by Koven, Seth
If, as I have argued, the leaders of the first two settlements mobilized the opposition between the “aesthete” and the “ascetic” in defining and representing the religious and social reform agendas of their respective institutions, this opposition often proved impossible to sustain. Oxford House asceticism may have entailed forsaking the material and sexual prerogatives closely associated with men of wealth, but, as Scott Holland’s words make clear, slums also provided ample sensory rewards. The very act of denying themselves certain kinds of pleasure could and did often produce intensely stimulating sensations as compensation. As Holland himself explained in a sermon entitled “Christian Asceticism,” true Christian asceticism entailed not an act of repudiation but rather the joy of redemption.113
Despite their insistent representation of themselves as ascetic apostles of simplicity, Oxford House residents practiced an intensely and self-consciously aestheticized form of Anglo-Catholic worship.114 Their strategy in appealing to poor parishioners relied upon making services a feast of beautiful sights, sounds, and smells. Elaborately choreographed processions, masses, and worship services rivaled, and perhaps also oddly paralleled the marketing strategies of their enemies, the owners of music halls and pubs, who poured tens of thousands of pounds into decorating their establishments. As one Anglo-Catholic missioner in the East End acknowledged, his mission was “a sort of chapel and music-hall combined.”115 When Winnington Ingram left Oxford House to become the Bishop of Stepney, he joyously processed through streets thronging with tens of thousands of East Londoners. These processions, with their colorful banners and striking robes, were intended to be aesthetic as well as religious experiences, at once celebrations of spiritual community and street carnival (figure 5.3).
FIGURE 5.3. Winnington Ingram did not see himself as a ritualist per se, although he was closely associated with many leading ritualists and linked High Churchmanship with social reform in the 1880s and ’90s. The neochivalric iconography used in his religious processions through slum neighborhoods lent color and pageantry to religious events and helped broaden the church’s appeal to the poor. Neomedieval and chivalric imagery also figured prominently in the visual culture of advanced aestheticism. (From S. C. Carpenter, Winnington-Ingram, London, 1949.)
The aesthetically sensuous forms of worship favored by Oxford House presented several challenges as the settlement sought to carve out for itself a distinct niche within the overlapping worlds of philanthropic and religious London. In an age of widespread anti-Catholicism exacerbated by the development of vibrant religious communal institutions among London’s Irish Catholic poor, Oxford House needed to unambiguously stand apart from Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholic practices. It also could ill afford to be too closely identified with London’s famous—and notorious—ritualist Anglo-Catholic slum priests such as Father Stanton, Father Lowder, Father Dolling and Father Osborne Jay. Differentiating itself from these slum priests was no easy task for Oxford House because the two groups of men had so much in common. The founders and leaders of Oxford House admired these clergymen and appealed to the same constituencies for support in Oxford and London.116 Like the men of Oxford House, Anglican slum priests adopted celibacy and simplicity in their daily lives as part of their religious vocation and program of social reform. They, too, were outspoken in their commitment to nurturing cross-class brotherly love to heal the injuries of class and poverty. To compound confusion between the settlement and the missionary enterprises of slum priests, Father Dolling’s mission in East London in 1884 was called the “Oxford House Movement, Magdalen College Branch.”
But Dolling and Jay and their ilk, unlike the men of Oxford House, courted controversy and regularly flouted the authority of the Anglican hierarchy.117 They were out and out ritualists—that is, they were Anglicans whose services incorporated many of the symbolic gestures, religious artifacts, and ceremonies used by Roman Catholics that were not sanctioned forms of Anglican worship. Evangelical zealots and duly appointed ecclesiastical commissioners alike regularly scrutinized slum priests’ religious services in the 1880s and ’90s. Such observers were only too happy to interpret a bent knee at the altar as a covert priestly genuflection—yet another sign of dangerous Romanizing tendencies among men required to uphold the articles of faith of the Church of England.118 Whereas Oxford House increasingly hoped to awaken Anglicans to their obligations to the poor by helping former residents achieve positions of influence within the church, Dolling and Jay and several other Anglo-Catholic slums priests, including the Christian Socialist Stewart Headlam, seemed to relish their status as gadflies and outsiders.
Not encumbered by the need or desire to please their clerical superiors, slum priests tended to be much bolder than their peers at Oxford House in practicing their ideas about brotherly love. The East London vicar under whom both Dolling and Jay served briefly in the mid-1880s wrote scathing and frantic letters to his bishop accusing his charismatic curates of fomenting “democratic and socialistic agitation” and countenancing gambling and swearing at the mission.119 Headlam’s vicar, Septimus Hansard, himself a noted radical in the 1850s, was even more intemperate in his condemnation of his wayward curate’s defense of working men’s right to enjoy music halls and his bohemian radicalism. In a series of vituperative letters to the bishop of London, he insinuated that Headlam was not only deviant in his priestcraft but a “pernicious” moral influence on the young as well.120 While the vicarious delights of so much slum work depended upon juxtaposing but not merging the high and the low, men like Jay and Dolling dangerously obliterated the boundaries separating them. Dolling regularly told irreverent jokes with the “slummiest” of men whom he invited into his own home for a smoke and a chat. Jay’s sleeping quarters were located within his mission complex in Shoreditch, and visitors noted with horror mingled with admiration that the “exhalations from the gas and the men’s bodies” rose into Jay’s small overhanging room from the gymnasium, boxing club, and homeless shelter below.121
Almost exaggeratedly masculine in their powerful physical presence, these slum priests nonetheless struck many observers as sexually ambiguous. Headlam was briefly married to a lesbian who entered and then quickly departed their conjugal home with her lifelong companion; he, along with James Adderley, conspicuously offered Oscar Wilde spiritual succor at a time when even the latter’s friends shunned him. While one young soldier described Father Dolling as a “manly” man, a coworker commented that Dolling’s “masculine strength” was balanced by “immense reserves of deep sentiment” characteristic of his nobly “feminine” character (figures 5.4a and 5.4b).122 Jay’s manner was likewise disconcerting. His “almost brutal exterior”—he was a “stout, plain, coarse looking fellow with all the appearance of a prize fighter out of training”—contrasted sharply with the sumptuous and refined beauty of the mission church he built, with its splendid glass and mosaic work.123 It was difficult to reconcile the refinement of Jay’s aesthetic sensibility in the design and decoration of his church with his self-denying way of life and his rough manner and appearance. Jay’s persona puzzled contemporaries because it consisted of a transgressive mixing of aestheticism with asceticism. He possessed the refinement of a West London religious dandy and the plebeian crudeness of a Cockney boxer. Their ritualism, antiauthoritarianism, and disdain for social and gender conventions made Headlam, Jay, and Dolling into celebrities, the darlings of journalists in search of colorful copy, but it also ensured that Oxford House never openly cast its lot with them. To do so would have compromised its growing reputation as a training center for men eager to make their mark within the church.
Just as Oxford House men needed to find a balance between manly simplicity and the aesthetic attractions of their devotional practices, so, too, many of the aesthetic philanthropists of Toynbee Hall extolled the virtues of living the simple life in the slums, free from the artifices they associated with bourgeois respectability. Despite their refusal to live in apostolic poverty, Toynbee men imagined t
hat they had embraced a purer form of existence. Like their Oxford House counterparts, they believed that by living in the slums they were criticizing and, at least for a time, abandoning, the sham rituals of respectable society. They, too, often saw the London poor through a self-serving gaze that transformed their “neighbors” into recipients of charity and their “brothers” into desirable objects of fraternal love and sociological inquiry.
In her searing 1888 novel, Out of Work, Margaret Harkness offered a bitterly ironic perspective on Oxford House and Toynbee Hall residents. Harkness’s narrator described the physical appearance of her Christlike proletarian protagonist, Joseph Coney, and imagined the effect his hairstyle would have upon residents of the two settlements.
FIGURE 5.4. Slum priests and other High Church male slum workers, while typically committed to celibacy and living in all-male communities, were often remarkably successful in attracting female followers and financial supporters. Robert Dolling was particularly adept at moving between the homosocial worlds of the clubs he established for slum boys and young sailors (figure 5.4a) and the world of spinsterly charity he supervised with assistance from his unmarried sisters (figure 5.4b). (From Charles Osborne, Life of Father Dolling, London, 1903.)
As he took off his hat, and wiped his forehead with a red cotton pocket-handkerchief, one noticed that his brown hair stood upright, short and sharp on his head. It showed no parting. Men of his class often dispense with partings; they wear their hair on end, cropped close to the skin. One does not see this sort of hair-dressing in the fashionable parts of London, but it is not unbecoming.
The passage archly concluded that “no doubt some day one of the gentlemen at aesthetic Toynbee Hall or ascetic Oxford House, will adopt it, and set the fashion in the West End.”124
Harkness’s readers in the 1880s would have immediately understood that Jos’s spiky hair was a sign of his poverty, worn by some poor men out of convenience or involuntarily imposed upon them by poor-law, military, and prison barbers. By suggesting that the well-to-do men of Oxford House and Toynbee Hall would mimic this plebeian style, Harkness slyly lampooned their pretensions to have become East Londoners merely by living for a few months in a slum settlement. The passage also suggests that just as slumming itself had become a craze in the 1880s, so, too, the masculine personae of male settlers were themselves fashion statements—elaborate performances of new ways of being a man. The narrator’s quip that a shaved head would equally serve the purposes of the “aesthete” and the “ascetic” implies that the distinctions between these styles of masculinity could not withstand critical scrutiny. Harkness seems to be arguing here that the Toynbee Hall “aesthete” and the Oxford House “ascetic” were insincere masculine poses, different from one another but also interchangeable.
“TRUE HERMAPHRODITES REALISED AT LAST”: SEXING THE MALE SETTLEMENT MOVEMENT
If, as I have argued, male settlers criticized and reworked conventional ideas about religion, social reform, and masculinity, many of them also discovered in the corporate life of settlements a congenial place to experiment with heterodox ideas about male sexuality. Some expressed their sexuality through its ostensible rejection: that is, celibacy. Others found in their benevolent labors a way to gain deeper intimacy with the poor, particularly men and boys, upon whom they lavished their love and affection. If settlements provided a bridge between the cloistered world of the university and the adult world of work and family, they also constituted a haven where young men, many of whom had moved from all-male public schools to all-male colleges, could sort out for themselves their own sexual and social identities. Most male settlers eventually married, whereas a much larger proportion of their female counterparts remained single. But settlement house homosociability, with its spirit of brotherly love, contained powerful, albeit subterranean, currents of homoeroticism, which seeped into male settlers’ approach to religious and social questions. Analyzing closely how male settlers such as Winnington Ingram and C. R. Ashbee wrote about themselves and their work in the slums—listening for the subtle nuances of tone and inflection in their prose—provides one way to recover the sexed dimension and sexual politics of the men’s settlement house movement.
For a man who we can safely assume never had sex, Winnington Ingram thought and worried a great deal about it. He was profoundly devoted to sexual purity both in his private life and in his public pronouncements. His determination to cleanse the slums of London of immorality was matched by his devotion to his own rituals of bodily purification.125 His biographer informs us that throughout his adult life, Winnington Ingram shaved twice and bathed three times per day. He seems to have relished the boyish impression he made on his contemporaries, who repeatedly likened him to that notably sexless, perennial adolescent, Peter Pan. Nor should it come as a surprise to learn that real-life Peter Pans in the slums, adolescent boys and young men, were the particular object of Winnington Ingram’s pastoral energies and affections. His only apparent romantic entanglement with the opposite sex ended as precipitously as it had begun when his fiancée mysteriously broke off their brief engagement.126 As soon as he ascended to the See of London at the precocious age of forty-three, Winnington Ingram sought wise counsel about the church’s views on clerical—and in particular, episcopal, celibacy. He must have been disappointed, although apparently not persuaded, when the dean of Westminster identified “eunuchs for the kingdom of Heavens’s Sake” as practicing a form of asceticism associated with the subversive and rejected doctrines of Gnosticism.127
The character of the settlement changed significantly under Winnington Ingram’s stabilizing influence and boundless enthusiasm. He transformed a modest outpost of High Church Oxford into a permanent institution in the local life of generations of men, women, and children in Bethnal Green and an important force within the Church of England during the first half of the twentieth century. Within a few years of his arrival, he raised the money and supervised the construction of an impressive though plainly designed building, which remains to this day the settlement’s center for its work in the community. But several aspects of the inchoate vision of its first residents endured: a commitment to an uncritical High Churchmanship; a sense of bringing the gospel as a good gift to the poor; an underlying missionary impulse; and a sexually ambiguous but robust masculinity. Winnington Ingram left so profound an imprint on the settlement that it took two world wars to alter the pattern and tone of life he established there.
Henry Wood Nevinson, a journalist and close affiliate of Toynbee Hall, visited Oxford House in 1893. A brilliant observer of men and manners, he left a detailed account of his impressions of the settlement, its head—Winnington Ingram—and its residents. He found Oxford House “a more genuinely monastic establishment than Toynbee.” He liked the solidity and plain design of the rooms, which, unlike Toynbee Hall, were “quite free of pictures and tinsell decorations.” At lunch, he met a dozen residents, “fine ingenious Oxford youths,” who struck him as “kindly and honest enough” but “just in danger of self-sacrificial priggery.” As lunch began, Winnington Ingram, “who had been celebrating sexts or some such function,” appeared. Winnington Ingram was, Nevinson noted, a “tallish thin man of 35 with smooth black hair and clothes, the gold cross on watch chain very conspicuous: it pervaded his presence. Face thin, pale and rather wasted without being as yet distinctly ascetic. Eyes blue or very light grey, and a little watery; hands white and sacerdotal.” For Nevinson, Winnington Ingram’s outward appearance was an apt mirror of the inner man.
Figure pliant and like the face having a look of being always wrinkled into an inviting and encouraging smile, as much as to say, “Don’t you suppose for a moment I am at all superior to you; I am but a human brother devoted to God’s service and the Church can be as jolly in her holiness and purity as the most debased groveller of you all. Like all that sect he was of course as polite as a model and laughed copiously if not heartily at everyone and everything.
Nevinson, as a true Toynbe
e man, couldn’t bear “that sect.” They all seemed “exactly alike” with “no variety of thought or speech or manner.” He concluded that Winnington Ingram and his type were “the true hermaphrodites realised at last.”128
Nevinson’s biting description captured the essence of Winnington Ingram’s charisma and of the Oxford House man as a new masculine type in fin-de-siècle philanthropic London. Without denying Winnington Ingram’s sincerity, Nevinson’s tone is skeptical; he doesn’t quite believe that Winnington Ingram and his residents are what they appear to be. Just as the residents are almost but not quite prigs and Winnington Ingram is almost but not quite ascetic, so, too, the group as a whole constitutes an intermediate sex, neither male nor female.129 As “hermaphrodites,” they are simultaneously supersexed—endowed with the sex organs of men and women—and oddly unsexed. They seem capable of cloning themselves without depending on the reproductive labors of women. But whereas the religious, sexual, and gender identities of renegade slum priests such as Jay and Dolling made them dangerous and exciting personalities, another Toynbee man, Ernest Aves, pinpointed the qualities that enabled Winnington Ingram to succeed at Oxford House and within the Church of England. Winnington Ingram was “attractive and safe” and made each person he met feel as if he were “the man [whom Winnington Ingram] has been waiting to see for the last six months.”130
The absence of artifice at Oxford House, Nevinson hinted, was itself a carefully crafted pose self-consciously adopted by residents to serve several specific goals. It enabled them to differentiate their simple venture from that of Toynbee Hall, where both the walls of its drawing room and the personalities of many of its residents were more than a little tinged with aesthetic hues. The Oxford House man was ascetic in his personal habits, eschewing male pleasures of sex and drink, but he also wasn’t afraid to enjoy himself in games and strenuous sports. He embraced the traditional symbols of Christianity while rejecting the trappings of bourgeois manhood. In short, he was thoroughly modern and reassuringly anachronistic, orthodox in his faith while attending to the changing needs of the people, zealous in his attention to liturgical ritual and heterodox in his masculinity and sexuality.
