Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  FIGURE 5.2. Henrietta Barnett included figures 5.2a and 5.2c in her biography of her husband, Samuel. While they depict the two main rooms within the residential part of Toynbee Hall, Henrietta chose images of them without people. Her intention, we can infer, was to memorialize the advanced good taste of the interiors, which were decorated in a style indebted to the Arts and Crafts movement. Robert Woods, the American social reformer and sometime resident of Toynbee Hall, included images of the same two rooms in his study, “The Social Awakening in London” (first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1892). But these images convey an altogether different message, one which exposes some of the internal contradictions of the institution’s class-bridging aspirations. Rather than depicting young university men dining with their East End friends at a communal meal, we see two domestic servants, in their white caps and apron, hard at work (figure 5.2b). The picture of the drawing room (figure 5.2d) is crowded with figures, but all of them are ladies and gentleman. The conspicuous absence of laboring men and women within these two public “domestic” spaces, except in the role of servants, provides an ironic critique of Toynbee’s failure to establish relations of genuine equality with its Cockney neighbors. (5.2a and c from Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends, London, 1919; 5.2b and d from Robert Woods, The Poor in Great Cities, New York, 1895.)

  RELIGION AND CODES OF MASCULINITY

  The Barnett’s aestheticized spirituality and the ascetic vision of Christian missionary work held by the founders of Oxford House powerfully shaped the early histories of the two institutions and the ethos of the movement as a whole. The marked dissimilarity in the outward appearances of Oxford House and Toynbee Hall not only grew out of the institutions’ divergent conceptions of religion and social reform, but also reflected the quite distinct visions of masculinity and femininity that each promoted. Religious beliefs and gender ideologies worked hand in hand at the two settlements, each reinforcing and helping to articulate the other. Analyzing settlers’ ideas about family, women, and faith makes it possible to begin to decipher the subtle codes of masculinity prevailing at Oxford House and Toynbee Hall.

  Rev. Scott Holland, an admirer of Samuel Barnett and a major force behind Oxford House, was an eloquent spokesman for the corporatist vision underlying the first two male settlements. “It was absolutely unnatural,” he explained, “that human society should grow to such a scale that the ordinary relations of life which tie together men of different capacities and gifts should separate them.”82 Rather obtusely, Holland and many other pioneers of the settlement movement refused to see that it was equally “unnatural” for a band of wealthy graduates to live in single-sex male communities in the heart of a London slum. The oddness of the settlement enterprise, especially relations between settlers and their neighbors, disturbed the young American Robert Woods during his tour of Britain’s institutions of benevolence and social welfare.83 Woods, destined to play an important role building a transatlantic world of social reformers and interpreting English social movements to a broad American audience, confided to his friend Anna Dawes that the relation between settlements in London and their neighbors is an “artificial one.”84 If Toynbee Hall resembled an Oxford college transplanted into the heart of Whitechapel, its proponents also claimed it was a domestic space whose occupants were encouraged to see themselves as members of an extended family. As one enthusiastic resident recalled, nothing disturbed “the peace of the family” at Toynbee Hall during the year and a half he lived there.85

  Several factors insured that settlements were at best unconventional families. While both Toynbee Hall and Oxford House restricted residence to men, relationships between men and women were quite different at each institution. From the outset, Toynbee Hall provided many opportunities for well-to-do and educated women to contribute to its work as associates.86 As Bolton King, one of the settlement’s earliest and best respected residents, explained, “comradeship” among students at Toynbee Hall “has known no difference of sex.” “Women have found here respect and reverence, and have been treated as equals.”87 Several families attached themselves to the settlement and lived in lodgings nearby. Toynbee benefited from Henrietta Barnett’s powerful intellect and assertive personality and from the able female workers whom she had gathered around her at St. Jude’s in the 1870s and early 1880s.88 Samuel and Henrietta’s household, lodged in the rectory of St. Jude’s, also provided male residents with a model of conjugal domesticity.89

  Women were much scarcer at Oxford House, especially in the years before the founding of its sister settlements, St. Margaret’s and St. Hilda’s, a few blocks away.90 Even after these women’s settlements began their work, most Oxford House residents had few ties with their female counterparts. Oxford House had a much more distinctly all-male character than Toynbee Hall, a tendency only accentuated by the monastic longings of several of its early leaders. James Adderley and H. H. Henson, another early head of Oxford House, saw in the settlement an opportunity to realize their ambition to establish a celibate community of laymen devoted to serving the poor. They adopted suitably monastic nicknames for one another: Abbot Adderley and Prior Henson.91

  Edward Cummings, an acerbic young American resident at Toynbee Hall in 1888 and father of the poet, saw nothing natural about life at Toynbee. He captured the distinctly anti-domestic tone of the settlement in its early days. He believed that settlements brought

  your unregenerate man in contact with the most artificial and ephemeral phase of civilized life … of leaving him with an ideal in which eternal youth, free from the ties of family life, entertains its friends with dinners, pipes, lectures, songs and magic lanterns, in ample halls adorned with mysterious things aesthetic, and in the end discusses the evils of society over black coffee and unlimited cigarettes.92

  Cummings’s assessment was ungenerous, perhaps even a bit unfair. But he astutely noticed that settlement life entailed not only a commitment by residents to probe social questions but also a willingness to adopt a particular and rather peculiar masculine persona.

  Given the large number of Toynbee men for whom the aesthetic theories of the art critic John Ruskin were a sort of religious creed, it is hardly surprising that the settlement’s walls were adorned with “mysterious things aesthetic.” Many of Toynbee Hall’s leaders, friends and residents, such as Alfred Milner, Claude Montefiore, C. R. Ashbee, and E. T. Cook, were ardent Ruskinians who shared his paternalistic radicalism and his conviction that ethics and aesthetics were indivisible.93 But the Ruskinian “aesthetes” of Toynbee Hall should not be confused for their close cousins, the followers of the bachelor Oxford don, Walter Pater.94 Pater, in his essays on the Renaissance, had famously and scandalously championed “art for art’s sake” and enjoined his readers to experience the ecstasy of moments of extreme but necessarily fleeting, aesthetic gratification. Toynbee residents believed that art had too much important work to do in improving the world to be left in the hands of Paterian aesthetes. More damningly, many of Pater’s contemporaries felt that his adulation of male beauty, like his sensual vision of aesthetic experience, crossed the line separating pure intellectual inquiry from impure thinking, homosocial fraternity from homoerotic passion. Toynbee Hall “aestheticism” tended more toward Ruskin’s high moralism and manly love of adventure than to Pater’s effeminizing worship of pagan beauty.95

  Religion mattered a great deal at Toynbee Hall, but rarely in a way calculated to console traditional churchmen. As an early resident of Toynbee Hall observed in a poetic satire of its annual report, the Barnetts gathered around them “those elements contrary/ The man of Bxllixl and the Missionary.” Agnostic, Anglican, Dissenter, Jew, Tory, Liberal, and Radical: all flocked to Toynbee Hall to imbibe Samuel’s wisdom. During the settlement’s first decade, approximately a quarter of the residents were clerics or clergymen “crawling in the caterpillar stage.”96 But it was the seekers and doubters, not the men of faith, who gave Toynbee its distinctive character. The journalist
J. A. Spender typified many of the young men who ventured to Whitechapel in the 1880s. In the post-Darwinian world of Higher Criticism, he saw himself condemned to the “outer darkness” of unbelief. At a time when so many men and women experienced shattering crises in faith, Spender struggled “to get an idea of God which had any meaning or reality.” In Samuel Barnett he found a guide to direct him through his perplexities. Barnett “gave you the whole of his wise, subtle and original mind,” Spender recalled. “At Toynbee we called him the ‘seer’; and no one that I have known better deserved the name.”97 Barnett’s clerical successor at St. Jude’s offered a much less sympathetic estimate of Toynbee Hall and its warden. During a private conversation with an interviewer sent by Charles Booth as part of his survey of religious life in the metropolis, Rev. Bayne blasted Toynbee as an “irreligious influence” and complained that “infidelity and nonchurch going stand out as the swagger thing.”98

  The residents of Oxford House were cut from very different cloth. The settlement attracted men with strong religious convictions, many of whom viewed residence in Bethnal Green as preparation for clerical careers. Oxford House drew strength from the solidarity and fellowship of men who shared similar views about God and religious practice. Committed to ministering to the needs of the poor, they favored a blend of ceremonial liturgical practices and incarnational theology that found its highest expression with the publication of Lux Mundi (1889) under the editorial direction of Charles Gore, the first principal of Pusey House.99 If Toynbee residents gave full vent to exploring their spiritual doubts with one another in earnest and angst ridden conversations and often expressed their desire to do good through art and culture, Oxford House encouraged its residents to bolster their faith through doing God’s work. The whirlwind of daily and weekly activities at Oxford House left little time for indulgent self-reflection. The settlement’s most effective and charismatic head, Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram, asked a young man struggling to find his faith to “come and pray with us, and not talk about your doubts.” With evident satisfaction, Winnington Ingram recalled the results of the prohibition he had imposed. The man came to Oxford House and “for five years he worked among the poor, and he never talked about his faith at all. What was the result? Why, in working for others his faith came back to him: he saw the Gospel in action.”100

  Cosmo Gordon Lang (a future archbishop of Canterbury), knew both settlements well in the 1880s; he found the atmosphere at Oxford House “less strained and self-conscious [than at Toynbee]. The residents and visitors seemed to have less sense that they were … studying problems or testing theories…. [T]hey were, rather, loyally accepting something old and tried and sure and bringing it as a gospel, a good gift, to the people. This seemed to give them a greater simplicity and cheerfulness.”101

  Lang was surely right that “simplicity” was the hallmark of Oxford House in its early years. But what did Oxford House residents and supporters mean by “simplicity?” On the most obvious level, simplicity referred to the physical conditions of the settlement. The bare-bones domestic arrangements at the settlement added a patina of romance to the manly adventure of life in the slums and sustained settlers’ illusions that they were truly sharing in the “primitive” life of Bethnal Green itself. In the lexicon of Oxford House residents, “simplicity” meant much more than this. It figured prominently in their conception of their Christian mission to Bethnal Green and in the way they described their relationships with their neighbors. While theologians and historians fiercely debated the historicity of Scripture, Oxford House men congratulated themselves on conveying “simple” Christian truths to the poor in straightforward language. They called themselves Church of England and did not trouble over “theological quarrels.”102 According to an early circular intended to recruit graduates, the complex task of forging cross-class fraternal bonds was merely a matter of facilitating “simple personal intercourse” between the men of Oxford and Bethnal Green.103 In sum, they claimed to bring simple truths to their simple friendships with the poor while living under conditions of simple austerity. By claiming simplicity in their theological views, Oxford House implicitly disavowed the morbid, unmanly, and supposedly arcanely convoluted religious and personal musings of the founding fathers of the Oxford movement. Their emphasis on action rather than contemplation as a way to transform spiritual doubt into spiritual strength contributed to their identity as “muscular Christians” and manly men.

  For Oxford House residents, simplicity of life at the settlement was integral to their rejection of what they took to be the materialistic norms of bourgeois masculinity in the late nineteenth century. As one early resident confessed, he “long[ed] to throw all aside, and to be an ascetic as was [St.] Francis.”104 By residing at Oxford House, settlers could safely (and only for a short time) “throw all aside” without compromising their future prospects or their sense of themselves as “manly” men. How better to understand the lives of the poor, they asked themselves, than to minimize the material differences separating them from the beneficiaries of their altruism? The evangelical Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, the iconoclastic founder of the Labrador medical mission, had no sympathy with the high churchmanship of Oxford House; but he was captivated by the way its leaders were “proving that they were real men—men who had courage as well as faith.”105

  Oxford House residents’ sense of themselves as men was closely tied to their investment in viewing East London as an aboriginal space free from the stultifying constraints of bourgeois respectability. We see this clearly in the way Henry Scott Holland, one of the Oxford House’s most influential spokesmen, wrote and talked about the impact of his visits to “rough” London in the 1870s. He thrilled to the

  sight of the black and brutal street reeling with drunkards, and ringing with foul words, and filthy with degradation—and the little sudden blaze of light and colour and warmth in the crowded shed, with its music and its flowers and its intense, earnest faces, and its sense of sturdy, stirring work, quick and eager, and unceasing—God alive in it all. It is most wonderful to me—the contrast with our rich solemn days, our comfortable Common Rooms and steady ease.

  He concluded with a paean to the therapeutic value of his sojourns into the slums: “[I]t certainly does one good to get touched up by a rough strong bit of reality, like that.”106

  Repulsion and attraction, moral and aesthetic sensibilities, oddly jockey with one another for primacy in Holland’s imagination. In this passage, Holland attempts to force the profane to merge into the divine; or, perhaps more aptly, he insists that the sacred depends upon the dirt and squalor of the slum to make itself visible. The raw and uncultivated energies of East London become a sign of God’s animating presence and function as an antidote to the “ease” of Oxford where Holland felt himself hidden away from the “fullness of the new life.”107 At the same time, Holland’s rhetoric betrays anxiety about his own claims to make sacred the splendid squalor of the slums. The short interjection “God alive in it all” stands apart from, rather than concludes, his long and sensuous description of the excitations of the slums. It is too abrupt, perhaps even contrived, to be wholly convincing. The clause betrays Holland effort to contain, to justify, and to moralize the aesthetic sensations that threaten to make him into part of the spectacle he witnesses. He and his readers are left breathless and “reeling” along with “the drunkards.”

  The atavistic forces of the slum give Holland knowledge of God while stirring within him “primal sympathies” which put him in touch with the “spirit of the irregulated democracy.”108 Holland seems to believe that he can only tap into his own Christian manliness by inventing and encountering East London as a place of “heightened actuality” and brutal, eroticized excitations. As he explained to one of his closest friends, “you must see actual living, actual dying, actual sinning, real good hearty vice, naked sin: drunkenness, murder, revelling and such like.”109 Holland relishes the opportunity provided by his benevolent work in the slums to immerse
himself in the uncouth but invigorating squalor of the East End. At the same time, his mission there is to tame the very forces he finds so appealing in the poor and that he awakens in himself. Implicit in all of Holland’s remark is a critique of the illusory virtues of bourgeois codes of male conduct, which cut men off from their deepest selves and sympathies.110

  It was not just overheated images of the primitive invoked by male slum philanthropists like Holland that connected their benevolent projects in the East End of London to Britain’s imperial fortunes.111 Many Victorian men devoted to missionary work at home and abroad believed that living manly and simple lives among the heathen denizens of the London slums was excellent preparation for evangelizing in the distant corners of empire. And some, like Robert Morant, reversed this trajectory and lived in Toynbee Hall after his long sojourn to Siam serving as a tutor in the royal household.112 It was no accident that Balliol College, Oxford, under the leadership of Benjamin Jowett, sent many of its best and brightest students to Toynbee Hall and to the Indian civil service. Both were suitable destinations for men who saw themselves as servants of their nation and as champions of a progressive ideology that legitimized their self-assured ethos of imperial dominion.