Slumming
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But it was not the handful of English followers of Whitman at Oxford who most fully captured the mood of the early 1880s, although Whitmanic conceptions of comradeship and democracy did constitute a significant strand of the ethos and ideology of Toynbee Hall. Many more of the most talented undergraduates had fallen under the spell of two quietly charismatic Balliol men, Thomas Hill Green and Arnold Toynbee, each of whom had incorporated elements of Maurice’s Christian Socialism in his approach to spiritual and social questions.50 Both men had inspired their Oxford followers to seek forgiveness from and reconciliation with the laboring poor. Green’s call for a more expansive role for the state in rectifying social inequalities (even as he continued to exalt the efficacy of voluntary associations and individual moral action and growth) powerfully influenced the first few generations of male settlers.51 Toynbee had insisted that Oxford men, as students, constituted a peculiarly disinterested class whose moral, intellectual, and social standing impelled them to mediate between the conflicting claims of labor and capital. His youthful idealism and sincerity, his “good looks and sweet voice,” and his attempt to marry his passion for “political economy” with the outward demeanor of “the aesthetic young man of Punch” added to his appeal as an apostle of a new Oxford movement, at least in the eyes of that pioneering social scientist, Clara Collet.52 She associated Toynbee with a distinctly idealistic approach to social questions and with a distinctly new form of masculine self-presentation. Green’s premature death in 1882, closely followed by Toynbee’s a year later, only heightened Oxford’s desire to take up the kind of practical work in the slums that Barnett laid out in his scheme.
Settlements, the Barnetts hoped, would serve as bulwarks against the mechanization of benevolence and the impersonal forces of the market, bureaucratization, and urbanization. They would make possible the multiplication of friendships whose ever widening spheres of influence promised to bring social peace to the warring classes and Arnoldian “sweetness and light” to the darkest corners of the metropolis. The Barnetts demanded that settlers give their best selves, not doles, to the poor.53 In emphasizing personal ties of loving sympathy between rich and poor—what J. R. Green, the East End vicar and great historian of the English people, called the “femininities of clerical life”—the Barnetts espoused a style of philanthropy identified with women.54 Doing so placed the Barnetts in a somewhat difficult position. While applauding women’s consolidation of social authority through their benevolent labors in the slums, Samuel feared that men might abandon slum philanthropy entirely to women rather than blur the boundaries separating men’s and women’s work, paid and unpaid. Male reformers in the 1880s increasingly recognized the precariousness of their position within the feminized world of charity workers, which led some of them to exaggerate the fecklessness of “charitable ladies” who “distributed shillings broadcast” with no regard for the consequences of their actions.55
The Barnetts’ decision to make their university settlement an exclusively male institution—albeit one devoted to a style of charity identified with “real sympathy and womanly feeling”—reflected discomfort with a hardened, disengaged bourgeois manliness and their commitment to offering men alternative models of social citizenship.56 From the outset, the Barnetts sought not only to expand the horizons of the poor, but also to encourage the most talented male graduates of Oxford and Cambridge to think in new ways about their public and private selves. If settlements were explicitly experiments in reimagining class relations, they were also implicitly sites to invent a new kind of man who was manly but capable of deep empathy, public-spirited because he was attuned to the private grief of his neighbors.57
The Barnetts staked out their own idiosyncratic middle ground between liberal individualism and the collectivist politics espoused by socialists in the 1880s. During their first years in Whitechapel, the Barnetts adhered to the individualist policies of the Charity Organisation Society (COS), with its conception of the limited role of the state in regulating people’s lives. But by the early 1880s, they had begun to break away from the orthodoxies of the central committee of the COS and embarked on their long path toward what they called “practicable socialism.” Educating East Londoners to appreciate beauty in all its forms remained an important part of the Barnetts’ practicable socialism. For example, the Barnetts’ renowned Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions, which brought great British art to East Londoners, sought to enrich the aesthetic experiences of East Londoners and ensured that male aesthetes interested in social questions attached themselves to Toynbee. Other schemes, such as the Barnetts’ plans to cleanse the city and provide model housing for the poor, combined aesthetics with social hygiene. Still others, such as farm colonies for the unemployed, sought literally to remove the poorest of the poor from the city itself. Samuel was an early and outspoken supporter of old age pensions. As early as 1889 he declared to his brother Frank that “Free School Free Doctors Free Books and Free Church are plan[k]s in my platform.”58 Even as the Barnetts supported an expansion in the state’s obligations to its citizens, they continued to emphasize the instrumentality of culture, as well as relationships between men of culture and the poor, in shaping individual character and in civilizing the urban wilderness.59
Their ideas about philanthropy and culture were not always easy to reconcile with their thinking about fraternity. They admonished university men to avoid all traces of condescension in their dealings with their poorer brethren. At the same time, they seemed to concur with the elitist view that the “mere presence of a gentleman” in a slum district would raise the moral tone of those around him.60 Samuel enjoined settlers “to make common what is best” by striving after “an ideal that stops not short till beauty, knowledge, and righteousness are nationalised, and every noble source of joy is opened to the people.”61 They would do this, not by affecting the poverty of their neighbors, but by making the settlement into an oasis of cultivated beauty.
While Oxford warmly received Barnett’s speech introducing the settlement idea, two important details of his plan excited considerable commentary and disapproval: his criticism of slum missions and his determination that the settlement should have no official links with the Church of England and impose no religious test on residents. At a time when denominational rivalries were intensifying and Christians felt the pressure of secularism and atheism, the Barnetts’ approach struck some as misplaced and dangerous. C.G.L. (probably Cosmo Gordon Lang) suggested that the settlement must have “at least an indirect connection with the clergy of the parish…. [I]t ought never to abandon the religious element.” While avoiding the taint of party spirit and dogma, it must nevertheless remain true to Christianity.62
By January 1884, discontent with Barnett’s proposal centered on a group of men at Keble College. Keble was a recent creation, established in 1870 in reaction to the reforms that opened up Oxford degrees to Nonconformists. Its founders were committed to the Anglo-Catholic ideals of the Oxford movement, whose theology, emphasis on rituals, and sacramental practices had been so badly discredited by numerous well-publicized conversions to Roman Catholicism. Born in a defensive spirit of reaction, Keble College was Oxford’s prickly High Church conscience. By the early 1880s, Keble’s leaders were ready to showcase not only their commitment to the theatricality of incense, priestly vestments, and processions in their services, but also their wholesale embrace of many of the social principles of Maurice’s Christian Socialism. The High Church party at Oxford decided to establish their own rival scheme for a men’s settlement along distinctly Anglican lines. Edward Talbot, the warden of Keble, urged his undergraduates to “lend us the help of your brains; you must think out the laws of science, of political economy, of ethics, which govern the conditions … of these masses; you must give them the help of your sympathies.”63 Talbot later admitted without apology that Keble men had played the part of the “cuckoo” for “they in a degree stole Canon Barnett’s idea and put it to their own purposes.”64
Wh
ile the Barnetts’ supporters debated among themselves, the Keble men rapidly moved forward with their plans. On January 27, 1884, over 800 supporters assembled at Keble to hear the Bishop of Bedford, Walsham How, and the famed housing reformer, Octavia Hill, inaugurate a new campaign against metropolitan poverty. Lavinia Talbot, wife of the warden of Keble, recalled the day in her diary. “I shall never forget the impression of O. Hill—a little brown skimp woman with splendid eyes.” Dressed in black silk, alone on the platform with “the great mass of men before her,” Hill’s “whole being vibrat[ed] with passion.”65 Hill’s decision to join ranks with the Keble men deeply pained the Barnetts because she had been one of their closest friends at the outset of their married life.66 Samuel made no effort to conceal his chagrin that his plan to unite university men had already become the focus of party controversy. “The Keble people are very vigorous,” Barnett allowed, “and it will strain one’s charity to be in spirit their fellow-workers. I must begin by quenching the desire to say what I think. Words do a great deal to give form to thought.”67 Even before the leaders of the settlement movement had put their ideas about cross-class fraternity to the test of slum life, they struggled with their own unbrotherly feelings of competition with one another.
By the spring of 1884, plans for two distinct settlements had taken definite shape. The Barnetts’ proposal gathered supporters not only at Oxford but in Cambridge and London as well; the organizing committee selected Samuel as its first warden and named the settlement after Arnold Toynbee. In honoring Toynbee’s memory, the founders of Toynbee Hall not only ensured its identification with its namesake’s youthful idealism but also with perceptions of Toynbee as Punch’s iconic “aesthetic young man.” The Keble supporters wasted no time working out the details of their settlement, which they called Oxford House because only Oxford men were eligible to live there. The Rev. G. W. Knight-Bruce, a muscular Christian and high Churchman, agreed to take charge of the parish of St. Andrew’s in Bethnal Green and supervise the work of the nearby university settlers. The settlement would form an extraordinary part of the parish apparatus although its residents, unlike workers at conventional missions, were free to pursue their work beyond the borders of the parish itself. At the outset Oxford House differed very little from the home missions founded in the 1870s under the auspices of the bachelor cleric and ritualist clergyman, Edward King, Oxford’s beloved professor of pastoral theology.
In defiance of the Barnetts’ views, the leaders of Oxford House often used the terms “mission” and “settlement” interchangeably. By so doing, they encouraged the philanthropic and Christian public to associate their scheme with the growing fame of several charismatic ritualist Anglican priests who launched their own missions in East London in the 1880s. As with most other missionary enterprises, the dictates of Christian love came before the principles of scientific charity. One head of Oxford House made no attempt to conceal his habit of distributing small sums of his own money to the local poor as he walked the streets.68 Almost from its founding, Oxford House sponsored a shelter for homeless wanderers and vagrants and thereby provoked the disapproval of the ever-vigilant Charity Organisation Society.69 Such an enterprise, with its potential to demoralize the poor by undermining their capacity for self-help, would have been inconceivable at Toynbee Hall. Despite this ostensible lapse in judgment, “the philanthropic brotherhood” of Oxford House, as the COS’s secretary C. S. Loch called them, eventually earned the bona fides of the COS.70
The leaders of Oxford House chose an abandoned national school adjacent to the parish church as the site for the settlement and immediately set a team of local workmen to transform the empty schoolrooms into a modest residence designed to accommodate three or four university men. The Talbots came to visit the site in May 1884. Lavinia found it “excellent in many ways,” but she wryly observed that its was “p’raps too close to the Ch[urch] and Vic[arage] for quite the right independence and too close I think to Mr. Barnett and Whitechapel.”71 Only a fifteen-minute stroll separated Oxford House from Toynbee Hall.
By October 1884, with the plaster not yet dry, Oxford House opened its doors to Oxford graduates and the people of Bethnal Green. It was a small and unimpressive institution and attracted little notice in the press. The ground floor served as clubhouse, dining room, and common room. “A sort of garret in the upper part, roughly divided off into compartments was the first dormitory,” recalled Warden Spooner of New College, Oxford. The residents were “attacked by rats, their luggage and belongings were carried off by thieves, the cooking left much to be desired.”72 James Granville Adderley, one of the first heads of Oxford House and the youngest son of Lord Norton, fondly recalled the “primitive times” at the settlement, but he did so in order to make light of his sacrifice and to amplify his fortitude. The spartan physical conditions of the house and its location in the “wilds” of Bethnal Green made it easier for Oxford House men to model themselves after the early Christians, who had brought forth the light of truth in a hostile world of heathen ignorance and unbelief. Adderley later came to mock settlers’ assumption that their poor neighbors were in any meaningful sense “savages.”73 In a satirical reversal of roles, he claimed that Oxford House served as a shelter for the “rich unemployed,” members of a wanton class he described as “submerged gentlemen”—a mocking allusion to the notorious “submerged tenth” beloved of social statisticians.74
In marked contrast to Oxford House, asceticism had no place in the Barnetts’ plans for the settlement or for themselves.75 The Barnetts welcomed the first settler into the new settlement on Christmas Day, 1884, three months after the opening of Oxford House. By January 1885, Toynbee overflowed with hundreds of “guests,” a dozen residents, and journalists anxious to gather copy for their newspapers. Only three years later Baedeker’s guide to London confirmed Toynbee Hall’s status as a major landmark and tourist destination by including a paragraph about the building and the work of its residents. The hall, a derelict boys’ industrial school rebuilt to look like a neo-Elizabethan manor house, was a rather grand affair, especially compared to the squalid tenements and cheap lodging houses surrounding it (figure 5.1).76 When the art-loving Christian Socialist Percy Dearmer stopped by to visit Toynbee Hall in 1892, he found it a “most luxurious place.”77 A substantial courtyard buffered its main rooms from the noise of Commercial Street, one of East London’s busiest and most cosmopolitan thoroughfares. The Barnetts ushered their visitors through an Arts and Crafts style arched doorway into elegantly appointed public rooms strewn with Persian rugs and tasteful paintings and sculptures (figures 5.2a–d). Everything about the interior decoration of Toynbee Hall declared its founders’ and leaders’ allegiances to that mingling of good taste and advanced politics rightly associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. An early resident, C. R. Ashbee and the rough lads from the neighborhood in his School of Handicraft spent over two thousand hours decorating the “aesthetic tint [ed]” walls of the dining hall with a “frieze of escutcheons from the colleges at Cambridge and Oxford.”78 (These friezes are visible in figure 5.2b.) Each spring Oxford House men prepared for Easter through their own private Lenten self-renunciations; the Barnetts, Toynbee Hall, and their friends madly prepared for the apotheosis of their aesthetic calendar: the Easter Sunday opening of the annual Whitechapel Fine Art Picture Exhibition, which displayed pre-Raphaelite paintings (among many others) on walls decorated with goods donated by that avatar of high-minded aestheticism, Liberty and Morris.79
FIGURE 5.1. Toynbee Hall. (From the Builder, February 14, 1885.)
Compared to the ramshackle dormitory available to the first residents of Oxford House, Toynbee Hall offered its residents their own comfortable rooms to which no East Londoner had access, except perhaps the “admirable staff of servants” who knew their place and remained anonymous to the gentlemen they served (figure 5.2b).80 Ironically, the division of labor and space within the settlement reproduced precisely those social and economic inequalities that m
ade cross-class fraternity such an elusive goal in East London. The Barnetts hoped that Toynbee Hall would be the center of community life in Whitechapel, but in crossing its threshold, East Londoners entered into a world utterly alien from anything else they knew in their daily lives.
Oxford House never quite emerged from the shadow of Toynbee Hall and has been all but forgotten by historians. But it, and not Toynbee Hall, was the first settlement to begin work in East London. While Toynbee Hall captured the public’s imagination in a way that Oxford House never did, most settlements in Britain followed the lead of Oxford House by attaching themselves to various religious denominations. Sectarian rivalries, rather than a spirit of fraternal cooperation, fueled the proliferation of settlement houses in London for the next three decades as Wesleyan Methodists, Catholics, Quakers, and many other religious denominations established their own slum outposts. These settlements in turn reshaped the settlement idea to suit their needs. Some, such as Browning House in south London, even abandoned the notion of single-sex residential halls in favor of families integrated within neighborhoods.81 Even before the first settlement had begun its work in London, there was no single ideal of what a settlement was or ought to be. That statement needs to be underscored because historians have wrongly generalized about the movement as a whole based solely on their understanding of Toynbee and have ignored the rich diversity of perspectives settlers brought to their work.