Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  If Maurice found the roots of his Christian Socialism in Scripture, they were also bound closely to the political, economic, and social imperatives of the 1830s and ’40s. These were decades of economic dislocation and hunger, of the unprecedented emigration of Irish men, women, and children escaping famine, and of incendiary Chartist politics. Maurice’s friend and contemporary, the renowned novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley, contended that Christian Socialism arose phoenix-like out of the ashes of Chartism, the broad-based and heterogeneous working-class political movement that was intent on securing full political citizenship for laboring men. The disintegration of organized Chartism after the massive demonstration in Kennington Common in south London in April 1848 did not mark the “death day of liberty,” Kingsley argued, but instead galvanized the birth of Christian Socialism.15 Nor were the Christian Socialists alone in responding constructively to the apparent dangers and subsequent demise of Chartism. The mass meeting at Kennington Common so unnerved Queen Victoria and Prince Albert that they sought advice from the leading evangelical reformer, Lord Shaftesbury, about how best they should express their love for their poor subjects. Shaftesbury wisely enjoined Albert to link the interests of the monarchy to the needs of the people by heading up “all social movements in art and science … as they bear upon the poor” and thus set in motion the invention of the “welfare monarchy” in modern Britain.16

  Maurice’s conviction that Chartism had singularly failed to inculcate reason and order among its rank and file—habits of mind essential to the well being of individuals and societies—prompted him to found the Working Men’s College in London in 1854. He aspired to making the College into a “Society of which teachers and learners are equally members, a Society in which men are not held together by the bond of buying and selling, a Society in which men meet not as belonging to a class or caste, but as having a common life which God has given them and which He will cultivate in them.”17

  Distrusting “general tumultuous assemblies” as incompatible with education, Maurice and his cofounders controlled the government of the institution, its pedagogical form and content.18 While Maurice championed the gradual extension of the franchise to laboring men, he emphatically distinguished brotherhood from equality. Maurice’s radicalism was muted by his misgivings about the untutored will of the people; he often found himself in the uncomfortable position of condemning the democratic impulses of the College’s most active students and council members. Maurice’s contention that the preservation of liberty was compatible with—and sometimes even depended upon—accepting the existence of social hierarchy was deeply engrained within British political and intellectual culture. Most male settlers, even those committed to progressive social and political change, brought these values with them well into the twentieth century.19

  If well-to-do Victorians celebrated the plenitude of goods and services available to them, they also displayed a voracious appetite for the jeremiads condemning their materialism served up not only by Maurice, but by other “sages” as well.20 Practical idealists, not rigorous intellectual theorists, male settlers eclectically combined elements of Maurice’s teachings about brotherhood with ideas drawn from other thinkers as well in their own essays, reports, and appeals to the public. Samuel Barnett, for example, carried a volume of Matthew Arnold in his back pocket and brought Maurice’s lectures on the Epistles to read out loud to his beautiful bride, Henrietta, on their honeymoon before returning to their modest slum vicarage in Whitechapel. He and Henrietta read Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies together as they talked over their hopes and dreams about married life.21 A High Church heir to the Oxford movement inspired by Maurice’s incarnational theology, Henry Scott Holland “perspired” just listening to the “gorgeous eloquence” of Ruskin’s Slade Lectures on art at Oxford. He longed to throw himself into the squalor and frenetic pace of life in the London slums which, he conceded, made his daily existence at Oxford seem pale and effete.22 C. R. Ashbee saw himself through the prism of Carlyle’s fictional hero, Prof. Teufelsdrockh (literally, Professor Devil’s Shit) from Sartor Resartus. His ideas about cross-class brotherhood were heavily tinged with the radical moral and economic aesthetics of Ruskin and Morris as well as with the sexually charged vision of male comradeship and democracy of the Sheffield socialist, Edward Carpenter. The varied ideological and spiritual debts we find among male social reformers, bound together by dense networks of affiliation and discipleship, suggest that the intellectual fabric of the late Victorian age was tightly woven out of twisted and distorted threads, not disconnected and discrete ideological strands.

  Victorian conceptions of fraternity derived not only from the musings of theologians and social theorists but from models of brotherliness provided by social and political clubs, friendly societies, and trade unions. Clubland remained overwhelmingly male despite—and because of—the growth of societies for educated and well-to-do women in the late 1880s and ’90s.23 The club played a crucial role in the social and political identities of elite Englishmen throughout the nineteenth century who prided themselves on being “the most clubbable of animals.”24 Victorians believed that a gentleman’s club, with its distinctive political, social, or artistic coloration, told a great deal about the character of the man himself.25 Because so many elite men spent the better part of their lives moving from one exclusive all-male “club” to another—from public schools to Oxford and Cambridge colleges and, finally, to Parliament or the higher reaches of the civil service—the fraternal ethos of the club all too often insinuated itself into the way they believed the world ought to work.26

  Gentlemen did not monopolize club life in the metropolis. Brotherly associations, albeit of a more humble kind, also figured prominently in the lives of working people. A network of working-men’s and radical clubs spread throughout London from the 1860s onward as places of recreation, education, and political activism. The promoters of working-men’s clubs touted them as desirable and rational alternatives to pubs and music halls, which they condemned as dens of commercial vice and intemperance.27 For the poor, the term “club” also referred to locally based mutual aid societies providing lump-sum payments to members to cover funeral expenses. Building upon these deeply rooted traditions of mutual aid, trade unionists and socialists also insisted that their members stood in a brotherly relationship with one another.28 However, most trade unionists understood brotherhood to consist of protecting the particular economic and social interests of their members, for example, wages, hours, and conditions of labor, property in skill, etc., from the encroachment of outsiders, including laboring women.29 Members of newly emerging socialist organizations of the 1880s and ’90s, such as the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League, and the Independent Labour Party, by contrast, sought to preserve a more inclusive and democratic conception of fraternity in their political rhetoric, though in practice they sometimes were intolerant of the cultural habits and attitudes of fellow laboring men and women.30

  Among the most outspoken socialist proponents of “brotherhood” was Edward Carpenter, a Cambridge-educated poet and erstwhile curate for F. D. Maurice himself. While Carpenter’s egalitarian ideas about women placed him in the vanguard of the movement, he was especially committed to an eroticized (albeit elevated) view of cross-class male comradeship. He lived the “simple life” with his working-class lover, George Merrill, on a farm outside of Sheffield, which became a mecca of sorts not only for homosexuals, vegetarians, and socialists, but for many other men seeking alternative ways to think about themselves and their society.31 Carpenter admired the homoerotic poet of American democracy, Walt Whitman, and published his own epic poem, Towards Democracy (1883), which gained an increasingly wide audience by the end of the century and was frequently reprinted and quoted. Carpenter had close ties to leading social reformers in London (male and female), who sought out his advice in devising class-bridging philanthropic enterprises and who in turn served as models for Carpenter as he developed his theories about
sexuality, gender, and altruism.32

  The fraternal ties binding members of elite and plebian clubs, Carpenterian conceptions of cross-class male love, and the defensive rhetoric of male trade unionists bore faint resemblance to what Maurice had in mind when he enunciated his gospel of brotherhood in the 1840s. But all of these sources contributed to the protean meanings attached to brotherhood in late-nineteenth-century London. In a society that exalted the right to form voluntary societies of all kinds as a hallmark of English liberty, fraternal associations such as clubs not only left their imprint on individual men but also significantly shaped what the Victorians believed it meant to be English. Clubs and club ideals smacked pleasingly of an older, more human way of ordering social relationships. The proliferation of various “guilds” devoted to uplifting the poor and the weak—the Guild of Play, the Guild of Help, the Guild of the Brave Poor Things, the Women’s Cooperative Guild—reflected the Victorians’ infatuation with a medieval past of their own invention.33 But these neo-corporatist institutions and idioms also addressed a widely felt need to soften the hard edges of urban modernity and anonymity by reviving faintly anachronistic forms of community. The “archaic ring” of appeals to fraternal solidarity helps to explain its appeal to men and women acutely aware of the accelerating pace of change in their daily lives.34 The revival of fraternity as a means to address the urgent problems besetting the late industrial metropolis is yet another example of Britons’ attraction to what Alison Light, writing about interwar Britain, has called “conservative modernity.”35

  Late Victorian thinking about fraternity—what, for want of a more felicitous phrase, we might call “fraternalism”—was a mongrel ideology forged out of disparate elements.36 Brotherhood was conceptually unstable, riddled with tensions between inclusive universalism and its seemingly inescapable dependence upon various forms of exclusion. Not surprisingly, it also meant different things to different people. The rituals of comradeship among members of an Oxford literary society differed markedly from the “brotherly” practices of trade unionists. This did not, however, make it any the less attractive to reformers in the 1880s and ’90s. They eagerly embraced fraternal rhetoric as an alternative to the language of class division in establishing a wide array of social, educational, cultural, and religious institutions for the London poor, none more important than Oxford House and Toynbee Hall, the first university settlements in East London

  “MODERN MONASTERIES,”“PHILANTHROPIC BROTHERHOODS,” AND THE ORIGINS OF THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT

  The settlement movement gave tangible expression to male reformers’ acute desire to translate their fraternal ideals into practice; but it also reflected their deeply felt awareness that their own lives of ease were proof that they had sinned against the poor. Between 1883 and 1887, revelations of horrific squalor in the slums, fiery free-speech demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, and surging crowds of embittered East Londoners marauding in the streets of West London left an indelible imprint of the volcanic potential of Outcast London on polite society.37 Individual settlers’ allegiances spanned the entire political spectrum, but they collectively believed it was their special duty to remind members of the Victorian ruling class that they rightfully possessed, and needed to exercise authority to care for the poor. Because settlers were so self-evidently part of the establishment they criticized, they could, without exciting the anxiety of their peers, champion progressive causes within the metropolis, the nation, and the empire. Settlers’ jeremiads against unfair social and economic practices served simultaneously as social criticism and justification for their self-chosen roles.

  The university settlement movement captured all too well the paradoxical blend of arrogant self-confidence and anxious self-doubting of the late Victorian ruling classes. Without apology, the leaders of the first settlements manipulated widespread public fears about tensions between labor and capital in the early 1880s to gain supporters and financial backers for their fledgling scheme. But they also confidently heralded the potency of the high culture of the universities—what Matthew Arnold had famously called the “best that had been thought and said”—to bring order to the anarchic spaces of metropolitan poverty. The first two settlements, Toynbee Hall and Oxford House, were founded in 1884 in the midst of East London’s most notorious slum districts as residential “colonies” for male university graduates. Their leaders intentionally played on the popular trope that likened the savagery and mysteries of the East End to those of Britain’s eastern empire and compared Darkest London to Darkest Africa as places ripe for conversion. Promoters of settlements encouraged their well-to-do supporters to imagine that their slum locations were simultaneously safely distant from the elegance of West London and yet conveniently close enough for a late-afternoon or evening visit. Settlements combined elements of an Oxford or Cambridge college with many of the characteristics of a local center for social work and investigation, education, and cultural elevation. The audacious scope of their weekly activities—the sheer magnitude and variety of the charitable work residents undertook in their local communities, the inquiries into social conditions they conducted, and the clubs, classes, concerts, and lectures they sponsored—reflected the determination of the movement’s leaders to transform the mental and physical landscapes of slum dwellers.

  Samuel Barnett launched the movement in mid-November 1883, when he outlined his plans for what he called a “university settlement” to an audience of enthusiastic Oxford undergraduates. For nearly a decade he and his wife, Henrietta, had toiled to make St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, into a great slum parish, with a network of interlocking social and religious institutions. But despite their rising fame in social reform circles, the local poor had proved remarkably impervious to their spiritual blandishments.38 The university settlement movement promised them a way to build on their experiences while liberating them from the constraints of parish work. It also offered a means to deflect the criticisms volleyed at them by traditional churchmen, who distrusted the Barnetts’ use of oratorios and picture exhibitions in the place of sermons when reaching out to the poor in their parish.

  The Barnetts were the most notable and controversial promoters of aesthetic philanthropy in the metropolis. They closely linked the contemplation of beauty in its myriad forms with godliness and ethics. The establishment of a university settlement close to but entirely independent of St. Jude’s and the authority of the Church of England was an ideal vehicle for applying the Barnetts’ spiritualized aesthetics to the problems of Whitechapel.39

  The survival of a draft speech that Barnett began to write around June 1883 (but almost certainly never delivered in this form) makes it possible to glimpse the evolution of his thinking about the relationship between settlements and established church agencies, in particular missions. It also quite literally bears the traces of Barnett’s own struggle to grapple with the tension between ascetic and aesthetic, religious and secular, approaches to metropolitan poverty. In this speech, which was drafted for an audience of Oxford men and entitled “A Modern Monastery: A Suggestion for a Mission,” he contemplated establishing a “modern monastery” as a new instrument of social and spiritual regeneration in the slums. In the months after he first began to draft his speech, Barnett thought better of his initial formulation and discarded both “modern monastery” and “mission.” By November, he had systematically substituted the phrase “university settlement” each time the words “modern monastery” or “mission” appeared in his text.40 In the years ahead, he zealously insisted that settlements should never be confused for missions. Why? What initially had drawn Barnett to the idea of a “modern monastery?” What accounts for his emphatic rejection of it in favor of “settlement?”

  Barnett’s desire to establish a “modern monastery” may well have reflected his admiration for Thomas Carlyle’s critique of the cash nexus in his depiction of the virtues of monastic life at the all-male Abbey of St. Edmundsbury in Past and Present.41 More immediately, Barnett may a
lso have had in mind the “delightful bachelor households” formed by groups of university men who, from the late 1870s until the founding of Toynbee Hall in 1884, worked with him and Henrietta during their long vacations and affectionately called their residence the Friary.42 Barnett must have come to realize that monasticism had unfavorable connotations to most Englishmen in the 1880s, who associated it with Roman Catholicism, with outdated forms of association, and with the unnatural asceticism and sexuality of mendicant orders.43 While the terms “mission” and “monastery” smacked of self-denying clerical proselytism and celibacy, “settlement” emphasized the residents’ commitment to their newly chosen community. Missionaries were by definition outsiders; settlers, at least in theory, claimed to be insiders. They were literally affirming the traditional duties and privileges of legal “settlement” within a parish. Only one element of the monastic ideal conspicuously survived Barnett’s editing. The settlement remained an exclusively male enclave devoted to the cultivation of close friendships between men.44

  Barnett’s corrections and amendments to the draft suggest that he increasingly came to believe that the ascetic sensibility of the mission priest was incompatible with the spiritual aestheticism at the heart of his vision of the needs of the modern city and the university settlement as an instrument to address them.45 At the same time, his flirtation with the notion of founding a mission—albeit a “modern monastery”—suggests that the affinities, as much as the differences, between missions and settlements, between ascetic and aesthetic impulses, probably underpinned his later determination to distinguish between them.46

  Samuel did not need to convince his Oxford audience that the poor of East London had powerful claims over them. Oxford’s finest preachers, lay and clerical alike, had prepared the way for him.47 For the past several years, Oxford men had struggled to give definite form to their inchoate longings to help in the arduous work of cleansing the spaces of metropolitan poverty and moralizing their inhabitants. One correspondent to the February 1883 issue of the Oxford Magazine felt that Oxonians men had already taken their ideas about brotherhood too far. He complained that the “dirty vigor of Walt Whitman,” whom he dismissed as a “nauseous” sign of these democratic times, had encouraged Oxford men to enter into an “unnatural fraternity” with the “uncultivated.” Just as critics of the Oxford movement of the 1840s had detected something effeminate in its adherents, so, too, this writer hinted that the new Oxford movement of the 1880s, characterized by the “vogue” for cross-class brotherhood, was neither pure nor manly.48 The leaders of the settlement movement struggled with the tensions between their sense of noblesse oblige and democracy and between their desire to forge intimate bonds of friendship with laboring men and boys while avoiding any suggestion of “unnatural” homoerotic desires.49