Slumming

by Koven, Seth

75. In 1905, Samuel Barnett wrote that settlers “must live their own life. There must be no affectation of asceticism.” See H. Barnett, Canon Barnett, vol. 1, 312.

  76. For a detailed analysis of the paternalistic ideology of settlement houses by an architectural historian, see Deborah E. B. Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform in Late-Victorian London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), ch. 6.

  77. Percy Dearmer to Stuart Johnson, Easter 1892, as quoted in Nan Dearmer, Life of Percy Dearmer (London: J. Cape, 1940), 54.

  78. Ashbee Journals, August 28, 1887, Ashbee Papers; Edward Cummings, “University Settlements,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (April 1892): 263.

  79. The chairman of the Board of Oxford House, Sir William Anson criticized Toynbee’s programs in aesthetic education. See Sir William Anson, “The Oxford House in Bethnal Green,” Economic Review (January 1893): 15.

  80. This description comes from a note drafted in 1906 entitled “What Toynbee Hall Does for East London,” A/TOY/22/3/6, Toynbee Papers, as cited in Geoff Ginn, Gifts of Culture, Centres of Light: Cultural Philanthropy in the Late Victorian East End, Ph.D. diss., University of Queensland, 2001, 188.

  81. See Seth Koven, “Culture and Poverty: The London Settlement House Movement, 1870–1914,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1987.

  82. Henry Scott Holland, speech given at the Mansion House, January 21, 1891, appendix, Oxford House, Annual Report, 1891, 11.

  83. For a superb analysis of the impact of such European “tourism” on shaping social welfare in the United States, see Rogers, Atlantic Crossings, esp. ch. 2–3.

  84. Robert Woods to Anna Dawes, December 20, 1893, Woods Papers.

  85. Second Annual Report, Toynbee Hall, 1886, 40. American historians have offered first-rate analyses of the role of settlements as domestic spaces. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House as a Community of Women Reformers in the 1890’s,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10, no. 4 (Summer 1985): 657–677 and Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Both of these works focus on a settlement headed by women, but male settlements also produced “domestic” spaces and ideologies within their institutions.

  86. Clara Grant, a school visitor who ultimately established her own small settlement house, found Toynbee very open to her and other women engaged in social questions. She described herself as “a keen student at Toynbee Hall, where I found an intellectual home and came under the direct inspiring influence of its founder, Canon Barnett.” She also served as a watcher-docent at the Barnetts’ famous Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions. See Clara Grant, Farthing Bundles (London: A. & E. Walter, 1931) 79, 122–123.

  87. Bolton King, speech given at first annual meeting of Toynbee Old Students’ Association, Toynbee Record (July–August 1894), 134.

  88. Henrietta acknowledged the artificiality of settlements and eventually made her most lasting contribution as founder of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, where rich and poor lived in family units in their own homes. A few Toynbee men decided to live near the settlement with their wives and children and played active roles in the settlement as associates. See Margaret Nevinson’s vivid account of her ties to Toynbee Hall and her life nearby with her husband and children in Life’s Fitful Fever: A Volume of Memories (London: A. & C. Black, 1926), 77–103.

  89. The couple had no biological children of their own and many perceived Henrietta to be the more masculine of the two. On the Barnetts’ marriage and relationship to Toynbee Hall, see Seth Koven, “Henrietta Barnett: (Auto)biography of a Late-Victorian Marriage” in Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler, ed., After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 1994).

  90. Only one Oxford House resident, Patrick Buchanan, was married. He and his wife lived adjacent to the settlement’s working men’s club, the University Club. Perhaps because women had so few opportunities to contribute to the work of Oxford House in comparison to Toynbee Hall, where some taught classes and many others helped Henrietta, two small women’s settlements (St. Margaret’s and St. Hilda’s) linked themselves loosely to Oxford House as sister settlements.

  91. On Henson, see Owen Chadwick, Hensley Henson: A Study in the Friction between Church and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. 39–50. For Henson’s own account of his time at Oxford House, see Herbert Hensley Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), esp. ch. 2.

  92. Edward Cummings, “University Settlements,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (April 1892), 273.

  93. A co-editor of the monumental Works of John Ruskin (London: G. Allen, 1911), Edward Tyas Cook was an early resident of Toynbee Hall, where he edited the settlement’s periodical, the Toynbee Journal. The imperial administrator and future chairman of Toynbee Hall, Alfred Milner, had joined a group of idealistic undergraduates later closely associated with the Barnetts including Arnold Toynbee and the resolutely bohemian scion of one Anglo-Jewry’s most distinguished families, Leonard Montefiore. On Montefiore’s blending of high moral virtue and bohemianism, see H. Barnett, Canon Barnett, vol. 1, 304.

  94. Like nearly every other intellectual and political celebrity of the day, Pater made his way to Toynbee Hall in 1890, where he delivered a lecture on Wordsworth with his eyes shut to a subdued and puzzled audience. A long-time Toynbee associate, Henry Wood Nevinson, wrote a witty sketch of the event in Changes and Chances, 84.

  95. Alan Sinfield correctly observes that “aestheticism became a component in the image of the queer as it emerged, but it is a mistake simply to read this attitude back before the Wilde trials” (84). However, I am working with broader definitions of aestheticism and the aesthete than Sinfield. In this chapter, I show that aestheticism encompassed ideas and men not identified with effeminacy. See Sinfield, The Wilde Century, ch. 4. See also Linda Dowling’s teasing out of codes of masculinity and sexual desire in Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

  96. J. E. Kelsell, “Suggested Report of Toynbee Hall,” copy in Ashbee Journal, November 1886, ff. 399, Ashbee Papers.

  97. J. A. Spender, Life, Journalism, and Politics, vol. 1 (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1927), 46. For similar and quite moving descriptions of Barnett’s gentle spiritual magnetism, see the memoirs of a former Whitechapel vellum binder, Frederick Rogers, Labour, Life, and Literature: Some Memories of Sixty Years (London: Smith, Elder, 1913), 322. See also Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), 202.

  98. Baxter interview with Rev. Bayne, notes for Life and Labour of the People in London. Third Series. Religious Influences, vol. 2, London North of the Thames: The Inner Ring, A 39, parish notes, District 7 and 8, Booth Papers. In the final published version, Booth entirely discounted Bayne’s criticisms.

  99. Deeply attached to the ancient traditions of the church and the veracity of scripture as a record of historical events, such men insisted that “old truths” could best be preserved only by responding to “new needs, new points of view, new questions.” Charles Gore, preface, Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London: J. Murray, 1890), vii–ix.

  100. Winnington Ingram, as quoted in Carpenter, Winnington-Ingram, 39.

  101. Cosmo Gordon Lang, as quoted in J. G. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), 50.

  102. James Adderley, In Slums and Society: Reminiscences of Old Friends (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916), 47. Winnington Ingram’s first official biographer, Percy Colson, contended that Winnington Ingram’s character “has that great virtue which, of all qualities, is the most difficult to convey—perfect simplicity. There is nothing so subtle as simplicity.” Percy Colson, The Life of the Bishop of London: An Authorised Biography (London: Jarrolds, 1935), 8.

  103. James Adderley, “The Oxford House in Bethnal Green,” April 1887, pamphlet, reprinted from the Notes for Wor
king Members of the Associated Workers’ League, 7. For this and other early circulars advertising Oxford House, see GALond 4o 132, Bodleian, Oxford.

  104. But Henson also recognized that he, unlike his wealthy and aristocratic friend Adderley, could not afford to embrace a life of voluntary poverty permanently. See Henson, Retrospect, 14; and Chadwick, Hensley Henson.

  105. Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, A Labrador Doctor: Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 60, 58, 84.

  106. Henry Scott Holland, letter of October 1876, reprinted in Paget, Memoir and Letters, 88.

  107. Ibid., 61.

  108. Holland, letter of September 8, 1871, in ibid.

  109. Holland, letter of September 1, 1871, in ibid.

  110. Holland’s sense that the disavowal of luxury could itself be a source of pleasure echoed observations of British imperial adventurers. Mansfield Parkyns, who traveled in Egypt and Abyssinia, suggested that leaving “luxury … [for] a few months’ experience of hardship” would at first cause suffering but in the end lead to “real enjoyment.” Parkyns reveled in what he called the “sweets of savage life.” See Duncan Cumming, The Gentleman Savage: The Life of Mansfield Parkyns, 1823–1894 (London: Century, 1987), 66, 70.

  111. On the “primitive” in Victorian intellectual and social thought, see Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (London: Routledge, 1988). On the ways in which the discourse of the primitive functioned within a “sexualized field” of an imagined modern “us” and primitive “them,” see Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ch. 1.

  112. The mingling of ascetic self-denial, social reform, and imperial missionary impulses is strikingly evident in Robert Morant’s longing to live and work among boys in England and Siam in the 1880s and ’90s. As an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, in the early 1880s, Morant was ablaze with compassion for the poor and founded a “brotherhood” devoted to theological study and work among the rough lads in a village on the outskirts of Oxford. He was ready to cast his lot with Oxford House at the time of its founding when a spiritual crisis made him question his Anglo-Catholic beliefs and led him toward Toynbee Hall. Uncertain which scheme spoke most directly to his heart and mind, Morant left England for Siam, where he zealously guarded his sexual purity while tutoring young princes and helping to shape that nation’s system of education. Morant was happiest among poor boys in England and the “dear little” chaps in Siam with their “pearly white teeth and brown skin,” upon whom he lavished his affections and from whom he received the love he craved. Morant was one of the most influential welfare bureaucrats of his generation, and his intimate relationships with the poor while he was a resident of Toynbee Hall in the 1890s only confirmed his deeply held conviction that the health of the democratic state depended upon the voluntary submission of the “impulses of the many ignorant to the guidance and control of the few wise.” The “ignorant” many were to be loved, but not entrusted, with the nation’s future. See Bernard Allen, Robert Morant (London: MacMillan, 1934), 20, 52, 126.

  113. On this, see Henry Scott Holland, “Christian Asceticism,” manuscript of undated sermon, Holland Papers. Holland insisted that true Christian asceticism entailed not an act of repudiation, but rather one of joyous redemption.

  114. James Eli Adams provides a sophisticated analysis of the theatricality of asceticism. He argues that “every program of ascetic discipline requires holding a pose.” See Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 42. I follow Adams’s lead in proposing the instability of the oppositions between aestheticism and asceticism, muscular manliness and effeminacy.

  115. This is how Robert Dolling described St. Martin’s Mission in a tract dated December 31, 1884, which was reprinted in Charles Osborne, Life of Father Dolling (London: E. Arnold, 1903), 49.

  116. Neither Jay nor Dolling had much respect for the work of men’s settlements. Jay mocked Oxford House and Toynbee Hall as “little changing groups of stray residents” and once characterized Winnington Ingram’s ideas as “amiable absurdities.”

  117. G. B. Shaw’s Rev. Mavor Morrell in Candida is perhaps the best known literary representations of the unconventional slum priest-aesthete. G. B. Shaw, Candida (New York: Brentano’s, 1905).

  118. On the various controversies surrounding Anglo-Catholic ceremonial practices see James Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Attempt to Legislate Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). For an overview of ritualism in relationship to the history of High Churchmanship, see Kenneth Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship in the Church of England: From the Sixteenth Century to the Late Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: T &T Clark, 1993), esp. part 4.

  119. James Greaves to Bishop of London, October 11, 1886, ff 3, vol. 191, Fulham Papers.

  120. Septimus Hansard to Bishop Jackson, January 22, 1878, vol. 8, letter “H,” Fulham Papers. See also letters of Hansard to Jackson from December 5, 1877, and December 14, 1877. These files contain letters from a variety of people involved in Headlam’s music-hall controversy, both his supporters and detractors alike. As this evidence makes clear, McIlhiney’s claim that Headlam’s curacy under Hansard was the “only happy time period” in his official ministry is at best only partially true for the first years of their association. See McIlhiney, “A Gentleman in Every Slum,” 88. On Headlam’s music hall controversies, see John Orens, “The Mass, the Masses and the Music Hall: Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism,” Jubilee Paper (London: Jubilee Group, 1979).

  121. Jay’s celebrity was enhanced by the publication of Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago (1896), which was based on Morrison’s observations of Jay and his slum neighbors. Morrison painted an affectionate portrait of Jay as the slum priest Father Sturt in the novel. Morrison also endorsed Jay’s dismissal of the value of settlements by making fun of a thinly fictionalized version of Toynbee Hall called the East End Elevation Mission and Pansophical Institute. See Morrison, A Child of the Jago (London: J. M. Dent, 1996), ch. 2 and the excellent introduction by Peter Miles in the Everyman edition.

  122. Osborne, Life of Father Dolling, 140, 178. Kenneth Leech examines the legacy of Dolling in post–World War II London in “The End of the Dolling Era? Fr. Joe Williamson in Stepney,” in The Anglo-Catholic Social Conscience: Two Critical Essays (Croydon: Jubliee Group, 1991).

  123. Interview with Father Jay, February 10, 1898, B228, district 9, ff. 37, 59, Booth Papers.

  124. John Law (Margaret Harkness), Out of Work (London: Sonnenschein, 1888: rep., London: Merlin Press, 1990), 38–39. Citations are to Merlin edition.

  125. For discussion of Winnington Ingram’s involvement in campaigns against sexual immorality, in particular the use of movie theatres as places for homosexual encounters, see Dean Rapp, “Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic, and the British Film Industry, 1906–1918,” Albion (Fall 2002), 436, n. 53.

  126. According to Winnington Ingram’s biographer, he was briefly engaged to a woman he did not know well and who precipitously broke off the arrangement. He apparently never pursued any other romantic attachment. See Carpenter, Winnington-Ingram, 95, 116, 77.

  127. Dean of Westminster to Bishop Winnington Ingram, September 28, 1900, in reply to a series of questions posed by Winnington Ingram. Fulham Papers.

  128. H. W. Nevinson Diaries, February 11, 1893, ms. Eng.misc.e610/12, Nevinson Papers.

  129. Here, I am alluding to Edward Carpenter’s use of the term “intermediate sex” to describe men and women who were sexually attracted in different degrees to members of their own sex. Carpenter’s sexology was based on a continuum of sexualities in which some were “purely” drawn to the opposite sex, and some to the same sex, others were in-between these
pure forms, and hence “intermediates.”

  130. Interview with A. F. Winnington Ingram, December 28, 1898, by Ernest Aves, B228, ff. 34–35, Religious Census, Booth Papers.

  131. No evidence suggests that Bloxam had in mind the men of Oxford House as he developed his protagonist, Ronald Heatherington. However, we can be fairly certain that he (along with most High Church students at Oxford) would have been familiar with the settlement and its work. For a perceptive analysis of the connections between homoeroticism and Anglican theology and practice, see Frederick S. Roden, Same Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (London: Palgrave, 2002).

  132. The Chameleon reunited many of the same future clergymen and homosexual literati, including Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, who had contributed to the Spirit Lamp the preceding two years. Its publication excited considerable commentary, most of it very critical of the “unnatural” tone of its literary contributions. The work is reprinted in its entirety in Brian Reade, Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1971), 349–360. Page numbers in my text refer to this reprinted version of the story.

  133. See Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1925 (London: Oxford University Press), 143.

  134. No evidence discussing Bloxam’s appointment or work survives in Winnington Ingram’s episcopal files at Lambeth Palace.

  135. See Carpenter, Winnington-Ingram, 170–175. According to the historian of St. Saviour’s, Kilburn introduced vestments, reservation of the Sacrament, incense, and devotions to Our Lady and eventually banished all official Anglican service books in favor of the Latin Mass. Kilburn even organized massive processions of the Blessed Sacrament through Hoxton on the Feast of Corpus Christi. While Bloxam never provoked the level of public controversy that had surrounded Kilburn, he tenaciously preserved the style of services Kilburn had introduced. See John Harwood, “Vanished Church, Vanished Streets: The Parish of St. Saviour’s, Hoxton,” East London Record no. 9 (1986): 14–17.