by Bill Bryson
In practice, the workhouses could only hold so many people—no more than about a fifth of England’s paupers at any one time. The rest of the nation’s indigent survived on “outdoor relief”—small sums to help with rent and food. Collecting these sums was sometimes made almost impossibly difficult. C. S. Peel notes the case of an unemployed shepherd in Kent—“an honest and industrious man, out of work through no fault of his own”—who was required to make a round trip of twenty-six miles on foot each day to collect paltry relief of one shilling and sixpence for himself, his wife, and five children. The shepherd made the trudge daily for nine weeks before eventually collapsing from weakness and hunger. In London, a woman named Annie Kaplan, left to bring up six children after her husband died, was told that she could not support six children on the meager sum she was to receive and was instructed to nominate two children to send to an orphanage. Kaplan refused. “If four’ll starve, six’ll starve,” she declared. “If I have a piece of bread for four, I’ll have a piece of bread for six.… I’m not giving anybody away.” The authorities entreated her to reconsider, but she would not, so they gave her nothing at all. What became of her and her children is unknown.
One of the few figures who actively sympathized with the plight of the poor was also one of the most interestingly improbable. Friedrich Engels came to England at the age of just twenty-one in 1842 to help run his father’s textile factory in Manchester. The firm, Ermen & Engels, manufactured sewing thread. Although young Engels was a faithful son and a reasonably conscientious businessman—eventually he became a partner—he also spent a good deal of his time modestly but persistently embezzling funds to support his friend and collaborator Karl Marx in London.
It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club—in short, did everything one would expect of a successful member of the gentry. Marx, meanwhile, constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting at every opportunity of his wife’s aristocratic background.
Engels’s patient support for Marx was little short of wondrous. In that milestone year of 1851, Marx accepted a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, but with no intention of actually writing any articles. His English wasn’t good enough, for one thing. His idea was that Engels would write them for him and he would collect the fee, and that is precisely what happened. Even then, the income wasn’t enough to support his carelessly extravagant lifestyle, so he had Engels pilfer money for him from his father’s firm. Engels did so for years, at considerable risk to himself.
In between running a factory and supporting Marx, Engels took a genuine interest in the plight of the poor in Manchester. He wasn’t always terribly open-minded. As we saw in Chapter XVI, he didn’t think much of the Irish and was always prepared to believe that the poor were responsible for their own sad fate. Yet no one wrote with more feeling about life in Victorian slums. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, he described people living in “measureless filth and stench” amid “masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth.” He related the case of one woman whose two little boys, freezing and on the brink of starvation, had been caught stealing food. When a policeman took the boys home, he found the mother with six other of her children “literally huddled in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup and a small dish. On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s apron, which served the whole family as a bed.”
Engels’s descriptions were unquestionably touching and are often quoted now, but what is frequently forgotten is that his book was published only in German in 1845 and not translated into English for thirty-two years. As a reformer of British institutions, Engels had no influence at all until long after the reforms had begun.
Elsewhere, however, the conditions of the poor were beginning to attract attention. In the 1860s, a fashion arose among journalists to disguise themselves as tramps and enter casual workhouses—what we would now call shelters—to investigate and report on the conditions within, allowing readers the safely vicarious thrill of experiencing the horrifying conditions without leaving the comforts of home. Readers learned how inmates at Lambeth Workhouse were required to strip naked and step into a murky bath, “the colour of weak mutton broth,” which was filled with the sloughed and scummy leavings of earlier bathers. Beyond were grim dormitories where men and boys, “all perfectly naked,” were crowded together on beds that were little more than pallets. “Youths lay in the arms of men, men were enfolded in each other’s embrace; there was neither fire, nor light nor supervision, and the weak and feeble were at the complete mercy of the strong and ruffianly. The air was laden with a pestilential stench.”
Stirred by these reports, a new breed of benefactors began to found an extraordinary range of organizations—a Committee for Promoting the Establishment of Baths and Wash Houses for the Labouring Classes, a Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy, a Society for Promoting Window Gardening Amongst the Working Classes of Westminster, even a Society for the Rescue of Boys Not Yet Convicted of Any Criminal Offence—nearly always with the hope of helping the poor to remain or become sober, Christian, industrious, hygienic, law-abiding, parentally responsible, or otherwise virtuous. Still others strived to improve housing conditions for the poor. One of the most generous was George Peabody, an American businessman who settled in England in 1837 (he it was, you may remember, who provided the emergency funding that allowed the American displays to be installed at the Great Exhibition) and spent much of his vast fortune building apartment blocks for the poor all over London. Peabody estates housed almost fifteen thousand people in clean, comparatively roomy flats, though the heavy hand of paternalism was still painfully evident. Tenants were not allowed to apply paint or wallpaper, install drapes, or otherwise significantly personalize their homes. In consequence, they were not much cheerier than prison cells.
But the real change was the sudden growth of domestic missionary work, reflected most particularly in the endeavors of one man who did more to help impoverished children (often whether they wanted it or not) than anyone before him. His name was Thomas Barnardo. He was a young Irishman who came to London in the mid-1860s and was so horrified by conditions faced by helpless youths that he set up an organization formally called the National Incorporated Association for the Reclamation of Destitute Waif Children, though everyone came to know it as Dr. Barnardo’s.
Barnardo came from an exotic background. His family originated as Sephardic Jews in Spain, but moved first to Germany and then to Ireland. By the time Thomas came along in 1845, the family’s religious affiliation had switched to the more ferocious end of Protestantism. Barnardo himself came under the sway of the fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren, which is what brought him to London in the mid-1860s with the intention to qualify as a doctor and undertake missionary work in China. He never got to China. In fact, he never qualified as a doctor. Instead he began to take a missionary interest in homeless young boys (and eventually girls as well). With borrowed money, he opened his first home in Stepney, in East London.
Barnardo was a brilliant publicist and developed an immensely successful campaign based around striking before-and-after photographs of the children he rescued. The “before” photos showed grubby (and often scantily clad) waifs of sullen mien, while the “after” photographs showed them scrubbed, alert, and radiant with the joy of Christian salvation. The campaigns were so successful that soon Barnardo was expanding his interests in many directions, opening infirmaries, homes for deaf and dumb children, home
s for homeless bootblacks, and much more. The slogan emblazoned along the facade of the Stepney home was “No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission.” It was an unusually noble sentiment, and many people hated Barnardo for it. The problem was that taking in boys unconditionally was an affront to the principles of the 1834 New Poor Law.
Barnardo’s boundless ambition brought him into conflict with a fellow missionary, Frederick Charrington. The scion of an immensely wealthy brewing family based in the East End, Charrington had come into missionary work abruptly when one day he saw a drunken man beating his wife outside a Charrington pub from which he had just emerged, as his wife begged him for money to feed their hungry children. From that moment Charrington embraced temperance, renounced his inheritance, and began working among the poor. He saw the Mile End Road as his personal fiefdom, so when Barnardo announced his intention to open a temperance café there, Charrington took umbrage and embarked on a relentless campaign of character assassination. Assisted by an itinerant preacher named George Reynolds (who had until lately been a railway porter), he spread rumors that Barnardo had lied about his background, misrun his homes, slept with his landlady, and deceived the public through false advertising. Barnardo’s homes, he additionally hinted, were outposts of sodomy, drunkenness, blackmail, and other vices of the most depraved sort.
Unfortunately for Barnardo, an uncomfortably large proportion of this was true. Barnardo was something of a liar and made matters worse by responding with clumsy falsehoods now. When it was alleged that he was misrepresenting himself as a doctor—a fairly serious offense under the Medical Act of 1858—Barnardo produced a diploma from a German university, but it was shown almost at once to be a poor forgery. It was also proven that he had faked many before-and-after photographs of children he had rescued, making them look much more destitute than in fact they were. Many of the staged photographs depicted the children in artfully torn clothing that exposed alluring quantities of flesh, which many now interpreted as basely appealing to prurient interests. Even Barnardo’s most faithful supporters found their loyalties strained. Apart from concerns about his character and probity, many worried about his levels of debt. One of the bedrock principles of the Plymouth Brethren was a devotion to thrift, yet Barnardo borrowed freely and repeatedly in order to keep opening more missions.
In the end, Barnardo was found guilty of faking photographs and of claiming wrongly to be a doctor, but exonerated on all the more serious charges. Ironically, life in a Barnardo home was scarcely more attractive than life in the dreaded workhouses. Inmates were roused from bed at 5:30 a.m. and required to work until 6:30 in the evening, with short breaks for meals, prayers, and a little schooling. Evenings were devoted to military drills, classes, and more prayers. Any boy caught trying to escape was placed in solitary confinement. Barnardo didn’t merely recruit children, but snatched them off the streets in a spirit of “philanthropic abduction.” Every year about fifteen hundred of these boys were summarily shipped off to Canada to make room in the homes for more boys.
By the time of his death in 1905, Barnardo had taken in 250,000 children. He left the organization indebted to the tune of £250,000—a colossal sum.
III
We have spoken so far only of poor children, but well-to-do children had torments of their own to endure. These were torments of the sort that many of the starving poor would have been glad to get, to be sure, but they were torments nonetheless. Mostly they involved emotional adjustments and learning to live in a world that was shorn of affection. Almost from the moment of emerging from the womb, middle- and upper-class children in Victorian Britain were expected to be obedient, dutiful, honest, hardworking, stiff-upper-lipped, and emotionally self-contained. An occasional handshake was about as much physical warmth as one could expect after infancy. The typical home of the prosperous classes in Victorian Britain was, in the words of one contemporary, an outpost of “cold, harsh and emphatically inhuman reserve which cuts off anything like that friendly, considerate, sympathetic intercourse which ought to mark every family relation.”
Well-off children often had to endure the hardships of character building. Isabella Beeton’s brother-in-law, Willy Smiles, had eleven children but set out breakfast for only ten, to discourage slowness in arriving at the table. Gwen Raverat, daughter of a Cambridge academic, recalled in later life how she was required to sprinkle her daily porridge with salt, instead of the glistening heaps of sugar her parents enjoyed, and forbidden jam with her bread on the grounds that anything so flavorsome would wreak havoc upon her moral fiber. A contemporary, of similar background, recorded wistfully of the food served to her and her sister through childhood: “We had oranges at Christmas. Marmalade we never saw.”
With the crushing of taste buds came also a curious respect for the character-building powers of fearfulness and dread. Extremely popular were books that prepared young readers for the possibility that death could take them at any moment, and if it didn’t get them it would almost certainly get their momma, papa, or favorite sibling. Such books always stressed how wonderful heaven was (though it seemed also to be a place without jam). The intention ostensibly was to help children not to be frightened of dying, though the effect was almost certainly the opposite.
Other literary works were designed to make sure children understood what a foolish and unforgivable offense it was to disobey an adult. A popular poem, “The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches,” recounted the tale of a little girl who failed to heed her mother’s gentle invocation not to play with matches. As the poem put it:
But Pauline would not take advice,
She lit a match, it was so nice!
It crackled so, it burned so clear,—
Exactly like the picture here
She jumped for joy and ran about,
And was too pleased to put it out.
Now see! Oh see! What a dreadful thing
The fire has caught her apron-string;
Her apron burns, her arms, her hair;
She burns all over, everywhere.
To make sure there was no possibility of misinterpretation, the poem carried a vivid illustration showing a young girl engulfed in a ball of flame, on her face a look of profoundest consternation. The poem concludes:
So she was burnt with all her clothes
And arms and hands, and eyes and nose;
Till she had nothing more to lose
Except her little scarlet shoes;
And nothing else but these was found
Among her ashes on the ground.
“The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches” was one of a series of poems by a German doctor named Heinrich Hoffmann, who wrote them originally as a way of encouraging his own children to follow lives of rigid circumspection. Hoffmann’s books were highly popular and went through many translations (including one by Mark Twain). All followed the same pattern, which was to present children with a temptation difficult to refuse, then show them how irreversibly painful were the consequences of succumbing. Almost no childhood activity escaped the possibility of corrective brutality in Hoffmann’s hands. In another of his poems, “The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb,” a boy named Conrad is warned not to suck his thumbs because it will attract the attention of a ghoulish figure known as the great tall tailor, who always comes “To little boys that suck their thumbs.” The poem continues:
And ere they dream what he’s about
He takes his great sharp scissors out.
And cuts their thumbs clean off—and then
You know, they never grow again.
Alas, Little Suck-a-Thumb ignores the advice and discovers that punishment in Hoffmann’s world is swift and irreversible:
The door flew open, in he ran,
The great red-legged scissor-man
Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come
And caught our little Suck-a-Thumb
Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;
And Conrad cries out—Oh! Oh! Oh!
Snip!
Snap! Snip! They go so fast;
That both his thumbs are off at last.
Mamma comes home; there Conrad stands,
And looks quite sad, and shows his hands.
“Ah!” said Mamma, “I knew he’d come
To naughty little Suck-a-Thumb.”
For older children such poems may have been amusing, but for smaller children they must often have been—as they were intended to be—terrifying, particularly as they were always accompanied by graphic illustrations showing dismayed youngsters irreversibly in flame or spouting blood where useful parts of their body used to be.
Wealthier children were also often left to the mercy of servants and their private, peculiar whims. The future Lord Curzon, growing up as the son of a rector in Derbyshire, was terrorized for years by a semipsychotic governess who tied him in a chair or locked him in a cupboard for hours at a time, ate the desserts from his dinner tray, compelled him to write letters confessing to crimes that he hadn’t committed, and paraded him through the local village wearing a ridiculous smock and a placard around his neck announcing him as a “LIAR,” “THIEF,” or some other shameful condition that he had usually done nothing to merit. The experiences left him so traumatized that he couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone about them until he had grown up. Rather milder, but nonetheless dismaying, was the experience of the future sixth Earl Beauchamp, who was left in the clutches of a governess who was a religious fanatic; she required him to attend seven church services every Sunday and to fill the time between by writing essays about the goodness of God.