Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  13. See Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

  14. Maurice insisted that “working men should understand that they are brothers, and can work together as brothers.” Maurice wrote these words in support of the Society for Promoting Working Men’s Associations in the Christian Socialist (December 5, 1848), as quoted in John Ludlow, The Autobiography of a Christian Socialist, ed. and introduction, A. D. Murray (London: F. Cass, 1981), 228.

  15. Charles Kingsley, “Priests and People,” vol. 2 of Alton Locke (New York: J. F. Taylor, 1899), 329.

  16. Shaftesbury to Albert, as quoted in Frank Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of the Welfare Monarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 84.

  17. First Circular of the Working Men’s College, as quoted in J.F.C. Harrison, A History of the Working Men’s College, 1854–1954 (London: Routledge and Paul, 1954), 21.

  18. Frederick Denison Maurice, Scheme as quoted in Harrison, Working Men’s College, 91.

  19. The mingling of radical and reactionary ideas is one of the central themes of Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958; reprint with new introduction by the author, 1983).

  20. The concept of the Victorian sage was itself gendered as Carol Christ shows in “The Hero as Man of Letters: Masculinity and Victorian Nonfiction Prose,” in Thaïs Morgan, ed., Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

  21. Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett, His Life, Work, and Friends, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 59, 72.

  22. Henry Scott Holland to Legard, March 1870, as quoted in Stephen Paget, ed., Henry Scott Holland: Memoir and Letters (London: J. Murray, 1921), 46.

  23. Elaine Showalter notes that “fin-de-siècle Clubland existed on the fragile borderline that separated male bonding from homosexuality and that distinguished manly misogyny from disgusting homoeroticism.” See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 13. There were some notable exceptions to the all-male clubs, including the mixed-sex Whittington Club, which had been founded in 1846 along self-managed principles with an intended lower-middle-class clientele. See Christopher Kent, “The Whittington Club: A Bohemian Experiment in Middle Class Social Reform,” Victorian Studies 18 (September 1974): 31–55.

  24. Anonymous, “Anecdote and Gossip about Clubs,” London Society Magazine (February 1867), 102–103.

  25. That great chronicler of clubs and club life in London John Timbs conceded that clubs may not have existed in the time of Adam and Eve, but he felt sure they played an important role in the life of ancient Athens and Sparta. “Clubbism” was an engrained part of human nature, an offshoot of “man’s habitually gregarious and social inclination” and the full flowering of clubs in London merely confirmed England’s standing at the apex of civilization. See John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1872), 1–2.

  26. Peter Gay associates these all male institutions with anxieties about women’s activism and emerging feminism. See The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 288.

  27. On rational recreation, see Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); and Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1980).

  28. In 1871, it was still possible for C. E. Maurice to view trade unions as institutions capable of promoting a form of fraternity that would redefine the concept of liberty in England. See C. E. Maurice, “Fraternity,” Contemporary Review (October 1871), 407–415.

  29. See Sonya Rose’s analysis of male trade unionists’ desire to preserve male wages and work prerogatives from encroachment by women workers in Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992) esp. ch. 6.

  30. See Stephen Yeo, “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896,” History Workshop Journal 4 (Autumn 1977): 5–56. Many leading male socialists puritanically frowned upon the “irrational” and “profligate” habits and leisure activities of their popular constituencies. See Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). In addition, many male socialists’ theoretical commitment to gender equality did not deter them from demanding that their female comrades subordinate sex-specific demands to the movement’s distinctly male-centered political and social agenda. See Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question, 1884–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  31. On Carpenter, see Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks, Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis (London: Pluto Press, 1977).

  32. Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1908). Julie Taddeo explores the fraternal and homoerotic sexual ideologies and practices of the Cambridge Apostles at the turn of the twentieth century in Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002), ch. 1.

  33. For a study of one of these institutions, see Keith Laybourn, “The Guild of Help and the Changing Face of Edwardian Philanthropy,” Urban History 20 (1993): 43–60.

  34. The phrase is Anne Phillips’ from her essay, “Fraternity,” in Ben Pimlott, ed., Fabian Essays in Social Thought (London: Heinemann, 1984), 232.

  35. See Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 10.

  36. On fraternity in the United States and its association with middle-class men belonging to fraternal orders such as the Odd Fellows, see Mark Carnes, “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual,” in Mark Carnes and Clyde Griffen, Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

  37. See G. S. Jones’s superb account of this in Outcast London (London: Clarendon Press, 1971).

  38. Barnett’s growing frustration with the constraints of his work as a sort of mission-priest manqué is most evident in his annual parochial reports for St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, and in his parish magazine. See Samuel Barnett’s Pastoral Addresses and Report of the Parish Work, St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, published annually, in British Library. See L. E. Nettleship, “William Fremantle, Samuel Barnett, and the Broad Church Origins of Toynbee Hall,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 33 (October 1982): 564–579.

  39. See Seth Koven, “The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing,” in Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

  40. Samuel Barnett, “A Modern Monastery: A Suggestion for a Mission,” draft of speech, c. 1883, ms. 1466, ff 34, Barnett Papers. Lambeth Palace Library.

  41. On Carlyle’s vision of masculinity and homosocial dynamics, see Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  42. See H. Barnett, Canon Barnett, vol 1, 308.

  43. The bitter controversies within the Church of England, surrounding monastic paradigms of religious organization, which were widely denounced as un-English and unmanly, bore no relation to the small numbers of men and women who actually entered sisterhoods and brotherhoods from mid-century onward. There is a growing and excellent body of work on single-sex religious communities in the nineteenth century. On sisterhoods, see Martha Vicinus, Independent Women (London: Virago, 1985), ch. 2; Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhood in Victorian Britain (London: Leicester University Press, 1999). On male and female religio
us communities within the Church of England, see Arthur Allchin, The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities, 1845–1900 (London: SCM Press, 1958); P. Bull, The Revival of Religious Life for Men (London: Richard Jackson, 1904); Rene Kollar, “Anglican Brotherhoods and Urban Social Work,” Churchman 101, no. 2 (1987): 140– 145; see also his Abbot Aelred Carlyle, Caldey Island, and the Anglo-Catholic Revival in England (New York: Peter Lang, 1995).

  44. Despite Barnett’s best efforts, several contemporary observers detected a distinctly monastic odor at Toynbee Hall. Henry Wood Nevinson called Barnett the Abbot of Toynbee Hall, “a monastic establishment where there were no vows.” See Henry Wood Nevinson, Changes and Chances (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924), 91. That quintessential aesthete, Selwyn Image, affectionately wrote to the renowned Arts and Crafts designer Mackmurdo in March of 1885, that he had just been to “St. Barnett’s of Whitechapel” after a visit to Toynbee Hall. See Selwyn Image to Mackmurdo, March 26, 1885, Image Papers. Ironically, in recent years the Church of England has all but transformed Samuel and Henrietta into saints. Their anniversary is now celebrated in the Anglican calendar.

  45. Barnett wrote to his brother Francis that “the Settlement will not add to the hardness of life, in every way it is likely to bring ease. We shall live in space, comfort, and quiet.” Samuel Barnett to F. G. Barnett, March 1, 1884, F/Bar/2, Barnett Papers, London Metropolitan Archives.

  46. See Samuel Barnett, “The Ways of ‘Settlements’ and of ‘Missions,’” Nineteenth Century (December 1897), 977. In a letter to Jane Addams, Barnett insisted that the distinction “is one to be remembered if we wld. [would] preserve settlements from becoming what Mat Arnold called ‘machinery.’” See Samuel Barnett to Jane Addams, September 20, 1897, Addams Papers.

  47. Dr. Perceval used the occasion of his university sermon in January 1883 to explain that a man could only love God by loving his brother. See Dr. Perceval, University Sermon, Oxford Magazine (January 24, 1883), 14.

  48. “Democracy and Culture, A Rejoinder” Oxford Magazine (February 14, 1883), 67. A decade later, the slum journalist G. R. Sims observed that “The Christian philanthropist of to-day is peculiar in his tastes. He loves his brother as himself, but always seems to select for special affection the brother who is a murderer or a miscreant, and a black murderer or miscreant for choice.” G. R. Sims, “Mustard and Cress,” Referee (October 15, 1893), 7. See David Hilliard “UnEnglish and UnManly”; and James Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 98–99 for his sensible correction of Hilliard’s emphases and his more nuanced chronology of the conditions leading to the identification of Oxford movement effeminacy with sexual deviance. See also G. C. Faber, Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement (London: Faber and Faber, 1933).

  49. For a treatment of a similar configuration of religious, reformist, and sexual desires in the American context during a somewhat later period, see George Chauncey, Jr., “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era,” Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 189–212.

  50. In explaining the rise of the settlement movement, Barnett singled out Green’s influence: “Men at the Universities, especially those who directly or indirectly felt the influence of T. H. Green, were asking for some other way than that of institutions by which to reach their neighbours.” “University Settlements,” in Will Reason, ed., University and Social Settlements (London: Methuen and Co., 1898), 12.

  51. On Green, see Melvin Richter, Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); see also Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics, and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1984); and Andrew Vincent, “T. H. Green and the Religion of Citizenship,” in Andrew Vincent, ed., The Philosophy of T. H. Green (Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1986).

  52. The archly admiring description was that of Clara Collet, who would soon work with Charles Booth on his monumental survey of London. See “Diary of an Assistant School Mistress,” manuscript diary of Clara Collet, March 30, 1882, ms. 29/8/2, Collet Papers. On Toynbee, see Alon Kadish’s excellent, Apostle Arnold: The Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986).

  53. The Barnetts’ ideas about personal service drew upon the writings and experiences of Edward Denison, son of the Bishop of Salisbury and an Oxford graduate, who had lived and worked among the poor in the 1860s. On Denison, see Sir Baldwyn Leighton, ed., Letters and Other Writings of the late Edward Denison, M. P. for Newark (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1872).

  54. J. R. Green to W. Boyd Dawkins, April 1864, St. Peter’s Parsonage, Stepney, as quoted in Leslie Stephen, ed., Letters of John Richard Green (London: Macmillan and Co., 1902), 143. In response to women’s growing presence in the slums as charity workers, Green affectionately satirized their efforts in his “stray study” entitled “The District Visitor.” In Green’s eyes, the district visitor combined and surpassed the powers of her masculine counterparts, the parson and the almoner. Free from “manly” inhibitions, she “retails tittle tattle for the highest ends.” He concluded that her influence over the poor “is a strange mixture of good and evil, of real benevolence with an interference that saps all sense of self respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling with a good deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and babble.” See J. R. Green, “The District Visitor” in Stray Studies from England and Italy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), 277.

  55. See William Grey, “Recollections of Work Amongst the London Poor,” (1889), 18, which was a published version of a talk he gave at Johns Hopkins to social science students on January 12, 1889. This pamphlet also includes extensive citations from “Leaves from the Summer Diary of an East End Almoner,” originally published in the Charity Organization Review (January 1886).

  56. Alan Sinfield notes that “the more the economy depended on brutal entrepreneurs, the more it seemed that the middle classes should evince the sensitivity and responsibility that they imagined had characterized the ancient gentleman.” Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 58.

  57. T. H. Escott described the typical settlement house resident in the East End as “a gentleman in the prime of early and athletic manhood.” See Escott, Social Transformations of the Victorian Age (London: Seeley and Co., 1897), 116–117. On openness to new modes of thoughts and action, see Henry Nevinson’s description of the early 1880s as “a time of adventure and life renewed … of infinitely varied experiment.” See Changes and Chances (London: Nisbet and Co., 1923), 110. Helen Lynd identified the “chief significance of the eighties” as the “beginning of a new phase in the recurrent struggle for individual freedom.” See her still valuable classic study, England in the Eighteen-Eighties: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), 9. For her assessment of settlements in relation to the church’s outreach to the poor, see 321–324.

  58. Samuel Barnett to Francis Gilmore Barnett, July 1888, F/Bar/78, Barnett Papers, London Metropolitan Archives.

  59. See Helen Meller’s assessment of Barnett views about culture and the city in Meller, The Ideal City.

  60. The phrase comes from a letter written by Edward Denison on August 7, 1867 about the evils within communities that lacked “resident gentry” and the corrective power of gentlemen willing to work and live among the poor. See Sir Baldwyn Leighton, ed., Letters and Other Writings of the late Edward Denison, M.P. for Newark (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1872), 37.

  61. Samuel Barnett, “University Settlements in Great Towns,” Oxford Magazine (November 21, 1883), 387.

  62. C.G.L., “Letter to the Editor on University Settlements,” Oxford Magazine (November 21, 1883), 397.

  63. The Rev. Warden of Keble, Edward Talbot, sermon delivered at St. Mary’s, January
27, 1884, Oxford Magazine (January 30, 1884), 28.

  64. E. S. Talbot, Bishop of Rochester, Annual Meeting of Oxford House, held at Keble College, as quoted in Oxford House Chronicle (June 1896), 3.

  65. Lavinia Talbot diary, March 7, 1884, Talbot Papers.

  66. On Samuel’s admiration for and disappointment in Hill, see Samuel Barnett to Francis Gilmore Barnett, March 1, 1884, F/Bar/2, Barnett Papers, London Metropolitan Archives.

  67. Samuel Barnett to Francis Gilmore Barnett as quoted in Henrietta Barnett, Life, vol. 2, 29.

  68. See S. C. Carpenter, Winnington-Ingram: The Biography of Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, 1901–1939 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949).

  69. On this shelter, see Charles Bethune and Harold Boulton, “Houseless at Night,” Fortnightly Review (February 1887), 318–320; and Harold Boulton, “A London House of Shelter,” Fortnightly Review (February 1894), 215–224. The annual reports of Oxford House always included a summary of the shelter’s work during the year.

  70. For the COS’s cautious assessment of Oxford House and its House of Shelter “of a somewhat antediluvian character” see COS file on Oxford House, especially C. S. Loch to Edward Bond, June 5, 1890, A/FWA/C/D164/1, COS Files and Papers.

  71. Diary of Lavinia Talbot, May 4, 1884, Talbot Papers.

  72. Warden Spooner, autobiographical fragments, no. p., n.d., Spooner Papers.

  73. See James Adderley, Stephen Remarx: The Story of a Venture in Ethics (New York: Dutton, 1894), 50. This short quasi-autobiographical novel was a surprise best-seller after being rejected by twenty publishers. Adderley’s fame in his lifetime was always linked to his authorship of Stephen Remarx.

  74. James Adderley as quoted in T. P. Stevens, Father Adderley (London: T. W. Laurie, 1943), 14.