The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  Booth wrote that his experience of the work of the Slum Sisters gave him a ‘greater respect for true religion’. These are two from many examples. There is a strong connection, in my view, between the work done here and that which Christ sent out the Apostles to do.

  ‘Mrs. W—of Haggerston slum. Heavy drinker, wrecked home, husband a drunkard, place dirty and filthy, terribly poor. Saved now over two years. Home A.1, plenty of employment at canechair bottoming; husband now saved also.’

  ‘Mrs. R—Drury Lane slum. Husband and wife, drunkards; husband very lazy, only worked when starved into it. We found them both out of work, home furnitureless, in debt. She got saved and our lasses prayed for him to get work. He did so, and went to it. He fell out again a few weeks after, and beat his wife. She sought employment at charring and office cleaning. Got it.’

  Catherine Booth, wife of William, was as energetic and effective as he was. She was a devout Christian, daughter of a coachbuilder in Derbyshire, and by the age of twelve she had read the Bible eight times. Despite William’s opposition to her feminism, she went her own way and in 1860, in Gateshead Bethesda Chapel, she began to preach. A strange compulsion seized her, she reported, and an inner voice taunted her: ‘She will look like a fool and have nothing to say.’ Catherine decided that this was the devil’s voice and replied: ‘That is just the point. I have never yet been willing to be a fool for Christ. Now I will be one.’ Her sermon so impressed William that he changed his mind about women preaching and she went on to develop a reputation as a powerful speaker, especially in the Dockland parishes of the East End of London.

  The Salvation Army was not welcomed by the establishment. Lord Shaftesbury called William Booth ‘the Anti-Christ’. But they went marching on and in 1882, a survey in London found that on one weeknight, there were about 1,700 worshipping with them compared to 1,100 in ordinary churches. The ‘Sally Army’ reached out and fed and comforted those whom the Anglican Church could not or would not embrace.

  Catherine Booth went on to be the leading figure in transforming the condition of the ‘sweat-shops’, then mostly employing women. Her chief activity was with the match factories where the vile overcrowding and the pittance wages (9d a day) were made even worse by the use of yellow phosphorous which caused the widespread illness known as ‘phossy jaw’ (necrosis of the bone). The whole side of the face turned green and then black, discharged pus and led to early death. Catherine helped the workers to get the use of yellow phosphorus banned.

  There is a sense in which intelligent, brave women who were excluded from all the commanding heights of the state, found, through their faith nurtured by the King James Version, that the unexpected consequence was access to the power to change society. There are so many examples.

  Josephine Butler, for example, came from a very well-connected family. Her father was the cousin of Earl Grey, the Prime Minister, who led the Whig government from 1830 to 1834 and introduced the Great Reform Act. She was, claimed Prince Leopold, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’.

  She was an Anglican and saw the King James Version as her text when she immersed herself in charity work. She wrote and campaigned for improved educational and employment opportunities for single women. Most notably of all she campaigned with others to end what was known as the ‘white slave traffic’ – child prostitution then rampant in London. She was spat on and vilified but eventually Parliament passed an Act that raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. This and her work in securing the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, which applied only to women and gave the police the right to arrest any woman they considered might be a prostitute, proved that these women of the Bible could and did engage in politics and on a very controversial issue. Religion was not only a commitment and a faith, it had become, especially for women in the nineteenth century, a gateway to bring about essential social change.

  America was also accelerating and expanding its Christian charity with characteristic buccaneering effectiveness. The Charity Organisation Society founded in England in 1869 soon crossed to America, where it became more ‘scientific’, but still used ‘friendly visitors’, mostly women. It established the first professional training school for social work – the New York School of Philanthropy.

  The Social Gospel Movement was the cavalry of the Protestant Christian intellectuals and it rode into battle against inequality, alcohol, crime, racism, slums, child labour and poor schools. There was within the movement a strand of conviction that the Second Coming would not arrive until society had cleansed itself through its own efforts with the help of the Bible. Self-help before salvation. There were crusades against the twelve-hour day; there was the establishment of the YMCA to help young people from the country adjust to the city without falling for its temptations; and there were the settlement houses, such as Jane Addams’s Hull House.

  Jane Addams was born in 1860. Her Presbyterian father ran the local Bible class. She herself, as she grew older, did not follow his example: she was not personally religious. However she said that she had no doubt that the Bible and her father’s teaching had led her to the charitable social work which was to consume her life. She would use religious language and imagery to get her message to Christian communities. On the site devoted to Christian charity workers we read:Although she was baptised in the Presbyterian Church, Addams remained aloof from organised religion. Yet she saw her work in Hull House and in social reform as consonant with the great humanitarian spirit that animated the early Christian movement, and that now sought to embody itself ‘not in a sect but in society itself’. While it tended to promote ‘personal virtue’, the time had come, she believed, to promote the exercise of ‘social virtue’ in the service of humanity.

  In her impact she can be compared with Octavia Hill but her social politics seem closer to those of Henry Mayhew. She saw the distress in the most indigent and underprivileged areas of society and addressed it not as a vice or a crime but as a social problem. Hence her unique and lasting contribution, the US settlement movement, which began at Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, in 1889. She became just the second woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  In Karen Whitney Tice’s book Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women she outlines the steady professionalisation of social work in America. In it she describes the effect the ‘Bible Women’ (her phrase) had on their visits to slum homes. In 1911, for example, one woman spoke of her efforts in martial terms. ‘Our ammunition of war consisted of a broom, a scrubbing brush, a pail and a Bible.’ Whitney Tice surveys the relevant books and lists recommended to social workers – fiction and non-fiction—all of them citing the Bible. She also stresses the importance of the physical presence of the Bible in the work of the Bible Women.

  She writes: ‘What brought middle class observers and reformers into the daily lives of the poor was the practice of home-visiting . . . religiously motivated explorations that searched for those in the throes of odious circumstances gave rise to home visits, which took men and women out of church confines and into slum homes.’ Home visitor narratives of ‘last ditch repentance (on a deathbed of rags)’ and stock characters such as the ‘fallen woman, starving seamstress, and ragged match girl’ appeared in the annual reports of tract societies as well as in published fictional sketches at the end of the nineteenth century. Not for the first time, a claim was made for the particular suitability of these visiting women, their ‘unique moral virtues sustained by the sheltered domestic sphere they occupied’. It became known as ‘benevolent femininity’. This notion, according to Karen Whitney Tice, ‘carried the expectation that women’s influence should, like the “dew of heaven”, act in divine ways’.

  In 1861 in London, Henry Mayhew published a survey of London Labour and the London Poor. This was widely researched and considered then and since as a groundbreaking revelation. As mentioned earlier, his analysis of the condition of the poor considered that its cause lay in their inability to earn enough to live on and the desperate remed
ies they sought to try to escape the pain of that distress.

  Yet he too was immensely impressed by the Bible Women, often very young ‘Christian ladies’, who went out into the slums with their Bibles to sell and to instruct and aid the ‘moral plight’ of the poorest in London. The scope for patronage and even hypocrisy is not hard to spot. The sense of an exciting brief encounter with the devil might have been part of it. The phrase ‘slumming it’ soon signified a self-serving attempt to drop down a class or two for the frisson. Provided you could escape ‘up’ again whenever you wanted to. Nevertheless, good work was done and Mayhew, no religious fellow traveller, was not only persuaded but enthusiastic.

  The appointment of these female colporteurs has been attended with the most beneficial and encouraging results, for not only has the sale of Bibles been facilitated among classes almost inaccessible to such influences, but opportunities have been afforded of help to some of the most wretched and morally debased of our population . . . the lowest strata are thus reached by an agency which takes the Bible as the starting point of its labours, and makes it the basis of all the social and religious improvements which are subsequently attempted . . . at the present time there are 152 of these agents [women] employed . . . During the past year the Bible women in London disposed of many thousand copies of the Scriptures among classes which, to a very great extent, were beyond the reach of ordinary means used to effect this work; and their circulation was attained not by the easy method of gift but by sale . . . the very poorest being willing to pay by small weekly instalments.

  When literally millions of Bibles were being printed every year and its distribution reaching numbers never before imagined, it could be seen as odd that the Bibles were sold and not given to the ‘very poorest’. But the notion of buying the Bible and therefore owning it personally was an acknowledgement of dignity. This part of the visit was not charity only. You had to become part of that larger commercial society which denied you entry to so many of its rewards. You had your own, owned property in that market. It is not far from the transaction in psychoanalysis where payment, it appears, is an expression of your commitment.

  In any event, many of the poor paid up. The London City Mission alone, in 1861, employed 381 Bible Women who made 1,815,332 visits, 237,599 to the sick and dying; 2,721,173 religious tracts were given away, there were 584,166 readings of Scripture in visitations; 681 fallen females were rescued or reclaimed and 10,058 children were sent to school. It is unlikely that any of that would have happened without the Bible Women. In 1893 – 4, William Howe, who produced surveys of charitable bodies, showed that the income of the London charities reached £2.25 million in 1874 – 5 and rose to £3.15 million in 1893 – 4. This was about one-third of the figure spent by the Poor Law authorities at the time and there have been claims that charity – overwhelmingly Christian – exceeded state expenditure on the poor.

  The theory that poverty is the result of a lack of will and virtue, that indolence and sluttishness and drunkenness and crime render you undeserving of help until you take the path of reform through religion is now, in most of the English-speaking world, spoken of, if at all, with a shake of the head or with contempt for those misguided Victorian days. All antisocial behaviour is thought to be capable of repair through computed social adjustments. It may be a kinder way. It may be a better way. But it does not detract from the determination and the faith of those Bible Women who, with broom, scrubbing brush and pail and the King James Bible, went into the sewers of society on a mission to save souls by way of mending and redirecting ruined lives.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AND THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

  When Keir Hardie entered Parliament in 1892, he was the first independent workers’ representative to secure election. He was a Scot who had been a trades union organiser and before then, a coal miner. While it would be inappropriate to suggest any direct comparison between the working classes of the industrial UK in its most labour-intensive time and slavery, there were affinities.

  To Keir Hardie, born in 1856, the memory of children as young as six working in the coal mines would have been still current in the talk and oral history of his community. He would have known of women, even pregnant women, working in the pits, dragging trucks of coal along the rails to the shaft, chained to those trucks. He would have known of pitiful safety measures, pit disasters, early deaths through pneumoconiosis, pittance wages, the relentless exploitation of man by man.

  As a trades unionist he was part of a movement – reflected in the United States and in other countries also involved in the industrialised ‘advance’ – which was determined to better the lot of the oppressed, the undervalued, what Marx and Engels called the proletariat. It became an ideological debate, a power struggle between the workforce and the owners, the masters and the masses, and an increasingly urgent political issue.

  But for Keir Hardie there was a different and a deeper perspective. ‘The impetus which drove me first of all into the Labour movement and the inspiration which has carried me on in it,’ he said, ‘has been derived more from the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth than all the other sources combined.’ This continued in the British Labour Party for over a century, a line which includes George Lansbury in the 1930s and Stafford Cripps in the Labour reforming government of 1945. In 1996, in the Labour Party Shadow Cabinet, 50 per cent were in the Christian Socialist movement.

  It seems a good fit. The New Testament and the Social Gospel movement in North America, and the Labour movement in Britain, joined together Christ’s teachings – especially the Beatitudes – with the growing determination that there was an equality in mankind which had to be recognised and brought into the light.

  This was not new in the nineteenth century nor unique to it. The Church at its best through its monasteries had fed and housed the poor for centuries when other institutions did little more than ignore, hound or imprison them. Ideology had appeared in England in the fourteenth century with the radical preacher John Ball, an admirer of John Wycliffe, who was a leading actor in the 1381 so-called (miscalled) Peasants’ Revolt which came within a whisker of overwhelming established hierarchies in England. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span,’ he said in one of his sermons, ‘who was then the gentleman?’

  But it was the King James Bible which unlocked a sense of justice which had been repressed for so long. Most notably in the Civil War there were the Diggers and the Levellers who preached a form of communism, and the Methodists who supported the Tolpuddle Martyrs. These are just a few examples from a radical tradition still undervisited and undervalued in our histories of ourselves. What these groups had was their Bible in English, a Bible in print and therefore available in unprecedented quantities, a Bible that enabled many people to talk on the basis of a shared book. For the first time, each of them could be equal.

  Christian Socialism in Britain gathered this together in the middle of the nineteenth century and saw the politics of socialism and the philosophy of the New Testament as interrelated. Christ had spoken against the established religious authorities of the time: the egalitarian anti-establishment movement of nineteenth-century socialists aimed to do exactly the same. ‘Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus,’ wrote Walter Rauschenbusch (1861 – 1918), a Baptist minister and theologian and a central figure in the American Social Gospel movement which grew from the same roots as Christian Socialism in the UK. He went on: ‘whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.’

  He spoke for a group of educated people, mostly men, given the educational context of the day, who found in the King James Bible their justification and their agenda for what became an assault on centuries of under-addressed deprivation. In Britain those men were mostly clergymen, writers and activists. The Christian Socialist movement (which bred others such as the International League of Religious Socialists,
in twenty-one countries) could be said to have begun in Anglicanism and not, rather surprisingly, in one of the nonconformist groups which had instigated so much change.

  F.D. Maurice, an Anglican clergyman (who had a deep influence on the young Octavia Hill), declared in 1848 that socialism was an outcome of Christianity and it was he who coined the phrase ‘Christian Socialism’. He worked closely with another clergyman, Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies, a fairy tale of Christian Socialism which swept up a massive readership and spread the movement’s message across the land. One benign and lasting consequence was to set up numerous co-operative societies which were to play an integral part in the betterment of working-class life. In its quiet way, it was revolutionary. Its founders were clear that this revolution was based on the Scriptures as well as on economically and politically driven ideals.

  The idea was not as widely embraced in America but nor was it a negligible contributor to the social advances in American society. In 1889, in Boston, W.D.P. Bliss set up the Society of Christian Socialists, which emphasised the brotherhood of man and criticised the contemporary social order. In her book The Bible in America: Versions That Have Played Their Part in the Making of the Republic, Marion Simms writes: ‘one difficulty with both socialism and communism is that they expect entirely too much from purely economic changes. Man does not live by bread alone. The socialistic and communistic experiments that had a religious foundation always lasted longer than those which did not. Those who do battle for a just social system make a mistake when they push religion aside.’ Humanist materialists and atheists would disagree. Nevertheless it is impossible to deny the amount of good work done by those who drew their inspiration from the Bible, then and still now.

  The Christian Socialist movement in the UK was and continues to be active: faith and works. Christians are encouraged to take up politics, to campaign against prejudice and abuse of power, as well as to seek the Kingdom of God. It looks not only to the New Testament but to prophets – Micah and Amos – who spoke of injustice. F.D. Maurice, the founder, set the pace.