtues of democracy and acting democratically; between saying you love your brother and being loved in return by him. Male slum philanthropists found it easy to lavish their affection on and exercise authority over working-class boys and youths, whose physical vigor, high spirits, and independence they unfailingly praised. But these same attributes were much more threatening in adult working men, and all the more so when these men refused to proffer what many elite male settlers demanded from them: “freely accorded social homage.”198 When working men dared to demand a real share in decision making, Ashbee and Winnington Ingram abandoned the rhetoric of brotherly love and crudely asserted their power. These may have been bitter lessons for all involved, but they also captured the limits of what fraternity and democracy were—and were not—in late Victorian London.199
The spatial relationship between Oxford House and its flagship club aptly reflected the aspirations and contradictions of male settlers’ fraternal ideology. The Oxford House Club and the settlement house proper, with residents’ private and public rooms, literally shared a common roof—tangible proof of the settlement’s commitment to building bridges of friendship between rich and poor. A single door connected the two institutions. But that door remained tightly locked from the day the settlement opened until World War II and the arrival of that maverick head of house, Guy Clutton-Brock and his wife Molly. The Clutton-Brocks vividly recalled the moment they first opened the door when a club member exclaimed, “Ah, you’ve opened the door from the Club to the House and the House to the Club.” They noted, “That was a very big thing, that door.” Unlocking “that door” in the middle of World War II was an event at once trivial and momentous, a symbol of hopeful progress and shameful anachronism.200
Why were settlers so slow to share “frankness and fraternal trust” with the working men they sought to befriend?201 Many residents of Toynbee Hall and Oxford House were deeply attracted to the slums of East London because they perceived them as simultaneously lying within and beyond the boundaries of civilization. For these elite men, slums presented urgent contemporary problems while slum residents remained stranded in an archaic past. Settlers’ determination to see slum dwellers as primitives was tied not only to their ideas about class but to the way they understood their own robustly heterodox masculinity.202 In the decades following the First World War, settlers continued to engage in what one contemporary scathingly described as a “central Africa style of philanthropy.”203 Their rhetorical and psychological investment in this style of philanthropy proved disastrously resilient. We see this clearly in the career of Walter Carey, a prominent clergyman in Britain and South Africa. Carey served as bishop of Bloemfontein in the 1920s and ’30s, an appointment held several decades earlier by the first head of Oxford House, G. W. Knight Bruce.204 Carey was drawn toward the religious and social ideals promoted by Oxford House. A rugged man, a superb athlete, and a devout
High Churchman, he idealized Scott Holland and Winnington Ingram (“a real knight of Christ”) and praised Oxford House for its success in putting Christian fraternal principles into action in the slums.205 Like so many others of his generation, he dutifully disguised himself as a tramp to see how the poor lived. Charismatic and effective in bringing the Gospel to working men in Britain and to “natives” in South Africa, Carey also romanticized them as unspoiled primitives. He described the natives he met in South Africa as “simple, lovable, irritating by their backwardness, yet true and faithful.” Not surprisingly, when he went to present the views of his fellow bishops on the “native question” to the father of the Republic of South Africa, the Afrikaner General Hertzog, Carey admitted to Hertzog that he did not think there were more than one thousand native men “fit for an equal vote with the European.” Nor did he believe that native men were “yet capable of farming land well.”206 The discourse of the “primitive” made it easy for men like Carey to modulate brotherly love into a fatherly assertion of power in articulating their vision of the relationship between authority and democracy, church and state.
In 1984, Fred Gore recalled with annoyance and amazement the attitudes he encountered among well-intentioned Oxford men who came to enlighten him and his friends in the years between the wars. One of eight children of a French polisher in the furniture trade of Bethnal Green, Gore happily attended the well-appointed clubs for working boys and men at Oxford House. According to Gore, the kindly manager of the boys’ club at Oxford House he joined, who later became an Anglican bishop, had completely misjudged the poor. “I learnt donkey’s years later,” Gore explained, that he came down to Bethnal Green under the impression that he was going down to meet some sort of Central American tribe.” “You see, it’s incredible,” Gore continued, “that educated people should come down with such a wrong impression. These people down here, as poor as they were, when you looked out of our back window and you saw all the yards, they turned their little yard into a garden, and they kept rabbits and pigeons and things like that. They had their own culture, you see.”207
Unfortunately there was nothing incredible about the persistence of such views among reform-minded university men in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain. For settlers, seeing the poor both as their brothers and as savages was tied to the way they understood themselves as manly men and as bearers of the elite culture of the universities. They repeatedly described the poor as downtrodden Esaus—leaving themselves, without trace of irony, to play the part of Jacob, the civilizer but also the thief who stole his brother’s birthright.
Choosing to live outside what they took to be the geographical, psychological, and social boundaries of respectable society, slum priests and settlers refused to emulate the bourgeois paterfamilias’s devotion either to traditional family life or to the single-minded pursuit of individual self-interest in the market place. By settling in the slums, these men carved out for themselves a social space where, with the approval of society, they could place fraternity before domesticity. Their experiences living on the social margins, far from removing them from the center of power, only augmented their authority to define, speak, and write about pressing social issues confronting Britons. Their fraternal ideologies were, at least in their own eyes, well suited to the complexities of their task: to harmonize the conflicting claims of rich and poor; East and West; altruism and self-interest; womanly sympathy and manly strength; secular imperatives and Christian duties. Male settlers’ fraternal ideologies sustained not only their claims to educate, uplift, and govern their poor brethren but also to love and befriend them as well. The elite men examined in this chapter yearned to transcend and transform the suffocating systems of class and gender privilege, which they believed poisoned social relations and inhibited their own self-development. At the same time, the cultural logic of slumming powerfully informed their vision of poverty and the poor, constraining them from initiating a truly democratic reordering of class, gender, and sexual hierarchies even within their adopted slum neighborhoods. Theirs was less a failure of intention than of imagination.
Conclusion
The mission of Christians to the city in the 1880s is an invitation to us a hundred years later to answer the same challenge of increasing inequality and social disintegration which our predecessors so clearly saw and so vigorously met. They turned resolutely to what Henrietta Barnett called Practicable Socialism. Today we seek a new vocabulary to express renewed faith in the city.
—Faith in the City
CONFRONTED BY the violence of social dislocation and the desperate loss of hope accompanying endemic poverty in the early 1980s, politicians, activists, religious leaders, and academics on the right and left in Great Britain have had a great deal at stake in laying claim to their own competing versions of the Victorian past. For some of them, Victorianism stands in for dynamic economic expansion at home, military preeminence abroad, and entrepreneurial bravado unfettered by self-serving trade unions and a wasteful welfare state. For others, the Victorian past offers a cautionary tale about the evils and excesses of free-market capitalism and the racist brutality of imperialism.
As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government consolidated its power by dismantling a century of state-subsidized social entitlements, abolishing the Greater London Council, and defanging trade unionism, the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, assembled a blue-chip commission in 1983 to investigate “Urban Priority Areas.”1 Dismissed as “Marxist rubbish” by outraged Conservatives,2 the commission’s report, published as Faith in the City in December 1985, offered a trenchant interpretation of Victorian approaches to urban poverty while blasting the Conservative government’s “more or less crude exaltation of the alleged benign social consequences of individual self-interest and competition.”3
Faith in the City remains “hugely influential” in British politics, and leaders of both major parties continue to hearken back to it in their public pronouncements.4 An ambivalent testament to the enduring legacy of slumming and slum benevolence, it provides a way to reflect upon longterm continuities and changes in modern British social and sexual politics.
Like their Victorian predecessors, the archbishop’s commissioners voyaged into the slums to “see … the human reality behind the official statistics”; they, too, drew their conclusions “above all by … direct experience” of witnessing urban poverty and listening to the voices of the poor.5 They established their expert credentials through pastoral work in slums and leadership of social welfare institutions, including an East London docklands settlement house and Oxford’s Barnett House (named in honor of Samuel Barnett), its academic unit devoted to social work and public policy. The modern incarnations of Victorian philanthropies, including Barnardos, the Salvation Army, and the Family Welfare Association (the contemporary name for what was once called the Charity Organisation Society), all submitted evidence to the commission.
In all these ways, Faith in the City descends directly from late-nineteenth-century journalistic and sociological surveys of urban poverty and dozens of others parliamentary commissions and proceedings of church congresses. At the same time, the authors of Faith in the City notably distanced themselves from the mental world of Victorian slumming. They refused to position the poor as erotic objects of elite spectatorship, in marked contrast to so many of the philanthropists, evangelical “rescuers,” journalists, and social workers discussed in this book. They vehemently rejected the racist tropes of domestic imperialism that likened the poor to exoticized heathen subjects in favor of remaking the city and the church in the image of its multiracial, multi-confessional citizens. The report recognized the imperative to attend to the human dignity of those in need of assistance. The decaying physical infrastructure of Britain’s urban core, much of it dating back to the late nineteenth century, functions both as a material fact and as a metaphor for the continuities binding “Urban Priority Areas” to Victorian slums as well as the immense histo
rical gulf separating them.
Faith in the City invoked the Victorian past, not as an exercise in nostalgic moralizing about lost certainties, but rather to inaugurate spiritual renewal and a progressive vision of social and economic justice. Its authors clearly believed that the success of their policy recommendations depended, at least in part, upon the history within which they embedded them. In “self-lacerating” prose,6 the report chastised the church for its long neglect of the cities and their poor and reconstructed a usable past of Victorian worthies whose labors on behalf of the urban poor merited both remembrance and selective emulation. The historical prologue to Faith in the City ultimately divides men and women into two clear-cut groups. On the one hand, it condemns the vast majority who tragically reproduced the church’s “paternalistic,” “male-dominated,” and “mainly middle class” values in their dealings with the urban poor.7 On the other, it uncritically celebrates the achievements of a handful of visionary mavericks, precisely those “evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics,” Christian socialists, municipal reformers, and university settlers scrutinized in this study.
Conceptualizing the past in terms of heroes and villains, saints and sinners, may serve a powerful, even necessary, political message. It does not, however, make for very good history. I have done my best to avoid this trap. In its place, I have tried to produce a portrait, no less dramatic, in shades of gray. Just as slum explorers sought to illuminate the dark corners of the metropolis, this book has cast a critical light upon them, their ideas, their methods, their institutions, programs, and policies. Without diminishing their achievements, I have called attention to their problematic and consequential assumptions about freedom and democracy, equality and deference, fraternity and hierarchy, gender and sexuality. I have reassembled the complex web of sexual and social politics out of which emerged many of the most influential and enduring monuments of Victorian philanthropy and so much of the twentieth-century welfare state.