Christ’s Last Ante:
Charles Booth, Church Charity and the Poor-but-Respectable
Thomas R.C. Brydon
Department of History
McGill University, Montreal
October, 2007
A thesis submitted to McGill University
in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
© Thomas R.C. Brydon, 2007.
Abstract
The social statistician, Charles Booth, the ministers of London’s churches,
chapels and missions, the thousands of churchwomen, and the working classes of
London, all had one thing in common in 1900: their strong sense of insecurity.
The unpublished notebooks of Charles Booth’s “Religious Influences” archive,
the third part of his influential inquiry Life and Labour of the People in London
(1889-1903), tell us that in response to this insecurity all found stability in a
moral-religious ideology. This is the first dissertation to employ this archive in its
entirety. Booth employed this moral ideology to divide the metropolitan working
class into respectable and unrespectable citizens. He recommended the
authoritarian solution of the labour colony for the latter. Churchmen and women
social workers constructed their own religious and scientific hybrid for social
work among the poor, and women made an equally strict effort to divide needy
from needy. Both religious scientist and scientific religionist called their ideology
misleading names. Booth called his “scientific” social work. Churchmen and
women called theirs a Christian ideology of love and brotherhood with the poor.
In practice, both meant the moral segregation of poor people, specifically in the
field of charity, and their ideology had evangelical roots. The great contribution of
Booth’s Life and Labour survey was to reveal that poor working people in the
metropolis saw themselves not as a working class, nor as “rough” and
“respectable” classes, but as part of a poor-but-respectable hierarchy. Their lives
were characterized by a self-perpetuating round of social, economic and
behavioural self-discipline on the one hand, and psychological and emotional
release on the other. The extraordinary frankness of the private testimonies of
over 1800 metropolitan personalities reveals to us a middle class obsessed with
the moral segregation of working people, and – in contrast to much social history
stressing coziness and communality – a working class that morally segregated
itself as part of its response to the anxieties of absolute and relative poverty. This
popular effort before 1914 to create a multi-classed and respectable Christian
community I have called Christ’s Last Ante.
ii
Résumé
Au début du 20e siècle, le démographe Charles Booth, les ministres des
églises, chapelles et missions de Londres, les milliers de paroissiennes charitables
et les ouvriers de Londres ont tous un trait en commun : une immense insécurité.
Les carnets inédits de Charles Booth sur les influences religieuses, qui forment la
troisième partie de son enquête magistrale intitulée Life and Labour of the People
in London (1889-1903), nous apprennent qu’en réponse à cette insécurité, tous se
raccrochent à une certaine idéologie morale et religieuse. La présente dissertation
réfère pour la première fois à l’ensemble des archives. Booth se sert de son
idéologie morale pour diviser la classe ouvrière de la capitale en citoyens
respectables et non respectables et, pour ces derniers, recommande d’autorité les
colonies de travail. Ecclésiastiques et travailleuses sociales appliquent leur propre
mélange de religion et de science pour venir en aide aux indigents, pendant que
les âmes charitables s’efforcent avec non moins de rigueur de distinguer les
démunis d’entre les démunis. Le scientifique religieux et le religieux scientifique
commettent la même erreur d’appellation en parlant de leur idéologie. On voit
Booth qualifier son travail social de « scientifique ». Clergé et paroissiennes
parlent quant à eux d’un idéal chrétien fondé sur l’amour du prochain et la
solidarité. En pratique, tous opèrent la même ségrégation à l’égard des pauvres,
spécialement dans le domaine de la charité, et leur idéologie a ses racines dans
l’évangélisme. La grande contribution de l’enquête de Booth sera de démontrer
que les ouvriers de la métropole ne se perçoivent pas comme une classe ouvrière,
ni même comme une classe de gens « rudes » mais « respectables », mais plutôt
comme constituant une hiérarchie sociale pauvre-mais-respectable. Leur vie se
caractérise par la ronde sans cesse renouvelée de l’autodiscipline sociale,
économique et comportementale d’une part, et des défoulements psychologiques
et émotionnels de l’autre. Avec une candeur renversante, les confessions privées
de quelque 1 800 personnalités de la métropole nous révèlent non seulement une
classe moyenne obsédée par la ségrégation morale de la classe ouvrière, mais –
quoi qu’en dise l’histoire sociale qui parle réconfort et esprit communautaire –
iii
une classe ouvrière qui opère elle-même une ségrégation dictée par la crainte de la
pauvreté absolue et de la pauvreté relative. Cet effort populaire, avant 1914, de
créer une communauté chrétienne multiclasse et respectable constitue ce que
j’appelle « le dernier ante (du) Christ ».
iv
Acknowledgements
Professor Brian Lewis, my supervisor, deserves my great thanks for his
tireless work as an editor, critic, and “coach” in the writing of this dissertation,
but also for the excellent example he sets, for myself and for others, as both a
teacher and a writer of history. Professor Lewis’ encouragement and our many
conversations have had a crucial role in shaping this work and I thank him for his
patience, his humour and his friendship.
I also thank Colleen Parish and the staff of the McGill History
Department, SSHRC, and the staff of the London School of Economics archives.
Next I wish to thank Laura Nagy. Her now flagging laptop computer, her
support and her love have been the foundation for what this dissertation has
become. For her patience, her strength, and her partnership I thank her from the
bottom of my heart.
My mother, Cathay Gibson, provided me with an example of compassion
and sacrifice that underpins all of my writing. Her demand for a world without
hurt, desperation, poverty and discrimination has always been uncompromising.
Her sacrifices made this dissertation possible long before I sat down to write it. I
will always thank her for this. Likewise, for the same steadfast hope for a better
world, I thank my brother, Jeff.
My father, Tom Brydon, in side-wash camps and on our long drives,
taught me that so much rests on how stories are told. My understanding of history
began with his stories of my grandfather in World War Two. Behind any theory
of narrating history, for me, has always remained the “boring stories” I still ask
him to tell.
I thank Tavis Triance for his uncompromising rule that the writer must
always “make it new.” Sebastian Normandin I thank for his example as a scholar
dedicated to breaking boundaries. David Meren and Jarrett Rudy, likewise, kept
me honest. Danny Anderson, Martin Forcier, John Jaenicke, Chris Karogiannis
and Matt Farnholtz I thank for their long friendships. Professor Colin Duncan and
Professor Ruth Sandwell I thank for new approaches to writing working people’s
history, and I thank Richard and Jane Duncan, my good friends in London.
v
Table of Contents
Introduction
1
Part I. Charles Booth: Religious Social Scientist
Chapter 1. The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist
1. Introduction
33
2. The Confident Booth?
36
3. The Conservative and Imperial Booth
57
4. Captain of Industry? Booth’s Masculinity
61
5. The Moral and Intellectual Booth:
Origins and Inconsistencies in the Religious History of Victorian Morals 65
6. The Religious Booth: Letters from America and Italy
82
Chapter 2. Moral Classification and Authoritarianism:
Charles Booth’s Answer to the Victorian Social Problem
1. Introduction: The Harder Side of a Religious Sensibility
103
2. Moral Segregation: The Problem Behind the “Social Problem”
110
3. The Popularity of the Labour Colony Solution
129
4. The Response of Historians to Charles Booth’s Authoritarianism
137
Chapter 3. From Poverty to Charity:
Behind the Religious Influences Series
149
Part II. The London Churchmen
Chapter 4. “Ordinary Mortals”: History and Holy Men
1. Introduction
203
2. Insecure Ministers
208
vi
Chapter 5. Incarnational Inspiration, Scientific Security:
The Social Science of the Metropolitan Minister
1. Introduction
259
2. “Universalism” among Ministers
260
3. Scientific Holy Men
272
Chapter 6. Charity Control in East and South London
1. Introduction
310
2. “Your Gift to London”
311
3. East London and Charity Control
314
4. COS Critiques of the London Minister
320
5. Normal Men, Hard Lines:
Charity Elites and Charity Control in Poor South London
331
6. Rev. A.H. De Fontaine, Charity Registration,
and Holy Men against the “Dead Hand” of Parochial Charities
349
Chapter 7. Church Charity Control Outside the COS
1. Introduction
365
2. The Southwark Anglicans vs. J.W.C Fegan
366
3. Nonconformists and Charity Control:
The Generous Representatives of “Social” Nonconformity?
373
4. “Sympathy with Discrimination”:
Charity Control and the Nonconformists of East London
378
5. Distrust of the Adult Poor:
Charity Control and the Nonconformists of South London
383
6. Careful Men: Anglican Charity Control without COS Membership
392
7. The Bad, the Dead and the Misunderstood
396
vii
8. Conclusion
412
Part III. Women Social Workers in the Metropolis
Chapter 8. Women in the Churches
1. Introduction: Three Problems of Women’s History:
Love, Feminism and “Men’s Worlds”
416
2. Loving Poor People
419
3. A World Without Socialist Feminism
424
4. Behind Men’s Worlds: Ernest Aves, Harry Toynbee
and the Case of the Christ Church Relief Committee
428
5. “While he was in petticoats”: Anglican Women,
Charity Control and the Hierarchicalization of Poor London
434
a. Anglican Missioners
440
b. Anglican Church Workers
445
c. Wives of Clergymen and Nonconformist Ministers
462
6. “I have picked them up”: Nonconformist Women and Charity Control 469
a. Missions
469
b. Congregationalists, Baptists and Wesleyans
477
7. A Socialist Feminist in 1900: Mrs. Charlotte Despard
481
Chapter 9. Feminists Against the Poor:
“Secular” Philanthropic Professionals and London Charity Work
1. Introduction
485
2. Nursing the Poor: Misses Ward, Bullock, Meyer and Williams
491
3. Emma Cons: Philanthropic Housing and Working-Class Education
493
4. Miss Bell: Charity Registration
502
5. Miss Bannatyne and Miss Sewell: The Women’s University Settlement 509
viii
6. Misses Davis, Burrell, Pritchard, Lilly, Maclean, Simonds
and Mrs. Blyth: The Women of the East London COS
518
7. Conclusion
521
Part IV. The Poor-but-Respectable Working Classes
Chapter 10. The Hard Lines of the Working-Class Hierarchy in South London
1. Introduction:
Charles Booth’s Contribution to Understanding
Late Victorian Working People
524
2. The Making and Re-Making of the East Dulwich Working Classes:
The Case of Mr. E.M. Falkner
554
3. Dreams of Calm, Comfort and Order:
Working-Class Emigration to Pink South London
560
4. Behind the “Rough,” the “Residuum”
and the “Dead Level of Poverty”:
Hierarchy in Poor, Inner South London
575
Chapter 11. Working-Class Classism in London:
Churches, Clothes and the “Clothing Difficulty”
1. Introduction.
587
2. Hierarchy in the Churches
587
3. Hierarchy in the Clubs
589
4. Hierarchy in the Schools
591
5. Hierarchy in Dress: A Working-Class Movement
593
a. East London
593
b. South London
595
c. Pink South London
597
d. Purple South London
599
ix
e. Poor South London
602
6. “The Clothing Difficulty” and Religion among the Very Poor
619
a. Missions
620
b. Theatres
622
c. Open-Air Meetings
629
d. Peckham Rye
635
Chapter 12. Poor Respectability and Self-Discipline
1. Introduction
653
2. Self-Discipline:
Respectable Behaviour among the Poor-but-Respectable
654
3. Products of Poor Respectability: Radicalism?
671
4. Products of Poor Respectability:
Social Subordination and Moral Segregation
in the Working-Class Community
676
a. Will Crooks and Labour Colonies
677
b. “Mumpers” and “Cadgers”: The Charity-Scrounger Stereotype
694
Chapter 13. Products of Poor Respectability:
Hard Drinking and Anxiety Release
708
Chapter 14. Christ’s Last Ante: Successful Churches in 1900
1. Introduction:
Money Participation and the Churchgoing Working Classes
744
2. Welfare, Giving, and Saving
749
a. Anti-Charity Rhetoric
749
b. Working People’s Donations to Church Funds
753
c. A Few Pence for the Heathen
760
x
d. Saving: The Respectability of Paying for It
769
3. Cross-Class Cooperation and Working-Class Churchworkers
781
4. A Churchman of the People
791
Conclusion
1. Christians too Christian:
Booth’s Verdict of Churchwork in London
797
2. The End of “Churchfare”
801
3. Scruples and Social Science
802
4. Grateful Holy Men
804
5. The (Doubtful) Fruits of Experience
807
6. The Viability of Social Subordinative Relations in an Unequal World
810
7. Inequality and Christianity in 1900
816
Bibliography
821
xi
Introduction
Few men in late Victorian social histories are referred to more consistently
than Charles Booth. A virtual superstar in terms of the public knowledge of his
inquiry, he was referred to by social thinkers on a regular basis,1 and now he is
worth at least one footnote from most historians of the period.2 Yet often he is
only a vehicle for other stories. Few historians know that Booth is the story
himself. Charles Booth provides us with a window on a religious, class-stratified
society obsessed with old evangelical ideas of work and charity.
Historians of Charles Booth have him all wrong. Charles Booth was not a
very good businessman. He was too morally-minded to be a social scientist. Yet
he has been called both.3 There has been a deliberate attempt to paint him as a
leader in both respects, when Booth himself would have shied at the name.
As we will see in Chapter 1, Booth was at once extremely serious,
pathologically anxious, and helplessly indecisive. He was a man whose indecision
required an ideology that he felt was without capacity for error. Despite many
attempts by historians to secularize him, he chose a brand of nineteenth century
evangelicalism – an amalgam of science and religion which helped him through
1
David Englander, one of Booth’s major scholars, has emphasized that Booth’s survey, The Life
and Labour of the People in London, “deeply” influenced contemporary thinking about poverty
and its remedies. David Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to
Booth, 1834-1914 (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), 65.
2
Booth’s ubiquitousness seemed a fact always in the background of the reading required by my
masters’ thesis and comprehensive years at McGill University. But another student of the
university and my partner, Laura Nagy, has regularly shouted her own witnessings of Booth’s
omnipresent place in modern historical scholarship (both British and Canadian) from her desk (her
exclamations heard as this thesis was being written) and I thank her for hammering this point
home.
3
The only scholar dissenting from presenting Booth as an outstanding social scientist and
businessman (but particularly from the latter view) is his first academic scholar, A.H. John. A.H.
John, A Liverpool Merchant House: Being the History of Alfred Booth and Company, 1863-1958
(London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1959). Works specifically devoted to Booth and his work
include. Mary Booth, Charles Booth: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1918); T.S. Simey and
M.B. Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960); Belinda
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations: The Life and Labour of Charles and Mary Booth (London:
George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1972); Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral
Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), esp. Book 2; Rosemary
O’Day and David Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in
London Reconsidered (London: Hambledon Press, 1993); David Englander and Rosemary O’Day,
Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in London, 1840-1914 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).
1
both a crisis of faith, and later, the challenge of metropolitan social analysis. Like
many contemporaries, Booth struggled with the impact of Darwinism, yet his
encounter with evolutionary science amounted more to a reconciliation with
religion, a rapprochement with his faith, than a rejection of it. By the time of his
famous inquiry, The Life and Labour of the People in London, Booth depended
particularly on his moral-religious sensibility to determine which working
Londoners made good, independent citizens, and which did not.4
Nineteenth century Evangelical Christianity (an evangelicalism borne of a
starkly unequal society) had a hard current of authoritarianism.5 One can see
strong evidence of this not only in Booth’s recommendations of who was morally
good and who was not in the metropolis, but also in his choice of the labour
colony for the latter, a detention camp for the workshy to teach them to love
labour. Booth, of course, did not call his starkly moral thinking evangelicalism.
But looked at closely, Booth’s belief in moral capitalism and character in 1900
was a mirror image of the evangelicalism promoted by Anglican clerics threequarters of a century before. T.H. Green, in the words of Gertrude Himmelfarb,
spoke of a new “secularized Evangelicalism” in 1870.6 Secularized or not, it had
the same hard rules: that work, often painful, energized men and separated them
from those less virtuous. Historians have not explored Booth’ moral-religious
side. Moreover, while scholars discuss Charles’ wife Mary and her contribution to
his work, they have not been so keen to discuss how she nursed Charles through a
crisis of faith, and with the help of her family, perhaps helped to ground his mind
in moral convictions, thus readying him for his monumental, seventeen-year,
seventeen-volume study of the metropolis.
Booth’s conviction that a spiritualized capitalism produced a respectable,
working-class majority (however poor) underpinned much of the Life and Labour
inquiry. He betrayed his evangelical roots when he emphasized that it was the
4
Charles Booth, The Life and Labour of the People in London 17 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1902-3). Booth’s three series for the survey were entitled “Poverty,” “Industry,” and “Religious
Influences.” Citations will refer to the series, volume and page number.
5
The best account to date of evangelicalism’s impact on social and economic thought is Boyd
Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic
Thought, 1795-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
6
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 248.
2
pain and anxiety of competition that would separate the wheat from the chaff
among working people. As Gertrude Himmelfarb has noted, the moral division of
the poor was a theme evoked, in a number of instances, by working people, as
much as it was by the middle and ruling classes. This is the subject of Chapter 2.
Broadly, the separation of respectable from immoral and irregular working classes
could be seen in the well-behaved London Dock Strike of 1889, the separation of
regularly-working from casually-working dockworkers in de-casualization
schemes in London and Liverpool, in the selective philanthropic work of the
Charity Organization Society, and in most Edwardian welfare legislation.7 One
finds it at a local level through the lens of one South London newspaper, The
South London Press. Booth’s religious outlook led him to declare that ninetypercent of the population adhered adequately enough to moral and financial selfdiscipline to keep them respectable or poor-but-respectable. His moral view also
led him to demand incarceration of a workshy loafer class in labour colonies.
Historians’ depiction of Booth as sensitive and humanitarian unfortunately
ignores the authoritarian, moral-religious edges of his ideas.
Booth’s turn to a six-year study of Religious Influences in the metropolis,
after completing two surveys on Poverty and Industry in London, has baffled
historians for decades. But once we see Booth’s religious core, his belief in the
spiritual quality of capitalist competition, and his admiration for poor-butrespectable working people, his study of religious influences seems a logical next
step. This is the subject of Chapter 3. His Poverty series had shown Booth how
respectable and self-disciplined workers were in London (and he had made
draconian recommendations as to what to do with the minority who were not).
Most London workers, he found, carried with them a moral sensibility that caused
them to hold tightly to respectability and, for a poor fifth of working London, to
hold tighter to poor respectability. Booth’s Industry series, moreover, had
7
For a discussion on the increasing distinction of the respectable poor from an immoral underclass
see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in
Victorian Society (London: Penguin Books, 1971), esp. ch. 17; Himmelfarb, Poverty and
Compassion esp. Books 1-3. For a discussion of the same distinctions employed in Edwardian
housing and welfare legislation, see Thomas R.C. Brydon, “Poor, Unskilled and Unemployed:
Perceptions of the English Underclass, 1889-1914,” (M.A. Thesis, McGill University, 2001).
3
demonstrated to him that the London economy provided everyone with a chance
to succeed in the market place, provided they worked as regularly as possible. The
moral majority, in a spiritualized market, would overcome all odds, while the
immoral minority would find an unpleasant end in the street, in the workhouse or,
he hoped, in state-supported labour colonies.
The Religious Influences series was meant to be an audit of those
officially in charge of the spiritual welfare of the metropolis – those clergymen,
ministers, priests and missioners charged with instilling the many working classes
with the moral self-discipline that would propel them, within the struggles of the
marketplace, into poor respectability.
Booth believed most of all that the charity of the churches was the most
important factor in making poor-but-respectable citizens. For Booth, a man who
merged social and religious influences in most of his researches, charity was the
most important religious “influence.” Charity was to go to the deserving classes
he had identified (about 20% of poor London, and all of the respectable working
classes when they got in trouble), and charity was to be denied the class he called
“loafers” (10% of poor London). Although famous clergymen and newspapers
both welcomed the Religious Influences series as an encouragement to more
“responsible” charity, no historian has pointed to the Religious Influences series
and called it what it was: an audit of London church charity. This is readily
explained. Historians have been misled by the Booth children who swore their
father had no interest in religion. They have underestimated how much spiritual
harm he felt misplaced charity could wreak upon a poor metropolitan population.
As a result of this misstep, historians have instead portrayed Booth as a humane,
sensitive man, who rejected the hard-line individualism of the Charity
Organisation Society.
It seems clear, however, that Booth’s moral-religious sensibility caused
him to believe in the existence of good and bad working people. It caused him to
create a morally-charged science of dividing them, and to employ men in his
survey historians have not realized were religious – secretaries like George
Arkell. It caused Booth to believe in a capitalism that awarded the morally good.
4
It made him believe that religion, when mixed with incentive-destroying charity,
defeated its purpose of creating self-disciplined citizens.
The COS, far from breaking with Booth ideologically, had no qualms with
such notions. The Society’s attack on what it called “indiscriminate charity” and
its search for the poor-but-respectable working man and woman (a group
deserving of help) was the basis for its existence.8 Booth’s “disagreements” with
the Society have been exaggerated by historians.9 Despite public quarrels with
Society officials (over, for example, old age pensions) we have ignored the
affinity of Booth’s beliefs with theirs (and the paradoxical popularity of expensive
old age pensions as eliminators of “dole” charities at this time). The fact that COS
officials had a profound impact on the research and writing of Booth’s Religious
Influences series has also been ignored. Notably, scholars have missed the fact
that one of Booth’s closest secretaries, writers and investigators for the series,
Arthur Baxter, was himself a former COS official for Battersea.
When Booth spoke, people listened. Booth traced solid boundaries
between respectable and unrespectable working people. He hoped that local and
central government, and other authorities, would derive their social policies on the
basis of these boundaries. He hoped especially that his moral social science would
be used to determine who received relief in the metropolis, and who did not. In
terms of municipal and central government, it seems clear that Booth’s influence
produced Edwardian welfare policies taking very seriously the respectable/
unrespectable divide.10 But would the churches and their churchmen – publicly
professionals who were very thankful for his inquiry and his scientific method of
charity – follow his advice?
8
For the Society’s campaign against indiscriminate charity, see C.S. Loch, Charity and Social
Life: A Short Study of Religious and Social Thought in Relation to Charitable Methods and
Institutions (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910); Charles Loch Mowat, The Charity Organisation
Society 1869-1913: Its Ideas and Its Work (London: Methuen, 1961); Himmelfarb, Poverty and
Compassion esp. 185-206; Robert Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity and the Poor Law in
Victorian England (London: Macmillan, 1995).
9
David Englander and Rosemary O’Day, in their Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry and their Retrieved
Riches are particularly conspicuous for their attempts to distance Booth from the Society.
10
See footnote 1 above, and see discussion in Chapter 2.
5
On the surface, the London clergy (the average clergymen, ministers,
missioners and priests, rather than the heads of churches, who lauded Booth’s
survey in the press) did not appear a very reliable group. As Chapter 4 will
demonstrate, interviews with the London clergy revealed an anxious, depressed
group of men defeated and disillusioned by what they thought was the
secularization of the London working class. Some clergymen seemed on the verge
of breakdown. Repeatedly Booth and his reviewers praised the extraordinary selfsacrifice of ministers, but old age, sickness and the so-called “moral degradation”
of working-class communities threatened ministers’ physical and mental welfare.
Like Booth, therefore, we find in the metropolitan minister a fragile personality.
His authority was constantly questioned in an atmosphere of public drinking,
public sex and public violence. Some ministers fell into drinking themselves and
caused scandal in their East and South London communities. Others suffered
mental collapses. Always they were faced with the difficulty of adequately
funding church social auxiliaries. Ministerial embarrassments and lower class
ministers faced the snobbery and class consciousness of a multi-classed
ministerial community around them. Ministers spoke snobbishly of colleagues
with immoral or unrespectable pasts. All ministers, moreover, constantly accused
each other of misuse of, or excessive requests for, church donations.
Worst of all for these men, the gospel of their churches no longer seemed
to appeal to working Londoners. Ministers admitted to the Booth men that many
of their parishioners were indifferent to religion. South London ministers in
particular pronounced their neighbourhoods a spiritual dead-zone. They weren’t,
of course. An enormous portion of the working class, a fifth of it at least, were
attending church fairly regularly (which left out thousands more who attended
now and then, as well as those in social auxiliaries of the church, and of course,
those who prayed at home).11 Ministers, nevertheless decried the “indifference” of
11
At first, historians paying too much attention to orthodox attendance-based religiosity largely
repeated ministers’ assessments that the late Victorian working class was “indifferent” to Christian
religion. See E.R. Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City (London: Lutterworth Press,
1957); K.S. Inglis, The Churches and the Working Classes in England (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1963); Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (Hamden,
Conneticut: Archon Books, 1974); A.D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in England: Church, Chapel
6
the people, ignoring and dismissing unorthodox forms of worship. They bewailed
their position as Christian ministers with a great deal of self-pity, each man
overwhelmed by a strong feeling of crisis. An unexpected but nevertheless telling
image is that of ministers smoking cigarettes with Ernest Aves while being
interviewed. According to Gerald Parsons, anxious concerns about popular
irreligion caused ministers to participate in both Protestant and Anglo-Catholic
revivals (the latter leading to more worries for ministers as High Churches
became rumoured sanctuaries for Anglican sexual dissidents). In a time, as
Richard Dellamora has noted, when homosexual scandal, working-class
emancipation, and the liberation of a female elite challenged the authority of the
middle- and upper-class “gentleman,” upper-class ministers (and assertive, lowerclass ministers as well) felt themselves engaged in a difficult moral counterattack
in a world they felt was plagued by class, gender and sexual disorder.12
As in the case of Booth’s fragile mindset, and his evangelical solution, the
historian must find an ideological prop that provided the London minister with the
conviction to carry on. Historians have often argued that their response was an
intense Incarnational theology: a newly generous, welfarist religion and a break
from a harsher, evangelical past. But, as I argue in Chapter 5, this is too
optimistic. A number of ministers preaching an Incarnational “new love” for the
poor undoubtedly made charity-conscious observers like Booth nervous, but
and Social Change, 1740-1914 (New York: Longman, 1976); R. Currie, A. Gilbert and L. Horsley,
Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977). In recent decades, there has been a reversal of interpretations, historians
stressing a wide variety of informal and folk religiosity, including participation in irregular
churchgoing, in social auxiliaries, and in popular customs and rituals. Hugh McLeod traced the
change of interpretation to discoveries found in oral sources, but both Jeffrey Cox and S.C
Williams base their theses largely on evidence found in the Booth Archive at the London School
of Economics. Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870-1930
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Hugh McLeod, “New perspectives on Victorian
working-class religion: the oral evidence,” Oral History Journal 14 (1986): 31-50; S. C. Williams,
Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c.1880-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999); Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britian: Understanding Secularisation,
1800-2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
12
Gerald Parsons, “Emotion and Piety: Revivalism and Ritualism in Victorian Christianity,” in
Gerald Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1988); David Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,”
Victorian Studies 25 (1981-2): 181-210; Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual
Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,
1990)
7
overall historians and contemporaries have overestimated the generous, practical
potential of this rhetoric.13 Speaking of “practical religion” and an unproblematic
merging of “Science” and “Religion,” both Anglicans and Nonconformists –
including Bishop Edward Talbot, Dr. Clifford, R.W. Dale and Hugh Price Hughes
– spoke in the same language Booth did when he spoke of the moral “forces” of
capitalism. Social work, they believed, should be a combination of “scientific”
and moral forces.
If Christianity provided the moral force, however, who provided the
science? We can be sure it was not the churches themselves. Historians of parish
work at this time tell us that the churches had no hard and fast rules, and that no
definite handbook for training ministers in parish and neighbourhood social work,
in any denomination, existed until after World War I.14 Perhaps the most
fascinating thing about parish work in this period is that Charles Booth’s Life and
Labour volumes may have been as close a manual as ministers could find. A
closer look at the 1450 interviews with ministers themselves tells us that – if
Booth’s ideas of poverty were open to moral and religious influence – London’s
holy men (Anglican and Nonconformist) likewise tempered Incarnational doctrine
with a science of moral discrimination – and that this science may have been
Booth’s. Ministers mentioned and praised Booth’s works in their interviews, they
spoke in the same hierarchical terms of the working class, they spoke of a
despised loafer class, and they had the volumes of the Life and Labour survey
(and the helpful maps within them) on their bookshelves.
13
Scholars seeing a shift in the last quarter of the nineteenth century toward a new, social and
humanitarian Christianity include A.M. Ramsey, From Gore to Temple: The Development of
Anglican Theology between ‘Lux Mundi’ and the Second World War, 1889-1939 (London:
Longmans, 1960); Peter d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877-1914; Religion, Class,
and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968);
E.R. Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770-1970: A Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1976); Hilton, Age of Atonement; Cheryl Walsh, “The Incarnation and the Christian
Socialist Conscience in the Victorian Church of England,” Journal of British Studies 34 (July
1995), 366-370; Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850-1914 (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1996).
14
Rosemary O’Day, “The Clerical Renaissance in Victorian England and Wales,” in Gerald
Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 203204; A. Haig, The Victorian Clergy: An Ancient Profession Under Strain (London: Croom Helm,
1984). See also Anthony Russell, The Clerical Profession (London: SPCK, 1980), 1-49, 253-257;
Brian Heeney, A Different Type of Gentleman: Parish Clergy as Professional Men in Early and
Mid-Victorian England (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books 1976), 1-10, 13, 94-95.
8
One would expect that this gave Charles Booth faith that London’s
ministers kept a careful watch over their charity, distributing it “carefully” and
“sensibly.” Yet as we will see in Chapter 6 and 7, this was not always the case.
Booth’s over-reliance on COS representatives in East and South London, and in
the case of the latter, on the ubiquitous Harry Toynbee, biased his conclusions so
heavily that – no matter how earnestly ministers declared their adherence to “COS
principles” – it was never enough for Booth and his investigators. This has caused
some historians to paint the COS and the London clergymen (just as they painted
the COS and Charles Booth) as ideological opponents, as a generous new clergy
against an outdated, hardnosed Society facing obsolescence in a period of welfare
reform. In fact, they were all of them competing groups in an intensely subjective
field of charity control – each group painting itself as an “expert” – each group
criticizing the other – but each group armed with the same intent to discriminate
poor working people from poor working people according to the “science” Booth
had laid down in his Poverty series. One COS official and church worker in
Battersea, Mr. Warneford Moffat (who worked for the parish of St. Saviour’s)
told a sympathetic Arthur Baxter, in a long-winded rant, that the entirety of the
Battersea clergy were charitable incompetents:
Though he works with him cordially and likes him personally Mr. M.
evidently has the poorest opinion of Dr. Rice as a parson, an opinion which
extends to practically all the clergy of Battersea: the whole thing is ‘dead’, and
in common with many strong men who have had a practical training Mr. M
attributes the failure of the church primarily to the “pitiable stupidity” of the
clergy, who are, (at all events outside theology) ignorant, ill trained, and either
unwilling or unable to learn: “a parish” said Mr. M. “is simply what the
parson makes it: give me a live man in a parish and there are sure to be
results.” In their administration of relief especially does Mr. M. blame the
clergy: parochial relief committees should be universal (there are none in
Battersea except St. Saviour’s) and curates should be obliged to attend the
meetings of the C.O.S.: whether they adopted the C.O.S. view or not the
training to them, utterly inexperienced as they usually are, would be
invaluable. Mr. M. hopes that Mr. Booth will make a strong recommendation
in this sense in the book. The Bishop of Rochester is certainly strongly in
favour of Relief Committees and at a great meeting in Battersea about a year
ago advocated them strongly, but Dr. Rice (at one time the most hopeless of
the clergy) alone spoke strongly in their favour.15
15
Moffat, B 296: 139-143. Baxter highlighted this passage.
9
The greatest mistake of historians has been, as Booth did, to take COS officials at
their word. We have taken their criticism of insufficient ministerial “cooperation”
with the COS seriously, when we should simply be looking for the intent among
ministers to “give carefully.” It was not as if Booth or the COS’ “science of
charity” required a competent or terrifically intelligent individual to employ it. If
a minister had a moral sensibility, and believed in good and bad working people,
which most did, calling oneself a scientific religionist (in the minister’s case) was
as easy as operating as a religious scientist (in the case of Booth and the COS).
This allows us to see, first, a group of young, motivated South London
clergymen achieve the status of a charity elite in what was seen at the time as a
poorer part of London than that of the East End. This elite explicitly allied
themselves with the COS against “indiscriminate” charity. They mobilized, under
the leadership of Christ Church’s Rector, Rev. A.H. De Fontaine, to register all
churches’ charity through the use of the South London Registration Committee.
And they became charity reformers with the great hope that old, apparently
unselective Trust Charities (what were angrily called “dole charities”) might be
transformed into discriminating pension-providing organizations for the deserving
elderly (thus demonstrating the paradoxical popularity of pensions as dole-killing
expedients). Focusing on clergymen’s intent to give carefully also shows us that –
in and out of the COS – there were myriad ways ministers could adhere to the
principles of charity control. Unfortunately, Nonconformist ministers have
suffered from the same “binarization” by historians – the same hasty segregation
of historical constituents into “right” and “left” – which we find throughout
British social history in this period.16 A look at both the most radical leaders of
Nonconformity and the explicit testimony of average ministers pledging
“sympathy with discrimination” (in both the East and the South Ends), however,
16
Cox, The English Churches; David Englander, “The Word and the World: Evangelicalism in the
Victorian City,” in Gerald Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988); R.J. Helmstadter, “The Nonconformist Conscience,” in Gerald Parsons
ed., Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Gerald
Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel: Victorian Christian Social Attitudes,” in Gerald
Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988);
McLeod, Religion and Society in England 140-144.
10
tells us not to do this. Nonconformists such as the Wesleyans seemed most
symptomatic of a more sympathetic approach to slum children sweeping London
at this time, and this seems to have caused Booth a great deal of distress in his
published volumes, but in terms of adult working people, discrimination of the
“genuine” worker from the loafer remained paramount in Nonconformist social
work. Anglicans agreed: despite Booth’s attacks on them in his published
volumes, they presented a variety of personal and incidental reasons why they did
not cooperate with the COS, while still adhering to the Society’s principles. In the
end, a picture begins to form in which the Charity Organisation Society appears as
only one of a number of competing religious organizations, affiliated and
unaffiliated with the Society, yet all intent on the moral segregation of the
working class through the practice of charity control.
Finally, this focus on intent allows the historian to properly adjudicate
what were seen as charity “failures” in this period. Failures, importantly, were
few. Most presented no organized or ideological opposition to the principles of
charity organization. In view of the attacks of the Booth investigators on a handful
of “unprincipled” churchmen, and in view of the tendency even for ministerial
friends to rat each other out over charitable indiscretions (a further sign of the
importance with which charity control was held in churchmen’s minds) one
expects to find a number of examples of pauperizers in this South London set of
slum ministers. What we actually find, after a thorough look at churchmen’s
testimony in Poor South London, is a surprising lack of out-of-control,
overgenerous charity. On close examination of Anglican testimony, in fact, only a
single minister could be found truly delinquent among a handful of suspicious
charity administrators. And this man, the only clergyman among thirty Anglicans
in the area I am calling Poor South London, had been dead for three years. After
being briefed by his investigator Ernest Aves on the matter, Booth, in his
published volumes, called the parish administration of Father Goulden of St.
Alphege’s a thing of the past, and he welcomed a more “responsible” incumbent.
So much for “indiscriminate” Christian benevolence!
11
Evidence of this near universal commitment to charity control among
South London Anglicans, it is important to note, would probably be found in no
other archive save that of Charles Booth’s Religious Influences series, with its
147 handwritten notebooks, containing 1800 church and local government
representatives. No archive I can think of from this period contains testimony so
terribly candid, so frightfully honest, as that contained in Booth’s unpublished
notebooks. “Use me but don’t publish me” one South London vicar told his
investigators, and Booth obliged, fearing libel suits.17 A hundred years later
ministers’ intent in charity, and indeed in a wide variety of church social work,
can at last be revealed. For the first time, all of this archive has been explored.
So-called charitable “failures” are also helpful to our discussion of women
philanthropists in this period. How holy men deflected blame for charity scandals
demonstrates the gendered way these male charity distributors looked at their
work – how ministers viewed women church workers as incompetent
philanthropists when in fact both churchman and woman had the intent and the
“Boothian” science to discriminate needy from needy. When men were tagged
“failures” in the field of charity work, they regularly pointed fingers at their
church workers, who were typically women, painting them as silly and
sentimental “amateurs” beyond their control. If Booth and his investigators were
wrong to blame churchmen for careless charity, however, churchmen were
equally wrong in blaming their female churchworkers. There can be no doubt that,
in a hysterically charity-conscious era, women were a boon, as scapegoats, to
insecure ministers struggling (religiously and scientifically) to address problems
of urban poverty – especially when their learning tools included the unreliable and
subjective, moral “science” of the era. Ministers and charity scientists regularly
called each other frauds and amateurs in this period, basing their assumptions on
wildly subjective evidence of who was deserving of charity and who was not, and
when charity scandals reached their peaks, ministers in the spotlight were
17
Rev. Lee, vicar of All Saint’s Lambeth, used these words at the close of an interview full of
especially plain speech about working people, and his fellow ministers. “He shrinks from
publicity, in any case as regards his work,” wrote Ernest Aves, “and his last words were ‘Use me,
but don’t publish me.’” Lee, B 269: 43.
12
probably very thankful to blame their women workers to get themselves off the
hot seat.
It is these very dismissals by churchmen, the tendency of churchmen to
take credit for their church social work, and also the tendency for Booth and his
investigators to trust men’s testimony exclusively (believing equally in the
stereotype of the female amateur), that has served to obscure from history the
labour of thousands of female district visitors. Worse, it has obscured women’s
motives behind such work. These motives are the subject of Chapter 8. Instead of
focusing on women’s insecurities in church work, women’s class bias, and
women’s crucial involvement as groundtroops in the hierarchicalization of the
London working classes (begun by Booth, and carried on by metropolitan
ministers), historians have instead chosen to discuss women’s work in terms of
their “love” for the poor, their “socialist feminism,” and their creation of a more
caring, female social science in opposition to the moral social science of Booth
and the London minister.18 But historian’s emphasis on women’s love for the
poor, their total segregation from male administration of charity, and their
socialist approach to social work has obscured who these women really were. The
Booth archive, however, allows us to see moments where women did all that men
18
Some historians argue for the feminist gains of women involved in philanthropy include
scholars who piggyback their feminist history on top a rather conservative, pro-voluntarist and
anti-state approach to social care. These include: Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in
Nineteenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Brian Harrison, Peaceable
Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Geoffrey
Finlayson, Citizen State and Social Welfare in Britain, 1830-1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994). Brian Heeney’s account is less hindered by this bias, yet his account nevertheless tells a
history of feminism without due attention to women’s often unsympathetic treatment of the poor.
The Women’s Movement in the Church of England, 1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
Others argue that women (despite the continued presence of harder-minded female proponents of
political economy like Octavia Hill) created their own socialist feminist and notably feminine
brand of social care. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single
Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect:
Women in English Local Government, 1865-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Jane Lewis,
Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991);
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian
London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Neither argument seems convincing after a
look women’s motives and methods as they are described in the Booth Archive, though Rosemary
O’Day largely repeats this thesis in her article, “Women in Victorian Religion,” in Englander and
O’Day, Retrieved Riches. Seth Koven’s recent Slumming makes great strides for the history of
philanthropy and sexuality, but he largely repeats the thesis of Walkowitz and Hollis, dividing
women into socialists and non-socialists. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in
Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 226.
13
did in the field of charity control, simply with less historical credit. They peered
over the Booth Maps with Ernest Aves and Arthur Baxter, correcting the men on
their moral geography, tinting a street “pinker” here, or a darker blue, there.
One sees four basic types of women worker in the churches at this time:
the missioner, the “trained” churchwoman, the “untrained” religious
philanthropist, and the clergyman’s wife. Among paid and trained workers were
COS officials doubling as church volunteers, and deaconesses, trained in
institutions across the metropolis in responsible giving. These were the most
respected of church workers and were admired by the Booth Men and ministers
alike, though often Anglican Sisters, Nonconformist Sisters and deaconesses were
scapegoated in the times that charity scandals hit their churches. Women
missioners, unpaid district visitors, and others each came in for a great deal of
abuse from Booth investigators. These women were stereotyped as incompetent
amateurs, and their testimony was seen as less valuable, yet their adherence to the
ideal of charity control was no less fervent than their professional superiors. Most
women, whether or not they achieved the title of “professional,” according to
Rosemary O’Day, never had their testimony included in the published volumes.19
Again, their frank testimony, as with ministers, is illuminating but not flattering. It
seems problematic, in fact, that these women are discussed as “feminists” and
“socialist feminists” when most of this female elite achieved their “liberation” on
the backs of the poor they divided into deserving and undeserving groups.
It is also interesting to see that, between women church workers, the same
catcalls and professional bigotry existed during this period as that which raged
between Charles Booth and London’s ministers, and also between ministers and
churchwomen. Deaconesses painted district visitors, for example, as amateurs,
though probably – in their wildly subjective profession of spotting deserving poor
– the latter were equally “proficient.” It is also noticeable that paid church
workers, though they were ostensibly “trained” in universities or Deaconess
Institutions, received (like London’s ministers) largely content-less courses in
religious debate (to be used against local secularists) before they were sent blindly
19
Ibid., 339.
14
into slum parishes for a kind of on-the-job training. Nevertheless, neither a
theology stressing love for the poor, nor the experience of the domestic side of
poverty, served to convert women, from moral to structural interpretations of
poverty.20 The grime and dehumanized surroundings of East and South London,
indeed, may have even exacerbated already existing moral notions in women’s
minds, further convincing them that their duty was to find the “decent” and
separate them for care from the “demoralized” and “vicious” poor. London
deaconesses provided the Booth investigators with immaculate social and moral
descriptions of local working-class hierarchies, and some clearly felt superior to
their clergymen in terms of professional qualifications to deal with the poor. For
example, Mrs. Isabella Gilmore, the head of the Rochester Diocesan Deaconess
Institution, related how she had helped Booth with the moral colouring of his
Poverty Maps in 1889, and she was eager to see him make accurate corrections to
the maps for the 1902/3 edition, under her careful guidance.
Ministers’ wives not only served as essential emotional and psychological
supports in parishes (particularly evidenced by the testimony of ministers with
sick or deceased wives), they provided them with ideological support as well.
Bland statements that wives were “important” or that they “provided practical
help” to parishioners avoid what (very precisely and intricately) they told the
Booth investigators between 1897 and 1903. None disputed the importance of
charity control, or the division of poor from poor. Instead they provided often
colourful accounts of the varying respectability of local parishioners, and there
were instances even of wives questioning the professional legitimacy of local
women workers.
Nonconformist women were rarely interviewed in South London, and
those who were (like one Rotherhithe missioner) were ignored in the published
volumes, or called “pauperizers” generally. These women spoke of the general
hostility of religious workers around them. They used intricate class terms,
20
It was originally Raymond Williams who posited that one’s ideological approach toward
poverty might be shattered by the up-close experience of poverty. At least as much evidence, I
argue, exists which proves quite the opposite: that in fact experience of very poor people
galvanizes moral notions of poverty in the mind of their observers. See Willams, Marxism and
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
15
describing their Sunday school children as “poor but not shoeless.” They bucked
against clergymen who called their non-Anglican religion false or their charity
“unscientific.” In one case, two women battled against the attempts by a South
London clergyman (and perhaps his COS trained churchwoman) and his attempts
to discredit and control their mission. Assertively, Nonconformists of all kinds
attacked local Anglicans for their own charitable improprieties. Though equally
patchy, East London yielded more evidence from the Nonconformist women than
did South London. Yet from missioners to the prominent Nonconformist sects, the
evidence from the Booth Archive tells us to avoid (as we did with holy men) any
opposition between Anglican COS fanatics and a more humanitarian
Nonconformist sisterhood of social workers. One finds in Nonconformist
women’s testimony in fact a powerful sense of agency (clearly visible among
members of both sects) and one derived principally from the act of choosing
needy from needy. As with Anglicans, women enjoyed a combination of
professional pride and authoritarian power in their efforts to morally improve the
poor of the metropolis. Even in the case of Charlotte Despard, a Roman Catholic
and a woman explicitly describing herself as a socialist, exploring her testimony
sooner or later leads to mentions of a “loafing” poor and belief in deserving and
undeserving groups of poor people.
As with Booth and London’s ministers, women’s charity control rhetoric
had a special quality. This was the cruel genius of cries against “indiscriminate”
charity in poor communities containing multiple churches: they were selfperpetuating. Charity control fanatics could announce the end of pauperization in
one’s neighbourhood just when others were decrying its advent, and there would
always be “unhelpable”-looking individuals to substantiate the case that
demoralizing doles had been distributed. London, for a long time, had been (and
for a long time would be), a desperately poor city, and unless something
cataclysmic occurred (something on the scale of the wealth redistribution and
reversal of inequality prevalent during the 1945 to 1973 period), this cycle of
rhetoric need never cease.
16
“Secular” philanthropic professionals, also interviewed by the Booth
investigators, provide the same problems for historians looking for “socialist
feminists,” for like religious workers, they, too, often seem to have made feminist
gains on the backs of the poor (Chapter 9). The simple contact by these
professionals with the poor, once again, did not lead to any conversion to
structural notions of poverty, from moral notions of poverty requiring the
exclusion of a loafer class from care. In fact, as Margaret Sewell of the Women’s
University Settlement told a group of district visitors in 1893, this encounter
probably had the opposite effect. Sewell was among many women during this
period who cited that encounter as one which convinced her that the poor should
be morally segregated into poor-but-respectable working people worthy of help,
and negligent or willfully manipulative working people deserving no attention at
all from philanthropists and district visitors. Like Booth, Sewell believed very
strongly in a poor-but-respectable class, a class C, who should be every
philanthropist’s client. She noted that there were a plurality of institutions around
the metropolis (in addition to the COS), peopled by female as well as male
“professionals,” who could provide “training” in segregating poor from poor. As
with clergymen and ministers (though unlike Booth), Sewell realized that a
commitment to charity control could exist quite apart from COS membership. The
same accounts came from London’s nurses, for whom even medical care had to
be charitably responsible and keen to avoid “overlap” with other nurses.
Philanthropists in the field of housing adhered to the same rules of moral
segregation. Interestingly, housing philanthropists like Miss Emma Cons found
working people who approved of her notions of a respectable “gated community”
(however they sometimes chafed at restrictive regulations). Particularly did they
do so when such exclusive status for tenants was coupled with increased
involvement in the government of their dwellings. The housing philanthropist
dealt with in this dissertation (Cons) was a close associate of her more famous
colleague Octavia Hill, and her work in the creation of Morley College for the
upper-working-class set of South London had its special origins in clergymen’s
attempts to turn old trust charities (“dole charities”) into technical education for
17
an improved working class. The only difficulty with writing about Cons is that,
once again, she has been distanced by historians from the so-called obsolete
individualism of Octavia Hill, and made a left-wing “yin” to Hill’s moralindividualist “yang.” This binarization of good and bad women, or good and bad
clergymen once again proves mistaken when this most frank of sources sees Cons
committing herself against “indiscriminate charity.”
In the field of Charity Registration, after the fire-eating testimony of Rev.
De Fontaine, it is significant to find a woman, Miss Bell, at the head of the
Southwark Charity Registration committee. Bell’s extraordinary compilation of
churchmen and other philanthropists’ returns to the committee, in addition to an
already extensive set of testimony from London’s ministers, widens further the
contemporary commitment to charity control. Interesting in Bell’s testimony,
moreover, is her belief that the charity registry offered itself as a mediator
between testy, anxious ministers, all of them fearful of charity scandals – all of
them holy men who often could not cooperate with themselves.
Training many district workers in South London and leading the field in
the amount of returns sent to the Southwark registration committee was Margaret
Sewell’s Women’s University Settlement, temporarily headed by Miss Bannatyne
while Sewell was away ill. Bannatyne, like Sewell, drew attention to the
surprising commitment of undergraduates to create endless records of the poor
(much like Miss Bell did at the registry). Like ministers not officially cooperating
with the COS, Bannatyne puzzled Aves with the fact that the WUS’ methods were
almost-but-not-quite “COS methods,” when Aves himself admitted he could not
tell the difference. Aves was especially intrigued, as he had been with Miss Cons’
“gated community,” at how eagerly some working people in Southwark were
responding to morally-segregated charity performed by the WUS.
Finally, although Harry Toynbee somewhat dominated the work of the
South London COS, his East London notebooks show the extent of women’s
participation on the Society’s local committees all across the metropolis. Here
were the most brash critics of men’s charity, the COS appearing a special vehicle
for women to prove to men they were equally adept at the “science” of moral
18
segregation, perhaps more so. Unlike typical accounts which see women convert
to structural understandings of poverty through their encounter with it, therefore,
here we see women assert their expertise in the field of charity control as a result
of the same intimacy with poor people’s lives. There are in addition striking
instances of women asserting professional superiority over men. One official was
on hand during the interviews to express her deepest wish that she could bring
“amateur clergymen” up to some kind of standard of charitable distribution, and
Helen Bosanquet of the COS, herself, corrected Booth on the colouring of his
Poverty Maps. As with deaconesses of the metropolis, as with nurses, there was
an increasing belief among women philanthropists of the COS that their
professionalism, their knowledge of the people, and therefore their charitable
practices, were superior to the male ministers’.
Booth, London’s churchmen and churchwomen were all on the look-out
for the poor-but-respectable working-class – Booth’s Class C. Booth’s great
discovery in his Life and Labour survey, and one borne of his discussions with
ministers and working people all across the metropolis, was to reveal the
existence of an enormous respectable and poor-but-respectable majority among
working people. This discovery (the subject of Chapter 10) has been largely
ignored by scholars. Historians of the social survey have argued that Booth’s class
bias prevented any ground-breaking discoveries in working-class culture.21
Despite the urging by contemporaries like Robert Roberts, and by historians like
Johanna Bourke, most historians of working people have downplayed the
suggestion (originally Booth’s) that the working class was rife with status
consciousness in 1900.22 When historians have suggested conservatism in the
working class, they have always seen it as a static kind of conservatism rather
21
Harold W. Pfautz ed., Charles Booth, On the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 88, 146; Donald Winch, Economics and Policy
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), 48; Standish Meacham, A Life Apart: The English
Working Class 1890-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 7; Yeo, Eileen,
“Mayhew as a Social Investigator,” in E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo, eds., The Unknown
Mayhew (London: Merlin Press, 1973), 107, 108; K. Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty
(Boston: Routlege and Kegan Paul, 1981), 313.
22
Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (London:
Penguin, 1990); Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain 1890-1960: Gender, class and
ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. ch. 5: “Locality: Retrospective Communities.”
19
than a dynamic one, capable of constantly replenishing itself (as class
consciousness is portrayed as doing in the face of social and economic
oppression). Moreover, when historians have suggested more attention to
respectability in British society, their ambivalent approach to this phenomenon,
and their equally static portrayal of its functioning in working-class society, has
left its significance among working people unclear.23
Interestingly, as with Booth, churchmen and churchwomen, the historian’s
starting point must again be with anxiety among working people. It is anxiety,
especially anxiety arising from the experience of inequality, that helps us to see
working-class social relations as they really were. Working people in 1900 were
rather unique in Britain because they experienced anxiety arising from two kinds
of poverty at once. The first were the anxieties surrounding absolute poverty, the
struggle to survive, to stave off starvation and disease without sufficient money to
do it. The second was a new kind of anxiety for a larger than ever group of turnof-the-century working people calling themselves poor-but-respectable. This was
the anxiety surrounding relative poverty. A late-century depression made even the
wages of the unskilled worth more than usual and wages themselves had
undergone an eighty per cent rise since 1850.24 The result was a burst in workingclass spending, resulting in a new working class, and one extremely anxious about
maintaining social status within the working-class community.
23
For historians suggesting a static conservatism among working people: Gareth Stedman Jones,
“Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1914: Notes on the
Remaking of a Working Class,” in Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English
Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Ross
McKibbin, “Why was there no Marxism in Britain in Great Britain?” English Historical Review
391, 99 (1984): 297-331. For histories of respectability: Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics:
The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University
Press, 1980).; Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), esp. ch. 4; Paul Johnson, Saving and Spending: The WorkingClass Economy in Britain, 1870-1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); F.M.L. Thompson, The
Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (London: Fontana
Press, 1988); Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late
Victorians (New York: First Vintage Books, 1992), 201; Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and
Dangerous People?: England 1783-1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
24
E.J. Hobsbawm, The Pelican Economic History of Britain: Volume 3: From 1750 to the Present
Day: Industry and Empire (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 162; Beaven, Leisure, citizenship and
working-class men in Britain, 1850-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 48.
20
What were social relations like in the poor-but-respectable community?
Social epidemiologists tell us that what few historians seem to know: that poverty
does not make people nice, that, in fact, it makes people mean. Scholars like
Richard Wilkinson tell us something else: that the onset of widespread status
consciousness would have negative effects not simply on social relations, but also
on health, due to the fact that stress downregulates immune systems and leads to
serious illnesses such as arterioschlerosis and heart disease.25 In any history of the
period, we must keep this double-weight of absolute and relative poverty anxiety
in mind, because it explains well the onset of what I call “subordinative” social
relations among working people: that is, the repeated subordination of class,
gender, sexual and social “inferiors” due to the frustration with the demeaning
and devaluing effects of inequality. Perpetually struggling for and sometimes
unable to reach poor-but-respectable goals, working people took every
opportunity to displace aggression felt from being devalued by class superiors,
and they targeted their own perceived inferiors within the community.26
Subordinative social relations were a self-perpetuating social phenomenon. The
discovery of social relations like these finally puts working-class conservatism in
a dynamic light, it explains the calls of contemporaries like Robert Roberts for a
more accurate picture of his status-conscious community, and it moves us away
from hackneyed pictures of “salt of the earth” men and women, and cosy,
solidarity-based communities so common in working-class histories. It also
demands we search for areas in which this anxiety was displaced, not only in
social subordination, but in leisure activities. According to Wilkinson, insecurity
brought on by “psychosocial factors” creates sufficient emotional and
psychological pressures to lead people to repeated, heavy use of recreational
drugs.27 This means we should be able to find widespread evidence, in 1900, of
the most anxious of working people – poor working women – finding an outlet
somewhere to release tension.
25
Richard Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (New
York: New Press, 2005), 12-13.
26
Ibid., 28.
27
Ibid.
21
The great contribution of Booth’s research to the study of working people
is the repeated demonstration by working people of not only poor respectability,
but hierarchical social relations within the working class. At the time Christian
ministers were part of a wide voluntary reform movement believing that the
simple one-on-one contact of a middle-class person with a poor person could
“smooth away the hard lines” created by life in an anxious, status-conscious poorbut-respectable community. Interestingly, historians have done the same today.
Like religious reformers, they have attempted to smooth away the lines of a
status-conscious hierarchy, attempted to erase the psychological trauma
experienced by members of an anxious community facing the possibility of
extreme want and crushing social expectation, simultaneously. Seeing past
attempts by reformers to (rather ludicrously) offer friendship, flowers and cricket
clubs instead of money, and past historians’ attempts to see a uniform working
class in this period, allows us to answer a question that will be repeated
throughout this dissertatation: namely, “who hierarchicalized Poor London?”
With maps and statistics the first was Charles Booth, categorizing a metropolis of
men and women A to H. Churchmen’s interviews and annual reports belied
Booth’s efforts, providing him with the social and moral composition of the
parishes in which they lived and preached. These churchmen, in turn, only had
their moral geography ready for the Booth men because of the tireless visiting
efforts of women visitors of all kinds, from district visitors to deaconesses,
making women the true “ground troops” of the middle-class attempt to morally
segregate the London working classes for the purposes of Victorian social
science.
Despite such efforts on the part of the middle classes, however, the
question of who hierarchicalized London has its final answer in a look at the
city’s working people. Examining how working people treated each other in the
pages of the Booth notebooks, and how they spoke about each other, shows us
that working people were the original creators of working-class hierarchies. A
working-class builder from South London opens this discussion. His words detail
the painful (but dynamic and self-perpetuating) process by which working people
22
adjusted and readjusted the social ladders of their communities over time. The
builder in question, a Mr. E.M. Falkner of East Dulwich, related how his life
among working people had been a process of admitting the presence of social
superiors who looked down upon him, and how, in turn, he looked down upon
inferiors of his own.
Further examples of working people’s hierarchical social relations are
clear in their efforts and aspirations to emigrate from the slums to more
respectable, suburban neighbourhoods of East and South London (what Booth
called “Pink” South London). By doing so working people demonstrated that their
first impulse was not cosy communality, but rather to distance themselves from
their poorer brethren as much as possible. Most of all these families wanted calm,
comfort, and order: a break from the continual anxiety, conflict and chaos of the
poor riverside. The thirty-shilling families who successfully made the precarious
move north or south from poor, central London, however, did not leave behind a
“dead level of poverty” behind them, as many contemporaries assumed. They also
did not leave communities of two classes: the “rough” and “respectable.” In fact,
the evidence of the Booth archive demonstrates that however poor the districts of
East and South London became in the 1890s, their residents almost always
classified themselves as poor-but-respectable, and saw themselves as part of one
poor-but-respectable rung in a larger hierarchy of working people. Their Christian
ministers very often saw them the same way, and this makes Booth’s focus on a
poor-but-still-respectable class – his Class C – all the more understandable.
Booth, with his moral-religious tendencies, simply did not know that Class C, the
poor-but-respectable class, constituted nearly every poor working-class family in
London.
Chapter 11 will demonstrate that, respectable or poor-but-respectable,
working people were remarkably exclusive classes, riven by status consciousness.
One sees this in the claiming of churches, chapels, missions, services, schools,
and clubs by riverside and suburban working people. The Booth investigators paid
close attention to the testimony of ministers who described endlessly changing
church congregations, and surprising class exclusivity in each church, club and
23
school. Often ministers tried to take the credit for elevating and evacuating the
respectable from their parishes, suggesting that the churches were responsible for
residents’ moral betterment. But such changes were due to a London-wide
movement among working people to aspire to poor respectability, and nowhere
was this clearer than in the movement to dress above one’s class. In the upperworking class or “pink” districts of South London one finds churchgoing families
who blended in with their lower-middle-class neighbours. In the “purple,”
“middle-working-class” neighbourhoods of Walworth and North Camberwell, and
in the poor and “blue” slums of Lambeth, Southwark and Rotherhithe, one finds
working people tragically close to desperation, yet still able to shock their
ministers with a level of ostentation possible because of cheap clothing, higher
wages, and artificially low prices in a time of depression.
Poor families who failed in the face of what was called the “clothes
difficulty” at this time struggled to compensate for their failure to adhere to poorbut-respectable norms. Sometimes they kept their children from attendance at
school and church, while other times, if they let them attend inferior institutions
designated for the lower working classes, they nevertheless tried to distinguish
their children from others in the neighbourhood. This led to myriad “decent
exteriors” (in the words of one Board School headmistress). Interestingly, it was
the local churches and chapels and their social auxiliaries which may have kept
many poor families in adequately decent garments. Church clothing clubs, which
offered the purchase of fabric through very small and even irregular instalments,
sometimes even with bonuses for deposits made, allowed working women to turn
pennies into respectability for their families.
The “clothing difficulty” among poor-but-respectable working people in
London also had a major impact on Christian worship in the metropolis. New
forms of worship were demanded by the very poor – those who could not meet
the expectations of this newly clothing-conscious community in the 1890s. As a
result, the importance of the local Christian mission, where poorer working
people often came to worship in their work clothes or shabby clothes, was reemphasized by Christian ministers. Innovations in Christian services were seen in
24
the employment of theatres, wherein darkness shielded many of the poorlyclothed poor from view and allowed them to enjoy religious worship without
shame for their appearance.
Perhaps the most common form of worship, however, and one particularly
successful among men during this period was the open-air meeting. Both in East
and South London ministers mentioned the appeal of this rougher form of
worship, at first denouncing it as ineffective in bringing people to more orthodox
indoor worship, but never dismissing its clear popularity in places like Victoria
Park and Peckham Rye. That ministers’ and the ubiquitous Salvation Army’s
meetings reached saturation point in central London was clear, but its appeal
nevertheless lay in its rough-but-respectable quality. While infrequently
boisterous, open-air meetings were typically a calm and orderly means of
worship. This intermittently raucous but mostly orderly atmosphere allowed those
more smartly-clothed to participate in it without feeling as if they had chosen a
form of worship for the “rough” alone. Yet likewise, it permitted the rougher
respectable to feel absolved of the need to keep up expensive appearances. Lastly,
the harsh-worded, salvation-based evangelism often practiced on park grounds
like Peckham Rye was likely popular because it served as a counterbalance to the
extreme anxieties of poor respectable life. The ecstasy and emotional
displacement evoked by a salvation-based sermon provided a release among a
people accustomed to social and economic self-discipline like no other class in
British society.
Beyond their aspirations to economic and socially-related poor
respectability, working people were observed striving to maintain an uneven
brand of respectable behaviour in the late 1890s (Chapter 12). Ministers and
headmasters observed a working people less prone to public violence, less prone
to swearing, more likely to hide their poverty when they suffered from it, more
liable to limit their families through the hushed practice of birth control, and of
course, grimly willing to work at demeaning, monotonous, low-pay or sweated
labour.
25
It was inevitable that this wide variety of economic and behavioural selfdiscipline should lead to some form of release, and that we should find it widely
reported in archives like that of Charles Booth. Mistakenly, historians have
chosen this release to be working-class radicalism and unionism. Yet this cannot
be right. Union drives and strikes among the poor-but-respectable were efforts
that required more self-discipline, not less. Moreover, these efforts happened
rarely, and they were efforts which commonly achieved – if we take the largely
misinterpreted matchgirls’ strike as an example – very little for working people,
so complete was the power of industry and government. Historians need to look
for forms of real release that working people practiced all the time, and they must
be acts of psychological and emotional liberation, devoid of further acts of selfrepression.
Following Wilkinson, release among the poor-but-respectable came in the
twin acts of social subordination and alcohol use. These were probably the chief
means of displacing anxiety caused by absolute and relative poverty. In the case
of social subordination, I have chosen the largely irrational, but extremely potent
stereotype of the “loafer” (what we would now call the “welfare bum”) as a key
example of a hurtful tag used every day and all the time by a poor-but-respectable
people terrified of being called dependent. Among the most influential figures in
the working-class community – its male political leaders – we find that respected
figures like Will Crooks favoured the physical segregation of the loafer class from
the ranks of the decent unemployed. In numerous speeches, and with widespread
popular support, Crooks championed the cause of the labour colony, and unlike
Charles Booth, he brought the project to life. Although John Burns, the new
President of the Local Government Board, made the colony a short-lived
experiment, it is nevertheless significant to see Crooks, in speeches and in his
Booth interviews, affirm his strong belief that there were morally good and bad
working people. Crooks believed the latter should be dealt with severely –
preferably by working men like himself who could spot the “waster” better than
clergymen and other middle-class improvers (people Crooks argued were lost in
relief work without the working-class’ “expert” point of view). Also important is
26
yet another instance in which historians claim a member of the working class for
the ranks of progressives, when in fact he should be included among the multiclassed ranks of moral segregators. The much-loved George Lansbury has been
named one of the most loved figures of the twentieth century by historians, and
from his day to ours he has been another victim of the historians’ tendency to
oppose an imaginary progressive left against a moral right, instead of seeing both
adhering to a moral common sense.
Among the common people of London, the loafer stereotype was
extremely powerful. Although their leaders influenced their opinions greatly, it
was the inequality of their society which caused them to so commonly accuse
members of their own class of being “mumpers” or “cadgers.” Working people
struggled so hard to attain poor respectability. But they were endlessly
disappointed in their efforts to meet their aspirations, and they were made, in
every aspect of their lives (work, consumer items, leisure, and so on) to feel
devalued and dehumanized. They lived with this inequality rather than fighting it,
but they needed to displace their frustrations and therefore chose as their victims
anyone seeming, for the moment, to have lapsed in poor-but-respectable rituals of
self-discipline. As a result of the spread of these stereotypes, many churches and
chapels suffered losses in attendance when they became branded by working
people as places for the dependent and the charity-scrounging. Religious
philanthropists shocked the charity-conscious Booth investigators with their
certainty that working people (fearing accusation as cadgers) would not ask for
charity if they did not need it. Very importantly, historians do not pay enough
attention to the fact that in very poor societies, the idea of money spent wrongly,
or money awarded to undeserving people, tends to attract wide popular attention
and can cause great popular discontent. As a result, working people may have
been shocked or titillated by tales of the follies of working people at the bottom of
their class hierarchy. The South London Press provides an example of this. The
Press weekly reported humiliating incidents of charity fraud and tragedies of
poverty, lampooning a loafing class made up of real individuals suffering real
personal difficulties, typically as a result of having no money. Significantly, The
27
Press reported such scenes of poverty-related humiliation as entertainment – very
much like a Jerry Springer Show before its time. Rather than seeing this
stereotype as ridiculous and illogical to the working-class eye, one can see that
working people took the loafer stereotype extremely seriously, and that fear of
moral subordination on the basis of accusations of charity dependency, informed
working-class life from a very young age.
From material status consciousness to stereotypes of dependency, one
finds many examples of working-class social subordination without seeing a great
deal of historical attention paid to them. More noteworthy, however, is the fact
that one finds an extraordinarily wide range of examples of alcohol use among the
most anxious of the poor-but-respectable working class – the women of this class
– with a virtual scholarly blackout in response to it. This is the subject of Chapter
13. Historians like Ellen Ross have created roles for women in this period which
see them not as drinkers, but the victims of drinkers – male drinkers who drank
away their wages and caused the starvation and suffering of entire families. She is
right to do it. This happened all the time. Yet this focus has been too narrow. It
has excluded what two intrepid historians, David Wright and Cathy Chorniawry,
have discussed as the “considerable women’s pub culture” during this period.28
Ross’ equally illuminating essays on women’s survival networks make some
mention of this culture, but she is so tied to this idea of survival networks –
women exchanging knowledge and goods for the survival of their families – that
she has ignored how many women wanted to be and, in fact, needed to be
periodically and regularly drunk.29 Stress from poor-but-respectable norms caused
suicides to appear in the South London Press on a regular basis. Women, as a
result, chose periodic release to lighten their hard, short lives. My discussion
relates how, when and where women drank, including times of the week, popular
women-dominated pubs by district (which men called “cowhouses” and
28
David Wright and Cathy Chorniawry, “Women and Drink in Edwardian England,” Canadian
Historical Association (1985), 128.
29
Ellen Ross, “Survival Networks: Women’s Neighbourhood Sharing in London Before World
War I,” History Workshop Journal 15 (1983): 4-27.
28
“cowsheds”), and it hints at the deliberate responses of the drink market to meet
women’s entry at late century.
It is through a focus on working-class poor respectability and especially
the anxieties surrounding it that we can determine which churches were successes
during this era and which were not. With the popularity of the loafer stereotype,
one might suggest that the church and chapel’s days were over. But they were not.
Success in a poor-but-respectable community before 1914 was based on how well
churches responded to that community’s needs. In my final chapter, I show that it
was through the encouragement of what I call “money participation” that
churches drew East and South Londoners within their walls. Despite the cultural
Marxist’s old suggestion that class consciousness and collective identity lay
behind most saving institutions in this period, probably nothing could be further
from the truth.30 As Paul Johnson and Trevor Griffiths have written of friendly
societies, insurance agencies and co-operatives, competition was the chief
characteristic of working peoples’ approach to one another, not class solidarity.31
I would add that anxiety over poor respectability – over absolute and relative
poverty – played a key role here. It kept each family engaged in a kind of
competitive, collective individualism. Status consciousness mattered more than
class consciousness in working-class forms of saving and spending, and in my last
chapter I have chosen to extend Johnson’s and Griffiths’ discussions to include
more informal savings agencies based in the London churches.
Prior to drawing the poor-but-respectable community into his church or
chapel, the chief task of the minister of a successful church was to employ a
language among members of the community that denied his church was a “charity
church.” Poor-but-respectable people were money-obsessed, an irritable people
who depended on ministers to shore up their claim to independence. The problem
was that they were still too poor to truly wish their ministers to abandon their
30
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth, 1961), 313; E.P. Thompson, The
Making of the Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 456-69; Eric Hobsbawm et al.
The Forward march of Labour Halted (London: 1981), 8, 10.
31
Paul Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-Class Economy in Britain, 1970-1939
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Trevor Griffiths, The Lancashire Working Classes, c.1880-1930
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
29
social focus. Successful ministers responded by mastering a language in which
they denied any involvement in pauperizing social agencies, while retaining all of
the relief and savings agencies constructed over the past half century to meet poor
people’s needs. Besides denying the use of social auxiliaries, ministers also
boasted that, at their churches, members “paid their way.” Another more brutal
way of sending this message to the community was to have a reputation for
having no truck with loafers, and many ministers told the Booth investigators how
they had “weeded out” or expelled loafers in the community to secure a poor-butrespectable flock.
In addition to languages of independence for the benefit of their flocks,
ministers offered poor-but-respectable people “money participation” – a means to
demonstrate their competence with their own money, in public. Money
participation took three forms in the churches and chapels: donations, savings,
and charity organization by working-class churchworkers themselves. First, in the
case of donations, nothing could be further away from class consciousness than
the terrific liberality characterizing poor people and their donations to church
funds. Deliberate and seemingly foolhardy, working people used their pennies (in
contributions to building funds, offertories, and gifts to ministers) to bolster their
status in the community. They did it also through donations to missionary
organizations. The British empire provided an extended hierarchy to the poor-butrespectable working classes, colonized peoples providing an inferior class to even
themselves to which they could play charity-giver, just as churchmen and women
had done before them. That this points to a fundamentally racist as well as classist
working class is clear, and here we see that the anxieties of inequality caused
working people to socially subordinate more than an underclass at home.
Second, working Londoners publicly employed their money in savings
agencies – agencies which probably accommodated the poor-but-respectable
better than official agencies (friendly societies, retail stores). This was owing to
their flexible systems of payment and their acceptance of often very small
deposits. Bank totals yearly ran into the thousands at some churches. Trevor
Griffiths, discussing savings banks in Lancashire, has noted how newspapers in
30
northern towns published yearly deposits and that these could reach several
hundred thousands in places such as Bolton. Banks in the churches, moreover,
were paralleled by innovative insurance agencies like medical and loan societies.
Lastly, working people were invited into churchworkers’ positions,
sometimes to help in the administration of church moneys to the poor-butrespectable community. One sees many instances in which working-class helpers
or Sunday school teachers have been welcomed to the church as workers, though
the insecurity of ministers in response to working-class inroads into their
professional sphere is clear. It is the employment, however, of working people as
district visitors, and on church relief committees, that is most striking in the Booth
interviews. One finds churchmen speaking of such workers as more strict than the
middle-classes could ever be with the poor of their parishes, and the realization at
last seems to come among a minority of ministers that few knew the poor-butrespectable and their status-conscious ways better those of their own community.
The chapter closes with the account of the missioner G.W. Linnecar, a former
sailor with Booth’s original employer – the Lamport and Holt shipping line.
Linnecar’s story reminds one of Booth’s life, except from a man with none of
Booth’s privileges or pampering. Linnecar falls into crime in gangland Buenos
Aires after a stint as a sailor, but after a religious crisis and conversion, he returns
to London to begin a fairly successful career as an evangelist at a small mission in
Camberwell. Linnecar’s evangelical Christianity contains elements of Charles
Booth’s moral-religious notions of a spiritualized capitalism and immoral
underclasses, yet it also employs the orthodox churchmen’s and churchwomen’s
rhetoric of love. And yet it comes from a working man. Like his class superiors,
Linnecar experienced poverty close-up, in starkly unequal societies around the
world, yet also like them, his experience – rather than creating a conversion to
notions of structural poverty – has only emboldened his belief in moral
segregation. In his discussion of loafers – men he has chucked out of his mission
by force – Linnecar completes the circle of thought in this dissertation, and adds
further evidence to the argument that segregation of people according to a
31
subjective, moral and religious sensibility, achieved near-hegemony, in every
class of late Victorian and Edwardian society, before 1914.
32
Part I. Charles Booth: Religious Scientist
Chapter 1. The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist
1. Introduction
As an employer in both leather and shipping industries from the 1860s,
Charles Booth had extensive contact with the London and Liverpool working
classes throughout his life. This experience of working-class life was enormously
expanded by his seventeen-year study of the poverty, industries, and religious
belief prevailing in London’s working-class neighbourhoods. Yet historians have
had grave difficulties in squaring this lifelong contact, and even study of workingclass life with the harsh, even authoritarian, proposals Booth supported for
dealing with London’s very poor.
Booth’s lifelong obsession with the moral and material improvement of
working people culminated in a city-wide social classification scheme, employing
an alphabetical, six-class hierarchy and colour-coded maps showing where each
class lived. Booth, in his study of poverty in the metropolis, separated four
respectable classes of working people from two classes he felt were made up of
the socially and morally “unfit.” He recommended a draconian scheme of labour
colonies for the latter, where the behaviour of poor men might be modified to
make them appreciate the value of work. Booth believed strongly that by
segregating dangerous and immoral groups from the working public (preferably in
labour camps), the work and charity previously wasted on these groups would go
to the more deserving, and also that the capacity of unfit labourers to morally
infect decent-but-poor neighbours would be greatly limited. A notable fact is how
many people agreed with Booth in 1900, and how the hatred of the unfit, loafer
class (or Class B) had no class bounds. But this would be to jump ahead.
Before we can understand why he made such proposals, we must clarify a
number of important details about Charles Booth. As in the case of Booth’s
extensive contact with working people, certain facts about Booth’s personality
have been played down by historians. The first is Booth’s insecurity. Historians, it
seems, have attached a confidence (fitting of his class) to a personality that did
33
not really possess it.32 We attribute to Booth a confidence based in our
understanding of middle-class power. Because he was a wealthy member of the
late Victorian middle classes, and ostensibly a very successful businessman, we
present him as a tremendously confident individual. His self-assurance is simply
assumed in view of the disproportionate power his class regularly exercised as
employers and governors. This conflation of power with confidence, however, is
mistaken. Power Booth had, but confidence, he lacked. As we will see, Booth in
reality was a rather insecure man, and this aspect of his personality needs to be
emphasized rather than seen as a nuisance to tales of middle-class dominance.
Because we do not take account of Booth’s nervous and indecisive mind,
moreover, we have not questioned how he overcame this weakness. An anxious,
insecure man with an eating disorder needed a source of ideological strength to
make the conclusions he did about working people. We need to ask what served
as the source of Booth’s convictions, if we hope to find out what precisely gave
him the confidence to socially classify, street by street, a city of four million
people.
To do this, I will argue, Booth most likely relied on a moral-religious
sensibility. Historians have played down this personality. But it underpinned
Booth’s starkly moral picture of poor London society. Such ideas are given short
shrift in recent accounts of Booth and his survey. David Englander and Rosemary
O’Day rule it out in the opening pages of their Retrieved Riches: Social
Investigation in Britain, 1840-1914. Booth was no ordinary philanthropist, they
write: “He rejected charity as a cure and Christianity as a creed.”33
I will argue in the chapters of this section (Part 1) that, instead of
exploring this sensibility, historians have presented Booth as a successful business
man, a brilliant and painstaking social scientist, a progressive activist, a man
ultimately to be “celebrated” for his work. For this reason we have largely ignored
32
Booth’s psychological constitution has never been prominent in scholarship about him and his
survey. We might compare the Simeys’ 1960 account, in which it is downplayed, to that of David
Englander and Rosemary O’Day thirty-five years later, in which it receives no mention at all.
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth; David Englander and Rosemary O’Day, Retrieved Riches. See
below.
33
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 13.
34
evidence that might see Booth as something less than a decisive Captain of
Industry. In fact, even when we use evidence that hints at Booth’s weaknesses –
Beatrice Potter’s description of Booth as a sickly, ascetic priest, or his business
colleagues’ recollections of a nervous Booth as always too preoccupied to sit
down during lunch – we employ this evidence to bolster our masculine
interpretation of Booth as self-disciplined, strong-willed and self-assured. Also
ignored by historians, and only touched upon here, is Booth’s connection to
British imperial aims in South America. Lastly, and most distorting our picture of
Booth, we have ignored his crisis of faith in the 1870s – an emotional and
psychological collapse that so damaged his health as to almost end his life. How
Booth arose from this, the lowest point in his life, we cannot understand apart
from the support of his exceptionally intelligent and tolerant wife, Mary; nor can
we ignore any longer the hints contained in Booth’s letters to Mary from America
and Italy. As with Mary, more emphasis must be placed on the role that the
Macaulays, his wife’s family, played in restoring Booth’s confidence in a moralreligious understanding of the world.
A discussion of the history of moral ideas of British society helps us to
understand how powerfully and influentially an originally evangelical worldview
imposed itself on the minds of the British people, early on in the nineteenth
century. Evangelicalism underwent a number of transmutations, but was never
fully refuted as a result of the scientific revolutions of the nineteenth century
(Darwin’s being only the last), and this particularly rugged ideology was
constituted and reconstituted in two theological formulas, the first based in
Christ’s Atonement and the second in his Incarnation. In the hard Puritan ideals of
this evangelical ideology we can see the origins of Booth’s moral-religious world
view. Always articulated in harmony with modes of “science” prevailing at the
time, these evangelical ideas would influence fundamentally Booth’s ideas of
moral capitalism, his social science, and his ideas of relief to the poor (all of
which were underpinned by moral ideas), just as they had clerical economists a
half century before. Looking at Booth’s mindset in terms of his own insecurity
and his sources of ideological conviction will allow us to come to better, and
35
more realistic, conclusions about precisely what Booth tried to accomplish with
his Life and Labour survey. Indeed, it is only by debunking the persona of the
progressive social scientist that Booth’s children and his 60s biographers gave
him, and only by placing Booth’s momentary, 1882 experience of socialist ideas
alongside the much more significant psychological crisis and conservative
reformation lasting literally all through the 1870s, that we will find the
exceedingly, if curiously, religious man who was Charles Booth. In his religious
persona Booth’s paradoxical kindnesses (to the true working classes) and his
cruelties (to beggars and loafers) become clear, as does something no historian
has solved yet: the reasons, very much to do with charitable relief, that Booth
followed a study of London poverty, and a study of industries based in the
metropolis, with a study of religious influences among working people.
2. The Confident Booth?
Who was Charles Booth? Most of the evidence we have about the man
suggests that Booth was not a terribly confident man, and so the question arises:
how and from where did Booth find the conviction to say (in the first published
volume of his Poverty Survey) that nearly ten percent of the late Victorian
working classes were so morally corrupt as to require incarceration in penal
detention facilities? Historians have, for half a century, attempted to reconstruct
Booth’s mental make-up. The Simeys, indeed, in their 1960 biography, pointed
first to the “lack of curiosity as to what sort of man Charles Booth was.” It would
be easy to assume that Booth drew his confidence from his social position as a
male, upper-middle-class industrialist – or to praise him as a humanitarian who
“put the [moral] preconceptions of his age to the test.”34 But this would be to
overestimate him: to make him less a man of his time, and more the man we want
him to be.
Mary’s biography is of use in this respect, as is the Simeys’, for their
treatment of Booth’s more emotional, psychological side. In her memoir of her
34
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 7, 8.
36
husband, Mary recalled the Booth family’s low expectations of the young
Charles. She affirmed, charitably I think, that “[h]e showed very early the steady
application and constancy of purpose which always continued to distinguish him.”
If Charles was dogged, however, he was no intellect. Booth as a boy “was not
considered one of the clever ones” by his parents. His father, it was said, would
commonly “indulge” him, and Mary provides us the mental picture of him
patiently listening to Charles’s “crude” schemes and ideas from his chair.35
The Simeys noted that a powerful sense of strength and conviction arose
from the Booth family’s religious sensibilities. They pointed to religion’s
centrality in the Booth family’s lives (the Booths were Unitarians and Booth’s
mother was a well-known Norwich preacher), and that his life and work would be
forever coloured by the “moral tradition in which he was reared.” The tradition
made his parents “hard workers and straight thinkers,” with a “solid foundation of
moral principle” “deeply rooted in their character and their religion.”36
Unfortunately, the Simeys’ repeated emphasis of the Booth family’s
religious convictions (and of Unitarianism’s concomitant “feeling of obligation
for the less fortunate”) only takes us so far. Their picture of “yeomen-merchants,”
“nonconformist to the backbone,” and “leading comfortable, civilized lives”37
tells us surprisingly little about what the Booth family was really like. Painting
them the way they do may even serve more to obscure the anxieties of first
generation “newly rich” middle-class men and women in Liverpool, than bring
them properly to light. One has to assume on one’s own that Nonconformity gave
this class the emotional and psychological security it needed, but the actual
emotional or psychological insecurity suffered by the rising Liverpool families of
the 1830s and 40s, in the Simeys’ account, seems not worth discussing.38 In
Charles Booth: Social Scientist, all religion appears to have given Booth was a
sense of social and philanthropic obligation. The “Unitarian principles” that he
35
Booth, Charles Booth 5.
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 17, 10, 13, 14.
37
Ibid., 14, 15, 17.
38
In terms of the family’s sense of status consciousness, there are few references. Significant
moments in the Booth family’s changing sense of status, however, are certainly hinted at in
recollections of the purchase of a larger house, “in Croxteth Road, fronting on to the then newly
laid out Princes Park.” Ibid., 17.
36
37
allegedly “never forgot” amounted to little more than a selfless social
conscience.39
A.H. John, who gave more emphasis to the church-community that
dominated the lives of Charles Booth and his brother Alfred as young men, gave
more of an idea of the culture of this community in his description of its church
(Renshaw Street Chapel, in Liverpool):
Architecturally the Chapel may be described as the spirit of Puritanism
turned into stone, a fortress built foursquare against the assaults of Satan,
an Ironside among chapels, with no beauty that men should desire it, save
that of fitness for the purpose. This was defined by the Open Trust Deed,
as the worship of God, whose Divine Nature, as indicated by the
architecture, was clearly that of Ein feste Burg [“Our mighty fortress”].40
A.H. John, like Mary Booth, was not as hesitant to probe this period’s
correspondence and to find “the young Booths” taking “an active share in the
affairs of the Renshaw Street Chapel. Their names appear in its contemporary
records and many of their father’s surviving letters are given over to news of its
activities.
‘Over at the Dukenfield yesterday,’ it was written in June 1858, ‘as a
delegate from our congregation to the 209th anniversary of the Lancashire
and Cheshire Presbyterian Association. The chapel was handsome but
decorated with flowers which was nice but Puseyistic.’
John stressed that the morality and ethics of the Booth’s Nonconformity were
“uncompromising.”41
Historians have taken tentative steps towards broadening our
understanding of this generation’s moral-religious mind. Discussing the moral
upbringing of Leonard Hobhouse, England’s first professor of sociology, for
example, Stefan Collini notes, initially, that the relation between this sort of
39
Ibid., 29.
L.P. Jacks, The Confessions of an Octogenerian (1942) 138, quoted in A.H. John, A Liverpool
Merchant House (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1959), 20. The best known of Martin
Luther’s hymns is Ein’ feste Burg is unser Gott. The words are a paraphrase of Psalm 46.
Frederick H. Hedge, in 1853, translated it into the popular English version, “A mighty fortress is
our God, a bulwark never failing.”
41
Ibid., 21, 20.
40
38
upbringing and one’s later personality and opinions can only be a “speculative
matter” for the historian. But he adds that “connections have been suggested
between the psychological effect of a strict moral upbringing and a later tendency
to project the resulting doubts about one’s own moral worth as strenuous moral
judgments on the world.” Collini’s discussion is as helpful to our picture of Booth
as it is to his of Hobhouse. He explains:
This is an approach which might prove fruitful in looking at that
generation of late-Victorian reformers who rejected the religious faith in
which they were brought up but who continued, with not a little anguish,
to judge themselves and the political world by exacting moral standards. It
is certainly an approach, concentrating as it does on the changing cultural
determinants of character, which would be preferable to the endless
repetition of the claim that they were seeking a ‘substitute faith’ for their
lost Evangelical beliefs.42
Compared to Collini’s doubtful, anxious, moral mind, an artificial sense of
calm is created by the Simeys’ description of Booth’s childhood. “[H]is life,” they
write, “seems to have been singularly free from those frustrations and animosities
to which the twentieth century tends to look for explanations of what a man
becomes.” This juxtaposition of a fragile twentieth-century mindset with that of
Victorian men (apparently made of “tougher stuff”) borders on the ridiculous as
the Simeys discuss the sudden deaths of both Booth’s parents before he reached
twenty-one. Booth’s mother died when he was thirteen. Yet it is affirmed that his
family’s “lives” were nevertheless “not blighted by bereavement but raised and
spiritualized by ‘the discipline which brings forth under Providence the good fruit
of faith and love.’” His father, it appears, died when Booth was twenty (Booth,
away on business at the time, only hearing about it in a letter from his sister
Emily). It appears that Booth clung hard to the continued presence of his father
following his mother’s death. Mary described how he “loved to talk of him,
always had his photograph close at hand in any room he occupied,” and
42
Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England,
1880-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 52, 52 n. 6. Collini cites Robert E.
Lane, Political Thinking and Consciousness: the Private Life of the Political Mind (Chicago:
Markham Publishing Company, 1969), esp. pp. 211-215 for one account of the “relation between
personality and political opinion.”
39
remembered always his father’s sympathetic ear during his boyhood. The blow (in
1860) that his father had died from scarlatina must therefore have been crushing.
Perhaps, as the Simeys write, his grief may have been “offset” by his “growing
intimacy” with the daughter of a German merchant, nineteen-year-old Antonia
Prange. But shortly after his marriage to Antonia, she died also. Booth was in
Germany at the time, staying with members of Antonia’s family, when the news
came that she had contracted a “sudden consumption.” There were apparently
“three weeks of sick apprehension” before Booth would write in his diary: “I
heard last night that she had died.”43 Even Booth’s wife conceded how intense
and adoring Booth’s love had been for Antonia.44 Incredibly, Booth’s ordeal was
not over. While visiting Constantinople, his brother Thomas died of fever in 1863.
“[T]he death of the brilliant brother whose promise and friendship were woven
into Charles’s own life was reality at its sharpest and bitterest,” writes Belinda
Norman-Butler.45 With his multiple experiences of abandonment through death,
the historian must question how Booth coped. A father of three in 1876, his baby
daughter Paulina Mary “died very suddenly of croup” only months after her birth,
the tragedy bringing “intense grief.”46 When Booth wrote his wife from Italy in
1893 (Mary had left him to care for her mother who had fallen suddenly ill), his
first words were those of a man for whom the anxiety of these first years had
never gone away:
Teano, April 4, 1893.
MY DEAREST – It is no doubt without any real reason that I feel anxious
about you, and in an hour, or half an hour perhaps, a reply may come to
the telegram I sent from here yesterday to reassure me….47
We must piece together a more human personality of Booth from the
evidence. Evidence from Booth’s life has hitherto been employed in order to
43
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 17-20; Booth, Charles Booth 5-7.
Ibid., 7.
45
John, Liverpool Merchant House 27; Belinda Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 33.
46
Ibid., 48.
47
Booth, Charles Booth 69. Mary did write him that day, and Booth wrote her again to tell her.
“MY DEAREST,” he wrote once more “– Telegram received, and now my bosom’s lord sits
lightly on her throne.” Ibid., 71.
44
40
demonstrate his confidence, rather than reveal his nervousness and insecurity. As
he grew into young adulthood, Booth suffered from the pressures to be at once a
competent businessman (engaging himself in a leather business and purchasing
two steamships with his brother, Alfred), a husband his wife could take pride in
(they married in 1868), a good father, and later, a competent statistician and social
scientist.
A combination of all of these pressures probably contributed to Booth’s
lifelong eating disorder (what Mary called his “trying abstemiousness”). Mary
said that Booth acquired chronic indigestion from a combination of “overwork” in
business, philanthropic and political matters. He commonly avoided eating and he
slept too little – even when married he worked commonly until eleven at night. In
the late 1870s Booth worked from dawn until midnight “every day of the week,”
held private sessions Sunday mornings and, according to the Simeys’, “lived
frugally on bread and butter, vegetables and cider,” depriving himself of all
luxuries save his “white waistcoat.” Booth became a vegetarian in 1881, and was
apparently less and less “robust” as his life continued.48 Throughout his work on
the Life and Labour survey (from the mid-80s until 1903) he “made extra time for
himself by reducing to the minimum the necessities of eating and sleeping,”
reducing his own life “to a point of austerity…” Norman-Butler noted: “His
breakfast was hot milk. In the evening he much preferred tea or coffee, brown
bread and butter, a boiled egg and an apple on a tray, at about 6 p.m., to long, set
dinners. This gave him more time to work, as well as suiting his exhausted
digestion better…”49 The Simeys note: “It is significant that those who recollect
him in these days think of him as standing at his high desk in the office eating a
piece of fruit in order that no time might be wasted on lunch.”50 As Collini
suggested in his discussion of Leonard Hobhouse, there was a Puritanism here
which, hitherto, has been little understood.
48
Eating meat of some kind in Cassino, in Italy twelve years later, Booth was ill for two or three
days. Ibid., 81.
49
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 145.
50
John, Liverpool Merchant House 13, 10, 6, 69; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social
Scientist 57, 61 n. 1, 61, 99.
41
At three points at least in his life, during the early seventies (in response to
a crisis of faith), the early nineties (following his work campaigning for Old Age
Pensions) and in 1905 and 1908 (interrupting his contribution to the Royal
Commission on the Poor Laws), Booth suffered “crushing” emotional and
psychological collapses.51 The first was probably the most severe, and there were
probably many smaller episodes in between. Even a small illness could play on
Booth’s nerves. In 1880, for example, we see a letter to Mary aboard ship to New
York in which he writes: “I got an attack of depression with the last of the [sea]
sickness…”52 And in 1893, after catching a cold: “It got on my nerves before it
was over, and am feeling slack today [sic]. It remains therefore, that I shall have
to be careful, and I shall take it easy to-day and to-morrow.” Later in life, Booth’s
letters to his inquiry co-worker Ernest Aves allow us to gauge Booth’s
psychological stability.53 Rosemary O’Day notes that, throughout his survey
years, Booth increasingly relied on Aves “for support and stimulation,” and
though the overriding theme of her chapter (in Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry) is the
dialogue and independence of mind maintained between Booth and his
secretaries, it is also possible to see Booth rather frayed at the ends, leaning on his
secretaries for psychological support. “I cannot tell you,” he wrote, “how grateful
I am for your patient thorough work over the revision [of the Religious Influences
volumes, published 1902-3] and it will be the same in bringing everything to
focus in this last volume. I have been put to it to keep any thing like a clear mind
– business and other things have been so very disturbing – so I lean on you very
much.”54
Although, at first glance, much of the evidence about Booth’s personality
points to self-assuredness, it can be made to reveal a more uneasy mindset. One
51
Often these breakdowns (certainly the second, and the third) led to convalescence in Italy,
where the fragile Booth (in his 30s, 40s, and 60s, respectively) would regain his strength and
composure. Ibid., 174-175. John notes that Booth’s collapse “kept him away from the business in
1874-5,” and that despite the fact he returned to England (from Switzerland) in 1875, “It was
not…until the end of 1877 that he recommenced his business life, and then in London rather than
in Liverpool.” Liverpool Merchant House 40.
52
Ibid., 59.
53
Mary, Charles Booth 83.
54
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 178.
42
aspect of Booth (whose tedious attention to detail made his brother, and business
partner, Alfred “groan”) was his “insatiable” appetite for information. Booth
insisted that “he would not rely on other men’s opinions, but must first inform
himself as to every last detail of whatever matter was at hand.” “We must put an
end to this sloppy, brotherly way of doing business, or we shall pay dearly for it,”
he told his brother. Early on, Booth committed himself to the practice of reducing
every situation to terms of simple written facts and figures which was to
characterize everything he did from then onwards. “My ‘statements’ strike you as
childish and very often I think they are,” he wrote Alfred, “but I think they are
worth doing.”55
To maintain a modicum of control over the facts before him, Booth would
adhere to the practice of collecting colossal amounts of information for study, not
only throughout his business career, but in the work for his London survey. This
is probably why fifties sociologists like W.J.H. Sprott, tagged him little more than
a bean-counter, a lover of facts for facts’ sake.56 For his “Poverty” survey, Booth
subjected his contingent of school board visitors (for his first poverty inquiry) to
twenty hours of interrogation and sometimes much more than this.57 During his
Industry Series, when Booth could not make head nor tail of the swathes of
overcrowding statistics he had amassed, he “jettisoned” the information “he
himself collected” from dockers and East End housing authorities and decided
instead to write a purely descriptive account of London Industries.58 His
55
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 22, 23.
W.J.H. Sprott, “Sociology in Britain: Preoccupations” in Howard Becker and Alvin Bostoff,
Modern Sociological Theory in Continuity and Change (New York: Dryden Press, 1957).
57
Booth wrote: “In the Tower Hamlets division…we gave on average 19 ¾ hours work to each
School Board visitor; in the Hackney division this was increased to 23 ½ hours. St. Georges-inthe-East when first done in 1886 cost 60 hours’ work with the visitors; when revised it occupied
83 hours.” Quoted in Kevin Bales, “Charles Booth’s survey of Life and Labour of the People in
London 1889-1903 in Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales and Kathryn Kish Sklar eds., The Social
Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 88.
The Simeys note how 34 visitors gave twenty hours of cross examination with Maurice Paul,
Booth and Jesse Argyle for Booth’s 1886 inquiry into the East End. Despite this we should note
Booth’s half-curious, half-terrified belief that his mountain of facts might still not be interpreted
properly: “At the outset we shut our eyes, fearing lest my prejudice or our own should colour the
information we received.” “Poverty,” 1: 25. Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social
Scientist 87.
58
The Simeys, apologetically, called the Series a “straightforward account of industrial
conditions.” They tell us that Booth’s “own preoccupations deprived him of the unifying influence
56
43
interviewers reacted with disbelief to the amount of time it took to complete (with
1,800 London ministers and other local authorities) his interview questionnaires.
Arthur Baxter, the newcomer to the Religious Influences survey in 1897,
complained, to no avail, how tedious the interrogation of every last London
clergyman, minister, missioner and priest would be if every interview took twoand-a-half hours. “I shudder to think,” Baxter wrote (reporting on his first
interview of the survey), “what will happen with men who are inclined to be
‘gassy’.”59 An American reviewer in Gunton’s Magazine vented his frustration
with the sheer bulk of his data in 1896:
The statistics gathered by Mr. Booth relate to penny banks, school
libraries, bands of hope, cricket and football clubs, to the number of pupils
attending the board schools, to their physical condition, to the character
and occupation of the parents etc. The schools, too, are classified as well
as enumerated, and the number of both boys and girls provided for in
secondary and proprietary schools. All this detailed information when
gathered up for a single city amazes an American reader, and starts the
inquiry cui bono? To this, all that needs be said is that it is Mr. Booth’s
belief that the data are worth collecting; and that to the Londoner the work
itself is like a parliamentary blue book. It would be of little consequence
for us to know how many school children had bad mothers, or what trade
their fathers followed, or whether they had a square meal before coming to
school or not. We have no time to read such details; even if we had them,
and if any one with Mr. Booth’s genius should collect such statistics, they
would probably be condensed and used for the purpose of establishing
certain sociological principals, or would be related to the evolution of
certain social phenomena interesting to all thoughtful persons…. One
might go through these six volumes and glean out a good many practical
things important to know, and with a direct bearing upon life about him.
Such a service will be rendered by some future editor, who will condense
this mass of detailed information, and give us the results which they have
led up to.60
of a firmly constructed hypothesis or theory,” before admitting, as Booth did, that for the moment
he had simply “lost sight of the ‘long view’” of industrial relations – somewhere, one suspects,
amidst his vast forest of data. Ibid., 131.
59
Chandler, B169: 3.
60
Dr. M. McG. Dana, “Charles Booth and His Work, (“Life and Labour of the People.” Charles
Booth. London and New York, Macmillan and Co. Six volumes; at $1.50. 1895) Gunton’s
Magazine 11 (March,1896), 196. Charitably, Dana concluded: “Perhaps the author was wise in
refraining from positive generalizations; he has left that for various specialists, and has rather
sought to supply all possible data relating to the social and industrial condition of the teeming
toilers in the greatest mart and metropolis in the world.” (197)
44
Scholars, following his wife’s lead, have repeated to this day that Booth never
used all of the mountains of data he collected (Kevin Bales remarking that Booth
was “in many respects, more successful at collecting data than analyzing it”).61
All of this leads one to suspect that he required such data, in some respects, more
for comfort than for use. There was an exhaustive thoroughness here, to be sure.
But there was also a kind of blind faith, a kind of desperation, with which Booth
hoped that out of a great statistical framework, “built to receive accumulations of
facts,” he would evolve “the theory and the law and the basis of more intelligent
action.” Among so many “complicated facts,” Booth affirmed, there had to be one
fact in common.62
Such evidence should tell us that Booth believed he lacked control over
his life and labours, not that he had mastered them. The Simeys prefer a more
superficial picture. They see a glorified Booth for whom “the preparation of
statements, the translation of facts into figures, the collection and analysis of
information relating to a given situation, were accomplishments of which he could
claim to be a past master.” The endless cow-counting that had made his brother
and business partner groan, they argued, would now be used to apply the
“scientific method” to “social problems” to which “he increasingly devoted his
attention.”63
Such elements may indeed have helped Booth succeed in his business
ventures, and the Simeys applaud him for it, seeing such success as a “striking
tribute both to his personal character” and to the “soundness” of his methods. But
historians should be equally focused on the more troubling mentions of Booth’s
rather fatalistic personality, a personality always expecting a sudden upset, or loss
of control. Booth, it is noted, had a “temperament” that preferred “disaster” to
strike because, in his view, disasters “called for renewed activity” which was
“always preferable to a state of inaction, however secure.” He was a man,
moreover, who was never sure he had mastered his surroundings. Booth was
“constantly subjecting himself to a dispassionate criticism of his own manners
61
Bales, “Charles Booth’s survey,” in Bales, Bulmer and Sklar, The social survey 69.
Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 77-78.
63
Ibid., 66.
62
45
and methods.” Early on in his business career he berated himself at not being able
to “talk to people” more proficiently, chastising what he called his “stupid ‘Booth
reserve’.”64 During the 1860s, the unsure Booth was an easy mark for quicktalking leather retailers. “I was never able to tell whether the skins were right or
not,” Booth wrote his brother, Alfred, “and Turney [the manager of a Midland
“split skin” firm] could always shut me up.”65 Even by 1880, when he had
become his firm’s senior partner, he thought himself quite capable nevertheless of
“making some mess with my hasty tongue and stupid thick head.”66
In Mary’s, the Simeys’, Norman-Butler’s and subsequent discussions,
moreover, there has been a noticeable tendency to ignore the role Alfred played in
the success of the two brothers’ shipping business. Historians have not noticed
what a perfect foil Alfred was for Charles – his opposite in almost every way –
and if we juxtapose the elder brother against the younger, we get a better – if
much diminished – idea of who the latter was. A reading of A.H. John’s A
Liverpool Merchant House demonstrates that the elder Alfred was the practical
reason for the firm’s success – and that his commonsense, his calmness, and his
lack of reverence for business (and “work”) generally, were the true reasons the
Booth firm succeeded as it did. Booth’s endless contemplation, and attachment to
the “theoretical,” the book tells us, can be seen as valuable qualities, but it
reminds us of an important fact: that one cannot run a shipping business on
nervous attacks and contemplation. Early on in the book the author quotes the
Booth brothers’ father, comparing Charles to his great-uncle George – “grave and
thoughtful, slow in coming to a decision, fond of intricate calculations, whether in
matters of account or of mechanical problems” – and Alfred to his grand-father,
Thomas: “My father was a man of business, prompt, energetic and decisive. They
were many years in partnership and it will be readily understood that my father
64
Ibid., 24, 23, 23.
John, Liverpool Merchant House 29, 28.
66
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 58.
65
46
took the lead as acting partner, while my uncle generally acquiesced in his
proceedings.”67
John emphasizes the nepotism that characterized the Liverpool
Nonconformist elite. Unlike Booth’s later ramblings on the “great fight” of
competition between man and man in the marketplace, he and Alfred were
apprenticed to the firm of Lamport and Holt in great part because “Mr. Lamport –
was his father’s second cousin.” Note that Alfred Booth went first, “followed” by
his brother, that he completed his apprenticeship at twenty-three (in 1857), and
that he “sailed almost immediately to take up a temporary post in the New York
office of Rathbone and Company.”68 Note also that 1857 was a year in which
financial crisis hit the company, a crisis that required quick-thinking, and that
Alfred proved an able apprentice amidst this crisis – able to learn on the job and
remember his lessons, as Rathbone (later Governor of the Bank of England)
steered the firm clear of disaster. Before he died, Alfred’s father would
congratulate Alfred for the invitation by Rathbone and Company to stay on a
further year in New York, at a salary of $1,500 (Alfred had refused an offer of a
partnership in a cotton broking business and was considering forming an
independent business at the time). “It is particularly gratifying to me,” his father
wrote, “to see your services so highly valued.”69
Understanding Alfred as the “able elder brother” makes much more sense
of the Booth firm’s early successes than do accounts of Charles, the nervous
mathematician, dragging a complacent Alfred into efficiency. The Simeys paint
Booth as critical of his brother for his lack of work ethic, for sloppiness and so
on,70 but focusing on such criticisms is to miss the point that Alfred could handle
a crisis, or make quick-decisions demanded by his business, and that Booth, very
67
H.A. Whitting, Alfred Booth; Memories and Letters (1917) 7-8, quoted in John, Liverpool
Merchant House 16-17, 30-31. It is interesting to note that Charles’ daughter Meg was viewed by
his family as most like her father and great-great uncle. “Of all the Booth children, [Meg] was
most like her father, less certain and more artistic than the others and when encouraged, blissfully
funny.” Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 153.
68
Note also that Henry Gair and William Rathbone were “prominent members of the Renshaw
Street Chapel,” in Liverpool. Ibid., 24.
69
Ibid., 22, 24-25.
70
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 22, 23. For the same quotations, employed
towards a rather opposing argument, see John, Liverpool Merchant House 31.
47
often (at this point in his life), could not, the latter rather impotently preferring his
figures, tables and numbers. Having said this, we should not paint Alfred as an
exemplar of the “Captain of Industry” stereotype which blankets this era. Alfred
initially wanted to be an artist, and found a life of business distasteful.71 The latter
manner of life, however, led to a more comfortable life than did the former, and
so, for Alfred, it became a means to an end. As his father wrote (a year before he
died), he hoped Alfred might never be “so engrossed in mercantile life as to be
prevented from (enjoying) to some extent your natural tastes.” Nevertheless he
told Alfred that he understood entirely if the latter preferred “a moderate income
pleasantly earned to a large one attended with disagreeable circumstances.”72
Often Alfred took the helm in moments of crisis, such as at the time of his
father’s death. Immediately following this tragedy, Alfred was at the forefront in
setting up what was to become the Booth brothers’ leather and steamship
companies, while Charles’ role was largely passive. A “hurried decision” at this
time was “made largely to provide an opportunity for the younger brother
[Charles].” A partnership was formed to establish a merchant house dealing in
leather goods with an American, “a man by the name of Walden” (who Alfred
had met in the course of business at Rathbone and Company). Alfred and Philip
Holt then personally opened New York offices for their new shipping agency
(based in Liverpool). Where was Charles in all this? John puts it this way:
“…here was an opportunity for the young Englishman [Alfred] to establish his
own business which, with an American partner, would enable him to return home
to manage the Liverpool House. At the same time it made provision for his
younger brother, Charles.”73 Charles was sent to New York, and ended up
babysitting an increasingly incoherent Walden, who succumbed to insanity in
71
From the mid-seventies, managing the business from Liverpool, Alfred “resumed with vigour
his interest in art and history, as well as renewing his close connection with the affairs of the
Renshaw Street Chapel, of which he was Congregational Treasurer from 1875 to 1883.” John,
Liverpool Merchant House 40.
72
Ibid., 29-30. As John writes, Alfred always kept a comfortable end in mind: he “served thirty
years” shipping leather and rubber and beef (30), and turned altogether from a business world he
saw as petty and low-brow. In this he was quite a contrast to his brother, Charles.
73
My italics, ibid., 25, 26.
48
1863. The two brothers had been left ₤14,000 by their father,74 and were to be
granted “credit facilities” by such “friends” as the Holts, and Rathbone and
Company.75 Alfred reacted quickly, and in a gentle, conciliatory way, suggested
that Booth come home, while he attended to the problems at hand. The
partnership with Walden was now over, and quite suddenly the firms of Alfred
Booth and Company, Liverpool, and Booth and Company, Liverpool were
formed, with the two brothers now partners in their own firm. As John noted,
Alfred suggested Booth return home:
“What one feels about our business in New York,” wrote Alfred Booth
when matters had been settled, “is that constituted as it now is – you and I
– it is rather placed there by force of circumstances than by choice of ours;
and that if it were a fresh start, two situated as we are would hardly be
expected to establish their business at New York. You, however, do not
dislike the idea of remaining out for a while (the people here will be
wanting you back badly soon, I know) and I have no objection to taking
my turn, and I do not see what better can be done than carry on this
business so far as I am concerned; but what you want, active, constant
work and responsibility, might be found perhaps, without going so far for
it.”76
Once in business together, Charles would criticize his brother and partner
for his lack of zeal, as well as thoroughness, in the conduct of business. Bored or
revolted by business, Alfred nearly retired in 1867, 1877 and most notably in
1882, when the seediness of bribing a Brazilian official ₤1,000 for the ManaosNew York shipping contract made him retch (the latter episode requiring the
combined efforts of his partners and friends to stop Alfred from canceling the
contract).77 Alfred Booth only saw “the routine of business” as a “self-discipline,
74
Norman-Butler cites a different figure, writing that the elder Booth “left his children £20,000
each, great wealth in those days…” Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 32.
75
John, Liverpool Shipping House 27. It should be added that, while the two brothers were
newcomers to the business world, the state of the ever-expanding American population (creating
huge demands for “raw materials which could not entirely, and in some cases not even partially,
be supplied from home sources”), finding markets at this time, especially for leather goods, was
like shooting fish in a barrel. Two wealthy men like the Brothers Booth were not likely to fail.
Ibid., 26, 48. By 1870 sheepskin sales reached ₤8,000 a month, by 1873, ₤16,000, “and by 1880,
Alfred Booth and Company were perhaps the most important suppliers of pickled sheepskins to
the American market, having almost a monopoly of the trade to Boston.” (48-49)
76
Ibid., 27.
77
Ibid., 30. “It is certainly a degradation I never imagined being brought to,” Alfred said at the
time, “and I cannot tell you how I desire we could be clear of the whole thing.” Ibid.
49
which as the years passed grew more irksome.” But we should not confuse this
revulsion with business matters with poor business acumen. Alfred was the
Thomas Booth to Charles’ George. While Booth infused in business a Christian
spirit of honour, civilization and chivalry, seeing unseen phantasmagorical forces
dictating profit and loss and virtually spiritualizing capitalist competition (all up
and down the social ladder) – and indeed while he tried to make a “science” and a
“system” of how these forces worked through his endless piles of collected data –
Alfred skirted both the spiritual and the systematic, and was a better businessman
for it. John’s conclusion is probably the best: “The structure of [Charles’] mind
made his judgment in immediate, day-to-day, problems less ready than that of
either his brother [Alfred] or their partner and cousin, Thomas Fletcher. ‘But I
want your real opinion in these matters, you have a better judgment than I have’ –
is a constant expression in his letters to his brother.”78 As the brothers’ twin
businesses of leather and shipping took off from the late 1860s, the picture is of
an excited Charles writing enthusiastically about steam power, embarking himself
on a new “scheme” (originally advanced by the Holt brothers) of high-pressure
engines, and convinced that the companies’ ships should be named after “great
figures of the Church”; but, importantly, it is also of Alfred working laboriously,
and unenthusiastically, behind him.79
None of this is quite in line with “Booth the success,” or “Booth the
would-be social scientist.” Nevertheless, the Simeys typically dismiss or
understate the more insecure moments in Charles’s life. Even when Booth’s
fragile mindset seems incontestable, his biographers prefer their picture of an
implacable and (to today’s reader, an almost masochistically) industrious
78
Ibid., 30-31.
Ibid., 32, 37, 53. The ships were indeed named after “divines,” and some of their names
included: Hildebrand, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Polycarp and Dominic. (53) I do not wish to
discount Booth’s work for the firm excessively, but rather to put his faults in better light. Booth, to
be fair, had his victories. Following his extended convalescence, Booth, in 1879 and 1880, made
his company’s trade to Brazil more profitable through the purchase of two ships, by creating a
more rigid timetable for ships’ movements, and by emphasizing the traffic of gunpowder to Para,
Brazil, in exchange for nuts and more significantly, rubber, direct to London. (64-65) Also,
Norman-Butler, although she often inflates Booth’s role in the firm, speaks of Booth’s decisive
reorganization of the firm’s New York offices in 1878. Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 5051.
79
50
entrepreneur. “The next few years,” the Simeys wrote (speaking of the late
1860s), “were to be accompanied by considerable anxiety, pleasurable though that
anxiety might be to one of Charles’s temperament.” Indeed, they refer, almost
insensitively, to his repeated psychological collapses over the course of his life,
discussing them blandly as his “recurrent ‘breakdowns.’”80
Instead of recasting him as a redoubtable “Captain of Industry,” a new
focus on Booth’s anxieties causes his personality to take a complex but more
human shape. He emerges as a gravely serious, yet highly indecisive,
noncommittal personality. Booth, it appears, commonly refused to align himself
with any doctrine of belief, but, at crucial moments, fell back on a moral, almost
religious sensibility for certainty. Booth’s life and labours were a strange
combination of indecision and conviction, commitment and withdrawal. Although
momentarily captivated by Positivism, for example, Booth “never took the step of
joining the Positivist body,” and according to Mary he ultimately lost interest in
the movement.81
In her biography, Mary repeatedly made excuses for his perpetual
indecision, and yet hinted at a man groping for a greater meaning. His “nature,”
she said, “though enthusiastic, had many needs, many aspirations difficult to
satisfy, and not easily confined within the limits of any formal body of doctrine.”
When she defended him from the tag of socialism (some contemporaries called
“socialistic” both his pension proposals and his ideas regarding penal detention of
the unfit), Mary defiantly affirmed – “Charles Booth was not frightened by a
word. Labels and even creeds meant little at all to him.”82
Mary tried to explain in the early pages of her memoir that her husband’s
seeming indecision was, in fact, a sign of his judicious nature. Too often,
however, her defenses of his shrewdness sound like an apology: “He held aloof
80
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 26.
Booth, Charles Booth 8-9. The Simeys write that, “[i]n common with many of the more
‘rational’ amongst the young intellectuals of the day,” Booth was “attracted by the hope that
Comtism provided a formula which would unite explanations of the working of natural laws in
terms of human behaviour with principles of moral action and social endeavour.” Simey and
Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 48. It seems not to have satisfied him sufficiently in this
respect.
82
Booth, Charles Booth 9, 26.
81
51
from political party and from any definite religious system, not from any
contrariness of nature, but because he found much to sympathise with in many
forms of thought and methods of government, and too much to wish different in
nearly all to be willing to attach himself irrevocably to any.”
Mary had to admit that “[i]n such a temperament there are obvious disadvantages,
and this he often found himself, and was prompt to recognise.” Throughout his
life, she said, her husband “seldom entirely agreed with any of those with whom
he acted...”83 Mary tried to see this as a sign of his sympathy with others’ views,
of his inherent agreeability. But what I think Mary was (quite charitably) alluding
to here was simply that her husband often had grave difficulties in making up his
mind.
To be fair, Booth enjoyed the intellectual exercise of narrowing matters
down. For seventeen years he gathered over thirty interviewers around him, spent
enormous sums of money, and accumulated mountains of data, in the attempt to
reduce exaggerations he felt were rampant in the public mind. While he derived
much satisfaction from the thinning of over-amplified ideas, however, when it
came to dissolving such data into facts or principles or action-based remedies for
social problems, very often Booth shied away.
We see this tendency clearly in his early studies of poverty (published in
the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society), and in his published volumes of Life
and Labour’s Poverty Series. In the latter Booth wrote how he believed the “lives
of the poor lay hidden from view by a curtain.” On this curtain, he felt, late
Victorian pamphlets and newspapers had “painted terrible pictures: starving
children, suffering women, overworked men; horrors of drunkenness and vice,
monsters and demons of inhumanity; giants of disease and despair.” “Did these
pictures truly represent what lay behind[?],” Booth asked. Did they reflect the
reality of poverty in the East End? “[O]r did they bear to the facts a relation
similar to that which pictures outside a booth at some country fair bear to the
83
Ibid., 26. Admittedly, Booth’s agreement with a wide range of proposals, from representatives
across the political spectrum, for London’s poverty problems, can be seen as his agreement with
the “moral” beliefs shared by such men and women, regardless of their political stripe. For this see
below.
52
performance or show within?”84 To answer this question Booth’s study was to
narrow the “terrible picture” of London poverty down. As we will see, he found
the rough proportions of working people in “comfort,” in poor respectability, and
in “self-made” poverty, and he did this in order to put an end to the sensationalist
newspaper accounts of a wholly “poor” or “outcast” East London.
In separating the poor-but-respectable from the idle-and-begging working
classes, Booth also narrowed down which group of people deserved help when
their poverty disabled them. During the winter of 1885, when the Mansion House
Fund organized colossal sums from West End donations to help the East End
poor, Booth noted how a lack of facts concerning which of the poor were “truly”
in need made poor relief in London a panicky operation characterized by
excessive giving. In a paper to the Royal Statistical Society, Booth noted how in
hard winters “the rich are helpless to relieve want without stimulating its sources
– the legislature is helpless because the limits of successful interference by charge
of law are closely circumscribed. From these helpless feelings spring socialistic
theories, passionate suggestions of ignorance, setting at naught the nature of man
and neglecting all the fundamental facts of human existence.” Booth wanted to
“relieve this sense of helplessness,” infuse a sense of sobriety into matters of
charity distribution, and to do this he believed “the problems of human life must
be better stated.”85 Booth, in 1889, would point out that a large group of the
working class (the undeserving poor, who barely deserved the name “working
class”) did not merit the attention of philanthropists. Booth, therefore, desired to
narrow down poverty, but he also hoped to narrow down need. In doing so he felt
he was preventing panicky West Enders from carelessly “lavishing” excessive
84
“Poverty” 1: 172.
“The Inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets (School Board Division), their Condition and
Occupations,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1887), 376, quoted in Simey and Simey,
Charles Booth: Social Scientist 68. In view of the discussion to come, it is perhaps useful to
demonstrate the clear parallels of such thought with the Christian economics of evangelicals like
Thomas Chalmers (writing at the end of his own life, and the beginning of Charles Booth’s): “A
public charity for [the indigent poor] tends to multiply its objects – because it enlists the human
will on the side, if not of poverty, at least of the dissipation and indolence which lead to poverty.”
Thomas Chalmers, “The political economy of the Bible,” North British Review 2 (1844-1845), 49.
Quoted in Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement 67.
85
53
amounts of money upon East End charities, who might cause members of the
undeserving classes to “multiply.”
Although his studies were only meant to distil social problems (rather than
propose remedies for them), Booth was always wringing his hands over the
accuracy of his facts. Mary noted, for example, that in his early statistical works
of the 1880s, he always “remained in doubt as to whether any of the proposed
remedies [for London’s social problems] would be of much avail…” Booth was
always anxious whether the data he had accumulated “accurately ascertained” the
“elusive” yet “all-important” facts.86 In Booth’s mind, “both single facts, and
strings of statistics may be true, and demonstrably true, and yet entirely
misleading in the way they are used.”87
Two historians of Charles Booth have chosen to view him as a more
determined sort of man, a dogged man, as “the chief,” and this tone in their
writing imbues Booth with a methodological and ideological sure-footedness that
seems forced upon his personality. Rosemary O’Day and David Englander take
Booth’s words to Beatrice Potter in 1886 and, instead of seeing them as another
instance of Booth’s characteristic factual panic, see him bent on making his
contemporaries “feel the reality of the situation in which poor and rich, employed
86
Booth, Charles Booth 16.
Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 78. One gets a glimpse of Booth’s
sense of factual panic from his regional researches prior to the Life and Labour inquiry, and even
after volume one of the Poverty series was published. In May 1887 Booth let the Royal Statistical
Society examine his early findings on East End Poverty, so sure was he that he was going to “go
wrong.” (Ibid, 89) He criticized his own work on the neighbourhood of St. George’s in the East,
moreover, finding it “very imperfectly done.” (Ibid., 93, n. 2) Outside criticism of the latter work
apparently spurred him to start over in East London and Hackney (research later published as his
second paper to the R.S.S. in May 1888). Booth said to himself at the time: “I run the risk of being
considered tedious in the hope of being thorough.” (Ibid., 94) Despite rave reviews of his 1889
Poverty volume, the Simeys note that “[t]here is no evidence to suggest that Booth…considered
the possibility that what was required might not be more facts but a reconsideration of those
already in his possession: being acutely aware that the facts he had so far collected made the
problem plain enough but threw little light on its solution, he apparently concluded that this must
be due to some deficiency in the quality of his information.” (Ibid., 111) By the second volume of
his Poverty survey, after having tramped across all of London, Booth was no more confident. He
had “walked in faith” throughout his investigations, but even after a vast accumulation of data, his
work had not “done much to make the path more clear.” (“Poverty,” 2: 591, quoted in ibid., 117).
Even by the last volume of the Industry survey, Booth could remark only that still more
information was required – that he would still “attempt no answer.” With one Series to go, the
Religious Influences Series, Booth said he was “not yet finished,” adding: “I have to ask once
more the patience of my readers.” (“Industry,” 5: 338, quoted in ibid., 136).
87
54
and unemployed, East Ender and West Ender, employers and employees found
themselves.” This is a grand, perhaps over-the-top way of describing the man’s
motives. Such statements, moreover, are shortly followed by universalistic,
thoroughly acontextual statements about Booth’s “compassion.” This seems
inappropriate when Booth’s words to Potter were merely – “It is to me, not so
much verification – the figures or the facts may be correct in themselves – but
they mislead from want of due proportion or from lack of colour.” On this fairly
slim basis, however, O’Day and Englander contend that Booth “saw his research
in the context of policy, of social action,” and, moreover, that he saw an “aim” in
all his work (which was to provide the accurate picture on which social “ills”
could be eradicated). Most misleadingly, they oppose the exaggeration of past
sensational accounts (by Mayhew, Stead, and the Pall Mall Gazette) with what
they believe Booth brought to the study of his society: “the human aspect…
because [Booth] was a man of compassion but also because in human experience
lay ‘actuality.’”88
Language like this makes the 1990s a better home for Booth than the
1890s, and it makes for more questions than answers. What amounted to “the
human aspect” in discussions of social relations at this time? What constituted a
“man of compassion” in 1900? What constituted social “actuality” when more
than half of society did not have (and many thought, did not deserve) the vote? In
the end, a more reasonable picture of Booth is that of a man unsure that his facts
were leading him anywhere, and of a Victorian searching for a culturally contextspecific framework in which to employ his data (however misleading he thought it
was). This seems better than O’Day and Englander’s un-Victorian, a-“moral,”
feeling and caring Booth. The authors caution the historian that “[i]t is only too
easy for an academic working in the twentieth-century equivalent of an ivory
tower to interpret [Booth’s letter to Potter] as an intention to enliven dull statistics
with a bit of local colour.”89 Nevertheless, as a starting-point, this uncertain and
88
89
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 36-37.
Ibid.
55
often descriptive tendency is far preferable to investing Booth with our own
ideals.
As the Life and Labour investigations proceeded, Booth (for the most part)
demonstrated a determination to avoid either recommendations of remedies for
London poverty (i.e. public housing, healthcare or unemployment insurance), or
alliance with a political ideology. At the close of his Industry Series, Booth said
he had only wanted to provide “a picture of a way of looking at things, rather than
a doctrine or argument.”90 Mary Booth quoted the survey to impress upon her
readers that Booth only wanted to “observe and chronicle the actual, leaving
remedies to others.”91 When he wrote these words, it should be added, Booth was
not a half, or a quarter of the way through his famous inquiry, but in his very last
volume. Booth was almost panicky in his refusal to take an ideological or
otherwise theoretical position in his writing. He told Beatrice Webb: “To action I
have never pretended, and any claim on abstract thought, abandon as a childish
delusion, so nothing is left for me but investigation.”92 He explained his ostensible
neutrality thus, (again, in his Final Volume):
To this attitude [leaving remedies to others] I would now revert. For the
treatment of disease it is necessary to establish the facts as to its character,
extent and symptoms. Perhaps the qualities of mind which enable a man to
make this inquiry are the least of all likely to give him that elevation of
soul, sympathetic insight, and sublime confidence which must go to the
making of a great regenerating teacher. I have made no attempt to teach; at
the most I have ventured on an appeal to those whose part it is. Some
individual views and convictions have been intentionally allowed to show
themselves and here and there in comments made, but no body of doctrine
is submitted.93
These individual views and convictions were likely those which enabled him to
classify London’s working people into six, morally-defined working classes, and
to recommend that one be segregated from the rest, but this we must leave until
the second chapter.
90
“Industry,” 5: 337, quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 136.
Booth, Charles Booth 135.
92
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 117.
93
Booth, Charles Booth 135.
91
56
Equally characteristic of Booth’s frustratingly middle-ground assessments
were his later recommendations for industrial peace, proposals he wrote during
years of increasing industrial unrest just prior to World War I. Booth emphasized
that any direct action in industrial affairs, from either capital or labour, was both
extreme and unwise. Beyond this Booth’s words appeared to lack substance. “All
life,” he said, “rests upon a balance of forces. We stand or fall, morally and
economically, as well as physically, by management or mismanagement of
conflicting forces.” He was eager to “press forward,” yet he scorned the
“patronizing tone sometimes adopted in speaking of the achievements of our
ancestors.” He felt the “influence of the past” was “still alive and potent” in his
world. This made him question the Liberalism under which he was raised. He
now regretted, for instance, what he called the “excessiveness,” the
“exclusiveness,” the “hostility” and the “clamour for privilege” which
characterized the trade unions’ bid to moderate the market economy’s impact on
unionized working people.94 One wonders what manner of sensibility was behind
these words. What were these “forces” at work in industrial relations? What was
this “influence of the past”? Were they connected with the near-spiritual
requirements a man apparently had to have in order to “regenerate” London’s
“diseased” social conditions? Such questions move us beyond typical discussions
of what kind of man Booth was.
3. The Conservative and Imperial Booth
Booth’s endless waffling was very likely a gratifying exercise for him, and
his fence-sitting seemed almost a sign of wisdom to Anglican conservatives like
his wife. Nevertheless, Booth occasionally found himself forced to take an
ideological position. From political historians Booth certainly cannot hide, but do
Booth’s politics give us a clearer picture of the man? In his youth, Booth had
supported the Liberal Party over the working-class franchise and campaigned in
Liverpool for education of that class, but he tended toward the Tories after the
94
Ibid., 33-34.
57
1860s. In their letters, both Mary and Charles had only “unstinting praise” for
Conservative leader, Benjamin Disraeli.95 There is some evidence of how Booth
voted in the last decade of the century. In a capricious moment – a break from her
largely unconditional praise in regard to Booth’s excessive brand of
contemplation – Mary admitted in her memoir that Booth voted Unionist on
National Service, Ulster, and the Boer War, and she added that “with regard to
fiscal policy it may almost be said that his views were theirs.”96
References in A.H. John’s history of Booth’s shipping company, moreover
(we should recall Booth’s scheme to trade gunpowder for the expensive
commodity, Brazilian rubber, in the late 1870s), reveal both Booth and his brother
to have been significant participants in what J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, and
also P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, have called Britain’s “informal” South
American empire.97 Norman-Butler’s references to the project paint it as another
exciting departure in Booth’s life:
Charles added a new guest and a new venture to Gracedieu life by inviting
Baron Bronislaw Rynkiewicz to stay. This Polish entrepreneur had
acquired during his travels in South America various important
concessions, among them the Manaos Harbour Concession, on the Upper
95
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 50.
Booth supported tariff reform and he subscribed to and joined the Unionist Party. Ibid., 36. The
Simeys note also Booth’s “formal adherence to the Conservative party” in the 1900s. This
coincided with the involvement of Booth’s shipping company in the “opening up of the Amazon
river.” Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 174. O’Day and Englander note that
Booth developed his ideas on protectionism most publicly in his article, “National Reform,”
National Review xliii (January 1904), 686-701 (cited in Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 154 n. 86).
Norman-Butler notes how Joseph Chamberlain “resigned over Colonial Preference [a proposed
tariff wall around Great Britain parts of the British Empire] with which Charles was in
sympathy…” Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 161.
97
A rather under-reported aspect of Booth’s life is his involvement in South American shipping,
particularly his work opening up trade in Brazil. Up to now, all we seem to have are discrete
references to Booth’s link to empire. Mary mentions that “Booth went on board one of the
steamers of his Company to Brazil” in 1876. We hear of “Booth’s planned business trip to
Manaos” in 1903, at the close of his Religious Influences Series. Most revealing is the Simeys’
account. “Booth sailed for Brazil on 1 April, for the opening of the harbour of Manaos a ‘thousand
miles up the Amazon’, whose conception owed so much to his foresight and planning.” Early in
the biography they trace much of Booth’s success to his analytical and statistical mastery of the
shipping trade to the West Indies and South America, a mastery that enabled him to “foresee the
effect of the discovery of the pneumatic tyre on the Brazilian rubber trade, with which the fortunes
of the Booth Steamship Company were, of course, closely bound up.” Booth, Charles Booth 12;
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 180; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social
Scientist 160, n. 2, 22, 27. There are repeated mentions of Booth’s shipping trade with Brazil A.H.
John, A Liverpool Merchant House (London: Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1959).
96
58
Amazon. Over the years, just as the Booth Steamship Company had grown
in power by assimilating the Singlehurst Line, so had the ships themselves
grown in size. It was therefore becoming more and more difficult to land
cargo from big ships in a river which rose and fell fifty-four feet between
the high and low seasons. The Baron was convinced that piers could be
driven into the subsoil of the river bank, and that a harbour could be built
which would obviate all the difficulties and restrictions of landing cargo at
Manaos. Charles wrote to Mary from Gracedieu: “This Manaos Harbour
Works is a big affair, and I think we must take it up…”98
Gallagher and Robinson, however, place Booth firmly in a wider imperial
context. Booth’s Upper Amazon project was part of a wider British “empire of
investment” in South America. “Britain neither sought nor acquired territorial
rights on the South American mainland,” but maintained “indirect political
hegemony” over countries like Brazil. “Latin America received about 10 per cent
of Britain’s exports (and re-exports) between 1850 and 1913, and accounted for
about the same proportion of Britain’s retained imports during the same period.
These shares were larger than those of any other continent or country within the
empire.”99 Booth’s shipping line was part of a wider trend which saw British
shipping dominate trade to the continent, benefit tremendously from a trade which
tripled in this period, and enable (with the help of joint-stock banks and free
trade) a “mountain of investment” to come to countries like Brazil.100 As Cain and
Hopkins tell us, government debts and extraordinarily accommodating Latin
American leaders eager to pay them,101 ultimately, made countries like Brazil,
politically and financially, dependents of British investors. The integral part
played by shipping lines like Booth’s in stripping Brazil of its independence in
this period is clear as Cain and Hopkins discuss the truest “index of Britain’s
presence and influence” in the country:
98
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 130.
J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 2nd
series, 6 (1953), 8; P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000 2nd ed. (London:
Pearson Education Ltd., 2002), 243, 249.
100
Ibid., 251-252, 248, 249.
101
One example was President Campos Sales (1898-1902) – coincidentally, taking office in
almost precisely the same years as Booth’s Religious Influences Series interviews – who, in return
for Lord Rothschild’s loan of ₤10 m. to the Brazilian government to cover its debt service, applied
“harsh deflationary measures” and pledged “the whole of her receipts from customs duties to meet
debt payments.” Ibid., 265.
99
59
It was in Britain’s interest as a mature creditor to encourage Brazil to find
markets for her exports, wherever they might be, so that she could acquire
the foreign exchange needed to service her debts, as well as to buy imports
(including manufactures from Britain). And, as Brazil became a mature
debtor, the proportion of export receipts devoted to debt service grew,
while that spent on commodity imports declined. Moreover, the financing,
shipping and insuring of Brazil’s overseas trade remained overwhelmingly
in British hands down to 1914, irrespective of destination. Above all,
Britain continued to be responsible for the major share of the vastly
expanded flows of foreign capital (portfolio and direct) which
accompanied the creation of the Republic [of Brazil in 1889] and
continued down to the final boom on the eve of World War I.102
Booth, therefore, was politically and fiscally a Conservative, and he was a
supporter of Britain’s expansive Latin American informal empire. There is other
evidence of Booth’s imperial ideals. In Norman-Butler’s account, Booth, while on
a ship to New York, expresses satisfaction upon meeting a “Southern woman
from Louisiana,” who, though “rather full of herself,” is nevertheless “interesting
and able to see the big English view of the future of Africa.” Mary was a strong
supporter of empire and no doubt reinforced Charles’ imperial notions. “She
herself was in no doubt as to that [imperial] cause, being rooted in the idea of
authority, central government, and retention of what her ancestors had won.” “Her
views on India in the twenties,” writes Norman-Butler, “followed the same lines,
and she would certainly have been part of the Suez group in the fifties…” In later
life Mary “absolutely detested” Mahatma Gandhi.103 That Booth and his wife
were Conservative, empire-builders is clear. Yet we need to dig deeper into
Booth’s personality if we are to get more than this rather general idea of his
ideological foundations.
102
Ibid., 264. Britain was “still the largest foreign investor in Brazil in 1929, and possibly even in
1939 too.” (533) Despite its age, Alan K. Manchester’s 1933 British Preeminence in Brazil: Its
Rise and Decline. A Study in European Expansion (New York: Octagon Books, 1964 [1933])
continues to dominate the citation of Brazil’s colonial history, as does Richard Graham, Patronage
and Politics in Nineteenth Century Brazil (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990).
For British trade, investment and shipping, respectively, see D.C.M. Platt, Latin America and
British Trade, 1806-1914 (London: A. and C. Black, 1972); Irving Stone, “British Direct and
Portfolio Investment in Latin America Before 1914,” Journal of Economic History 37 (1977):
690-722; D.C.M. Platt, Britain’s Investment Overseas on the Eve of the First World War: The Use
and Abuse of Numbers (New York: St. Martin’s Press,1986); Robert Greenhill, “Shipping, 18501914,” in D.C.M. Platt, British Imperialism, 1840-1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
103
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 152, 106.
60
4. Captain of Industry? Booth’s Masculinity
Scholars of middle-class masculinity may also be able to draw a general
outline of the man. Booth certainly dreamed he might fit the bill of what John
Tosh has called the “manly,” middle-class, entrepreneurial “type” of the period.
He was a member of the “coming men” of the Victorian middle classes, a man
who felt it crucial to “disfigure” his life by “excessive attention to business.”
Business was a “romance” to him. Most of all he enjoyed “contact with a set of
men working towards one end: all this delighted and absorbed him.” With their
usual praise of a man they called a “financial success…soundly based on moral
principles,” the Simeys called him a “typical and most attractive example of the
merchant class of which he was a product and to whose tradition and philosophy
he owed a lifelong loyalty.” Booth shared with the men of this class the “profound
belief that self-realisation comes from purposeful work, not from the enjoyment
of society.”104
Mary noted Booth’s apparent “love of work” when she quoted one volume
of Life and Labour in which he suggested that “the only permanent sources of
happiness lie in work and affection.” There was an inner Puritanism here that
belied Booth’s more gregarious moments. It was important, Booth believed, that
one not substitute the personal temptations of luxury for the discipline of
foresight. Always one must “think four years ahead,” Booth believed, and he
spent his time “mentally preparing himself to face the exigencies of that distant
time.” “Only in this way,” he felt, “could a man advance securely and avoid the
ruin that awaits the unwary.”105
John Tosh’s account of the “manly vigour” of the Manchester industrialist,
however, takes us only so far into Booth’s mind. The Victorian industrialist was
supposed to have among his qualities “energy, virility, strength – attributes which
equipped a man to place his physical stamp on the world.”
104
John Tosh, “Gentlemanly Politeness and Manly Simplicity in Victorian England,” Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002), 457, 462; Booth, Charles Booth 93; Simey and Simey,
Charles Booth: Social Scientist 30; Tosh, “Gentlemanly Politeness,” 462.
105
Booth, Charles Booth 93-94.
61
Next came the moral qualities which enabled men to attain their physical
potential – decisiveness, courage and endurance. These virtues had
traditionally had a strong military resonance; now they were considered
applicable as much to the struggle of life as to the battlefield. These
qualities of physique and character – what Carlyle called ‘toughness of
muscle’ and toughness of heart’ – were in turn yoked to some notion of
social responsibility – whether loyalty to one’s peers or chivalry towards
women. The desired outcome was the ‘independent man’ – who was
beholden to no one, who kept his household. These were the English
characteristics which Hippolyte Taine summarised in the 1860s as ‘the
need for independence, the capacity for initiative, the active and obstinate
will.’106
When he worked, Booth certainly worked hard, but this neither defines the
man, nor his outlook on a troubled world and its problems.107 Historians by and
large have disagreed, of course, noting Booth’s tendency to overwork as a sign of
his inner strength. Booth, one scholar writes, would spend a “full day at the office
or docks and spend an evening and well into the night working on the [Life and
Labour] survey – this in spite of a lifelong frailty and illnesses that would have
incapacitated an ordinary man for an ordinary day’s work.”108 But neither the
amount he would work, nor his financial independence, nor his Taine-ite
“obstinacy of will” (an almost useless phrase, so much more apprehensively did
Booth see the world), really tells us anything about who Booth was or from what
source he drew his convictions.
A focus on Booth’s mental and physical frailty, rather than any
stereotypical “toughness,” leads us in new directions. It prompts us to ask what
precisely gave Booth – an otherwise very weak man – strength. It should also be
pointed out how many middle-class successes of the period – industrial, political
and intellectual – were not tough. Some, as John Tosh points out, simply
pretended to be. John Bright, for example, fostered an image of himself as a “man
of the people,” but his political career was cut short by “a nervous disorder which
106
Tosh, “Gentlemanly Politeness,” 460.
The Simeys note how Beatrice Potter “found in his characteristically altruistic devotion to the
work in hand an inspiration to the subordination of self which must have been of inestimable
assistance to her at this difficult stage in her life.” Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social
Scientist 73. Yet if work was a subordination of self, an act of repression, we surely see in this an
inner weakness in Booth, the sign of a troubled mind.
108
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 79.
107
62
his robustness of manner belied.”109 Others were simply waylaid by their own
frailties. Arnold Toynbee, the wildly influential proponent of “moral citizenship”
after which Toynbee Hall was named, suffered a “nervous collapse” and died in
early March 1883.110 Leonard Hobhouse’s intellectual and journalistic career was
repeatedly ambushed by psychological “breakdowns.” Just prior to accepting the
Martin White Chair in 1907 (the first professorship in Sociology instituted in
Britain), Hobhouse suffered “one of his periodic nervous breakdowns and was in
the pit of one of his more frequent depressions.”111
In Booth’s case, while historians have attempted to emphasize his “inner
strength,” Booth himself would never even have attempted such a fiction. In his
late thirties, Booth looked like this:
…tall, abnormally thin, garments hanging as if on pegs, the complexion of
a consumptive girl, and the slight stoop of the sedentary worker, a
prominent acquiline nose, with moustache and pointed beard barely hiding
a noticeable Adam’s apple, the whole countenance dominated by a finelymoulded brow and large, observant grey eyes. Charles Booth was an
attractive but distinctly queer figure of a man.112
Charles Booth, in Beatrice Potter’s words, looked more like an Anglican
priest than an industrialist. In a time when people were judged as much by their
faces and outward character as by the facts, Potter thought that “alike by his
appearance and by his idealistic temperament,” Booth did not make one think of a
“great captain of Industry, bringing in its train the personal power and free
initiative due a large income generously spent.”113 He was a meek, thin, sorrylooking man, and his mental make-up (whatever the equally fragile Beatrice
Potter believed) matched his physique. He was not confident or overly
“principled” in his business, research, and philanthropic affairs.114 Booth only
109
Tosh, “Gentlemanly Politeness,” 470-471. Tosh also mentions William Gladstone’s efforts to
overcome his aristocratic links through widely publicized “treefelling” efforts at Hawarden,
captured in Eugenio Biagini’s Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 396-400.
110
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 236.
111
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 209.
112
Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (London: Longmas Green and Co, 1950), 188.
113
Ibid., 189.
114
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 80.
63
acquired an understanding of the “economy of steamer management,” for
example, during sporadic moments of reading (while convalescing abroad) during
his first emotional collapse of the early seventies. Mary held his hand through the
creation of a smaller boiler for his ships which would burn less coal (apparently
Booth “superintended” the operation), but she admitted that “for practical
purposes” their first trip to Para, Brazil proved a “failure.”115 Fortunately,
mistakes among the milieu of men as wealthy as Booth meant no hardship for
either himself or his family.
The point here is that there is no need to instill principles or fundamentals
in a mind that had very few. For most of his life, with the exception of an anxious
tendency to long hours and thoroughness, Charles Booth hardly knew for sure
what he believed in. From the time he was young until the end of his life, Booth
always found an audience for his rambling. With the vision of Booth aboard a
(very long) failed mission to Brazil, Mary by his side, the comparison to the
Ancient Mariner is irresistible. From the first, his father listened “indulgently to
all his crude ideas and schemes.” The exceptionally intelligent Mary likely
replaced the Elder Booth, guiding her husband’s ideas with equal sensitivity and
subtlety. In business, always steady in a crisis, was the reliable Alfred. Despite
such support, however, Booth was simply not a strong man, and never felt entirely
secure in his business or analytical decisions.
At the same time, Gertrude Himmelfarb is right to suggest that Booth was
not “the schizophrenic that some commentators have made of him – a man torn
between the conflicting roles of businessman and humanitarian, or of business
man and social scientist…”116 To place Booth as a man torn between the left and
right is to assume that certain fundamental moral ideas about poverty were held
115
Booth, Charles Booth 12-13.
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 80. Himmelfarb has in mind Booth’s editors of the late
1960s, Harold Pfautz and Albert Fried and Richard M. Elman. Pfautz rather simplisitically saw
this humanitarianism arising from “Protestant morality,” but does not elaborate the meaning or
origins of this morality. Fried and Elman see it arising inevitably from the (to them) inherently
“radical” approach of “the investigator” (because this person searches for the “truth.”) There is too
much essentialism and generalization here (Protestant morality, radicalism, scientific truth) for any
in-depth historical understanding of the man’s work. Pfautz ed., On the City 15-16; Fried and
Elman ed., Charles Booth’s London xxix.
116
64
only by those of the right at this time, and, more wrongheadedly, that these moral
notions could be overcome by close contact with the horrible byproducts of
capitalist society – the poverty which Booth and the “coming men” of the middle
classes helped to create. This is to assume that those who truly “see” poverty,
“write it down,” or render it into statistics, inevitably await a conversion to
radicalism because they have witnessed the evils of inequality. At the end of the
nineteenth century, therefore, we need to look at Booth as a moral man with moral
ideas, within an exceedingly moral culture: a man who could make a special
analysis of 4,000 poor families (as he did in 1888, characteristically, just to be
sure his “facts” were correct), and see, nevertheless, only moral and non-moral
cases of need.117
5. The Moral and Intellectual Booth:
Origins and Inconsistencies in the Religious History of Victorian Morals
It is a better understanding of these moral ideas, their intellectual history
in Victorian England, and their startling predominance across the political
spectrum at this time, that can best help us in our outline of Charles Booth. Booth
was not exactly a confident industrialist, yet neither was he a conflicted capitalist.
While we may see him as indomitably opaque and as having broadly conservative
political allegiances and masculine gender norms, in terms of his moral outlook
Booth is not so difficult to pin down. Historians have let the word “moral” stand
in for “religious” on a number of occasions in regard to Booth’s views on poverty
and the poor.118 John Brown, E.P. Hennock, and Michael Cullen have each noted
117
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 95. Booth here wanted to make one more
careful analysis (before he did it all again in the published “Poverty” volumes of his Life and
Labour Inquiry) as to the causes of poverty among two classes he called the “poor” and “very
poor.”
118
In other areas of late nineteenth century social history, historians like Alan J. Kidd on social
control through charity in Manchester, and Jennifer Hart on religious social control, use the term
moral-religious instead of simply moral. Kidd noted that those discussing remedies for poverty in
the late nineteenth century discussed it as a “process both moral (and therefore religious) and
social (in terms of making ‘respectable’).” Alan J. Kidd, “Outcast Manchester: Voluntary Charity,
Poor Relief and the Casual Poor 1860-1905,” Alan J. Kidd and K.W. Roberts eds. City, class and
culture: Studies of social policy and cultural production in Victorian Manchester (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1985), 49; Jennifer Hart, “Religion and Social Control in the Mid-
65
Booth’s unfailing ability to lapse into moralistic diatribes against certain members
of the poor, and this despite a great deal of contact with them. Citing his
colleagues, Cullen drew attention to Booth’s preoccupation with the “moral
consequences of poverty”: “As John Brown has put it [in 1968], Booth’s
‘unflattering descriptions of the poor perpetuated a language suffused with moral
undertones’…. Above all perhaps is Booth’s insistent use of the terms
‘respectable’ and ‘disreputable.’”119
Where, however, did Booth’s moralism originate? To trace the history of
the most powerful moralisms expended on the subject of nineteenth-century
poverty we must backtrack to popular religious sentiments common in the four
decades prior to Booth’s birth. At this time the most vocal, and most influential
moralists in terms of popular culture, were evangelical ones. Their spokesmen
were a number of Anglican clerics who influenced early Victorian governments at
the highest levels, and whose hard attitudes against relief of the poor reached deep
into the English middle classes. Boyd Hilton’s important contribution, in his Age
of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic
Thought, 1795-1865, has been to demonstrate that these men also believed
themselves exceedingly “scientific” in their economic views. Hilton notes two
significant facts. First, he suggests that the political economy (or Christian
economics) of influential clerical groups like the Clapham Sect informed popular
opinion (and indeed made classical economics more intelligible) to a greater
extent than did the professional economists of the period. These ministers were
often “amateur practitioners” of economics, “many of whom wrote from an
avowedly moralistic, and often specifically Christian standpoint.” But their
fundamentally religious beliefs were essential to “shaping as well as rationalizing
the economic philosophy of the period.” It is these ministers, Hilton suggests,
Nineteenth Century,” in A.P. Donajgrodzki, Social control in nineteenth century Britain (London:
Croom Helm, 1977).
119
Michael Cullen, “Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey: Some New Approaches,” in T.C. Smout ed.,
The Search for Wealth and Stability: Essays in Economic and Social History, presented to F.W.
Flinn, (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), 159; John Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour
Colonies, 1889-1905,” Economic History Review 21, 2 (1968): 349-360; E.P. Hennock, “Poverty
and Social Theory in England: The Experience of the Eighteen-Eighties,” Social History (1976):
67-91.
66
“who provide the most vivid insight into the ‘official mind’ of the period, and it is
they – more than the ‘classical’ economists – who throw light on the ideological
elements…behind the policies of Free Trade and the Gold Standard.”120
From religious authorities, and thence to the minds of congregations across
England, the ideas of Malthus and Ricardo were popularized and entrenched in
English minds, sanctified by evangelical language.121
Second, Hilton argues that this exceedingly “scientific” economics of
Atonement made Darwin’s supposed synthesis of religion and science
symptomatic of his cultural present, rather than a break from a backward,
“religious” and “unscientific” past. Hilton notes the tendency of historians to
wrongly “regard evangelism as irrational” and to argue “that it was bitterly
antipathetic to the scientific developments of the first half of the nineteenth
century.” But evangelicals such as Rev. Thomas Chalmers (the most influential
member of the Clapham Sect) and Rev. John Bird Sumner (Archbishop of
Canterbury, 1848-1862) “looked to science with confident expectation,” “anxious
to show the hand of God at work in the formation of rocks and the movement of
the heavens, as well as in the economic operations of society.”122 They also
promoted scientific investigation. Eerily alike in their language to Charles Booth
fifty years on, William Whewell (Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge,
1838-1855) “believed that, to deal ‘inductively’ with moral sciences, it was first
necessary to build up hundreds of examples of human conduct, and [Henry]
Sedgwick [Professor of Geology at Cambridge, 1785-1873] described the proper
role of the political economist as ‘observing and classifying phenomena, from
which he deduces consequences that are to him in the place of moral laws’.” “In
this way Christianity promoted rather than impeded scientific investigation,”
concludes Hilton, “though of course it often distorted scientific investigation.”123
Economic science and Christian religion, therefore, had been wedded together
120
Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement 6.
Chalmers presented Malthus’s ideas “to a wider audience and in a more acceptable form, as
McCulloch [John Ramsay McCulloch, Professor of Political Economy, London, 1828-1832] did
for Ricardo.” Ibid., 64-65.
122
Ibid., 22, 23.
123
Whewell to Richard Jones (Professor of Political Economy, London and Haileybury), 25 Feb.
1831, quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement 51.
121
67
long before religion encountered the harshly individualistic (and “scientific”)
social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (when, as we will see, this marriage was
reshaped and reconstituted into a further moral-scientific hybrid). Evangelical
Christianity’s moral ideas about poverty and charity would survive the impact of
both “scientific” revolutions.
Christian economy’s science was a science, as science typically is,
because influential authorities of the period – clerical authorities, in this case –
said it was. It was the science whose rules saw every natural, social or economic
phenomenon as a painful moral test.124 Such tests were to be left to occur
naturally: no obstacles should be put in their way. Suffering in life, especially,
was a moral test, and one which all people should be thankful for enduring, since
it was the key to salvation. By this reasoning, the rich were to have full
responsibility for businesses which went bankrupt, and were to remain anxious at
all times about keeping their alms to the poor spontaneous, genuine kindnesses to
the deserving and avoiding at all costs contrived, disingenuous doles, carelessly
distributed only to court favour with God. This made for an extraordinary level of
anxiety and guilt among evangelicals, specifically, over the fact that one’s life,
labours and works might not be worthy of Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of men.
Chalmers admitted fully that with evangelical beliefs came a profound sense of
uncertainty, a lack of confidence that their salvation was assured:
Under the economy of ‘Do this and live,’ the great point of anxiety with
him who is labouring for the good of his soul, is, ‘O that I had obedience!’
Under the economy of ‘Believe, and ye shall be saved,’ the great point of
anxiety with him who is labouring for the good of his soul is, ‘O that I had
faith!’…Men may make a work of faith…[but] in the doing of this work,
there may be felt all the darkness, and all the anxiety, and all the spirit of
bondage, which attached to the work of the old covenant.125
124
As Hilton describes it, “God transcends this world, and his providence is responsible for
everything that happens in it. His creatures are in a state of natural depravity, weighed down by
original sin, and life is effectively an ‘arena of moral trial’, an ethical obstacle course on which
men are tempted, tested, and ultimately sorted into saints and sinners in readiness for the Day of
Judgment. Then, souls will be despatched either to Heaven or to Hell, literally conceived as states
of eternal felicity and everlasting torment.” Ibid., 8.
125
T. Chalmers, “Introductory essay’, Tracts by the Rev. Thomas Scott (Glasgow, 1826), pp. xxiixxiii, quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement 19.
68
Discussing “true charity” in 1847, E.B. Pusey (Professor of Hebrew at Oxford,
and Tractarian) criticized “unstrenuous or frivolous giving,” while another
evangelical demanded of the charity-giver,
“He wants your heart, your feelings, your time, your anxiety.” Men must
half not wish to give, but then must do so joyously, for charity must be
“cheerfully dispensed” as well as “prompt, spontaneous, and free.” It must
hurt, and the hurt must be enjoyable. It must be prompt and unplanned, but
also “steady and uniform, not arbitrary, capricious and eccentric.” It must
be done as a matter of “principle, and not merely of feeling, an obligation
of conscience, and not an excitement of the passions.” It must be “selfdenying and laborious…not an effeminate compassion,” but “clothed in
humility” and modelled “in the love of God.”126
Such seemingly insensible language regarding charity, in reality,
amounted to an uncompromising severity in evangelical ministers’ dealings with
the poor. “The poor” (as they were unitarily called by most contemporaries before
1850127) were to be denied the indulgence of routine charity, because it would
serve to dull the pain of their lives and thus prevent their salvation.128 This meant
that Thomas Chalmers, an Anglican pioneer of the parish social work in
Britain,129 required only “spontaneous” and irregular charity to be administered in
his parish of St. John’s, Glasgow. Evangelicals like Chalmers and Sumner, it is
important to note, still gave a great deal of charity. “What evangelicals insisted on
126
E. B. Pusey, Chastisements Neglected Forerunners of Greater: A Sermon, preached on the Day
appointed for a General Fast and Humiliation (1847); John Angell James, Christian Philanthropy:
as exemplified by the Life and Character of the Late Joseph Sturge (1859) (Angell’s italics) both
quoted in ibid., 105.
127
Only infrequently did early Victorian contemporaries, like Francis Place, speak of “the poor”
not as one class, but more accurately, as many classes. A well-known expert on working people
during the first decades of the nineteenth century, Place pointed out the tendency for reviews,
magazines, pamphlets, newspapers and reports of both Houses of Parliament and the Factory
Commissioners to ignore the “jumbled” and diverse nature of working people. E.P. Thompson,
The Making of the English Working Classes 213.
128
For Hilton’s discussion of evangelical views of charity, see ibid., 81-85; 100-114. Jose Harris
sees Chalmers as one of the “founders of the ‘organised charity’ movement.” Jose Harris,
Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy, 1886-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1972), 103.
129
Anticipating the move of the majority of Anglican clergymen after 1850, Chalmers
recommended that industrial suburbs “could be assimilated into rural parishes, each with its team
of voluntary helpers, deacons, and curates, under strict clerical control. Rigorous attention to the
homes, families, individual personalities, and immortal souls of the poor would induce a frugal
self-reliance on their part, and encourage a sufficiency of spontaneous concern on the part of their
relatives and betters.” Ibid., 58.
69
was that each act of charity, besides discriminating between deserving and
undeserving recipients – which Poor Law authorities might not do properly –
must be heartfelt, ‘spontaneous and individual’ on the part of the giver[.]”130
Chalmers’s idea, originally Malthus’s, was that compulsory or systematized
charity was dangerously overindulgent (doles, in the Malthusian sense, causing
the poor to “procreate themselves back into all their old misery”) and also
immoral (preventing salvation) for both “indiscriminate” giver and “improvident”
receiver.131 How this theory of charity played out in practical terms at St. John’s
and other parishes would, in fact, be more similar to church charitable distribution
at late century than Hilton gives it credit. Charity, in the 1820s as much as in the
1890s, was distributed to the deserving and withheld from the undeserving, by an
organized contingent of church and volunteer workers, such methods causing
untold hurt to poor people who needed help.132 A symptom of the blinding power
of such cruel ideologies was Chalmers’ firm belief that “moralizing” the poor –
through selective, irregular charity – would make them “physically happy.” A
“virtuous” species, deprived of indiscriminate charity, would be a “happy”
species.133 The widespread popularity of Evangelical ideas of charity was
ultimately to blame for an atrocity committed by the British state in this period:
the delay of aid to the starving Irish in the 1845-1847 potato famine. Sir Charles
Trevelyan, a prominent member of the Clapham Sect, and Assistant Secretary at
the Treasury (and therefore the man responsible for administering government
130
Ibid., 101. Quotation is from Chalmers’ On Political Economy.
The St. John’s experiment apparently renewed Malthus’s hope (in 1831) in his own theory that
a “‘fundamental change in the habits and manners of the great mass of our people’ was a practical
possibility after all…” Ibid., 91.
132
Hilton pays close attention to the theoretical incompatibility of Chalmers’ laissez-faire charity
with the organized charity demanded by men like Charles Loch of the late-century Charity
Organization Society (88-89, 101, 278-279, 279 n. 84). But practically-speaking their systems
were the same. When St. John’s brand of urban, parish charity was multiplied after 1850 on a
London-wide scale, COS officials were going “house to house” as Chalmers had, looking for
deserving recipients “suffering quietly.”
133
[Chalmers], “Political Economy of the Bible”, North British Review 2 (1844-5), 49, 30 and
Chalmers, On the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God quoted in Ibid., 84, 84, n. 41. Making the
same connections between political economy, evangelicalism, charity and the deserving poor,
Gerald Parsons notes too how the “predominant Christian social stance” at this time was
“conservative,” and that it had equal currency between Evangelical and High Church (Tractarian)
Anglicans at this time. Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” in Parsons ed., Religion in
Victorian Britain 43.
131
70
relief at this time), was also a man “who regarded ‘dependence on others’ as ‘a
moral disease.’” Evangelical hegemony at this time meant that Trevelyan could
call the Famine “the judgment of God on an indolent and unself-reliant
people.”134 It meant, ultimately, that poor and starving people died. Because it
bears so close a resemblance to Charles Booth’s notions of a retributive,
spiritualized capitalism, it is most important to note that evangelical Christian
economists believed not only in the “hidden hand” in the capitalist economy, but,
as Hilton writes “that the ‘hidden hand’ held a rod” – wielded justly and even
brutally by a rather authoritarian God – in response to immoral human
behaviour.135
Where did this “science” of suffering go in the mid to late nineteenth
century in which Charles Booth lived? Even in the year Boyd Hilton published
The Age of Atonement one historian could still write:
So what went wrong? The simple answer, at least in relation to Anglican
Evangelicalism, is that we really do not know. Scholarship, though
considerable, tends to present Evangelicalism as a Victorian prelude
(Bradley, 1977). There is no satisfactory account of the movement during
the Queen’s reign. The standard studies of the Evangelical party within the
Church of England, all written before the First World War, are now sadly
deficient (Moule, 1901; Balleine, 1908; Russell, 1915). The status of
Evangelicalism in Victorian Britain, its role, structure, sociology and
strategy have not been the object of sustained study.
This historian, David Englander, concluded: “Our ignorance of Victorian
Evangelicalism is profound.”136 However, for probably most historians – aware of
a late century de-emphasis on a vengeful Godly father and upon the notion of
Hell, apprehensive of an explosion of middle-class voluntary effort in the
churches, concerned to make room for the era of the emancipation of the working
classes, as well as for the widely varied discourse on social problems and social
remedies (in which people began to use the word “socialism,” though they did not
yet know what it meant) – the standard line today is that evangelical, retributive
134
Hilton, Age of Atonement 109, 113; Jennifer Hart, “Sir Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury,”
English Historical Review 75 (1960), 99.
135
Hilton, Age of Atonement 114. My italics.
136
David Englander, “The Word and the World,” in Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain 23.
71
religion mellowed out, lost its edge, lost its cultural currency.137 But what, then,
do we make of surviving evangelical religion in the average middle-class, lowermiddle-class, or upper-working-class man or woman at late century? What do we
make of the words of respected municipal reformer and Walworth vicar, Rev.
A.W. Jephson (interviewed in December, 1899, for Booth’s Religious Influences
Series), who, in complaining of the evangelical theology preached by lowermiddle-class and working-class London City Missionaries, said this: “well! he
[the missionary] says lots of things about Hell fire which I don’t agree with, but
he goes everywhere, and sees everybody, and lets me know all cases of sickness
and distress: besides the people like to hear about Hell fire.”138 We must recall
here Hilton’s remarks that evangelicals popularized their harsh doctrines –
particularly the idea of moral poverty – and that their evangelical economics were
disseminated across a religious culture, entrenching what, for most people, was a
kind of vulgar moral economics. Hilton notes that a third of Anglican clergymen,
and the vast majority of lower-class Nonconformist ministers, explicitly believed
themselves evangelical thinkers, by 1850. Hilton notes, too, that the High Church
movement, which began with the Tractarians of the Oxford Movement, did not
discard the atonement-centered beliefs in which many had been brought up. Nor,
he adds, did Broad or Liberal Churchmen.139 One out of every six English people
137
Geoffrey Rowell, Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological
Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1974); Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society 183-184; Jeffrey Cox, English Churches; Hugh
McLeod, Class and Religion esp. ch. 8. Parsons covers all these bases in his essay, “Social Control
to Social Gospel,” citing not only the church’s political pragmatism in the face of an “era of
Liberal party division, the rise of the Labour Party, and the centrality of class, economics and
social issues in national political life,” but also a profound theological shift “away from the
centrality of the doctrine of the Atonement, the wrath of God, the fear of hell, and a drama of
redemption conceived in sharply doctrinal terms.” Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” in
Parsons ed. Religion in Victorian Britain 59.
138
Jephson, B 276: 27-29. David Englander has noted “hardline” London Calvinists, like C.H.
Spurgeon, “who held fast to the auld vision of Hell and were none the less popular for so doing.”
Englander, “The Word and the World,” in Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain 30.
139
Hilton, Age of Atonement 27-28, 28-29. On the now “commonplace” notion among historians
regarding the affinity between evangelicals and Tractarians at this time, see Yngve Brilioth, in her
The Anglican Revival: Studies in the Oxford Movement (London: Longmans, Green, 1925), 2944. Hilton notes Thomas Arnold’s contradictory dislike of the Clapham Sect as a Broad
Churchman, but that his ostensible opposition to it did not prevent him from believing life to be “a
series of trials, and that these should turn out to be ‘our greatest advantages’ spiritually[.]” Arthur
Penryn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (1844), I, 45, quoted in ibid., 28.
72
by 1850, without being clerical professionals, thought of themselves as
evangelicals. Hilton goes a step further, in fact, telling us the figure was probably
much higher than this – that “evangelicalism could hardly have had the impact
ascribed to it if it had been confined to those who formally acknowledged the
label.”140 G.M. Young may still be the most accurate, therefore, in arguing for
what we would call evangelical hegemony by 1850. Regardless of their religious
creed or political stripe, Young wrote in 1936, average Victorian men and women
found themselves “at every turn controlled, and animated, by the imponderable
pressure of the Evangelical discipline[.]”141 We should also recall that the
extraordinary inequality characterizing mid-to-late British capitalism, inequality
spurring anxiety, callousness, and status consciousness which would have only
helped to pound the evangelical nail into the wood of middle, lower-middle, and
upper-working-class minds. Christian economics had been disseminated, and in a
sacred language, across the country. It was sunk in the minds of most thinking
men and women. What part of this moral commonsense survived until 1900
remains a very important question for scholars, and the answer to this question, to
date, is that scholars do not yet have a convincing answer for it.
Christian economics, in Boyd Hilton’s view, could not withstand the
assaults of conscience that accompanied the 1845 potato famine and the cholera
epidemic of 1849. A substantial group of Anglicans (though perhaps not
Trevelyan and his ilk) were arguing that no God could sanction such suffering.
They questioned not only the fairness of hell-fire, but the brutality inherent in the
“idea that God would inflict excruciating suffering on his son as a vicarious
sacrifice for men’s sins.”142
Yet what precisely changed in the world of ministers, Christian men and
women from the 50s, as a result of such questioning? Hilton argues that
theological support for the ideas which underlaid the Age of Atonement (1790s to
1840s) were replaced by 1870, with those heralding an Age of Incarnation.
140
Hilton, Age of Atonement 26; Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on
the Victorians (London: Cape, 1976), 52.
141
G.M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969
[1936]), 1.
142
Hilton, Age of Atonement 281.
73
Anglican theorists rewrote their Christology to focus on Christ’s life (his
generosity, his humanism) rather than the guilt-inspiring fact of his death (for
sinful men). A similar transformation took place in Nonconformist theology
during the 1880s and 1890s, according to Richard Helmstadter.143 It was common
by this time for religious thinkers “to assert that a theological transformation had
recently taken place, whereby a worldly Christian compassion, inspired by the life
of Jesus, had alleviated such stark evangelical doctrines as those of eternal and
vicarious punishment.”144 Gareth Stedman Jones agrees. A gulf had arisen
between “two distinct systems of thought.” An old (importantly) “religious”
social science was replaced by a new one:
…perhaps one of the most significant products of the 1860s was [J.R.]
Seeley’s Ecce Homo, an attempt to construct a broad church theology
‘impregnable to the assaults of modern criticism and science’. The central
thesis of Ecce Homo was that: ‘the Christian moral reformation may be
summed up in this – humanity changed from a restraint to a motive…the
old legal formula began, “thou shalt not” and the new begins, “thou
shalt”….Christ’s biography may be summed up in the words, he went
about doing good; his wise words were secondary to his beneficial deeds.’
Seeley’s book was the first to assert confidently the equation between
religious feeling, active self-sacrificing philanthropy, and science – a triad
which was restated more subtly by T.H. Green and his followers, and lay
at the basis of much middle class social involvement in the following two
decades.145
This theological transition was extraordinarily good for business (and
likely relieved the anxieties of a great many religious businessmen), because God
in the Age of Incarnation no longer sanctioned the suffering of middle- and uppermiddle-class bankrupts. Hilton argues that a change in business legislation arose
out of a new theological climate at mid-century. From the 50s came appeals for
143
Richard Helmstadter, The Conscience of the Victorian State, ed. Peter Marsh (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1979), 135-172.
144
Hilton, Age of Atonement, 5. Parsons gives the same account. Harsher doctrines had given way
to “the centrality of the doctrine of the Incarnation, the love, mercy and Fatherhood of God and the
corollary of the brotherhood of man, the call to redeem this world as well as the next, and a drama
of redemption conceived less in terms of doctrine and more in terms of the redeeming
participation of the divine in the human.” Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” 59.
145
Stedman Jones, Outcast London 5-6
74
limited liability legislation146 – legislation to allow multiple small share holders in
a business, and the practical inability of a shareholder to sue a business which
went bankrupt. It was this very legislation, as I noted above, that enabled the
Booth brothers to buy their first ships. The birth of the modern corporation,
therefore, was underpinned by a new de-emphasis on the sinful nature of the
upper-middle classes (formerly to blame and anxiously welcoming punishment
for business failures). “Limitation,” Hilton writes,
was…a case of the well-off investing classes softening the rigours of
capitalism at the very point where it threatened themselves. In the same
way, the repeal of hell-fire can be regarded as unbuttoning a system of
spiritual capitalism at just the point where the upper classes felt
vulnerable. Maurice, one might say, was limiting the liability of sin.147
Less severe bankruptcy laws were part of a sea-change in the way
Christian economists looked at both the economy and the future “development” of
society. Atonement-centred theology had economists regard the economy as a
thing (like the population) to be kept from “excessive,” uncontrolled growth
(through the prevention of unlimited investment limited liability legislation
entailed). Incarnational economics set investors free by welcoming growing
economies. In this new economy, much less sinful, and indeed altruistic
businessmen could now compete in a great battle to – through hard work – make
themselves – as well as those who worked for and benefited from their businesses
– men of “character.” Employing a discourse surprisingly similar to that of
“market liberals” today, mid-century economists proposed that it was through a
perpetual redoubling of competition between economic agents that a more moral
society would result.148 Society could now grow in population, and its members
146
Hilton notes that Parliament “endorsed this development symbolically in 1855, and again more
fully in 1856, when it made provision for general limited liability. See also John Saville, “Sleeping
partnerships and limited liability, 1850-1856,” Economic History Review 2nd series, 8 (1955-6),
418-433; James B. Jeffrys, Business Organisation in Great Britain: 1856-1914 (New York: Arno
Press, 1977), 19-53.
147
Hilton, Age of Atonement 277
148
This is precisely what George Soros and other thinkers have called “market fundamentalism”
today, though it is admitted that the notion’s proponents are not aware of the basic theological
foundations of their investment-centred beliefs. Probably since Karl Polanyi’s time, believers in
market liberalism have been compared to religious fundamentalists. George Soros, borrowing
from Karl Polanyi’s ideas, has called them “market fundamentalists.”
75
“develop” their characters, in a world in which the world was no longer simply a
static “place of moral trial and a prelude to eternity,” but rather one where “God
was seen as directing the progress of society and not merely receiving saved
souls.” As Hilton notes, this theological idea of progress (theoretically democratic
in its class-ambivalent idea of moral character149) was most explicitly evident in
the thought of William Gladstone: “Britain is passing, he more soberly said, ‘from
a stationary into a progressive period’, and in accepting this the natural theologian
in Gladstone stopped looking for evidence of God’s omnipotence in the workings
of the machine, and found it instead in the moral improvement of society.”150
Yet would there be the same change in middle-class attitudes about charity
for the poor accompanying this theological change from “retribution to
restitution”?151 Here, in the transition of mid-century retributive religiosity to the
“morality” of the 1870s onwards, the name seems to have changed, but the
product has stayed the same. As Stefan Collini notes, the notion of the end of
retributive religion does not square with the revitalization of very similar moral
ideas after 1850. Specifically, there is no practical difference between
Atonement-centred and Incarnational ideas of charity. Boyd Hilton, himself,
admits that Incarnational enthusiasts such as Llewellyn Davis and Octavia Hill (a
follower of F.D. Maurice) were equally as hostile to “indiscriminate charity” as
had been Thomas Chalmers forty years before.152 Gertrude Himmelfarb points out
in her Poverty and Compassion that moral thinkers influenced by T.H. Green after
1870 put their faith in a new “secularized Evangelicalism.” Green explained that
149
Theoretically democratic as opposed to socially democratic; or democracy in a laissez-faire
capitalist context as opposed to democracy in which all members of society are equipped
financially, by the state, and through redistributive taxation of individuals and businesses, enabling
universal participation for all individuals in the democratic process. In Gladstone’s era, any man
with character, regardless of his class, was theoretically invited to share in the moral and financial
progress of the nation, but socioeconomic inequality continued to prevent such participation for
most men (and nearly all women).
150
Hilton, Age of Atonement 343.
151
Ibid., 270.
152
Ibid., 273-290, 331, 334-335.
76
“God has died and been buried, and risen again, and realised himself in all the
particularities of a moral life.”153
The mirror-image similarity of both religion and morality is only enhanced
when it is admitted that the latter commanded the same cultural hegemony as the
former. The “tendency to carry morality into every sphere of life” was, Collini
writes, a tendency consistent across the political spectrum after 1870. Collini’s
concept of late Victorian morality, like G.M. Young’s of early Victorian
evangelicalism, is a hegemonic one. He has found it “intoned like hallelujahs in
the litany of every reforming group of the period,” from the hardest individualist
to the most earnest socialist. The ideal of character, and the exclusion of a section
of society (on moral grounds) that the character-ideal involved, was “at the very
heart of the hegemonic assumptions of the age.” Only a tiny minority of
“immoralists” (and Collini includes the advocates of Ibsenism in the 1890s and
Nietscheanism in the 1900s) thought outside of this moral mainstream.154 For the
rest, the moral sensibility was simple commonsense. As one contributor to The
Encyclopedia of Social Reform noted in 1897 (the same year Booth began his
Religious Influences Series):
Perhaps no characteristic of the present efforts for social reform are [sic]
more hopeful and more important than the deepening emphasis now
placed – however far we may yet be from placing all the emphasis we
ought – on the moral element in social reform. A hundred years ago the
key-word in social reform was “natural rights”, and in economics “laissezfaire”. Today the key-word in reform is “cooperation” and in economics
“character”. If this may seem to some too optimistic a view, we remind
them that individualist, socialist, and even anarchist reformers all seek
cooperation, while in economics the reason why individualist economists
fear socialism is that they believe it will deteriorate character, and the
reason why socialist economists seek socialism is their belief that under
individualism character is deteriorating.155
153
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 248. Susan Pennybacker, in her discussion of London
County Councillors, and Martin Wiener, in his work on Graham Wallas, have both remarked that
“Even for those who were not committed religionists” in this period, “‘a secular Evangelicalism’
thrived.” Susan Pennybacker, A Vision for London: labour, everyday life and the L.C.C.
experiment (London: Routledge, 1995), 3; Martin Wiener, Between Two Worlds: The Political
Thought of Graham Wallas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 10.
154
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 49-50.
155
Ibid., 49 n. 126.
77
Here, in as common a text as an encyclopedia, we find a very evangelical
concern. We see reformers from every part of the political spectrum demanding
that a man’s character, borne of hard work, should not be allowed to soften by
either excessive relaxation (as individualists would say) or by unemployment (as
socialists would), because each of these will interrupt the character-building
suffering entailed in the hard work he does. Was this evangelical thought, or was
it “moral” thought? The best we can do is to call it both: a moral-religious
sensibility. I am aware that (as Gareth Stedman Jones notes) moral economists
(and friends of Charles Booth) like Alfred Marshall believed that “man did not
experience labour as necessary pain, but rather as a creative activity in itself, the
result of which was to develop character,”156 but in being aware of this we should
not get caught up in essentialism. Hard work (however altruistic) making for
moral character is so close to atonement-based work making for suffering, and
therefore salvation (moral preservation), that Green and Marshall’s “secular
Evangelicalism” could have simply kept its old name.157 It is also important to
remember, as Stedman Jones does, the continuing popular adherence to much
more uncompromising ideas of political economy in the wider society beyond that
of intellectuals and “liberal” thinkers like Marshall. “The views of Marshall,
Green, Toynbee, and their followers represented the vanguard of liberal theory in
the 1870s. It is not intended to suggest that their views were representative of the
broad mass of middle or upper middle class opinion.” Evangelicalism’s influence
on the popularization of political economy should be in our minds for Stedman
Jones’ next sentence: “Vulgar political economy remained the mental stock and
trade of most employers and politicians long after it had been banished from the
upper reaches of economic science.”158 Such statements are particularly important
when we think of the mindset of late century employers like Charles Booth.
The fact that, particularly from the 70s, newly “scientific” (social
Darwinist) Britons wanted to distance modern morality (entailing the spiritual
156
Jones, Outcast London 6-7.
As we saw above, Chalmers, too, believed hard work and thrift inculcated through selective
charity, made people “happy.”
158
Jones, Outcast London 7-8 n. 23.
157
78
progress of society through the discipline of ever-increasing capitalist
competition), from “old-time religion” (entailing the spiritual preservation of
society through the God-given punishments of poverty and failure in business)
does not mean historians of the period must do the same. Just as evangelical ideas
explicitly popularized political economy, evangelical (now moral) notions in
many ways tempered the individualism of social Darwinism.
Moral-religious hegemony was galvanized and reinvigorated in the great
psychological and emotional crisis that confronted the generation born in the midnineteenth century: the encounter of average Britons with social Darwinism.159 To
be sure, the idea of evolution seemed to spell the end of moral-religious
sensibilities. But what did evolution destroy and what part of religious morality
lived on? Spencerian thought, reaching its heyday in the 1870s, put all faith in
endless competition and individualism, in a heartless struggle for the survival of
the fittest. But immediately accompanying this most vulgar and most “scientific”
of individualisms was the almost immediate invention (one might say,
resurrection), in the thought of Huxley, Toynbee, Green, Marshall and Hobhouse,
of a more lukewarm, more moral kind of evolution. Theirs was a moral kind of
capitalism, in which a self-disciplining morality underpinning new concepts of
social cooperation, duty, social obligation, social corroboration, altruism, and
character could continue to accompany social evolution. “The literature of the
1880s and 1890s is packed with attempts,” as Collini explains, “to dismantle the
Spencerian syllogism for religious, moral, or political reasons, but most writers
tried to restate the lessons of evolution rather than to deny their relevance.”160 In
terms of the social science to which these men would give birth, the moral
element (which they called “character”) found a way to reassert itself among the
most prominent of social thinkers (even Spencer’s writing, as Collini notes, had
its more moral moments). In his Liberalism and Sociology Collini affirmed his
agreement with Talcott Parson’s 1937 assessment, namely, that “the late159
For a discussion of the popularization of and “moral” reaction to Spencerian thought, see
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology esp. chapter 5 (“The Metaphysics of Progress”) in part three
(“Sociology”) pp. 147-170.
160
Ibid., 158.
79
Victorian ideal of ‘character’ [that] was universalized in Marshall’s economics
could be extended to Hobhouse’s ‘sociology’ and indeed a great deal of the
‘social science’ of the period.”161
For evangelical thought, therefore, damage from the fallout of social
Darwinism was localized. Genesis, after the 1860s, may have been too
problematic a concept to accept any longer as a matter of fact. Historians of social
science must be careful, however, not to throw the “moral” baby of late Victorian
“science” out with the bathwater of creationism. Old ideas of the spiritual or
“moral” salvation of men survived, as did the idea that this process would involve
hard work – work that man must be punished for not doing. By late century, these
ideas demanded (very generally) “work” (“service,” “sacrifice”) and otherwise
“decent” living from all members of society. They demanded from all a kind of
self-realization through moral behaviour. Conceptually-speaking, then, in the
half-century after Darwin, it may have been entirely possible to dump the idea of
a 4000 year-old universe, while keeping the meat of Christianity’s religious
notions (whatever contemporaries believed they were doing, or even said they
were believing). People continued to believe that those who demonstrated their
adherence to self-restraint through a work-based moral behaviour were the best
kind of people in society.
Most thinking social theorists, by the 1880s, likely reacted to Spencer by
having what they believed to be more of a “heart” (as this was understood by late
Victorians). They defiantly renewed their faith in an old (at base, Christian)
morality. Whatever they now called their moral notions, we might see them in
truth as post-evangelical, their evangelicalism different only in that it had adopted
new ideas of social evolution. This still meant the persecution and exclusion of
non-working or irregularly working parts of society on largely moral grounds, but
it also meant increased social cooperation among a moral majority who adhered to
the new ideals of social obligation and cooperation – ideals which ultimately
161
Ibid., 216, n. 29. See also Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York:
Macmillan, 1937), Ch. 4.
80
amounted to the institution of welfare reforms for a larger and larger, respectable
working class.
The generation born in the mid-nineteenth century may have had a very
difficult emotional and psychological time moving from religious to “moralscientific” notions of society, but most could not bring themselves to adopt
unvarnished Spencerian thought. As we can see in the example of Leonard
Hobhouse, re-affirming moral beliefs in the face of scientific developments met a
personal and psychological as well as intellectual need. Part of the explanation of
the nature of Hobhouse’s social theories rested in the very personal need to
exorcise an amoral universe:
In mood, he oscillated between buoyant optimism and energy, and fits of
cosmic gloom and depression in the manner of a classic manic-depressive.
“Throughout his life there were periods of moody depression and
slackness of will.” It is particularly interesting to notice that while in his
major published works optimism is the dominant note, in his occasional
writings and even more in his private letters doom and despondency
predominate. It is clear that the programmatic, almost willful, optimism
which he built into his theory was, at least in part, a response to his
personal needs, a reassurance that things were not as bad, or not always
going to be as bad, as they seemed. What J.A. Hobson said of Hobhouse in
the twenties held true at most times: “His real conviction was that we were
‘going through a bad time’, but that the permanent factors in the making of
human history were unassailable in their working for a wiser, and a better
world.”162
From the 1870s many middle-class social thinkers like Hobhouse chose
what they thought was a science “with a heart,” a science which they dubbed
“moral,” but which basically was still very religious. In order to moralize their
science they appealed to entrenched ideas that were, and had been for a century,
evangelical ideas. For social scientists such as Booth and a great many other
social thinkers besides, this new combination of science and religion would
ultimately be manifested as England’s excessively moral form of sociology (of
which, at the LSE, Leonard Hobhouse was England’s first professor). This
conception of society would always demand the attack upon, and exclusion of, an
162
J.A. Hobson and Morris Ginsberg, L.T. Hobhouse, His Life and Work (1931), 69. Quoted in
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 169.
81
immoral group from society, but it had the best of hopes, and even wanted to
materially help, the more moral remainder. Where did Booth fit in this postevangelical, but still very religious, late century culture? What connections did he
have with the Christian economics of the early Victorian period? This is what the
next section will explore.
6. The Religious Booth: Letters from America and Italy
Probably symptomatic of the rather secularized history of moral thought in
which Booth finds his place, the history of Charles Booth, 1840-1916, is troubled
by the same lack of explanation for the man’s vibrant moral, and I would say,
religious, tendencies. Charles Booth was, at least until the mid-60s, a religious
young man, in an orthodox sense. For this reason, as in the case of Christian
economics after 1850, we need to determine which parts of his religious-moral
ideas survived after the shock of religious doubt hit him. Like many of his
generation Booth abandoned the denominational Christian faith of his parents
(Unitarianism), and like many he went looking for an ideology to fill the spiritual
vacuum left by the abandonment of his faith. Comtism was supposed to be a
“formula which would unite explanations of the working of natural laws in terms
of human behaviour with principles of moral action and social endeavour.” But
Positivism was only a theory to Booth, and provided him little comfort in
practice. Booth “looked about him for some escape” from the cold and scientific
world he had chosen. He said he wanted “some temporary religion which would
accept science and assist progress and satisfy the heart of man for a time at
least.”163
It would be wrong to say that the Booth of the early 1870s – “lonely and
depressed” and in an “agony of indecision in the face of the moral dilemma with
163
As the Simeys write it: “This was all very well in theory but provided little comfort in practice.
He spoke with deep feeling of the perplexity which beset those whose minds were loosened from
old ways of thinking but who were unprepared for the new and could find no rest in it. He himself
was not prepared to accept ‘the exact scheme of a Utopia’ put forward by Comte.” Simey and
Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 48
82
which he was confronted”164 – simply stopped looking, and abandoned himself to
science and secularism. Booth, like many of his contemporaries, more likely
began at this point a slow “rapprochement with religion.”165
Historians of Booth are determined to keep this from happening.
Englander and O’Day stress Mary Booth’s contribution to Booth’s thought and
work, but paradoxically, avoid any mention of her assistance with Booth’s moral
make-up. Instead, they manhandle Booth from his original Evangelicalism into an
undefined and largely undocumented secular Positivism, seeing a potential even
for socialism (see discussion in Chapter 2).166 Though the two scholars’
association of Booth with socialism will be dealt with later, their disassociation of
him with evangelical ideas about poverty is likely due to the Booth children’s
insistence, in 1957, that their father was secularized, “unbelieving” and
unspiritual by the late nineteenth century.167 The two take this as fact, though the
children, in a casual letter between sister and brother, were attempting to recreate
their Victorian father’s mind sixty years previously. The Booth children’s letter,
originally addressed to the Simeys’ (who were writing Charles Booth: Social
Scientist at the time) was received by them in mid-draft. Up to that point (1957)
the draft they had written saw Booth on a spiritual as well as academic journey,
bringing the science of sociology, just as he was bringing himself, back to
religion. Needless to say, there were revisions, and the Simeys tied themselves up
in knots attempting to de-religionize Booth after the cautions from Booth’s
children. As we will see in Chapter 3, there were many parts of their narrative
which were never excised, and these leave us with a variety of hints at Booth’s
religiosity.
Other historians have dealt very carefully, if not entirely sure-footedly,
with evidence that late Victorians like Booth experienced a return to a religious
164
Booth’s brother Alfred remarked on “Charley’s isolation” during this period. Ibid., 49.
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 52. See Collini’s brief, and I think, inconclusive, discussion
of Hobhouse’s “religious” tendencies, in his conclusion of ibid., 241-243.
166
See Englander and O’Day’s suggestive comments that “the path from positivism to socialism
was well-trodden in the 1880s,” and their vague discussion of an “affected” Booth after certain
“encounters” with socialism in their Retrieved Riches 15.
167
See Rosemary O’Day’s discussion in O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 163164.
165
83
sensibility, probably most intensely in the 1890s and 1900s. Booth’s
contemporary, Leonard Hobhouse, thought he experienced such a process
between the 1890s and 1920s. Like Englander and O’Day, Stefan Collini ascribes
Hobhouse’s religious leanings to Positivism. Hobhouse, Collini writes,
approached a “belief which could be called religious, akin to that de-christianized
humanist deism which enjoyed such a vigorous life among English intellectuals
during this period, especially in Positivist and Ethical Society forms.”168 Like
Booth, Hobhouse called himself an agnostic when he was asked, but as with the
casual association of these men with positivist spiritualism, the agnostic tag
remains insufficient for the historian.169 Collini is not able to demonstrate in
concrete terms what Hobhouse’s many references to a “spiritual order” really
meant. Intriguing nevertheless are Hobhouse’s references to
a religion and an ethics which are as far removed from materialism as
from the optimistic teleology of the metaphysicians, or the half naïve
creeds of the churches. It gives a meaning to human effort, as neither the
pawn of an overruling Providence nor the sport of blind force. It is a
message of hope to the world, of suffering lessened and strife assuaged,
not by fleeing from reason to the bosom of faith, but by the increasing
rational control of things by collective wisdom… which is all that we
directly know of the Divine.170
In 1925 Hobhouse said he had been forming such thoughts in his mind “gradually
for 30 years….”171
Of crucial help in Booth’s very similar rapprochement with his more
spiritual side was his wife Mary. Mary Macaulay met Booth in 1868. She was the
niece of Lord Macaulay and the cousin of Beatrice Potter. Charles and Mary
married in 1871.172 From the first Mary struck Booth as a woman of convictions –
someone nothing like himself. Her certainties probably drew him to her and, in
proposing to Mary, he presented himself as a half-disconsolate, half-frenzied man
168
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 241, 242.
It should be remembered, too, that agnosticism, originally T.H. Huxley’s term, was never
meant to mean anything more than the pursuit of knowledge. It did not preclude spirituality. I
thank Dr. Sebastian Normandin, for pointing this out to me.
170
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 242-243.
171
Ibid., 243, n. 35.
172
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 28.
169
84
“desperate for companionship.” Mary, unsurprisingly, told her father to send him
packing. Both were put off by Booth’s “north country accent.” He said “‘castle’
and ‘grass’ as southerners say ‘lass.’” As Belinda-Norman Butler writes:
“Basically the two families came from identical social backgrounds, but the fame
of the historian and the civil and military prowess of the [London-based]
Macaulays made them look down on commerce and the provinces.” Booth
showed his uglier side at this point, “flatly” refusing to be dismissed by both
Mary and Lord Macaulay. The Simeys’ brief means of responding to Booth’s
pathetic, rather boorish tantrum at this point is the unsatisfactory sentence: “So
determined a courtship could not be denied, and after the briefest of engagements,
the marriage took place at Teignmouth on 29 April 1871.” Norman Butler’s
summary is equally insufficient: “Finally, she [Mary] said she could not possibly
love anyone as much as Papa [Lord Macaulay], and Charles said that would do
nicely…”173
Mary was Booth’s only consolation and his chief support throughout the
early 1870s – what she called his “gritty period”174 – and what was, essentially, a
crisis of faith. From about 1870 he had been “often lonely and depressed,
exhausted by his long agony of indecision in the face of a moral dilemma with
which he was confronted…”175 Booth at this time, could barely eat. He required
rest before and after meals. His weight decreased alarmingly, and after seeing
doctor after doctor in England, the family went abroad for him to convalesce in
Switzerland. During this period Booth was commonly so exhausted that “any
mental exertion” would bring on the “miseries of his disorder.” She would hide
from him his books and periodicals, but in the midst of his brooding, she observed
him begin to form the “ideas which he developed later” grow and take shape.176
Graciously, Mary put up with his irritated, unpleasant personality. Booth in this
period, apparently, played “devil’s advocate” with Mary’s every utterance. To
173
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 50; Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations
39.
174
Ibid., 59.
175
Ibid., 49.
176
Booth, Charles Booth 10-11; Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations: “What had begun
probably with those early tragedies combined with hasty meals, over-exertion, and that ardent
search for truth, had developed into a general breakdown.” (44)
85
every statement she uttered, Booth responded with a “barrage of criticism” – to
the point, Mary said, that his argumentative manner “threatened the very
foundation of her existence.”177
Yet for five years, and from London to Switzerland and back, Mary held
on.178 With phrases like – “It was upon this experience of difficulties shared and
eventually overcome that the ultimate and enviable security of Booth’s marriage
was founded…” – the Simeys unhelpfully play down this ugly aspect of Charles’
history.179 Mary’s own words about the period amounted to a grim “never again”:
“I could almost pray,” she wrote,” that if life holds another epoch of suffering as I
have gone through, in store from me among its dark secrets, I may be taken away
before its time draws near.”180 Having returned to England in 1875, Mary still
referred to him as an “invalid,” who could deal neither with society or work.
“[N]o thought could be entertained of his undertaking a regular office life.” The
family “took a house in London, and, though still unequal to mixing in society
generally, [Booth] saw a good deal in an informal way, and as he could bear it, of
his friends and cousins, and those of his wife.”181 She recalled how, at this time,
“the Benthamites, Mill, Comte and the abounding Unitarians, Positivists, and
other faiths came to be as much a part of breakfast as marmalade.”182 It was in the
hellish early years of their marriage that Mary committed, perhaps dragging an
inconsolable Booth along the way, to a “search for a new creed to fit the
circumstances of contemporary living.”183
177
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 49.
With Booth still very much an invalid, Mary had to struggle through the birth of her son, Tom,
in the “intense cold” of a “primitive wooden chalet” high on a hilltop in the Swiss canton of Vaud.
When the doctor arrived, he was apparently “much perturbed” by her circumstances, and by
Charles Booth. ‘Quel pere de famille!’ he exclaimed.” Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 45.
179
Beatrice Potter made fun of her at the time for throwing away her writing career and attending
to “wifely duties.”
180
Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 50.
181
Booth, Charles Booth 12.
182
Quoted in O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 145.
183
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 50. Evidence in the Simeys’ account gives
us an idea of Mary’s extraordinary selflessness. The first years of her marriage were clearly
emotionally excruciating. Booth, with his nervous indigestion and temperament, seems also to
have nevertheless demanded a sexual relationship from his wife (given his behaviour at this point
it seems unlikely that it was the other way around), for she was pregnant throughout the early
1870s. For all these reasons, the picture we have of Mary, on a health retreat in Switzerland in
1873, putting up with a sick, brooding Booth and perhaps assessing periodical articles for his
178
86
Booth would find that “creed” by fostering, from the mid-seventies, a
spiritual and perhaps even religious sensibility which would both restore
happiness to his life as the basis (however infrequently he evoked it) for his often
unyielding moral standpoint on remedies for working-class problems, industrial,
social or personal. As the Simeys note, Booth left “no memorandum” giving
reasons for his return to emotional and psychological stability, and remark that the
“process of repair” remains a mystery. But at the bottom of it was Mary. Thanks
to Mary, Booth spent the seventies “argufying” with her, thinking aloud about
problems of business, and later (in the 80s) about problems to do with his London
Inquiry. In the Simeys’ vague language, Mary’s “talents,” her “phenomenal
memory,” her philosophical bent of mind, were at his disposal.184 She read for
him. In many ways, she pulled him up, dusted him off, and re-made him: “She
acted as universal critic and amanuensis, making herself responsible for
everything he wrote, whether it concerned his business or those of his leisure,
correcting and re-writing with the confidence and freedom of one who shared his
innermost thoughts.”185 Writing from a small town outside of Boston, Booth
wrote characteristically: “But really, really, I become tiresome over all this. I use
writing to you as a method of thinking, making vague thoughts clearer. She don’t
mind, my wife don’t, she even likes it,” Booth said humbly.186
What, however, did Mary tell him in this crucial period? What galvanized
Booth, what began to fill him with conviction, actually had a great deal to do with
the family Mary came from. Thanks to his marriage to Mary, Booth was able now
to hobnob with the cream of England’s “urban intellectual aristocracy” (in Noel
Annan’s much-quoted words), a group who were always debating “the
contemporary conflict between science and religion and its implications in terms
perusal, remains a picture of powerful and surprising selflessness. Ibid., 50-51; Booth, Charles
Booth 11.
184
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 52-3, 54, 53, 50.
185
Ibid., 54.
186
Booth, Charles Booth 56. Booth became increasingly apologetic in his letters of the late 1870s.
One, from 1878 reads “As I lie in bed thinking over all the mistakes and blunders I have made,
[the phrase] comes continually to my lips, ‘Bless my wife, bless my dear wife.’ I then think of all
she has done for me, and I am grateful.” Quoted in Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 49.
87
of nineteenth century life…”187 This group was one we have seen before.
Foremost among these were the Macaulays, part of a “new class of intellectuals,”
as the Simeys noted, “which emerged out of the Clapham Sect and of which her
uncle, Lord Macauley, was one of the most distinguished.”188 The man to write
Charles Z. Macaulay’s biography in 1881, and another conversation partner for
Booth, was none other than Charles Trevelyan, Mary’s uncle, and the man who
gained such historical notoriety during the Irish Famine. While O’Day and
Englander, in their separate volumes on Booth, practically race through mentions
of the Macaulays and their tremendous historical significance for the history of
moral attitudes (never mind their influence on Booth), they do mention the very
important fact that Trevelyan was also “a founder of the Charity Organization
Society.”189 It is only with A.H. John’s history of the Booth businesses that we
see Booth decisively “brought…under the influence of his wife’s father…”190 At
their home Mary would criticize the women philanthropists of Booth’s Unitarian
circles as unsophisticated (perhaps unscientific?) busybodies. They were silly
women, “covered by the sense of charity and the fluff of flannel,” who spoke only
“inanities” and stained the name of Dorcas by turning his charitable societies into
“societies for circulating gossip.” Mary became “the source of his vigour” when
he turned to poverty, she was responsible for endless attacks on his “basic
assumptions,” and she provided the stimulus that made “revolutionary changes in
outlook possible.”191 At dinner parties, still sickly but at last happy, he listened
and was likely deeply influenced by his wife’s Claphamite father, “Charles
187
Ibid., 45; N.G. Annan, “The Intellectual Aristocracy,” in J.H. Plumb ed., Studies in Social
History (London: Longman’s Green and Co., 1955).
188
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 39. My emphasis.
189
There is no mention of Trevelyan’s history during the famine. He is referred to as “the reformer
of the civil service.” Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 14. O’Day’s only reference to the
possibility that Mary exercised a conservative influence on Booth is as she mentions (vaguely) her
“literary” influence as a Macaulay academic on the Religious Influences Series, whereupon she
adds: “She appears to have succeeded in persuading her husband of the advisability of steering
away as far as possible from making proposals for remedy in this work.” O’Day and Englander,
Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 186.
190
John, Liverpool Merchant House 40.
191
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 39.
88
Macaulay; and in later years was wont to say that his intimacy with his father-inlaw had a greater effect on him than any other single influence in his life.”192
Invited to this discussion by the London Macaulays, it is rather significant
that Booth became an increasingly happier man. He remained a nervous,
“consumptive girl” of a man (as Beatrice Potter described him at the time), a man
who did not eat, but “picked,” and a man who was so indecisive that he always
wanted to know “what you thought and why you thought it; what you knew and
how you learnt it.”193 But he “was never again to sink to the dangerously low
level which threatened his very existence during what his wife referred to as ‘the
gritty period.’” Hit by one of his smaller bouts of depression, Booth penned this
curious letter (in Mary’s biography, quoted suggestively by the Simeys) to Mary
aboard a ship to New York in 1880. It spoke of new beginnings:
I got an attack of depression with the last of the [sea] sickness, but thrust
off both together, and am now blessed with a heart brave enough, and see
my life before me as a smiling land over which I can surely make my way
till I come to that river we know of – and not as a prickly wilderness
through which man can neither walk nor see.
One meditates much at sea, but whether to much purpose I hardly know.
In the gloomy period I amused myself naturally with all the mistakes of
the past, and shrugged my shoulders at the certainty of incorrigibility, and
though that mood is past, there is something to be got out of those
meditations, not of shoulder shrugging, but of putting one’s back into what
one has to do, and in being ready for failure in anything and at any time.
It is astonishing how much older I feel than when I crossed two years ago,
and I am, and for once I believe it is mostly gain. It does not do well to be
too young for one’s years, which I was, and am still. One must be really
young to play successfully that capital game which lies ready to one’s
hand at the beginning of one’s life. It depends on how far that game takes
you, what shape the next start can be given, and here came in one of those
mistakes of mine. Well, that is preaching enough, even about oneself, and
to one’s wife, and of a Sunday, and at sea, so now about the voyage….194
Booth had begun to foster in himself a mindset which (though not a return to
Unitarianism or orthodox Christianity) was nevertheless a return to a more
comfortable understanding of the workings of his world. Like Hobhouse, he had
192
Booth, Charles Booth 9.
Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (London: Longmans Green, 1950), 189.
194
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 59. Full quotation here is from Booth,
Charles Booth 59-60.
193
89
found a way to make the world “good” again, to find a “heart” in it. Booth had
regained certainties he had lost, and as we will see, these were spiritual certainties
as much as they were psychological ones.
Mary, indeed, may have wanted subsequent readers of Booth’s life to
know about her husband’s regained spiritual mindset. She deliberately devoted
over thirty pages of her 170-page memoir of her husband to this very topic.
Chapter Two of the book, entitled “Interests and Pursuits,” was largely devoted to
Booth’s exploration of his often intensely spiritual side, which he expressed in
letters to his wife from Peabody (near Boston), from the New Jersey shoreline,
and from a number of Italian villages.
Mary hinted that these letters contained aspects about her husband “too
personal” and “too private” to be revealed in 1918. Speaking of the “enormous
mass of correspondence” between herself and her husband, however, she hoped
that “some day,” “some student of the future,” “perhaps a 100 years hence,” might
tell of “the ways in which a Captain of Industry in the days of the Great Queen
did his work, before State Control, and possibly International State Management,
revolutionise the conduct of Industry.”195 We see the first signs of Booth’s
outward religious sensibility not in his London survey, but rather in his letters
from the late 1870s on. In these letters, indeed, Booth demonstrated not the
secrets of a “Captain of Industry in the days of the Great Queen,” but rather a man
engaged in the reformation of his own religiosity. We see this, indeed, in two
ways – ways, importantly, that could not exist apart from each other. On the one
hand, Booth’s religious sensibility manifested as an appreciation for simple piety
and ritual (without much concern about the denomination in which it arose). In his
letters from America he searched for an appropriate kind of religion, a religion
which produce honest, decent-living, moral people. Booth’s letters from Italy
demonstrate that for him it was this ritual and routine which made people decent,
and regular in their ways. But it also showed itself in a harder concern with an
immoral group – the degenerate mirror-image of the first, and much smaller –
195
Ibid., 38.
90
unreformed by the mental and spiritual discipline that organized religion had
granted its adherents.
The year 1878 found Booth on a business trip to New Jersey and here,
twenty years before the interviews of the “Religious Influences” series, we find
Booth describing to Mary what he felt were the most important and appropriate
practices of religion. Historians have instead focused on his misspelling of Marx’s
name (Booth accidentally called him “Karl Marks” in a letter to his wife in
1878).196 But if we truly want to know Booth, we might focus instead on the next
thirty pages of the memoir, which were composed of his experience of religion
inside and outside a number of churches in 1878, 1880, and 1893. We know that
in England, in his spare time, Booth enjoyed the presence and majesty of Wren’s
churches, and that he took time to wander about them, talking about them with
Mary afterwards (Booth reverently said in his “Religious Influences” series that
on entering them one was made to think of “man and duty”).197 His wanderings in
America and Italy tell of an even deeper spirituality.
In a small Massachusetts town called Peabody,198 twenty miles outside of
Boston, Booth clearly demonstrated his possession of a religious ideal, if only for
the reason that popular religion in the region did not meet his expectations. He
complained that one household did not fit his standard of what a religious home
was supposed to be. “This is not a religious household,” Booth said, clearly
perturbed, “and I was absolutely almost shocked at no blessing being asked before
tea.” While they might be “good Christian folk,” moreover – while they might
“go to church and all that, and they have the regulation motto or text in the
‘parlour,’ ‘God bless our Home,’ in illuminated text” – Booth nevertheless
reported to Mary that “piety does not pervade the atmosphere.”199
196
Himmelfarb and the Simeys both reproduce this gaffe as “Karl Marks,” while Mary writes it
“Carl Marx (is that the name?)…” Poverty and Compassion 157; Charles Booth: Social Scientist
58; Charles Booth 52.
197
Ibid., 29; 227; “Religious Influences,” 3: 50, 57.
198
The town, wrote Booth, “used to be called Salem and then Danvers and then South Danvers,
and finally its name was changed to Peabody in honour of George Peabody whose native place it
was. Several of our customers live either here or just near here…” Booth, Charles Booth 54.
Booth’s trip was probably made in order to discuss purchases of leather by local boot and shoe
factories. John, Liverpool Merchant House 26.
199
Booth, Charles Booth 54-55.
91
Such spiritual inadequacies did not stop Booth from attending a nearby
Congregationalist Church and remarking, equally critically, about both the
popular religion and preaching methods there. “No,” wrote Booth, “these people
are not overburdened with religious feelings, and the whole congregation seemed
to accept the service in a calm and critical spirit.” Booth was clearly not aware of
his own precociousness and laid out in detail why the religion he saw practiced
was not the religion he “preferred” (the religion for which, perhaps, he most
yearned): “The minister was a stranger, there being no established pastor at
present and the ‘supplies’ are listened to with a view to discussion afterwards.
This sort of thing does not raise the soul or tend to enthusiasm of any kind, and
bad as it is, I prefer the Methodist type of which Kent is an example.”200
In mid-summer, 1880, Booth again found himself on a business trip to
America, yet his trip took something of a detour, and he chose to visit Ocean
Grove, a religious retreat on the New Jersey shore (which Booth called “a
religious watering place”). It is significant that, four pages following Booth’s
Methodist prescription for religious practice, his memoirist, Mary, included
precisely the experience he “preferred” – religion that involved an “effort to bring
pleasure to the aid of godliness, like the lively music to revival hymns.” Here at
Ocean Grove, wrote Booth, one found the “wonderful development of
Methodism.” Here with its cottages and tents was a “sort of extended and
dignified and extended camp meeting,” “with much preaching and psalm
singing,” at which periodically “brother this or brother that” held forth “from
anywhere and at any time for the asking.” Although it took place in an enormous
auditorium held up by a “forest of wooden pillars,” the backwoods retreat bore a
close resemblance to the open-air religious meetings Booth and his investigators
would visit twenty years later, in places like Peckham Rye. Booth said he had
never seen “so large a congregation – 5000, 6000, 7000 – I do not know.”201 Until
Peckham Rye’s 10,000, he would not hear of a larger one.
200
201
Ibid., 56.
Booth, Charles Booth 60-62.
92
After his experiences at Ocean Grove, Booth murkily approached an idea
(in one letter to Mary) that had probably occupied his mind for over ten years, and
one which – until he finished the last corrections of his London city maps – would
plague him for twenty-three more. This was, very simply, what sort of religion
made the best man. Later, in a letter from Italy discussing beggars, he would
repeat this mental process. Writing from Ocean Grove, Booth’s thoughts were a
muddy mess, and for clarity’s sake, they should be quoted at length. He told Mary
how he had attended an adult Sunday school class at the summer retreat:
The subject at the moment was the number of the submerged population
[after the Flood], and it is not a subject which leads itself well to statistics.
Oh dear it is a queer world that we live in, and God’s work in it is not the
least curious thing. I do not know what is God’s work if this sort of effort
is not – a strenuous effort after a certain ideal of life sustained by prayer
and glorified by praise…202
But Booth’s momentary approval turned suddenly to irritated dissatisfaction. As
much as Booth might praise this form of religious learning, there was still
something, in his view, insufficient about it. It was too small in scope, perhaps too
fantastical, it lacked a more scientific certainty, and it therefore failed to
adequately enlighten its believers
…and yet what a very poor thing it is in some ways – small, narrowing,
tending to self-satisfaction, hardly touching at all the more difficult
problems of self, needing a basis of ignorance just as much as they say it is
needed for the masses in the Catholic Church, but with a difference
between the ignorant who acknowledge their ignorance and therefore turn
to the priest, and the ignorant who acknowledge no ignorance, and who
then accept anything as true without much question if it seems likely or
comes to them in the right form.203
Already, in 1880, we can see Booth thinking hard on how an appropriately
practiced religion could best remedy the “problems of self” – what he would later
discuss as the “civilizing” effect of religion. For now, as usual, Booth collapsed
into his own indecision: “That sentence was almost too much for me,” he wrote
202
203
Ibid., 63.
Ibid.
93
next, “and I don’t know that I have said what I mean, or perhaps I don’t know
what I mean.”204
What it was that Booth was fumbling towards by 1880 – very likely the
same thing that put an end his “gritty period” of seventies’ self-disparagement –
we do not know. Booth never talked about it. But something was giving him
happiness and people noticed it. Beatrice Webb discussed “Charlie Booth” in this
period (February, 1882) as a man with a “stronger clearer reason,” with a
“singular absence of bias and prejudice,” and seemingly without “any vice or
even weakness in him.” This was probably to exaggerate Booth’s confidence
somewhat, but something had nevertheless caused a change of attitude in Booth
which made him appear to people as “a man who [had] his nature completely
under control; who [had] passed through a period of terrible illness and weakness,
and who [had] risen out of it, uncynical, vigorous and energetic in mind, and
without egotism.”205 “Long afterwards in 1891 his 12-year old daughter Meg,
perplexed by differing attitudes to religion expressed in drawing-room and
schoolroom, asked what he thought about it all. Looking at her intently he said, ‘I
think I believe in Purpose.’”206
“In what lay the secret of this remarkable achievement of peace within
himself[?],” the Simeys’ ask. This, they write, was “a subject Booth never
discussed.” It was around this time, however, that Booth likely threw off the last
vestiges of his (already tentative) faith in Positivist thought. It was also at this
point that Mary returned to the Anglican Church. As a result of these events, the
Simeys see Mary and Charles “repudiating” Comte and “abandon[ing] the search
for a new creed.” Because Booth was clearly feeling better, they assume that he
became content with a “reverent unbelief” (his phrase) which “sustained him until
his death.”207 Perhaps the Simeys realized that they were dismissing out of hand
what was in fact a budding spirituality, for they wrote: “he never lost his interest
204
Ibid., 63. Booth’s soul-searching at Ocean Grove the Simeys only view as an “interesting”
account written “in terms which clearly anticipate similar descriptions included in the Religious
Influences Series.” Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 65 n. 1.
205
Webb, My Apprenticeship 190-191.
206
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 45.
207
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 60
94
in every form of religious belief, and in fact became more rather than less
convinced of the importance of its influence on human progress…”208 The
similarity of Booth’s thought to Incarnational economists seeing moral good in
dynamic societal development and capitalist competition, as well as to the
“determined optimism” that characterized Hobhouse’s “rapprochement with
religion,” is striking here.
Booth’s was a highly personal form of Christian belief – unorthodox and
under the skin – but present nevertheless. This is probably best evidenced in
Booth’s letters from small villages in Italy in 1893, where again Booth immersed
himself in religious experience.209 At Cassino, Booth told Mary that “[e]very one
who comes here wishes at once to visit the monastery. I might go – or I might not
– at any rate I was in no hurry.” Cancelling his plans to move on to nearby
villages, however, Booth toured the place the next day, which he said had a
“wonderful structure.”210
A week later, at Teano, Booth was describing the place’s “three large
churches, of which the largest, the Duomo, is very beautiful among beautiful
churches.”211 Booth said he stood from afar, in the gathering dark, to listen to “the
whole evening service.” Tempted, however, when he saw the village women
going into the church, Booth told Mary that he “went in also.” The litany he heard
that day very much fit Booth’s personal model of religious practice. The service
had “something of our litany,” he said, though the congregation had a
larger share, and every one present joined in an evidently knew every
word by heart, for it was too dark to read, and besides they have no books.
The responses burst spontaneously from the whole congregation; no one
led at all, and the greater part was chanted. There was no organ or
instrument of any kind, and to some extent the voices took different parts.
208
Ibid.
Booth’s trip came as a result of exhaustion, helped on by influenza and pneumonia. Mary
accompanied him to Sicily as he “rather fretted” over the excess luxury of his “first-rate hotels,”
only to be called back to London by news her mother had become ill. Feeling better, Booth left
Naples for Cassino, and thereafter began a tour of surrounding villages. Booth, Charles Booth 6465.
210
Ibid., 66, 67.
211
Ibid., 70. Booth went on: “Fresh, partly modern-looking decorations very skillfully blended
with older marbles and very old grey columns. The modern-looking work is mostly blue and white
and gold – the effect was very striking, and I must look again at it. The shape also is of the best
proportioned Basilica pattern with large side chapels.” Ibid.
209
95
“The whole thing was perfect as an act of simple congregational devotion,” Booth
said, “and I did not know the Church of Rome could do it – but it seems to do
everything.” Booth listed Bible Classes and Sunday schools (as he and his
investigators would in the “Religious Influences” interviews) as among the
churches’ educational auxiliaries.212
One later passage by Booth could just as easily have been written by
Ernest Aves or Arthur Baxter – describing South London’s Roman Catholics four
years later. Booth described how the “church bell rang the two strokes which
mean, I believe, the raising of the host; every one uncovered their heads and
waited till the bell for a third time rang its two strokes. In Church or out of
Church, the hold on the people is certainly extraordinary.”213 But this was not
solely, as some historians have noted, simply evidence of Booth’s “detached”
ability to describe religious rites and customs. It was rather a sign of Booth’s
malleable religiosity. Where once Methodism’s worldly confidence in the face of
nineteenth-century secularism had impressed him in the late 1870s, by the early
1890s Booth wanted to participate in the intense, popular devotion expressed by
Catholic churchgoers he found in the Italian villages. He admitted to Mary that,
“[a] little earlier I assisted at the evening services in one of the other churches”
(though he did not sing). He marveled at the fact the villagers “required no
leading,” and “no organ to help them.” The people simply “sang fully out,” and
Booth was overwhelmed by “the effect of the voices rising so spontaneously.” So
“beautiful” had it been to Booth that he remarked, “I should have been very glad
to have come to Teano if only for these two services.”214 Although it came as a
passing thought, Booth remarked that the people of Teano seemed “most
respectable.”215
In Riardo, in April 1893, Booth described every detail of a funeral
procession he witnessed: the flowers, the crucifix, the priest “in white lace jacket
212
Ibid., 70-71.
Ibid., 87. This was penned over a week later, in the village of Riardo.
214
Ibid., 71.
215
Ibid., 73
213
96
and biretta.” A lifeless boy named Vincent Denuzzo, lay upon “a gilt bier high on
the shoulders of four men.” He had died the night previously. Booth said he
“turned and went with them to the Campo Santo, where, in a little chapel, the
body on its bier was laid to wait till tomorrow morning for burial.” Booth watched
the candles lit around the body, and he watched family members (who “cried a
little”) sprinkle holy water upon the corpse. He was shocked when the sugar
plums placed on the dead child were distributed to the children assembled (“oh
dear!”). Yet the experience was clearly precious to him. “But after all a pretty
sight,” Booth wrote “– for much as I would not have missed it.”216
The villagers seemed to have graciously accepted this rapt voyeur into
their midst. Booth was next present at a christening and narrated every detail of
the event. While having his boots mended, the bells seemed to have drawn him in.
He wrote: “I went to the Church this evening.” “First, at the door of the church,
the priest read a long piece out of his book, evidently adjurating the parents, who
stood on either side of the grandmother with the infant, and at intervals the priest
made signs of the cross and other gestures, and touched the child here and there to
suit his words.” Such experiences made Booth somewhat giddy, so delighted was
he by the scene. He described how the priest led the procession into the church.
Part of his robe was “thrown over the infant, they all went to the font, and then
followed the most elaborate anointing and sprinkling with holy oil and holy water
– the poor little thing as good as gold all the time.”217
Booth was also present at a number of masses. Spoken devotions Booth
described as a “brilliant sort of fantasia of a voluntary” in which both he and the
villagers “blessed and crossed ourselves.” Every night the church was “full like
this” Booth told Mary, the villagers almost taking over the duties of the priest
(“the congregations know the whole service by heart”). Booth was an avid
participant in such devotions. “My shoe maker, meeting me coming out, said
‘You were there, and yet did not understand a word.’” Obstinately, Booth
216
Ibid., 74-75. With Booth’s history, one wonders if there was there a bit of morbid
contemplation in the next paragraph – “The boy was well till yesterday, then struck with fever, and
in a day dead, and to-morrow buried”? Ibid., 76.
217
Ibid., 77-78.
97
corrected the man. “I had understood something,” he said in his letter to Mary,
“and so I told him….”218
Later Booth seems to have become, in a sense, an honorary member of this
clearly very religious community.219 “The Church bell is ringing lustily,” he wrote
his wife as he prepared for church, “and I suppose the messa cantata will soon
begin, which is to be followed by the procession with the saints [later described
by Booth down to the steep streets on which it ran its course]. I think I shall go to
church, and I ought to be seeing about it, as no doubt it will be very full.” It was,
the “whole population” turned out to fill an “overflowing” church. Booth
described how he was “invited to march” in the procession afterwards. As Booth
watched, prominent community members of the procession, in his words,
“beckoned me to join, and I did so.” After a while the “blazing hot sun” forced the
“bareheaded” Booth to “slip out,” which Booth hoped was not taken as
rudeness.220
Charles Booth, who historians repeatedly discuss as an agnostic, described
religiosity to his wife as a “natural” practice in his letters from Italy, and this
should not go unnoticed. “One does not need to go to Church when the bell
rings,” Booth remarked: “the men go in later; gradually, however, the Church
fills, and it seems quite natural that almost everyone should wish to kneel there
for a bit, and join in or listen to the singing, and accept the Benediction.” Booth
added: “Already I feel that a habit is growing in me in this direction.” Such was
life in the village, Booth told Mary “– very simple, and I think very healthy – at
any rate it seemed to suit me; so, as I say, I am beginning to think whether another
week here may not be the best thing I can do.”221
Booth did not want to leave the villages of Italy, and we see him prolong
his stay in his letters. In a sense, Riardo and Teano served as the second “religious
retreat” that we have a record of Booth attending in the period before the
“Religious Influences” survey. Booth told Mary all about his experiences in letter
218
Ibid., 78.
“I now receive invitations from the inhabitants to see or do this or that…” went one letter. Ibid.,
79.
220
Ibid., 84, 85, 86.
221
My italics. Ibid., 80.
219
98
after letter. The villagers apparently thought him “frightfully extravagant in
postage stamps,” but Booth clearly wanted his wife to hear every detail. One letter
saw Booth troubled that he had failed to communicate the proper details of his
experiences, owing to a postal error. “I feel a good deal puzzled about yesterday’s
latter,” Booth wrote frustratedly. “I am sure I wrote and told you about the
evening service, but when can I have posted it? However, I hope it has gone
somehow – if not, it does not matter, there was nothing special said – it only
confirmed what I wrote in the 9th.”222
In her Victorian Aspirations, Belinda Norman-Butler notes a third retreat
in 1897, a “badly needed holiday” in her words, after the rigours of the Industry
series. This retreat took him to Spain where once again, he wrote home of
churches like Seville Cathedral. Interestingly, we again see Booth’s intense
curiosity with the Catholic Church as a force for “good,” but strangely thwarted
(in the days of the Spanish Empire) by the “wickedness of man.” Booth seemed
intensely interested about a past, and a present conflict between good and evil in
men’s hearts (and perhaps, as we will see, between good and evil men in the
modern metropolitan society). Norman Butler writes:
About to embark on his third series, Religious Influences, he summarized
his reactions to the Catholic Church: I took my early walk Cathedral-way
and tried to grasp the whole idea, which is rather difficult, but I think I got
it. Oh, it is a most wonderful building to the glory of God and for the
religious needs of man! How very nearly the Catholic Church did succeed!
Its absolute, ultimate, and eternal failure is perhaps the most hopeless
thing of all in a rather hopeless world; such a revelation of the inherent
wickedness of man. Of course, good is no less inherent, and one hopes
even more persistent, but the bad always breaks out and does for great
aims.223
There was another aspect of Booth’s religious mindset, an uglier one, but
one inextricably attached to his praise for the pious. Naggingly, as he observed
the Italian villages, thoughts of the “submerged tenth” – the loafing, beggar class
at the bottom of society – entered Booth’s mind. Such thoughts came amidst a
passage in which Booth noted the powerful “hold on the people” the church
222
223
Ibid., 84, 83.
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 124.
99
exercised on most in the region (see above). Riardo, in Booth’s mind, was a
paradise of religion-inspired regularity. Booth said his experiences in the village
had proved especially “interesting” because, as he wrote, “[n]o one has ever
begged from me, no one has ever tried to sell me anything or in any way make
money out of me.” Booth evidenced a chemist who shrugged off the price of a
bottle of wine, and a shoemaker who “twitted” when Booth paid him an excessive
fee. “In vain,” moreover, had he tried to get his housekeeper, “Jacomina,”
(Giacomina) to tell him what he owed her for a week’s work.224 The people of
Riardo were infused, Booth seems to have thought, with a sense of decency and
self-sacrifice borne of their religious ways.
Booth, it seems, also became convinced that in this community the instinct
of the beggar was completely foreign – even to the poorest of villagers. “I say no
one has ever begged,” Booth reiterated “– there are no beggars. There is a little
dwarf of a woman, half imbecile, who climbs about, and to her I have twice given
a penny. She understands enough to take it, but one has almost to open her hand
to put it in.”225
Conceptually, for Booth’s generation and indeed for the one before it, the
moral ideal of a regular living, respectable (and perhaps religious) population did
not exist apart from concerns about an irregular, disreputable and anti-social
group. Hard-working people “of character” could not be imagined without their
nemesis, a begging, loafing people without it. Stefan Collini has remarked how
“[n]o amount of quotation could adequately convey the extent and intensity of this
concern,” so pervasive were the concepts of self-discipline, self-reliance, and
character. Collini has discussed the “psychological underpinning” of
contemporary moral arguments. Irrationally, they inspired excessive alarm at the
possibility that (as a result of charity or state reforms) entire classes of men and
women might “relax” (through drinking, not working etc.) and that, thereby, their
self-reliance or character might be permanently weakened.226 To beg, to
deliberately avoid work, meant one might already be incapable of regular work
224
Booth, Charles Booth 87-88.
Ibid., 88.
226
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 28, 30, n. 62.
225
100
because of moral carelessness. Of course, to believe this was always, to some
extent, to ignore the economic context in which both classes lived and worked.
Moral notions of work and poverty, however, were too strong at this time to be
overcome by economic or structural facts. Begging remained a moral crime.
Throughout the late nineteenth century, the fear of relaxing working men and
women continued to cause panics over careless charity or relief. Collini notes how
such claims drew upon the “long-standing anxiety about the effect of extreme
poverty upon the religious and moral habits of the working classes” – and that
“much of the alarm expressed at the poverty revelations of the 1880s was of this
type – above all, the fear of the ‘moral [and religious] destruction of the next
generation.’”227
Living as he did in this fuzzy, subjective, and alarmist moral world, one
sees increasing hints of Booth’s curiosity as to, on the one hand, how many
people composed the begging classes, and why they did the inexcusable thing
they did, and on the other, how many remained who composed more respectable
classes, no matter how poor. The submerged tenth and the supposedly nonexistent beggar population of Riardo came to Booth’s mind in his letter to Mary
because, when faced with understanding a society – any society, from New Jersey
to Riardo to London – Booth’s ultimate reference was to a cosmology, religious at
its core, of moral segregation.
Emotionally, and psychologically, Booth had been through hell and back.
Fortunately for his career, he had an abler, elder brother in Alfred, who (however
reluctantly) took the reins of their infant business when Charles could not.
Fortunately for his sanity, he had a strikingly intelligent nursemaid in Mary, who,
with the help of her family, pulled him from a crisis of faith back to moralreligious certainty. In this, the history of Charles Booth, 1840-1916, appears alike
to the evangelical religion (and the Christian economy) that struck the rocks of
Darwinian doubt in the 1860s, but which returned, galvanized into that
spectacularly vague phenomenon Edward Denison called “secularized
227
My italics. A.S. Wohl, “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” International Review of Social
History 13 (1968), 203, quoted in ibid., 31.
101
Evangelicalism.” Booth would begin his study of poverty intellectually refreshed
by one of the standardbearers of Victorian morality, the Macaulay family, whose
morality was based, originally, in an Age of Atonement that few people, truly, left
behind in the last half of the century.
In terms of psychological crises and intellectual turning points, nothing
would ever equal the crisis of Booth’s crisis of faith. It is instructive to compare
this crisis, and its resolution, to other moments in Booth’s life emphasized by
historians as affecting his point of view. Although with only a twenty-four page
ledger to support them, Englander and O’Day have insisted that several evening
conversations (a few days, somewhere between 1882 and 1883) “affected” or
“sensitized” Booth sufficiently to consider a socialist point of view (see Chapter 2
below). Such evidence clearly pales in comparison to Booth’s ten years of
emotional turmoil – a physically debilitating, emotionally crushing experience
(for Booth as well as his wife, from our evidence) – a crisis that found its
resolution in the arms of the exceedingly moral Macaulays, whose calming,
reassuring moral embrace Booth explicitly admitted. Booth lost, and then
reacquired, a moral and strangely religious sensibility in these years, succumbing
to the same rapprochement with religion affecting social thinkers like Leonard
Hobhouse at the time. We know that a moral-religious sensibility in the early
nineteenth century, among members of the Clapham Sect, meant a cruelly
uncompromising stance on charity to the deserving and undeserving poor which,
in the case of Charles Trevelyan, truly knew no limits. Had Booth become more
sympathetic to the working classes in an era that saw so many of them financially
and politically emancipated, and in which the “condition of England” question
achieved such prominence? Such questions are what the next chapter means to
answer.
102
Chapter 2. Moral Classification and Authoritarianism:
Charles Booth’s Answer to the Victorian Social Problem
1. Introduction: The Harder Side of a Religious Sensibility
Booth’s moral-religious sensibility can be most clearly seen in his
spiritualization of competition, a legitimation of the lives of competing men so
powerful that Booth reserved no sympathy for lazy and unproductive classes who
(he believed) refused to participate in the market’s “great game.” Contemporary
phrases like “belief in free enterprise,” or a “belief in the market” approach
Booth’s beliefs fairly well, but they do not quite equal his Victorian religious
mindset. As in the case of these phrases, Booth’s idea of competition implied and
permitted persistent misery among a section of society. Within it was assent to the
idea that certain social groups will have no chance at socio-economic wellbeing.
But Booth’s mindset was different in that, in addition to this contentment with
misery, he vigorously demanded further consequences for the immoral and
unproductive. His was a religious, and indeed, evangelical sensibility because, in
addition to accepting the inequalities of capitalism, Booth both observed a moral
division between decent working classes and disreputable working classes, and
added to this his hopes of effecting some kind of moral retribution for the latter’s
sins. One class deserved respectability and citizenship for its moral self-discipline,
and the other deserved swift retribution for its refusal to seek redemption. This
was more than simply a faith in the market, or in “individualism.” It was a return
to an evangelical Christian economy that believed (as we saw in Chapter 1) not
only in the “hidden hand” behind the capitalist economy, but believed “that the
‘hidden hand’ held a rod” and that the latter should be wielded justly and even
brutally by a rather authoritarian God in response to immoral human behaviour.228
It is insufficient to discuss Booth as a “passionate individualist, both by
temperament and conviction,” as the Simeys do – as a man with a “faith in free
enterprise” and an “acceptance of the inequalities he believed to be inherent in
228
Hilton, Age of Atonement 114. My italics.
103
human nature…”229 Also inadequate, however, is O’Day and Englander’s
suggestion that Booth’s belief lay somewhere between Positivism230 and the softer
political economy of American economist, F.A. Walker.231 Instead, it is by
trusting Mary Booth’s testimony more than we usually do – trusting her at her
word that Booth shrugged off Positivism (see above) – and by questioning, as
Mary may have wanted us to, the real significance of Booths’ letters from abroad
– that we can go a step further in determining the basis for Booth’s “moral
capitalism.” If we do this, we can demonstrate clearly that Booth’s belief in an
already devastating market capitalism was powerfully underlined and given a
harder edge by his moral-religious faith.
As with the Clapham Sect of three quarters of a century before, it was
when Booth spoke of the suffering that people experienced through (for example)
“the strange and monstrous strangulation of overproduction,” or the hard times
brought on by “cycles of depression,” that this hard religious sensibility became
most evident.232 It is in both his Industry Series and in Mary’s memoir that we see
229
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 29. In his “Industry series,” Booth publicly
declared his faith in his employer-class fellows in industry and commerce, who he praised for
improvements in the standard of living. Ibid., 129; “Industry,” 1: 153. Belief in individualism and
free enterprise, here, should remind the reader of Booth’s willingness to accept some casualties of
the capitalist system. Some of the underprivileged and poor would always escape the ken of
middle-class men imbuing themselves, as Booth did, with a Unitarian or otherwise morallycharged social responsibility, and with this Booth was content. Booth believed this was simply
part of life’s “lottery.” Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 29-30
230
Before committing to their Positivist picture of Booth, the two authors admit that Booth’s
“views are, in fact, difficult to characterise.” Despite Booth’s numerous statements to the contrary,
they portray him as a Positivist by past association in their account. He is portrayed (in the 1870s)
attending a variety of Booth’s meetings and associations with his more committed Postivist
cousins, the Cromptons (Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 144-146). They also label his final
“spiritual” recommendations for labour relations (in 1913) as “Comptean capitalism” (156, 158),
when Booth’s “spiritual” belief in near-superhuman captains of industry could just as easily have
come from the ideas of Alfred Marshall, and been imbued with the same spirit of religious
rapprochement that underlined the thought of L.T. Hobhouse. None of this takes us much beyond
their original statement: that, “[t]he record, though thin, shows Booth at the opening of the 1870s,
searching for a personal identity and social purpose, and struggling to overcome the moral
confusion and doubts created by the separation of science and belief.” (145)
231
Ibid., 147-151. O’Day and Englander’s discussion of Walker is illuminating, because it gives a
specific face to the less unequivocal brand of mild political economy Booth – and many of his
generation – increasingly adopted during this period. Otherwise Booth’s mentions of Walker only
tell us what we already know – that he was searching for an economic science with a moral
“heart.” See above, Ch. 1, pp…
232
Booth, Charles Booth 97. Quotation from Booth, “Industry,” 5: 72-73, 75-78.
104
Booth suggesting, quite unselfconsciously, that the pain of work self-discipline
could constitute a revitalizing experience.233
Characteristically, before approaching the subject of suffering, Booth
asked his reader to avoid exaggeration: to look at things like cycles of economic
depression “from a more distant point of view” instead of from “near by.” This
way they would have a less “cruel aspect,” and could be viewed as less
“malignant” than they really were.234
If men did “suffer from these alterations,” however, Booth suggested that
this was not altogether a negative thing. It is here, indeed, that Booth’s moralreligious sensibility takes on its most masochistic aspect. In bad times the
community – both the middle and the working class – gained “not only by the
strengthening of character under stress, but also by a direct effect on enterprise.”
As to character, the effect, especially on wage-earners, is very similar to
that exercised on a population by the recurrence of winter as compared to
the enervation of continual summer. As to enterprise, and this applies
more particularly to the masters, it is not difficult to understand the
invigorating influence of periodic stress.235
When it came to judging “measures of collective action,” Booth measured
the value of each reform in terms of the extent to which they encouraged and
preserved this invigorating form of stress and anxiety – this feeling that there
were consequences for improvident or immoral action. Booth “abhorred” any
social welfare proposal that would substitute “a new set of consequences for the
natural set of consequences following upon a man’s action.”236 He felt that his
anxious economic man must be preserved. In a particularly insensitive moment
233
In the conclusion of his Industry series Booth waxed romantic about the “good battle for life”
which individuals and families fought “for themselves and those who belong to them.” The
Simeys, as they quote the Series, aid and abet Booth’s individualism, writing that his “idea of
alternating periods of want and plenty” was dealt with in a manner “never bettered.” Simey and
Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 135; “Industry,” 5: 336.
234
Booth, Charles Booth 97-98.
235
Ibid., 98.
236
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 30. In his Industry Series, Booth was open to
proposals for more education of workers, enforcement of special provisions for health and safety,
and landlord responsibility for factory maintenance, but not to public works or other “socialist”
measures. All interference in industry, Booth believed, should be subject to a test of whether
“incentives to individual effort were left to operate with unimpaired effect (“enabling the
individual to act more freely and intelligently for himself”).” Ibid., 133; “Industry,” 5: 295-382.
105
(for both Booth and his 60s biographers), the Simeys’ added that “[Booth] was
himself prepared to accept the full implications of his own hardy philosophy. ‘If I
choose a man and he cheats me, I am rightly served and to go crying for redress is
to act like a child.’”237
Booth believed that “bad times” caused men to exercise their wits and
become more capable of handling economic matters than before, and that both
working men and their managers could harmlessly stand the strain.238 In his
Industry Series he spoke of the “invigorating stress” of sudden adversity,
unemployment and poverty.239 Booth, in a decidedly Spencerian moment, saw
periodic crises as “the economic equivalent of natural selection, an inescapable
audit from which in the long run the best and most efficient elements would
emerge invigorated and strengthened characters.”240
Such assumptions, we should note, bore almost no relation to Booth’s
personal or business life, interrupted as it was by regular breakdowns in the 1870s
and subsequent vacation getaways.241 A.H. John notes that the Booth brothers
eagerly took advantage of limited liability legislation (nine years after the bill was
enacted) to get the funds necessary for his shipping company’s creation (the
“value of the ships was divided into sixty-four parts” and “the money was found
within a month”).242 Booth also very commonly benefited either from market
monopolies or agreeable compromises with his “competitors” in the leather and
237
Ibid., 30. Later, the Simeys note smilingly how Booth’s “faith in competitive individualism
extended over every page [of the Industry series]: his personal enjoyment of that way of life
enthused every opinion he expressed.” “This was life as he himself lived it,” the Simeys believed.
“He loved its ‘pleasures, risks and excitements.’ He had found his own salvation by fighting his
way through its dangers and uncertainties, and he was convinced that it was for the common good
that others should do the same.” Ibid., 131.
238
In his fifth Industry volume there was little apology for competition that was sometimes the
cause of “much misery” in English society. Misery dealt out “stern justice” to the inefficient while
doing good for the rest of working-class society. That some had to be punished for “inefficiency”
was simply the “necessary reverse of a medal on the other side of which good must be found.”
Ibid., 132; Booth, “Industry,” 5: 72, 80, 280, 314.
239
Booth, “Industry,” 5: 73-75, 256-257; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 208209; Englander and O’Day .Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 151.
240
Ibid., 151. There would be constant “improvement” through this process, because it would be
accompanied by “a weeding-out of the incapable, and a survival of the fittest.” Booth, Charles
Booth 98; “Industry,” 5: 75.
241
John, Liverpool Merchant House 40.
242
Ibid., 35. Seeking to open new shipping routes, the company raised ₤141, 450, “again found
from existing shareholders and friends…” (67).
106
shipping industries, so as to avoid costly price wars.243 In his shipping company’s
earliest days, Philip Holt (of the Lamport and Holt shipping line) told Booth: “as
long as he left the China Seas to Alfred Holt and Company he could steam and
trade where he pleased.” “Nineteenth-century Mersey princes spoke like this!”
exclaims Norman-Butler.244 Booth’s faith in a spiritualized capitalism was
nevertheless the reason he could argue that the poor were “happier” or as happy as
the middle classes – and in this his thought bears a striking resemblance to that of
Thomas Chalmers fifty years before. Because of constant “invigorating stress”
and hard work, Booth thought that working-class life may have had (in the
Simeys’ words) superior “social and emotional compensations” inherent in their
way of life.245 We know now that this was (and continues to be) a patently wrong
assumption. Social epidemiologists have, in the past two decades, demonstrated
the direct and deadly biological effects these anxieties pose to people of all
classes – however Booth and others believed they might “stimulate” and “guide”
the capacities of men.246
243
It would be Alfred who would acquire an “increasing knowledge of skins,” reducing decisively
“losses from bad valuations” and ensuring, in their leather business (from 1868), that
“sales…remained unchanged at between ₤2,000 and ₤2,500 a month.” (Ibid., 47) These sales rose
to ₤16,000 by 1873 and Alfred Booth and Company’s status as the “most important suppliers of
sheepskins to the American market” had a lot to do with the fact the company had “almost a
monopoly of the trade to Boston.” (48-49) Although more competition was encountered from the
beginning of the 1880s, by 1890 the company was now a “well established Anglo-American
concern in the pickled pelt trade, with its largest markets in Boston boot and shoe industry. The
total value of the business amounted to between ₤250,000 and ₤300,000 annually.” (51) Nor were
Booth’s ideals reflected in his shipping business, where “from the start, with formidable
competition from sailing vessels, the popularly expected conflict in the North Brazilian steamer
trade, was largely averted. Opposition, when it came, was provided by foreign companies; but
even here, combination rather than competition was the outstanding feature.” John notes that the
“tendency towards acting in concert was therefore inherent in the character of the liner business.”
In the 1860-1910 period, this uncompetitive manner of business led inexorably to amalgamation
of existing companies because essentially, “each of the interests was really a form of partnership.”
(60-61) The lack of competition among the liners was most symbolically reflected in the fact
Alfred Booth and Company’s ships “shared with the Red Cross Line and the Maranham
Steamship Company a berth in the Brunswick Dock, Liverpool, which they retained until 1902.”
(68)
244
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 34.
245
The Simeys, unfortunately, believe that this assumption “has been consistently and regrettably
overlooked by his successors, who have assumed far too readily that the middle-class way of life
is intrinsically better than the one ‘beneath’ them.” Fifties’ social scientists, they hoped, would
“redeem” ideas of working people’s lives that were stressful, but somehow very happy, too. Simey
and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 264-265. The Simeys cite John Madge, The Tools of
Social Science (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1953), 17.
246
Wilkinson, Impact of Inequality.
107
Why were these thoughts of spiritualized competition religious per se? It
was for the same reason early nineteenth century evangelicals could theologically
justify, with their creed of Atonement, their political economy and their decisions
to withhold charity from the poor and food from the starving. After 1850, an Age
of Incarnational thought, new emphases on cooperation and brotherhood
demonstrated not a break from the evangelical past, but continuity with it. Wilfrid
Richmond, Oxford Don, founder of the Christian Social Union, and author of
Christian Economics in 1888 (as Boyd Hilton tells us), enthused that commercial
and industrial life was a “moral fabric” and that man was “made in a glorious
image, right worthy of being multiplied. Combination is the ‘law of life’, and
what is called division of labour should really be called ‘combination’, since it
depicts men organizing and uniting their forces in industrial fellowship.” “Life,
laborious and self-denying life, should be graced with beauty and filled with
many pleasures.” Inherent in economic battles between men and men was
especially the “freedom of energy, a system of life in which all objects of desire
fulfil their function in evoking energy, and in giving the pleasure which attends its
exercise, in which the energies of all are called forth to their fullest extent.”247 The
ability of clerics like Richmond to avoid touching upon their own starkly unequal
economic context is striking: the simple fact of competition and industrial work is
simply glorious in itself.
Some contemporaries, it should be said, most famously William
Gladstone, were “dismayed by the mid-century softening of interpretation as to
the meaning of the Crucifixion,” blaming it on the increasing “tenderness” of the
times. He was disappointed in the fact that people now believed “that pain is
essentially or at least universally an evil.” “[T]his, it seems to me, ought to be
denied. Pain is not in its nature an evil in the proper sense, nor is it universally
attended with evil as a consequence.” Despondently in 1896, Gladstone reprinted
ideas he had written in 1830: “[pain’s] most common effect, indeed, was to
‘energise feelings of self-mortification and self-sacrifice.’” Hilton notes that it
was this very idea of pain, which, over five subsequent decades (1830-1880),
247
William Richmond, Christian Economics (1888) quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement 332.
108
“both evangelicals and Tractarians regarded as the surest harbingers of virtue, in
nations as well as individuals.” Gladstone, however, was not so “embarrassingly
outmoded” as Hilton paints him. A deeper cultural hegemony in notions of pain
and competition, rooted in an earlier theological age, still had great currency in
the 1880s, and Booth himself took them up.248
Booth had been born of a moral culture which, as it had in the early part
of his century, simply made these things so. He felt that, for the middle classes
and for the working classes there were higher, spiritual rules determining success
and failure. It is worth noting that some of Booth’s last written words were a
vague statement about the “spiritual” rules of capital investment. Writing from the
industrialists’ point of view, Booth wrote:
Capital is wealth transmitted and vitalized by individual enterprise. It
expands and shrinks, and no quantitative tests can be readily applied. It
follows spiritual rather than physical laws; is eager, hopeful, brave, or
frightened, cowardly and crushed. In vagaries it is like the weather a
constantly shifting balance of many forces. Such are the conditions of –”
Perhaps as a goad to historians to look deeper into Booth’s religious sensibility,
Mary added only: “Here the hand stopped.”249
Booth recommended religion generally among individuals because its selfdiscipline stood as the only barrier between a man being good or bad, a success or
a failure. Belinda Norman-Butler has noted how in his concluding essay of his
Religious Influences Series, Booth wrote:
What religion has to offer…is a revolution of the soul…which instead of
ending life’s activities, renders them, with the heightening of conscience,
even more acute….there arises contest within contest, with ourselves and
our own passions, with others and with their passions….like wrestlers we
strive wrist to wrist before the decisive throw is final. Fresh adversaries
spring up….our emotions and passions prove the dragon’s teeth in the
fable. The very idea of repose is banished to another life. In this one we do
not desire it.250
248
Hilton’s emphasis. W.E. Gladstone, “On the mediation of Christ”, written in 1830 and printed
as an appendix to Studies Subsidiary to Butler (1896) quoted in Ibid., 345, 342.
249
Booth, Charles Booth 170-171.
250
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 83.
109
Of course, in Booth’s mind, this was not entirely true. Many working men and
women of his day shirked self-discipline, and many more refused religion’s
“revolution of the soul.” Revitalized in the 1880s with a new moral confidence,
Charles Booth had plans for them.
2. Moral Segregation: The Problem Behind the “Social Problem”
Booth’s work on the Life and Labour survey centered around the isolation
of a begging, non-working class from those who achieved (in any number of
forms) some kind of working-class respectability – what would turn out to be the
respectable working majority. He separated the good from the bad, the “bona
fide” from the begging. Gertrude Himmelfarb has suggested that, in doing this,
Booth was only attempting what had become a regular exercise for writers,
thinkers and activists in the reforming classes in the late Victorian and Edwardian
periods.251 Major events in working-class London, and nearly all of the remedies
for the late Victorian “social problem” that the middle and governing classes
created, all appear reducible to a single phenomenon: the moral segregation of the
working-class.
Himmelfarb’s book Poverty and Compassion serves as a catalogue of
these events and remedies. In terms of working-class events few could top the
Dock Strike of 1889. Here, poor, unskilled, working men demonstrated their
ability to maintain order despite their poverty. But they demonstrated more than
this. They proved to the country that there were a great deal more poor-but-stillrespectable men and women in the population than hitherto believed.252
251
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion. See also my own discussion surrounding the making of
the late Victorian underclass and its crucial relation to the “condition of England” question, in
Thomas R.C. Brydon, “Poor, Unskilled and Unemployed”: “Insufficient attention has been paid to
what became of the casual residuum in the minds of reformers and policy-makers when, after
1889, it was ‘no longer a political threat.’ For the late Victorians and Edwardians, this
conspicuously undersized ‘vagrant class’ remained (in Gareth Stedman Jones’ words) ‘only a
social problem.’ What historians of this period fail to consider is the fact that it may have become
the social problem, one which would ensconce itself in the currents of Edwardian social theory,
and one which would exercise a disproportionate influence over the way in which reformers, and
even governments, chose to deal with the problem of poverty.”(3)
252
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 52; 48-53.
110
Spurring a New Union movement (ultimately short-lived), working-class
organization across England in the 1880s pushed the boundaries of the respectable
“public” deep into neighbourhoods of the East End hitherto discounted as
“Outcast London.”253 The public eye, as well as social inquiry, latched onto the
newly respectable unskilled. David Englander suggests that Booth’s Industry
Series “was itself a response to the New Unionism.”254 Booth himself spoke of
great things to come when he discussed “London Dockside Labour” before the
Royal Statistical Society in 1892. He recalled how in 1887 the “character of the
men matched well with the character of the work and its remuneration. All alike
were low and irregular.” But by 1892 he was certain that dock unionization would
mean more regular and, therefore, more decent men.255 Booth’s beliefs were
shared by his co-worker, Ernest Aves. David Englander writes how Aves
welcomed the New Unionism. For him, “the trade union and co-operative
movements were perceived as character-forming agents in which the values of
discipline, duty and service might be acquired.”256
De-casualization schemes at the docks and in other areas seemed to
accomplish a similar feat.257 Casually working men would be separated from
regular ones. London’s decasualization scheme, according to the Simeys, became
253
Perceptions of a poor-but-respectable majority in the East and South London slums,
importantly, did not hinder the increasingly aggressive attempts by employers to smash new
unionism in the 1890s. The very successful attempts of the Shipping Federation to ensure
employers’ the freedom to employ scab labour during strikes (they called it “free labour”) are
described in John Saville, “Trade Unions and Free Labour: The Background to the Taff Vale
Decision,” in Asa Briggs and John Saville eds., Essays in Labour History: In memory of G.D.H.
Cole, 25 September 1889-14 January 1959 (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd, 1960), pp. 317-350.
254
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 131.
255
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 121. See also O’Day and Englander, Mr.
Charles Booth’s Inquiry 131, 151-152. Booth’s support of the organization of dock labour,
however, should be qualified. According to the Simeys he felt that trade unions were appropriate
only for about 2/8 sections of the London labour force. He spoke of the futility of resisting
mechanization, moreover, which would only hinder competition and the efforts of “capable men”
(like himself) creating “opportunities for all the world.” Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social
Scientist 134; “Industry,” 5: 80-1, 150, 159, 305-6; 310.
256
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 106.
257
Gordon Phillips and Noel Whiteside, and also John Lovell, have described how the 1889 strike
and subsequent decasualization schemes established and galvanized an elite of unionized
stevedores, warehousemen and other “permanent men,” but that these were a minority and that
membership in dockers’ unions declined rapidly after 1891. Phillips and Whiteside, Casual
Labour: The Unemployment Question in the Port Transport Industry, 1880-1970 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1985), 38-39; Lovell, Stevedores and Dockers (London: Macmillan, 1969), 92120.
111
known as “Mr. Booth’s scheme.”258 Booth’s hope was to drive the “casual
docker” to seek a “still more precarious livelihood elsewhere” by offering less and
less casual work, and he admitted the process would be a “painful one.”259 His
investigator for the Industry Series, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, with his colleague
Vaughan Nash, elaborated as they wrote The Story of the Docker’s Strike (1889):
“the members of Mr. Booth’s class B [the morally lowest in the working class
according to Booth] will be no gainers from the change, they will find another
door closed against them, and this in many cases the last door to employment.”260
Removing employment from individuals who only worked irregularly,
contemporaries came to believe, would force those of the displaced possessing
“character” to seek regular work elsewhere, and thereby separate themselves from
a group whose irregularity came from an immoral, undisciplined lifestyle.
A variety of examples also come from the world of social inquiry and
social reform. With the Charity Organization as its flagship, a new common sense
surrounding “careful” charity, only to the respectable poor, grew up since the late
1860s.261 The startling revelations of poverty contained within the tract The Bitter
Cry of Outcast London (1883) prompted commissions of inquiry in every large
city in England to determine how many of each brand of poor people were living
there.262 The housing panic of the 1880s, and the Royal Commission that was set
up to explore it, worried most about honest working men and the honest poor
258
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 212-213. Richard Williams, Liverpool’s
newly appointed divisional officer of labour exchanges, devised (over the course of 1911 and
1912) the city’s first registration scheme for dock labour. The scheme (already in place in London
and Manchester) envisaged “a system of preferential treatment” in which a “minority of dockers
would be selected by their normal employers as men of ‘approved character,’ and transferred
through public clearing houses to guarantee their continuous employment.” Williams knew that
this scheme would exclude 7,000 “surplus” dockers, but of this he was chillingly unconcerned. For
these men he recommended a labour colony (for which, see below). Phillips and Whiteside,
Casual Labour 91.
259
“Industry,” 5: 304, 416.
260
Quoted in Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies,” 358-359.
261
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 58-59.
262
The Simeys mention the newspaper report Squalid Liverpool. They also mention A.J.
Mundella’s inquiry into “educational attainments” of the children employed in his stocking
factory. W.H.G. Armytage, A.J. Mundella, 1825-1897; the liberal background to the labour
movement (London: Ernest Benn, 1951), 56. Also mentioned is Booth’s encouragement to Mr.
Frederick Scott, in 1888, to conduct a parallel inquiry in Manchester. Simey and Simey, Charles
Booth: Social Scientist 65 n. 3; 66 n. 3; 97.
112
who, it was felt, were endangered by crowded slum conditions. Its mandate was to
measure how representative East London’s outcast classes were, so that the threat
posed to these more moral workers could be better understood.263 When the Pall
Mall Gazette became concerned there might be exaggeration in the Housing
Commission’s reports, moreover, it made its own inquiry to measure the honest
against the outcast (believing that a respectable majority would be revealed).264
Booth’s friends, Beatrice Potter and Rev. Canon Samuel Barnett, were interested
in his project because they wanted, too, to see the “real,” “independent” working
classes.265 Barnett, for his part, had been waiting for a study to see past the
“sensationalized” poverty of London to its respectable working-class core.266
Potter, becoming a prolific writer of the period, never ceased to harp about the
fact that there were only two kinds of workers, the sober, thrifty sort whose
regular work had made for character-forming discipline, and the “hopeless” and
irregular casual labourer who required restraint and perhaps incarceration.267
Finally, it was such an act of “public spirit” to uncover the facts of poverty in late
Victorian London that H.M. Hyndman (leader of the Social Democratic
Federation) found it advantageous to invent an encounter with Charles Booth in
his biography, in which he and Booth haggled over the true extent of poverty in
London. Writing the entirely fictitious argument into his 1911 Record of an
263
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 60, 61, 63, 67.
Ibid., 67.
265
Ibid., 93, 95. O’Day and Englander note how Joseph Chamberlain put a question to Beatrice
Potter in late February 1886 that would prove to be “one of the main problems which would
exercise Booth and his co-workers[.]” “My department,” Chamberlain wrote, “knows all about
Paupers and Pauperism but has no official cognizance of distress above the pauper line.” As
O’Day and Englander found, he added an importance concern: that “the suffering of the
industrious non-pauper class is very great and is increasing.” Quoted in O’Day and Englander, Mr.
Charles Booth’s Inquiry 33.
266
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 63. Barnett published an article in Nineteenth Century to
this effect, in 1886. 1883’s “Bitter Cry of Outcast London” was certainly the most famous
example, but it was a preoccupation of the period to complain about the exaggeration present in
every publication dealing with the poor. Booth was concerned not only with the inaccuracies of
the “Bitter Cry” but with “the flood of personal impressions which had appeared in papers and
pamphlets during these years…” The publications “provided ample evidence of the distortion
which could result from the high-lighting of single factors without due reference to the subject as a
whole.” Simey and Simey Charles Booth: Social Scientist 78.
267
Two examples are her Industrial Democracy (London: Longmans, 1902), 539-45, 749-66; and
her History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans, 1894), 441-442.
264
113
Adventurous Life allowed Hyndman to take partial credit for Booth’s ultimate
rendering of deserving and undeserving poverty.268
A major theme of Himmelfarb’s Poverty and Compassion is the tendency
of late Victorian thinkers to adopt a “glass is half full” tendency in their social
theory. Booth became the posterboy of this brand of thought in arguing for the
“relative character” of the social problem. His statistics would, for the most part,
demonstrate not widespread poverty but rather “poor respectability” as the chief
characteristic of the East and South Ends. Booth deliberately employed School
Board visitors (many of them former policemen and soldiers) for his Poverty
inquiry because it was felt that they had had experience with all the separate
classes within the working class, and that they would not simply focus on the
poorest.269 His time lodging in the houses of the poor had impressed upon him
that London’s working classes were a diverse and divided group. Booth’s
argument for class-segregated curricula in England’s Board Schools, Himmelfarb
notes, was based on the assumption there were both respectable and unrespectable
children in the metropolis. Finally, Himmelfarb explains how his separation of
respectable from unrespectable could take racial lines. London’s Jewish
community was stereotyped in the Life and Labour inquiry as hating charity and
268
David Rubinstein’s research first revealed the truth behind this “Hyndman-Booth Myth” in
1968, and both Himmelfarb and O’Day and Englander repeat the fact that Hyndman likely “lied”
about his confrontation with Booth. This, of course, was unknown to the Simeys in 1961 and is
reproduced by them through the use of Hyndman’s autobiography, Record of an Adventurous Life
(New York: Macmillan, 1911), 331. According to Hyndman, an inquiry by the S.D.F. (which
Himmelfarb doubts actually existed) found 25% of working Londoners living in poverty. This
prompted Booth to enter upon his own inquiry, “with the idea on Mr. Booth’s part that we
[Hyndman and the S.D.F] had considerably exaggerated the proportion of the working people who
lived below the line of decent subsistence, Mr. Booth even going so far as to denounce me in a
quiet way for putting such erroneous and as he termed ‘incendiary’ statements before the people.”
Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 70. David Rubinstein, “Booth and
Hyndman,” Bulletin for the Study of Labour History xvi (1968), 22-24; Himmelfarb, Poverty and
Compassion 90-91, 408-409; O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 30-31.
269
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 93, 98-99. Booth’s belief in a plurality of working
classes is particularly borne out in his recommendation of the School Board Visitors. He praised
their “extensive knowledge of the people…their work keeps them in continual and natural
relations with all classes of people.” Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist
81.
114
exercising better than average self-control. The inquiry juxtaposed the Jews
against the city’s low and vicious Italian and Hungarian community.270
When welfare came to Britain in the 1906-1914 period social thinkers
continued to think of it as a manifestation of moral segregation. In his discussion
of the New Liberal theorist L.T. Hobhouse, Stefan Collini demonstrates how
support for pension and National Insurance legislation, as well as more “humane”
treatment of the deserving poor by the Poor Law, almost always coincided (in
reformers’ minds) with separation of an unfit class from the majority. London’s
unrespectable minority had received public attention for some time. Since at least
Mayhew’s studies of the 1850s people had called it the “residuum.” Booth called
it Class B. Hobhouse, as Collini notes, revealingly called them “the morally
uncontrolled.” Collini’s biography serves as a caution to historians not to be
fooled by Edwardian demands for more humane treatment of paupers by the
workhouse. Reformers like “Hobhouse and his fellow-Progressives,” it is true,
“always protested against the severity and degradation which the Poor Law
visited upon those who were driven by economic circumstances to ask for relief.”
But their real objection “was to the fact that the deserving and undeserving poor
were treated alike, not to the treatment as such.”271
Edwardian “welfare” legislation followed the same pattern. The Pension,
National Insurance, and Labour Exchanges Acts, in the words of two historians,
were ultimately machinery designed “to separate the deserving and undeserving
labourers as impersonally as possible, with a minimum of inquiry.” Pat Thane has
remarked upon the means-tested basis on which pensions were granted, and on
the Pension Act’s Poor Law-like “respectability test” (which excluded all but a
miserable minority of “very poor, very old” workers from its meager five-shilling
benefit). Almost two thirds of those insured by the National Insurance Act were
precisely what London’s dockers, domestic workers, “casuals” and factory
270
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 99, 138, 139-143; David Englander, “Booth’s Jews: the
presentation of Jews and Judaism in Life and Labour of the People in London” in Englander and
O’Day eds., Retrieved Riches 289-321.
271
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 139. For the late century history of the residuum concept in
Britain, see Jose Harris, “Between Civic Virtue and Social Darwinism: the concept of the
residuum,” in Englander and O’Day eds., Retrieved Riches 67-87.
115
labourers were not: highly, regularly paid workmen. One of the Act’s architects
(Hubert Llewellyn Smith, an associate of Booth and, notably, an interviewer for
his “Industry Series”) summed up the hard truth of National Insurance at the time:
“Armed with [the] double weapon of a maximum benefit and a minimum
contribution the operation of the scheme will automatically exclude the loafer.”
Labour Exchanges, located in “dismal and inconvenient buildings,” situated in the
“slummiest parts of town,” and staffed by men with “business rather than
bureaucratic experience,” were a further insult to the poor. Deserving and
undeserving distinctions were, moreover, explicitly enforced, both in the form of
the Poor Law’s “separate cell” workhouse policy (adopted by 434 Boards of
Guardians by 1904), and in the introduction of the Prevention of Crime Act. The
Act allowed policemen, “on the grounds of character alone,” to arrest alleged
“vagrants” for ill-defined offences like “loitering with intent.” V.A.C. Gatrell’s
assessment is telling: crime in Edwardian England, as a result of a contemporary
crackdown on “misfits, inebriates, mental defectives and paupers,” became more
closely regulated than it had ever been in the previous century or would be in the
interwar period.272
In the South London Press’ regular reporting of the minutes of the local
Poor Law Guardians we see the discourse of moral segregation even at the local
level. On August 7, 1897, the subject of discussion of the Camberwell Guardians
was as banal a matter as the tea given to workhouse inmates. Inmates had
complained that the tea they were served was too weak:
272
Pat Thane, “Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750-1914,” in F.M.L. Thompson
ed. The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950. Volume 3. Social Agencies and
Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 54; Pat Thane, “The Working Class
and State “Welfare” in Britain, 1880-1914,” Historical Journal 28 (1984): 896; Margaret Jones,
“The 1908 Old Age Pensions Act: The Poor Law in a New Disguise?” in Keith Laybourn ed.,
Social Conditions, Status and Community, 1860-c.1920 (Thrupp, Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 83-103;
Jose Harris, Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy, 1886-1914 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1972), 312-313; Alan Deacon, In Search of the Scrounger: The Administration
of Unemployment Insurance in Britain, 1920-1931 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1976), 12; Harris,
349, 353, 352; Rachel Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the Poor Law in Late Victorian and Edwardian
England,” English Historical Review 92, (Jan. 1977): 69; V.A.C. Gatrell, “Crime, Authority and
the Policeman State,” in F.M.L. Thompson ed. The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 17501950. Volume 3. Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 308-309. For a discussion of similar “moral” discrimination in Late Victorian and
Edwardian housing policy, see Brydon, “Poor, Unskilled and Unemployed,” 71-108.
116
Mrs. Brown Sinclair (a Guardian) said the inmates complained that the tea
was too weak – that in fact, it was not tea, but coloured water.
Mr. Street said one of the witnesses declared that the tea was so bad that
there could have been no sugar, water, nor anything else in it. (Laughter.)
The Guardians quarreled a while over the precise proportions – fluid to tea –
which made a decent brew, until one Guardian, Mr. Woodmansee, demanded
better tea for the inmates. Like unskilled dock workers, like social theorists, and
like Edwardian welfare administrators, he did so on the basis that many of the
members of the Camberwell workhouse were part of the respectable poor: “Mr.
Woodmansee held that one ounce and a half of tea to 10 pints of fluid was
ludicrously small. These inmates ought to be treated as honest poor, and not as
criminals on restricted rations.” Later the same Guardian added that the inmates
who complained were not “loafers and skulks.”273 These distinctions were
important. The inmates, many of them over 60, deserved better because one of
their Guardians had recognized them as the “right sort” of able-bodied poor.
Between August and October 1897, another article “The Paupers and their
Tea” seems to have set off a firestorm of accusations from both the Press and the
Lambeth Guardians over the question of whether Lambeth, or even farther regions
of South London, had become a “Pauper’s Paradise.” The Guardians at the
Prince’s Road and Gordon Road workhouses were each accused of being
negligent in discriminating between, on the one hand, able-bodied men
temporarily disabled because of a variety of circumstances, and, on the other, “the
sturdy loafer.” In the case of Gordon Road, it was alleged that one inmate,
twenty-two year-old James Allender, had murdered another inmate, twenty-nine
year-old Robert Brown, by knocking him to the ground in the workhouse smoking
room. The jurors at the Coroner’s Court seemed uninterested in the crime itself.
They, and later the Press, were more interested in the fact that Allender and other
witnesses from the workhouse were “well-built” or “strongly built,” and they
were appalled that the workhouse had such a luxury as a smoking room. Allender
pleaded that the deceased attacked him first with punches and kicks, and “denied
273
Boards of Guardians, Camberwell, “Paupers and their Tea,” South London Press August 7,
1897, p. 2.
117
that he struck the deceased in the smoking room.” A juror only responded: “I
suppose you don’t mean the billiard room. This place seems to me like a
‘pauper’s paradise’.” Allender said he had been an inmate for several years at the
house. The coroner replied that the house must be “very comfortable” for him to
stay so long, to which Allender responded: “Yes, it’s very comfortable for those
who have nowhere to go.” A Juror responded, “Or want no work to do.” The
courtroom then erupted in remarks (from the Coroner and a Dr. T. Adophus) that
Allender was too “able-bodied” be in a workhouse, and that he was shirking “an
able bodied man’s work.” The Guardians had committed an offence by admitting
a “sturdy loafer” like Allender. A juror added spitefully: “Not while the
ratepayers are stupid enough to keep him.”
In the weeks that followed Guardians attempted to defend themselves, and
their methods of discrimination, in the Press. One from Renfrew Road’s
workhouse responded that his house was “not for the loafer and his kin!” Lambeth
was not a “loafer’s paradise.” In late years, moreover, there were no more
“pampered paupers.” Another from Prince’s Road workhouse, Mr. Edwards,
when asked by a Press reporter if his inmates were “able-bodied,” said: “Not a bit
of it. Some are imbeciles, others are minus a leg or an arm, while the remainder
are deficient in one way or another. That is to say, these 26 young men are able to
do light work about the house, and do do it; but they are not the class of men you
are in search of – the loafer. He gets a short shrift.” Edwards also added that
loafers were women as much as men, and that women were worse to deal with.
“Most of the women included in the category he alluded to had had heaps of
opportunities to become good citizens. But their one great bugbear was – work.
He diagnosed their disease as laziness, demoralizing laziness! With that disease
they become emboldened in low cunning and impudence.” “Mark my word,” said
Edwards confidently, “there are difficulties in dealing with idle loafing men; but
they are not half so serious as those connected with idle, loafing women.” Page
four of the same issue was an extended tirade against the loafer, entitled, “The
Poor-Law Paradise.” The editor of the Press was appalled that “the deserving and
the undeserving were being subjected to precisely the same treatment in the
118
workhouse”: that Lambeth Guardians continued “to pamper the unworthy
member of society on the one hand[,] or on the other condemn the not unworthy
member [the latter, “compelled to resort” to the workhouse only “through the
stress of circumstances”] to the consciousness of a most unrighteous equality with
the other.” In a statement symbolic of the era, the editor said of the “sturdy loafer”
– “the sturdy loiterer who mistakenly imagines that society was made to be
preyed upon,” this “useless member of society” – that he or she constituted “one
of the most important social problems of the day…” Something must be done, he
wrote, “to remove that which is a reproach to our common sense and a strain upon
our civilization.”274
Yet further articles and editorials in the Press (throughout September
1897) tell us that the issue exercised a strong hold over South London readers.
Press writers, as we will see in Part IV, wrote a paper constantly reporting
Guardians’ minutes, coroners’ reports, suicide stories and moments of typically
money-related humiliation among the less advantaged of South Londoners. They
therefore kept the issue of moral segregation front and centre. Worry over the
Gordon Road workhouse’s methods extended to concerns with whether the
infirmary, and also a local asylum, were accepting frauds without knowing it (as
if people were faking insanity). The Press reported the minutes of the Camberwell
Guardians under the heading “The Lunatic’s Paradise.”275 The Guardians,
moreover, struck out at perceived “loafers.” One man, Frederick Wiseman, age
twenty-nine, “appeared to be a strong, healthy fellow,” and, when searched by
workhouse officials, it was found he had a shilling in his pocket. Angered,
Wiseman caused “a disturbance.” Remanded to police-court, Wiseman pleaded
with his judge: “I am not able-bodied, sir.” “I cannot help you,” replied the judge.
“You must go to prison with hard labour for 14 days.” Another man, John Barr,
did not wish to grind corn (the task presented him on entering the house) and
“absconded from the workhouse.” Barr was given the same sentence (fourteen
274
“A Pauper’s Paradise: Living on the Ratepayers: The Problem of the Sturdy Loafer” and
“Lambeth Not ‘A Loafer’s’ Paradise,” The South London Press 4 September, 1897, p. 2; “The
Poor-Law Paradise,” The South London Press 4 September, 1897, p. 4.
275
“The Lunatics Paradise,” The South London Press 18 September, 1897, p. 2; “The Poor-Law
Paradise,” The South London Press 18 September, 1897, p. 7.
119
days hard labour) when he asking refuge at the same workhouse two days later.276
Mr. Thomas Edwards of the Prince’s Road Workhouse handed Annie Tovey over
to the police-court for an even worse sentence. Tovey, aged forty-six, was a
domestic servant with one child in the workhouse, and though she had had three
jobs in the last four months, “she had left each of them.” On and off for the last
twenty-five years Tovey had sheltered in the workhouse, which apparently
seemed impudent to her judge. The prisoner declared that she did not leave her
last situation of her own accord.” Tovey was sentenced to 21 days’ hard labour.277
Booth, as we can see, answered a widespread call for a sociology and a
social policy which successfully combined the science of an evolving but not yet
perfected race with a renewed demand for moral-religious distinction of people
from people. L.T. Hobhouse articulated the need for a more morally-charged
notion of evolution, and Booth’s surveys of moral and immoral poverty, moral
and immoral working people, and the religious influence on both, attempted to
answer that need. Hobhouse was thinking of Spencer’s coldly “scientific”
understanding of human evolution when he wrote at the turn of the century how
“[v]olumes are written on sociology which take no account of history, no account
of law, nor of ethics, nor of religion, nor of art, nor of social relations in their
actual development, and, above all, have no consistent standard of value by which
to measure the progress of which they speak. And their utterances are held to be
the verdict of ‘science’ to which the mere student of society must yield.”278 J.A.
Hobson likewise rejected what he called a “crude biological sociology.”279
Refreshingly for both men, Charles Booth’s moralized picture of society would
276
“The Pauper’s Paradise: A ‘Destitute’ Man with a Shilling,” The South London Press 11
September, 1897, p. 5; “Did Not Like the ‘Task’” in Ibid.
277
“Twenty-Five Years’ A Pauper,” The South London Press 18 September, 1897, p. 7.
278
Leonard Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (Brighton: New York: Putnam, 1905 [1904]), 96,
98-99, quoted in Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 185.
279
J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938[1902]), 187, quoted in
ibid., 190. Collini notes that the search for a new sociology involved an “intensification of efforts
to obtain reliable contemporary social data, as shown most notably in the work of Booth,
Rowntree and the Webbs, but also in the multiplication of government statistics brought about by
civil servants like [Booth’s colleague and investigator] Llewellyn Smith” (188). Significantly, he
adds Philip Abrams important remark that “Modern British sociology was built, more than
anything else, as a defence against Spencer.” Abrams, Origins of British Sociology, 1834-1914; an
essay with selected papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 67.
120
not resemble the “half-formed” science that theorists feared.280 His study was as
religious (or moral), as it was scientific in its understanding of an ever-evolving
society. Ultimately this was to bring an originally Christian morality back to
social theory,281 to combine it with an otherwise unappealing evolutionary
individualism, to show how many respectable classes had developed over the
course of the century (even if some of them were poor), and therefore to give an
idea of how many people deserved – and how many did not deserve – public
sympathy and collective aid.282
Booth’s Poverty survey, and the coloured maps283 which illustrated its
findings, were meant to solve the late Victorian “social problem” once and for all.
Booth’s great part, as Himmelfarb has written, was to “define and explicate” this
problem so that the world could finally see how extensive the British respectable
public had become by 1900.284 “This was Booth’s innovation,” Himmelfarb
writes: “not the concept of “poverty,” or the invention of a “Poverty Line,” or the
280
Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction 98-99.
This re-moralizing of sociology was, of course, viewed more in moral, and even spiritual terms,
contemporaries not seeing the Christian origins of their moral thought. Philosophers such as Henry
Sidgwick remarked at the time how sociologists were attempting to introduce a “theological
significance” to their science of sociology, which he felt was rather “beyond the limits of [their]
special science[‘s capacities].” “The Relation of Ethics to Sociology,” International Journal of
Ethics, x (1899), quoted in Collini 196. Historians such as Jose Harris agree that a wide variety of
“reformist liberals” (T.H. Huxley, L.T. Hobhouse) and even “hard-nosed imperialists” (Benjamin
Kidd) rejected a cold “physiological evolution” for a social evolution that was “both
organizational and moral.” Jose Harris, “Between civic virtue and Social Darwinism: the concept
of the residuum,” in Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 71.
282
This interest in the civilized and uncivilized, decent and indecent conduct of societies seems to
have penetrated the historical field as much as any other. At the time attempting a history which
followed “the course of continuous organizations” (this was Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s History
of Trade Unionism), Sidney Webb recognized (in 1894) that this was running against the
historiographical grain. Most “modern historians” were pleading instead, it seems, for “more
descriptions of the manners and customs of the governed,” and for “descriptions of the manners
and morals of the people…” Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism, 16601920 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1920), viii.
283
Booth’s maps became known as the “Poverty Map” in the second volume of the Poverty Series
(released 1891), the working-class streets of London painted black (for the “Lowest Class”), dark
blue (for the “Very Poor”), light blue (for those in “Moderate Poverty”), purple (for those in
“Poverty & Comfort (mixed)” and pink (for the “Fairly Comfortable”). Middle and upper class
streets were painted red (“Well-to-do”) and yellow (“Wealthy”).
284
The Simeys note how Booth’s early work on the 1881 Census, which he published as a paper in
1883, attempted to “refute what he regarded as exaggerated statements as to the situation of the
poor.” 67
281
121
quantitative measure of poverty, but the delineation of classes of the poor – the
creation of a new typology, as it were, of poverty.”285
Booth’s new typology of poverty was in fact his great break from
evangelical social theorists who, in the past, had so fundamentally influenced
social thought and theory. The Simeys’ make this connection (though they
exaggerate Booth’s new departure with hints at Booth’s new “structural” ideas of
poverty, largely based on his support for old age pensions). They quote Chalmers’
On Political Economy, in connexion with the Moral State and Moral Prospects of
Society (1832) in which he remarked on the separate respectability and separate
Christian duties of the middle and working classes. Until the advent of a much
wealthier working class, attained in large part from its own self-moralization,
Chalmers saw no possibility that working people might live by the same rules as
their betters:
Next to the salvation of their souls, one of our fondest aspirations on
behalf of the general peasantry is that they shall be admitted to a larger
share of this world’s abundance than now falls to their lot. But we feel
assured that there is no method by which this can be wrested from the
hands of the wealthier classes. It can only be won from them by the
insensible growth of their own virtue.286
By 1900, something of this kind had been won as a result of Britain’s midVictorian (now declining) economic growth. While hundreds of thousands still
suffered in poverty, Booth noted that more working people than ever were not
only status conscious, but as independent-minded, as moral and as respectable as
the middle class had aspired to be in 1832. The poor then, were no longer “the
poor” but a plurality of working classes: poor, poor-but-respectable and
respectable.287 With a third Reform Act in 1884/5 and an eighty percent rise in
285
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 122.
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 5.
287
We should remind ourselves here that we are speaking of the middle-class discovery of the
working class’ plurality. Although they could not give their point of view until Booth’s surveys, a
contemporary of Thomas Chalmers, Francis Place, would have corrected Anglican social theorists
on this, had he been asked. A contemporary of the 1790s, Place pointed out the tendency for
reviews, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers and reports of both Houses of Parliament and the
Factory Commissioners to ignore the “jumbled” and diverse nature of working people. Although
Thompson did not agree with this portrayal of the working class, the quote is from Thompson,
Making of the English Working Classes 213.
286
122
real wages,288 Booth’s study revealed something of which Chalmers would have
never dreamed: the rise of a respectable working-class society.
After Booth’s survey and the creation of his maps, the begging, dependent,
pauper class would no longer “dominate the public imagination.” Booth had
answered the prayers of wide swathes of reform-minded British society in finally
determining how many people in English society were members – in his inelegant
phrase – of “the ‘deserving’ poor, the ‘laboring’ poor who sought to be
independent and who succeeded in doing so, for the most part and most of the
time – but who were nonetheless poor.” “It was for these poor,” Himmelfarb
concludes,
that the “model dwellings” were intended. It was to them that the
settlement houses catered. It was in their cause that so many people
professed to embrace “socialism.” And was for their sake that Booth
created the classes he did, differentiating the “poor” from the “very poor”
and making the “poor” the worthy objects of attention and concern.289
Booth’s researches led him all over London, and they led him to conclude
that nearly seventy percent (69.3%) of the London working classes were in
varying stages of “comfort.” Just over thirty percent (30.7%) were in poverty.290
Yet of this thirty percent, only ten percent were unrespectably poor. Twenty
percent of poor London should more accurately be described as poor-butrespectable.291 We should note especially that Booth believed there were six
working classes instead of one. Within this there were two unrespectable working
classes (A and B) and four respectable ones (C through F). Class A was a tiny
288
Beaven, Leisure, citizenship and working-class men 48.
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 122.
290
This was the average for all of London’s working classes. Certain areas contained much higher
concentrations of poverty than others. South London, in fact (rather than the East), had the highest
numbers in this respect: Southwark between Blackfriars’ and London Bridges approaching a
colossal 68%. Historians should be cautioned, indeed, against the assumption that poverty was
only confined to the East. Maida Vale and Notting Hill (West End neighbourhoods), at 50%,
demonstrated that poverty existed at all points of the London compass. Quoted in Simey and
Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 116.
291
This explains the St. James Gazette’s misreading (see below) of Booth’s ideas of poverty and
respectability – that one could be at once poor and respectable. The paper stated that eighty
percent of working Londoners (4 in 5) were not in poverty, when they should have said that ninety
percent of them, according to Booth’s statistics, were both respectable (70%) and poor but
respectable (20%). Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 161
289
123
criminal class and less than 1 percent of the population. Class B was just less than
a tenth of London’s population. It attempted to work as little as possible and was
usually poorly dressed. Class C through F were increasingly well-dressed, but
were poor and respectable at the lowest levels. Class C was differentiated from
the undeserving in Class B because they were intent on work, and because they
were “not ill clad.” Classes D, E and F showed increasing thrift and took pride in
both independence and, importantly, a hatred of charity. Sympathetic to the
majority of working people striving towards respectability in this period, Booth
kept the dividing lines between each class “indistinct.” He said each had a fringe
which might move, respectably speaking, toward more decent standards, and that
each class contained many “grades of social rank.”292
The casualness with which Booth and his co-workers referred to real
people as “Class A” or “Class C” types is noteworthy. The hierarchy he had
created had achieved such a level of reification in the minds of Booth, his wife,
and workers such as Beatrice Webb, that they saw working families as belonging
to a kind of “character-species” – a typology constituted of both religious and
scientific elements.293 Booth’s inquiry was symptomatic of a larger, morally and
religiously inclined culture, and this – particularly its hierarchical aspects –
historians have largely not explored. As Seth Koven admits, historians are
hamstrung by their own class analyses which see the social survey in this period
as a middle-class construction, an instrument of top-down power, and therefore
not “dialogical.”294 Only infrequently does it cross our minds that pictures of
society as that which Booth drew arose out of a popular, hierarchical culture
steeped in moralism.295
292
Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 61.
The Simeys note that, at a point when he was concerned about his “line of poverty” being too
high (at 18-21s.) he conducted his own multi-family study, bringing together what he thought
were “six Class B families (very poor),” ten families from Classes C and D and fourteen families
above the line of poverty, in classes E and F. Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist
186, 272-273.
294
Koven, “The dangers of castle building,” in Bulmer, Bales and Sklar eds., The social survey
370.
295
With varying degrees of success, some historians have made the move to see even workingclass cooperation in this conservative, moral culture. R.Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in
Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); T.R. Tholfsen, Working Class
293
124
In addition to confirming their moral and hierarchical norms, a wide
variety of new slum professionals, some of them religious men, and many of them
religious women, stood very much to gain from Booth’s observation of hierarchy
within the working class. As we will see in subsequent chapters, Booth’s work
aided them substantially in their charity work, giving them hope there were
thousands of silent but needy and respectable poor amidst the poor morass of East
and South London. The passing of time (she published Booth’s biography in
1918) did not prevent Mary from noting, almost commonsensically, the hierarchy
Booth had revealed to the late Victorian public. Discussing Booth’s decision to
make a more local study of the East End after his original statistical work upon
the British census in 1881, Mary unselfconsciously wrote in 1918 how the picture
provided by his census research had proved “unilluminating, even if fairly
correct,”
and he began to propose to himself a more intensive effort on a smaller
canvas, and chose for this purpose the East End of London, which with its
large, respectable working population, its casually employed, its loafers,
and its share (a small one, but still noticeable) of the semi criminal class
seemed to give a chance of obtaining results fairly typical.296
It had become a “typical” picture of society because Booth had helped
“scientifically” to make it so. Others quickly and easily digested his very
hierarchical findings. Gertrude Himmelfarb notes how this creation of hierarchy
influenced Beatrice Potter in her analysis of London dockworkers. Perhaps
inspired by Booth, Webb “took care to distinguish the several classes of workers
on the docks.” Yet we can note in Potter’s writing, just as we do in that of Booth
and his interviewers, that Booth’s notion of a hierarchical working class with
many social gradations within it, may not have been simply a middle class-fiction,
imposed on workers by a non-dialogic social survey. In fact, as we see in Potter’s
Radicalism in Mid-Victorian Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Harrison,
Peaceable Kingdom ch. 4; Joyce, Work Society and Politics; Thompson, The Rise of Respectable
Society; Griffiths, Lancashire Working Classes. For a good discussion of the languages of
hierarchy present in Britain in this period, David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), esp. ch. 3 “The Nineteenth Century: A Viable
Hierarchical Society.” See Part IV.
296
Booth, Charles Booth 17.
125
description (summarized here by Himmelfarb), Booth and his successors may
have been attempting to show their own society, and also historians in the future,
the deeply status conscious and conservative nature of the English working class.
The permanent workers, including the foremen, earned 20-25 shillings a
week, which placed them above the “line of poverty”…Regarding
themselves as superior to other dockworkers, they set themselves
physically apart by residing in small model dwellings or flats or in small
houses far from the docks. The “preference” laborers (“ticketmen” with
priority over the rest) were honest and hardworking, earned 15-20
shillings, were irregularly employed, and tended to live among the lower
classes of casual labor. The casual laborers consisted of two classes which
were often unfortunately confused. The “professional” casual laborers
earned 12-15 shillings a week and lived with their families in single
rooms, or if they were unmarried, in the more respectable common
lodging houses. At the mercy of the daily fluctuations of demand, they
never knew whether their work would last two or twenty hours, or when
and what they would be paid; thus their steady companions were the
publican or the pawnbroker. One of their grievances was the fact that they
were often mistaken for the lowest class of casuals, who were that not by
“profession” but by “inclination” or “misfortune,” having drifted into the
trade as a result of drink or “bad character.” Many of these were not so
much dockworkers as professional cadgers or semiprofessional criminals
who hung around the docks for an the odd hour of work or the free
breakfast or handout. They were the “leisure class” of the lower
orders….“Economically they are worthless, and morally worse than
worthless, and they drag others who live among them down to their level.
They are parasites eating the life out of the working class, demoralizing
and discrediting it.”297
The classes discussed in so commonplace and so cruel a way by Mary
Booth and Beatrice Potter corresponded perfectly to Booth’s depiction of six
working classes. Mary and Potter, like many during this period, believed as much
as Booth did in the moral segregation of working people. Significantly, they
believed that the “loafer” class must be quarantined, and that someone had to put
a stop to the indiscriminate charity doled out to this begging, “cadging” working
class (Class B). Sympathy, in terms of charitable distribution, as usual, was
exclusively for the poor but respectable. Potter said that the “more constant of the
297
Booth, “Poverty,” 4: 24, 32, summarized in Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 144-145.
126
casuals” – Booth’s Class C – were the “real victims” when charity found its way
not to them, but to loafers without a sense of self-discipline.298
It is unfortunate that so many historians have suggested that Booth
intentionally created a “poverty line” for the progressive good, for this is to
misread him.299 Himmelfarb demonstrates how misleading such accounts are, and
she does it simply by noting how infrequently Booth actually dwelt on his own
“line of poverty.” She also looks carefully at how indifferently the notion of a
poverty line was received in and outside Great Britain.300 Most fascinating,
probably, was how positively Booth’s findings were greeted, even in view of the
fact that his study had unveiled vast stretches of destitution.301 Booth was
received gratefully by most reviewers. The study quickly came to be called “Mr.
Booth’s Inquiry” by experts and the media.302
Interestingly, we find that lower-brow newspapers like the Daily News
referred to the line as the “line of plenty,” emphasizing not the extent of poor
London, but rather the size of the more respectable working public.303
Himmelfarb also cites the December 1892 edition of Century magazine, which
referred to the line as the “line of comfort.”304 Most striking in this vein were the
observations of the St. James Gazette (May 20, 1887), which pointed out that
Booth’s statistics “could be turned around to read not that one person in five in
East London was in a condition of poverty, but that four in five had incomes ‘at
least sufficient for decent maintenance.’”305
298
Ibid., 26, 34; quoted in Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 145.
The Simeys get the ball rolling in 1960 with statements that he “invented the concept of the
poverty line,” and that this was his “most striking single contribution to the social sciences.”
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 88.
300
Himmelfarb provides a long list of reviews from London to San Francisco. Poverty and
Compassion 104-105, 160-164.
301
The Simeys write how “every type of newspaper – daily and weekly, serious or sensational, at
home and abroad – carried reviews and articles” of Life and Labour’s first volume on poverty. It
was greeted with “wondering admiration” and it was generally agreed that this was “the most
important contribution so far to the great new problem of the urban poor.” The Daily News (16
April 1889) noted that Booth had rendered every detail of the problem “beyond the fabled
capacities of genius.” Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 109.
302
Ibid., 93.
303
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 104, 413, n. 13.
304
Ibid.
305
Ibid., 163.
299
127
In fact, from his earliest work in the East End, Booth simply wanted to
differentiate the poor-but-still-respectable (Classes C and D) from the idle, loafing
poor. “The question of those who actually suffer from poverty should be
considered separately from that of the true working classes, whose desire for a
larger share of wealth is of a different character.” It was the “talk of agitators,”
Booth said, “and the way of sensational writers” to “confound” these groups into
a single class of poor.306
To resolve this controversy, Booth created a hierarchy of respectable
classes. The moral and spiritual segregation of “decent” human beings from their
disadvantaged (and stigmatized) poorer fellows was the chief aim behind what
came to be called his Poverty Series. More than anything else Booth wanted to
stop what he called “the saddest form of poverty, the gradual impoverishment of
respectability, silently sinking into want.”307
The great strength of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Poverty and Compassion is
her emphasis on Booth’s unfailing sympathy for the poor-but-respectable.
Himmelfarb stresses how frustrating it was for Booth that Class C was so often
confused with the “loafers” and beggars of Class B. She drives it home to the
reader that Class C, for Booth, was morally better than “B.” He admired “C”
terribly because it had achieved (as Himmelfarb notes he once told a meeting of
the Charity Organization Society), an “acceptable level of decent independent
life.”
He may have had the COS in mind when he wrote that Class C, with its
irregular employment and improvident habits, was “most hardly judged,
and perhaps, also, most hardly used.” Toward the unfortunates of that
class “modern sentiment turns its hard side of moral condemnation”; the
more it knows of them, the harder it finds to draw the line between the
“deserving” and the “undeserving,” and the fewer it ranks with the
deserving. The industrious and thrifty usually needed no help; it was those
who fell below “the ideal standard of energy, prudence, or sobriety” who
were a problem. The problem, moreover, was with the entire class.308
306
Charles Booth, “The Inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets,” 376; Simey and Simey, Charles
Booth: Social Scientist 90.
307
“Poverty,” 1: 151.
308
Charity Organization Review (1889), 398, quoted in Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion
128-129.
128
Booth created his hierarchy of working people because he wanted to
highlight the sacrifices of Class C, praising them for their silent poor but
respectable lives. They braved the “invigorating stress” of competition. Pain
endured in poverty strengthened their characters. Juxtaposed against Class C,
Class B were willingly, almost animally, avoiding the pain of sober selfdiscipline, shirking the self-sacrifice of poor respectability. Members of class B
liked drink. They worked when starvation forced them to. A regular lifestyle they
found uncomfortable and they avoided extended labour as much as they could.
Class B was a “leisure class” – and a class defining itself by its relaxation, its
leisure, was to Booth, beneath contempt.309 Up until then, the hidden hand of the
market had not hidden a “rod” (to use evangelical terms) through which the
immoral classes might be punished. With a great deal of support from a grateful
late Victorian public, Booth was to devise one.
3. The Popularity of the Labour Colony Solution
When Booth set himself up as the defender of the “silent poor” (those in
danger of losing their respectability either by circumstance, or “infection” from
exposure to the loafers of Class B), it was one of those rare moments in his life
when he had a practical proposal in mind. A product of his moral mindset, it
would be harsh. As noted above, Booth adopted Class C and D as the special
“clients” of the Life and Labour survey. As the Simeys write, he had a special
affection for them, and the only way to adequately help them was to remove their
doggedly immoral competition:
Nothing that he had discovered caused him to retreat from his conviction
which he had expressed in his Papers, that the poor and the working class
constituted quite different groups, and that the crux of the problem of
poverty lay in the removal of the burden of the helpless and hopeless of
his Class B from about the necks of the true labouring classes.
If anything, this opinion was strengthened by the increased regard with
which he came to view those whose life could be described in terms of
309
Booth, Poverty, I: I: 131.
129
simplicity rather than want, and whom he now declared that they were his
clients, to whom he dedicated his book.310
It would be in order to provide more work for the poor-but-respectable in
Classes C and D, that Booth recommended Class B be consigned to penal
detention. He proposed for them what many at the time called the “labour
colony.” Class B consisted of people who stubbornly chose an irregular work
routine, lapped up the charity of West Enders, and seemed to enjoy a lifestyle
“relaxing” and, therefore, degrading to their character. These individuals, Booth
felt, had to be removed from jobs they only half-heartedly worked, and evicted
from neighbourhoods they poisoned with their irregular ways, so that more room
and work could be made for the “true” working classes. The rugged individualism
of the poor-but-respectable, Booth’s independent poor, would simply have a “far
better chance in a society purged of those who cannot stand alone.”311
Not simply Booth, but most prominent social thinkers, whether they
inclined “left” (collectivist) or “right” (individualist) in this period, demanded
moral retribution for this brand of immoral behaviour. The Idealist Alfred
Marshall,312 prominent clergymen like Samuel Barnett,313 the economist Arthur
310
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 108; Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 177.
Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 167.
312
Marshall was originally invited by Booth (in a letter dated 18 October 1886) to critique his
methods of visiting and classifying the poor. Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 86.
Himmelfarb writes how, “[l]ike Booth, Marshall suspected that this class had a ‘hereditary taint,’ a
‘taint of vice’ that was passed down from generation to generation. The ‘descendants of the
dissolute’ were naturally weak, and were weakened further by the corrupting atmosphere of the
large towns where they tended to congregate. To remove them from that environment and to break
that hereditary pattern, Marshall proposed establishing a colony ‘well beyond the range of London
smoke’…. Marshall (again, like Booth) was convinced that this plan would benefit not only the
lowest class of the poor who would be removed…but also the ‘industrious’ poor who would
remain in London. Indeed, the latter would be the main beneficiaries, for they would be relieved of
the pressure of a class that depressed their wages, drove up their rents, took up jobs and space that
they could better occupy…” Quoted in Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 289.
313
John Brown notes that Barnett was among those who “coarsened” and vulgarized the labour
colony scheme. “In 1903 Canon Barnett was able to write: ‘The problem of the unemployed is
complicated by the presence of the unemployable...Perhaps if some way could be discovered of
dealing with the latter, the working class themselves could find a way of dealing with the
former.’” Barnett went on to quote Booth “in support of the argument that ‘the lowest class of
unemployables preys on the class immediately above it,’ and proposed its removal to ‘labour
schools’ in the country. These should be of two types – ‘a school of restraint,’ where retention
would be compulsory, and ‘a school of freedom’, for men only, where under certain conditions its
inmates would be at liberty to come and go, with the eventual hope held out for their settlement on
311
130
Pigou,314 socialists and Labour Party leaders like Will Crooks and George
Lansbury, Fabians315 like Sidney Ball, Annie Besant, Sidney and Beatrice
Webb,316 New Liberals such as J.A. Hobson and William Beveridge,317 C.S. Loch
and the Charity Organisation Society,318 and the Poor Law Unions Association,319
the land or abroad in the empire. Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies,” 353. Quotation is
from S.A. and H. Barnett, Towards Social Reform (1909), p. 49.
314
Pigou saw labour colonies as a means of “checking the propagation of the poor and repeated
his proposal at Poor Law Conferences in 1894, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1903, and
1904. In June of 1904 the labour colony became a topic of parliamentary discussion concerning
the Vagrant’s Children Protection Bill.” Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the Poor Law,” 80.
315
A 1906 Fabian pamphlet differentiated the “respectable” working poor from those “on the other
side” whose “destitution is caused merely by the fact they are idle and incompetent; those who are
a tax on the community for which they have never done a fair share of work and never will. They
must be dealt with under some form of the criminal law, since society will soon recognize to the
full that to live without working is a crime…the weak-minded and incompetent must be dealt with
in farm colonies and in other ways as are adapted to make the best of them…the deliberately idle
must be set to hard labour, and their social vice, if it may be, sweated out of them.” Quoted in
Stedman Jones, Outcast London 333.
316
The Webbs (in the 1909 Minority Report they helped to compile for the Royal Commission on
the Poor Laws), enthusiastically detailed their own (very sophisticated) labour colony scheme. In
the words of G.R. Searle, a number of training camps would be set up under a new Ministry of
Labour: “These institutions, to quote the Minority Report, would serve as ‘human sorting houses,’
where the residents could be ‘tested’ systematically and then put through a course of exercises
designed to raise them to the highest state of physical and mental efficiency of which they were
capable….those whose unemployment was due to mere idleness would have to be given a training
in character, under the beneficent influence of continuous order and discipline. The most
recalcitrant cases could be committed by order of a magistrate to semi-penal detention colonies.”
“Like the militarists of the National Service League,” Searle wrote, “the Webbs would have had a
short way with rebels, ‘hooligans,’ ‘loafers’ and other social misfits.” G.R. Searle, The Quest for
National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914 (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1971), 242.
317
Hobson, Beveridge and the Webbs each praised the labour colony, both as a means of “relief
from the glut of low-skilled, inefficient labour,” and as an excellent means to eliminate “chronic
cases of sturdy vagrancy, idle mendacity, and incorrigible laziness.” Himmelfarb, Poverty and
Compassion 126. Beveridge in particular wished to draw a “clearer and broader” “line between the
independence and dependence, between the efficient and the unemployable…” “[T]hose men who
through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry, are to be recognized as
unemployable. They must be the acknowledged dependents of the state, removed from free
industry and maintained adequately in public institutions, but with a complete and permanent loss
of all citizen rights including not only the franchise, but civil freedom and fatherhood.” Beveridge,
“The Problem of the Unemployed,” Sociological Papers vol. 3, (1906), quoted in Stedman Jones,
Outcast London 335. See also John Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies,” 356; and W.H.
Beveridge and H.R. Maynard, “The Unemployed: Lessons from the Mansion House Fund,”
Contemporary Review LXXXVI (July-December, 1904), 629-638.
318
“In 1904,” writes Vorspan, “repeating a call the Society had voiced for over three decades, C.S.
Loch, the general secretary of the association, repeated his endorsement of government-regulated
labour colonies.” Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the New Poor Law,” 78.
319
In 1903 the Poor Law Unions Association demanded: “What we have to do is subject the man
to treatment that is likely to assist in the formation of regular and industrious habits. To do this we
must keep him from work. We must take complete control of the man for a time, because his mind
and will are so diseased that he is incapable of controlling himself, and that time must be long
131
all had the peculiar moral-sensibility that demanded hard consequences for
refusing to submit to the pain of character-building work. Himmelfarb’s list of
colony proponents is extensive, and includes, significantly, the founder of
working men’s clubs – that staple of respectable working-class life – Henry
Solly.320 During September 1897 those decrying South London’s “Pauper’s
Paradise” agreed that the labour colony was the best means of dealing with the
“sturdy loafer.” From the Prince’s Road Guardian, Mr. Edwards, and from the
South London Press’ editor, the simple solution was “farm colonies” “to
successfully impress the precept that if a man will not work neither shall he
eat.”321 All of these people agreed that the men and women of Class B should not
only undergo a kind of behavioural modification (being “made” to understand the
importance of work again), but also be quarantined so as to limit their capacity to
infect more respectable workers.
The first historian to point to the cache the labour colony scheme had
among high-level government representatives at this time was John Brown.
Brown noted the fact that newspapers such as The Times and the Daily News
reported that “the removal of the very poor from society was the logical
conclusion to be drawn from [Booth’s] investigations rather than a piece of a
priori reasoning.” Brown notes, moreover, the surge of interest, following
Booth’s initial recommendation, in continental versions of the labour colony. But
most directly Brown notes how Gerald Balfour, “who had been President of the
Local Government Board in 1905, admitted a few years later before the Poor Law
Commission that before leaving office he had been contemplating the adoption of
some form of penal colonies, probably under the Home Office rather than the
Boards of Guardians.” Indeed, while Brown noted early on in his article that
Booth’s recommendations ultimately had “little impact on policy,” I have made
arguments previously that Edwardian welfare legislation constituted a sort of
“labour colonies by other means.” This appears especially evident in an early
enough to give good hopes of the eradication of the disease…The vagrant’s laziness is very much
a matter of habit, and industry must be made habitual instead.” Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the Poor
Law,” 76.
320
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 126.
321
“Lambeth Not ‘A Loafer’s’ Paradise,” 2; “Poor-Law Paradise,” 4.
132
attempt at welfare reform Brown cites, the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905, in
which Gerald Balfour used Boothian language to describe the workings of the act
in Parliament. “In presenting to the Commons…Gerald Balfour stated that it was
a limited measure, intended to benefit only those in D and E of Booth’s classes,
not A or B or generally C. It aimed at guaranteeing the more prosperous workers
against the effects of the trade cycle by offering them temporary work.”322
L.T. Hobhouse was particularly severe in his recommendation of the
labour colony. As welfare reforms were provided for the deserving working
classes, it would become “possible to say of any individual whether he is out of
work through his own fault or not…When the sheep are thus parted from the
goats, it will be possible to deal with both classes. The determined idler must not
be allowed to prey upon society.” For Hobhouse this punishment was meant
especially for idle men. Wives and children might be provided for by public
relief, but “as to the man, he is a fit subject for discipline and restraint. For him a
labour colony must be provided.”323
Stefan Collini notes Hobhouse’s enthusiasm for the specifically “punitive”
discipline of this class. Such men, Hobhouse thought, were worse than paupers;
they were criminals.324 Collini does not make excuses for Hobhouse’s moral
extremism. “In such passages,” he admits, “there can be no doubt but that the
moral severity is intended….” Other historians have not been able to do this.
Particularly in the case of Labour leaders, some have overlooked the dangerous
moral oppositions that resided in the minds of men calling themselves Labour, or
even Socialist. Pat Thane’s treatment of Harry Quelch and Ramsay MacDonald’s
“moral socialism” is one example. Quelch commented at the time that “an able
bodied pauper appears to be an anachronism in a rational civilised society.” Yet
322
Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies,” 354, 350-351, 358. Brown cites the Royal
Comission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress [on which Booth served] Evidences (with
appendices) relating chiefly to the subject of “unemployment” P.P. 1910 (Cmd. 5066), XLVIII, 1,
p.6, Q. 77824; and Parliamentary Debates 4th ser. Vol. 147, 1115-1117.
323
Leonard Hobhouse, Social Evolution (1911), 179, quoted in Collini, Liberalism and Sociology
139.
324
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 86, 139. Collini notes that in his 1912 edition of The Labour
Movement (first ed. 1893) 37 Hobhouse continued to believe that “Idleness” should be regarded
“as a social pest, to be stamped out like a crime.” Leonard Hobhouse, The Labour Movement
(1912), 37, quoted in Collini, 139 n. 47.
133
Thane argues that this “criticism of the malingerer” actually expressed an
“affirmation of the dignity of labour and a rejection of the conditions which
withdrew that dignity from human beings.”325 Ramsay MacDonald she finds
arguing for social reform as an “end in itself”; “a matter of sympathizing with
[and] caring for society’s victims”; and (because social legislation required their
participation in the socialist state as a “doer of duties”) an “essential part of a
wider restructuring of the moral basis of the relationship between state and
society….”326 It may be better, however, to avoid this straw-splitting and get to
the meat of the matter, perhaps by quoting MacDonald when he spoke specifically
of the “loafer class.” Rachel Vorspan has done just this. She notes how,
commenting on Labour’s “New Unemployed Bill” (1907), MacDonald demanded
that:
the loafer must not be allowed to damage the claims of the deserving
temporarily unemployed. So long as he is mixed up with the unemployed
his little ways and escapades will be palmed off, as though he were a
typical example of the mass, upon a public only too willing to hear
unfavourable things about the poor unfortunate out-of-work.327
Clearly with the support of a large, outraged public, Charles Booth had the
same moral severity of Hobhouse and MacDonald in his discussions of the loafer
class. “I do not doubt that many good enough men are now walking about idle,”
he wrote,
but it must be said that those of their number who stoop low enough to ask
charitable aid rarely stand the test of work. Such usually cannot keep work
when they get it; lack of work is not really the disease with them, and the
mere provision of it is therefore useless as a cure. The unemployed are, as
a class, a selection of the unfit, and, on the whole, those most in want are
the most unfit.328
325
Pat Thane, “Labour and Local Politics: Radicalism, Democracy and Social Reform, 18801914,” in Eugenio F. Biagini, and Alistair J. Reid eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular
Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 268.
326
Ibid.
327
Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the Poor Law,” 78.
328
Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 147, 149-150.
134
The moral-religious lens through which Booth understood London’s
working-class neighbourhoods made him discuss Class B, as many of his
contemporaries did, in hateful terms. Booth was able, without hesitation, to
condemn, at one go, seven-and-a-half per cent of the workforce – 317,000 people
in London alone. He described them as “a deposit of those who from mental,
moral, and physical reasons are incapable of better work.” He described them as
beggars, loafers and “casual labourers of low character.” They were men, Booth
said, who “foul the record of the unemployed,” degrading whatever they touched,
and whoever they met. A class this repulsive, this dangerous, he felt, was
“incapable of improvement.”329 Booth believed that, if it could be surgically
removed from society, it should be. And he was never alone in this. His
recommendation for this foul class reflected “a wider context of assumptions
about poverty in which it was often treated as an excrescence, a cancer on the
underside of society which could be removed without any fundamental alteration
of that society.”330
This moral analysis of men and women, and the moral consensus
prevailing in late Victorian and Edwardian society (views which Jose Harris has
argued actually hardened in this period) provided the basis for what seemed an
almost searing hatred for Class B. From Charles Booth, a man otherwise so
terribly meek, so psychologically fragile and physically weak, moral notions of
poverty justified a proposal to place over 300,000 people “under State tutelage –
say at once under State slavery.”
Put practically, but shortly, my suggestion is that these people should be
given the opportunity to live as families in industrial groups, planted
wherever land and building materials were cheap; being well housed, well
fed and well warmed; and taught, trained and employed from morning to
night on work, indoors and out, for themselves or on Government
account…”331
329
Ibid., 1: 44, 38, 50, 176, 163-?.
Stefan Collini, “Sociology and Idealism in Britain, 1880-1920,” European Journal of Sociology
1, 1 (1978), 45.
331
Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 167.
330
135
Booth’s discussions of what was to be done with Class B outside of labour
colonies see him at his most heartless. Outside a labour colony, whether in the
workhouse or in slow debilitating destitution somewhere else, it was alright to
leave these people to their miseries, he seemed to say; their suffering, ongoing
and traumatic, was acceptable to him. Before the 1895 Select Committee on
Distress from Want of Employment, Booth admitted that excluding Class B’s
“casual residuum” from the workforce would make them suffer terribly, but that
this would nevertheless be a “step towards the cure of the evil [of unemployment]
in the end. Those for whom there is no longer a living must…be gradually
absorbed into other industries, or, if the worst comes to the worst, they pass
through the workhouse and finally die…”332 The words of the economist, Arthur
Pigou, demonstrate the banal way contemporaries discussed this “final solution”
(Pigou’s words) for the problem of unemployment – “the forcible detention of the
wreckage of society, or the adoption of some other means to check them in
propagating their species.” “Proposals of this kind,” Pigou admitted, “appear on
the surface to be stern and cruel, but apparent hardness to one generation may turn
out to be kindness to the race, when the interests of posterity are duly considered.”
Rachel Vorspan suggests that, because of their “ubiquitous” “belief that immoral
habits and behavioural patterns [were] communicable,” “[i]n a sense the [late
Victorians and Edwardians] adumbrated a form of what we would now call
behaviour modification.”333 Moral-religious ideas of idleness – notions of the
absolute moral necessity of work – were simply so powerful at this time that their
hegemony may have obscured the horror of their own authoritarianism. Booth
shrugged at such methods, and said frankly: “[I]t is not a pleasant thing to be
improved off the face of the earth.”334
332
Harris, Unemployment and Politics 48. Characteristically, what was chiefly on Booth’s mind
was the welfare of Class C. It was necessary to segregate the residuum, he told the Select
Committee, “not for their sake but for the sake of those who are left.” Quoted in O’Day and
Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 152.
333
Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the Poor Law,” 68, 76.
334
David Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform 67. The quote came from Booth’s Second
Paper to the Royal Statistical Society in 1888, which the Simeys quote, and which I reproduce
more fully here: “The individualist community on which we build our faith, will find itself obliged
for its own sake to take charge of the lives of those who, from whatever cause, are incapable of
independent existence up to the required standard, and will be fully able to do so.” “However
136
4. The Response of Historians to Charles Booth’s Authoritarianism
I have objected before to the “benign manner” in which recent scholarship
has treated Booth and his inquiry. When Booth and his inquiry are discussed by
historians there is a tendency to inflate his humanitarianism.335 It must always be
highlighted that when Booth’s classified the London poor, he persistently and
unerringly focused on the idea of character and whether or not different classes of
poor people possessed it. A self-disciplined poor-but-respectable class (and those
working classes above it) fit Booth’s expectations in regard to character, but these
hard-working classes were inseparable in his mind from what he saw as their
nemesis: the loafing, immoral, casual labourer who took their jobs and their
charity. David Englander notes, quite rightly, that Booth provided the late
Victorian and Edwardian public with three things: a widely accepted basis for
morally measuring poverty (not really a poverty line at all, but as Michael Cullen
has argued, a “respectability line”), the relative size of six helpable and
unhelpable groups, and a means to “separate those perceived as social problem
groups from the self-supporting elements of the population.”336
From the Simeys to David Englander and Rosemary O’Day,
unfortunately, qualifications of Booth’s adherence to this “poor-butrespectable/loafer” binary often give way to blanket approval of Booth’s
“humanitarianism.” Writing in 1960, the Simeys saw no reason to criticize
Booth’s ideas. Their own adherence to moral ideas of poverty, and their use of
crude terminology (caused by a lack of awareness of how to deconstruct their own
terms) hamstrung their analysis from the start. The title of their Charles Booth:
Social Scientist is perhaps the most obvious example of their uncritical attitude.
“It was Charles Booth,” they write, “who, more than any other person, influenced
public opinion toward accepting a new outlook [and a “new optimism”], and was
slowly and kindly, it is not a pleasant process to be improved off the face of the earth.” Simey and
Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 96.
335
Brydon, “Poor, Unskilled and Unemployed,” 41-70.
336
Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform 65; Michael Cullen, “Charles Booth’s Poverty
Survey,” in Smout ed., The Search for Wealth and Stability 159
137
able to change the course of the development of the society in which he lived. He
did so by analyzing its weaknesses with skill, intelligence and courage; under his
leadership sociology began to function as the midwife of a new social order [and a
“new type of citizenship”]…”337
In addition to hagiographic statements like this, the Simeys’ book is
chock-full of universalisms like “public,” “society,” “social” and “citizenship” (as
well as mentions of a vaguely expressed “new optimism” Booth possessed) as if
Booth had no plans to exclude a large part of society from help on the basis it was
morally unfit. In their first pages, indeed, they essentially admit that moral
segregation remained, in their view, an acceptable practice. “His problems are
also ours,” they twice note in their introduction. “Above all,” one needed to
determine the extent to which the “troubles” of society could be “attributable to a
lowering of moral standards,” and whether this, in turn, “stem[med] from the
weakening of religious influences[.]” “The opposition between moral exhortation
as a means of social improvement, and legislation and administration,” they wrote
pages later, “recurred over and over again during the Victorian era; it established
a theme in public controversy that is still an outstanding one today.” Repeating
throughout their introduction what, to them, was still a very real opposition
between material and moral remedies for poverty,338 the Simeys admiringly
337
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 5.
Ibid., 1, 6. We may be more familiar (in terms of terminology) with the classic opposition
between providing a “measure of social and economic security” and “undermining the incentive to
work” (1). Additionally, however, the Simeys provide (in their Introduction) a catalogue of
similar moral oppositions between which they still thought it necessary (even in 1960s social
policy) to find a “middle ground.” They mention Booth’s endeavour to assess the “extent of
poverty” vs. “connexions between poverty and individual character,” (3), Booth’s sense of “moral
obligation” vs. his “objectivity and exactitude of natural sciences,” (3) his “personal”
observations, vs. his “statistical measurement,” (4) the problem of whether poverty was from
“moral delinquencies” or “deficiencies in conditions of industrial employment and in general
social organization.” (4) Also mentioned are the merits of “advancement of social welfare through
public administration” vs. “exhorting or compelling individuals to behave morally” (a 19th century
conflict Booth’s “new outlook” apparently resolved) (5), how his pensions apparently “contributed
to social security” but did not weaken the “play of individuality,” (5) the separate virtues of
“action designed to remedy social abuses, and promote the well-being of the individual,” vs. “the
maintenance and encouragement of personal responsibility and initiative,” (“the most urgent moral
dilemma of the Victorian era”), (5) whether poverty was caused by “human nature” or “low
wages,” (6) and, finally, the so-called dilemma of disburdening “the citizen of part of at least of
his material cares” when this might be “undermining personal responsibility, and therefore
encouraging immorality. ” (6) In Charles Booth: Social Scientist, Booth is a hero (his
338
138
explained that Booth sought to “establish the mid-point on the scale occupied at
one end by subjective judgment, concerned with such problems as those of
evaluation and responsibility, and at the other by impersonal descriptions and
analyses and similar data.”339 Most interesting is the Simey’s comment that
Booth’s moral/material tension was based in two inherited traditions, one
religious, one secular, a contradiction Booth probably never resolved. These were
“the traditions of Unitarian Nonconformity, on the one hand, and those of British
empiricism on the other…”340
By the 1990s and certainly by 2000, historians have been enabled by
postmodern analysis to discover ideological oppositions – the us’s and others’s
within the seemingly innocent social concepts (character, idealism, individualism,
collectivism or socialism) which existed plentifully in 1900. We have the
theoretical tools to be more ruthless with Booth’s “good intentions.” They reveal
to us that Booth mentally carried with him a “tension” between moral and
economic poverty. This meant he carried with him a capacity – subjectively
“achievements of such solid worth that attacks on them have always been unthinkable” 7) because
he was “determined to put the [moral-religious] preconceptions of his age to the test,” and because
“what he had to say about the world [was an] expression of the intellectual anguish and moral
doubts of the Victorian era.” (9) His inquiry, they wrote admiringly, should be “appraised as his
means of expressing the feelings of obligation derived from the moral tradition in which he was
reared.”(10) By the end of their biography, the Simeys resolve their moral dichotomy with the
comment that Booth created a “more complicated generalization that poverty could be regarded as
a facet of the structure of society, as well as be attributed to the moral failings of individuals. This
contention was validated by a brilliantly successful statistical work, which provides a classic
example of how sociological research should be conducted.” He “inaugurated a new epoch in the
formulation of social policy” and he kicked off “the march towards the Welfare State…” Ibid.,
190-191. O’Day and Englander reacted to this passage with some alarm, calling it “a dangerous
description of Booth’s work…because it read back modern sociological methods into Booth.”
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 20.
339
Ibid., 3, 253.
340
Ibid., 8. These suggestive oppositions seeing Booth as explicitly “religious” or “spiritual” only
occur occasionally in the Simeys’ general discussion of him as a scientist with just enough
moralism. They do however occur twice more in the book, once when they see Booth’s judgment
of church spiritual and social work as “based on a system of values which ultimately stemmed
from his own spiritual life” (a not unredeemable fault in their view) (228) and again, when, owing
to his non-committal attitude to Spencerian social history or Le Playian social science, Booth is
described as having “left his philosophical position between the ‘science’ of Comtism and the
revelation of Christian religion in one dimension, and in another, between the individualism of
classical economists and the socialism of his supporters for Old Age Pensions.” (253) For reasons
why the Simeys dealt so strangely with the “religious Booth,” see below. That Booth did not read
a great deal (not Le Play, nor Mayhew, nor Marx), and that he therefore gained his theoretical
views from an altogether fuzzier place, is repeated by O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s
Inquiry 8-9.
139
generated, and occurring at almost any moment one engaged in social (or
personal) analysis – to exclude a person, or group of persons, from care and
compassion. This mental tendency was everywhere in late Victorian England. It
was in the “time spirit” Gertrude Himmelfarb tells us exercised virtual hegemony
over late Victorian minds. Beatrice Webb’s much-quoted labeling of Charles
Booth as the “most perfect embodiment of…the mid-to-late Victorian time spirit
– the union of faith in the scientific method with the transference of emotion of
self-sacrificing service from God to man,”341 repeats the same “reality” vs.
“morality” conflict within the hearts of most late Victorian social theorists. This
conflict caused late Victorians to believe they were offering a service to society
(as indeed, perhaps, they were to those they believed were poor-but-respectable
classes), when all the while their analyses were fundamentally susceptible to
moral blurring and, therefore, awful social exclusion. This means that as
important as it is to point out that proto-sociologists of the period (like Booth)
were finding some working people to be blameless for their poverty because they
the victims of structural economic problems – as Booth was doing with a majority
of what he called “poor but comfortable” London – it remains very important for
historians to continue to acknowledge the people he excluded from mercy. John
Brown’s unqualified statement of this fact remains refreshing in the midst of
scholarship now rather awash in qualification. Without hesitation Brown wrote
that, among social theorists of this time “a connexion between moral and social
problems existed quite apart from the question of whether the lowest sections of
society were in any way responsible for their situation.”342
Because Booth’s most prominent historians – Rosemary O’Day and David
Englander – treat lightly his unpredictable, moral capacity, they are targets for
some criticism.343 Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry, their 1993 study, contains
341
Webb, My Apprenticeship 190; Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 79, 179-184.
Himmelfarb notes helpfully that Webb spoke both of the “middle decades” and of the “last
quarter” of the century as the period in which the “Time Spirit” reigned in the English mind. Ibid.,
428 n. 1.
342
Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies,” 360.
343
Perhaps indicative of their more leftwards political perspective, Englander and O’Day are very
critical of the Simeys account (perhaps more so than they are of Booth himself!). Calling for a
“wider revision of the Simeys’ framework,” (Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 4) they castigate the
140
sentences such as: “He was a great man, great because he was both humble and
ambitious, not for himself but for his work.”344 The two authors remark how “Mr.
Booth did not overestimate his personal knowledge of the East End.”345 They
repeatedly describe him as “humane” and “sensitive” in his approach to the
poor.346 They even see him as a “sympathetic” man with “a larger liberal vision”
who “tried not to be judgemental.”347 Booth even brought a “human aspect” to his
understanding of society, because he was “a man of compassion” and because of
“his profound and lasting awareness of the complexity of the human
condition…”348 While they are right to suggest that Booth’s “notebooks”
contained a variety of working-class testimony, to say they “display a sensitivity
to the language and sentiments of working people” is surely misleading.349 Booth
was sympathetic to Class C, to those who he classified poor-but-respectable, to
those whose lives were full of painful self-discipline. Those not conforming to
latter for shoddy standards of scholarship and lack of footnotes (5), and for dismissing the
possibility of examining the unpublished notebooks of the Booth Archive in more depth
(apparently the Simeys “read parts, found it puzzling and incomprehensible, and gave it up as a
bad job,” dismissing it as “extraordinarily indigestible”). (6) The response caused Gareth Stedman
Jones to ignore it when writing Outcast London. In response, therefore, to the Simeys’ cobbling
Booth into a glorified “Father of British Social Science” (4) and for drawing Booth “in their own
image [as 50s sociologists]” their Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry was to “reveal more accurately the
motivation, meaning and method behind the Booth Inquiry.”(10) Equally indicative of
Himmelfarb’s more reactionary perspective was her outspoken affinity with the 50s sociologists,
who she felt had written the “most comprehensive and balanced study of Booth” on record.
Poverty and Compassion 422 n. 4.
344
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 20.
345
Ibid., 49.
346
Ibid., 9, 51, 156, 51. Even when discussing Booth’s 1889 descriptions of Class D and E –
gained from lodging with working families – they stress his “humanity” and “sensitivity.” It is
surprising that they can do this, in view of the fact that he did not feel any kind of sympathy for A
and B below them, and when Booth’s boundaries between good and bad working people would
never objectively hold. Booth created a “bad” tenth among the bottom third of society (all of
which was poor!), and he asked a philanthropic public to discriminate the “good twenty” from the
“bad bottom ten.” Can these historians not see the enormity inherent in lending scientific status to
a glorified “welfare bum” stereotype when so much of society was poor? For a discussion of the
inflated impact of such stereotyping on the London poor, see my “Poor Unskilled and
Unemployed,” 64-65.
347
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 156, 142, 157 196.
348
Ibid., 37.
349
Ibid., 157. Englander, in his last word on the subject, continued to find “curiosity and
commitment, enthusiasm and energy, sympathy and humanity” noticeably “evident” in Booth’s
notebooks and manuscripts. David Englander, “Comparisons and Contrasts: Henry Mayhew and
Charles Booth as social investigators,” in Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 132. Booth and
his associates were also unusually curious and sensitive and this allowed them to get “uniquely
close” to working people. (133)
141
such norms he wanted put in labour camps. Booth both reified the latter, the
“loafer class,” through his pseudo-scientific texts and maps, and he deeply
influenced contemporary thinking in arguing for a form of social apartheid.
Sensitive, humane, and non-judgmental his proposals were not. Nor was
the masochistic theory of character and work, religious at its core, which gave
Booth’s social theories their conviction. Booth gave a larger respectable society
the same conviction that a loafer class, a class to be hated, was in their midst.
Describing Booth’s influence on future legislators such as William Beveridge,
John Brown categorically affirms that, more than any other figure, “Booth gave
this policy its currency and by far gave it its most impressive support.”350 Jose
Harris, too, has noted that Booth’s theories “coloured and conditioned a whole
generation of social thought about the habits and conditions of the different social
classes.”351 No amount of qualification by either Booth’s early biographers, or his
later scholars should obscure Booth’s perpetuation of the loafer underclass in the
imagination of late Victorian society, his enshrinement of this class in late century
social science, or the fairly obvious authoritarianism characterizing his schemes to
dispose of it.352
350
John Brown, “Social Judgments and Social Policy,” Economic History Review 21, (1971), 111;
Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies,” 356. It is interesting to see Himmelfarb (rather
discontinuously) attempt to tone down Booth’s support for the creation of labour colonies after
affirming so forcefully both the popular support of such institutions and (almost admiringly) the
near-hegemony of the moral-religious notions they were founded on. Twice she notes that labour
colonies were “not intended as a practical proposal,” and that the conception behind them – that of
“heightening the distinction between the undeserving “very poor” and the deserving “poor” – was
more important to him (Poverty and Compassion 125, 129). This is not borne out by the evidence,
and the Simeys note that Booth had committed himself to a future, “fuller consideration of his
ideas considering the elimination of Class B” (which he did not write) at the same time he was
preparing to publish the Religious Influences series (1902-1903) (Simey and Simey, Charles
Booth: Social Scientist 158 n. 1). Himmelfarb does this perhaps in order to shy away from
associating Booth too much with the logical and authoritarian extension of his thoughts.
Himmelfarb dismissively notes the fact that one reviewer of the New Left Review made the same
connection, comparing it “with what he said was a similar plan adopted in the German town of
Elberfeld,” and remarking: “From this to the Nazi system of invigilation does not seem very far.”
Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 417 n. 14; Victor Kiernan, “Victorian London: Unending
Purgatory,” New Left Review, 1972, 89.
351
Harris, “Between civic virtue and Social Darwinism,” in Englander and O’Day, Retrieved
Riches 78.
352
Before Himmelfarb, the Simeys were the first to contradict their own praise of Booth’s moral
balancing act. They seemingly cannot bring themselves, in a concluding statement about the
labour colony scheme for Class B, to admit frankly that Booth named 9 parts of this society
respectable, and one part disposable. In a confusing series of pages, we are told that Booth was
142
Englander and O’Day’s next account of Booth (in their next work,
Retrieved Riches) also fails to address the stubborn problem of Booth’s lifelong
moral-religious bias. In the case of the labour colony, Booth scholars are agreed:
Booth was, they suggest, simply not serious when he came up with the colony as
a punishment for the loafer poor. Booth believed in decasualization schemes
(essentially labour segregation, by other means) and pension legislation, but his
“support for labour colonies for the segregation of inefficient elements,” claim
David Englander and Jose Harris, “was more a cri de coeur than a programme of
action.”353 Harris even writes that labour colony supporters like Booth and
William Beveridge were “notably unsuccessful at influencing social policy,”
though, as I have argued before, it could be suggested that much of the moralsegregating legislation listed above could be seen essentially as “labour colonies
by other means.”354 Among recent historians, Harris, nevertheless, comes the
closest to arguing for the presence of a deep-seated current of thought surrounding
the social residuum and the colony solution, noting that “residualist thought
contained other and more complex strains than the crude and obvious inheritance
of social Darwinism.” Harris also mentions earlier nineteenth century strains from
Ricardo, the 1834 New Poor Law, Old Dissent, “classical economics” and old
political economy as possible starting points for tracing Booth’s ideas.355 Harris
momentarily “led astray” by Victorian morals, traditions and beliefs - morals which the authors
otherwise, and at other times, find him balancing perfectly with his detached, empirical sensibility.
They apologetically note that the “moral standpoint” Booth adopted here was one which, in other
proposals, he had been “too ready to deplore.” And they depict him involved in a “retrograde step
toward the doctrinaire, undermining much of the educative work accomplished” – a strange fact
since, according to the Simeys, he had “already shown” that “questions of employment” were
“more important than questions of habit.” Finally, in what seems a statement meant to cover up
fairly obvious contradictions, they conclude: “Nevertheless, even when all this has been taken into
consideration, it remains true to say that…[the labour colony scheme] cannot be held to invalidate
his achievement to any serious extent.” Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 194196.
353
Englander, “Comparisons and contrasts,” 135; Jose Harris, “Between civic virtue and Social
Darwinism.”
354
Ibid., 72, 83. Brydon, “Poor, Unskilled and Unemployed,” esp. Pt. 1, sec. 6: “The Strange
Death of the Labour Colony in Edwardian England,” and sec. 7, “Social Legislation in Edwardian
England: Labour Colonies By Other Means,” pp. 54-70.
355
Harris, “Between civic virtue and Social Darwinism,” in Englander and O’Day eds. Retrieved
Riches 72, 80-81. “Fear of the residuum…long ante-dated the crisis of the 1880s,” writes Harris,
and lists examples of “residualist” thought extending as far back as the turn of the nineteenth
century. (77) We should note that evangelical fundamentalism, according to Boyd Hilton, and
143
never arrives at evangelicalism as the roots of Booth’s “authoritarianism,” but
when she uses the word she deliberately avoids linking Booth too closely with
it.356
This is to ignore the power and severity (in Collini’s terms)357 of the
moral-religious mindset among the right and left-leaning of the period. John
Brown, the only scholar to take Booth to task for what he rightly saw as morally
dangerous ideas legitimated by Booth for a wider Edwardian audience, continues
to leave endlessly qualifying historians in the dust with his straight-talking 1968
article: “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies, 1889-1905.” Booth was neither
“scientific,” nor “objective,” Brown wrote. His sociology was clouded by “moral
judgments.” “His scheme for the removal of class B would have meant evacuating
from London alone about 345,000 people.” Booth’s authoritarianism was a “sober
authoritarianism,” Brown wrote, and most frighteningly of all, it was popular.358
Whereas scholars like Himmelfarb dismiss Booth’s authoritarianism
through ignoring the logical implications of dividing people morally (see note 123
above), the editors of Retrieved Riches believe that Booth’s proto-socialism made
such authoritarianism impossible for him to tolerate. Englander and O’Day
portray Booth (rather forcibly, in narrative terms) experiencing a vaguely-defined
awakening to the structural causes of poverty.359 In the light of historical
developments, in particular David Rubinstein’s 1968 debunking of Booth’s
dramatic encounter with H.M. Hyndman, this is a more difficult task than it was
among scholars who thought the encounter had actually happened.360 Following
Rubinstein’s discoveries, historians have been without a rather crucial element of
their narrative – a narrative which sees Booth experience an “awakening” through
an encounter with socialist ideas. As if longing for the presence of this (or any)
narrative prop to Booth’s alleged socialism, Englander and O’Day revisit the
now-dead Hyndman debate (calling it a “controversy”). Curiously, they remark
sometimes Thomas Chalmers himself, were at the bottom of all of these “strains.” Hilton, Age of
Atonement.
356
Harris, “Between civic virtue and Social Darwinism,” 82-83.
357
See above.
358
Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies,” 351, 352, 353.
359
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 13-14, 19, 25.
360
See above. Rubinstein, “Booth and Hyndman,” 22-24.
144
how there has been a “long-standing historical debate about the nature of Booth’s
indebtedness (if any) to H.M. Hyndman.” But this cannot be right. Two years
previous to Retrieved Riches, O’Day and Englander personally closed the case on
this encounter, admitting the fictional character of Hyndman’s account.361
There is, of course, a motive behind Englander and O’Day’s revisiting of
this, history’s first attempt, to see Booth not as a (religious) moralist but,
strangely, as a proto-socialist. It is, in fact, to present a new prop on their
historical stage, a new event in which Booth awakens to structural poverty. This,
we find out, is to be Booth’s “discussion on socialism.” It occurred sometime
between 1882 and 1883, and it was a four-way, three-evening conversation
between Booth, a land-owning lawyer, a soon-to-be window cleaner, and a tailor.
To be honest, the Hyndman myth, though a myth, had more dramatic flair.
In it, Hyndman at least could be seen to challenge Booth – the proud and faithful
market fundamentalist – to prove once and for all that the Social Democratic
Federation’s horrible calculations of East End poverty were wrong.362 Now with
only a “discussion on socialism,” Englander and O’Day must work very hard to
make a life-changing moment out of this discrete debate, and in the end the effect
on the reader is negligible. They preface their account of the debate with the
remark that many Positivists made the leap from Positivism to Socialism in the
361
“Booth’s conviction that a new sort of inquiry was needed to ascertain the facts about the
conditions of life in the metropolis empirically was emerging in mid 1885. It pre-dated the
publication of the results of Hyndman’s alleged inquiry in the autumn of 1885, which is said to
have shown 25 per cent of the population to be living in conditions of extreme poverty. The two
men did not meet until February 1886. Unfortunately the idea that Booth’s great survey was the
direct result of his reaction to Hyndman’s conclusions was put forward strongly by the Simeys (p.
69) on the basis of their reading of Hyndman’s comments in his autobiography and is still given
credence in influential modern works.” O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 30-31.
The two authors cite Edward Royle’s Modern Britain: A Social History, 1750-1985 (p. 199) as an
example. Strangely, and self-contradictorily, Englander and O’Day have made Retrieved Riches
yet another of these “works.”
362
In the account, an angry Booth shows up on Hyndman’s door. He is “very frank.” He tells
Hyndman “plainly” that he has overstated East London poverty. He remarks dismissively that
Hyndman’s figures could never be “substantiated.” Hyndman (who believed he had “never yet
been shown to be wrong in [his] statistics”) is offended at the accusation, both for himself and for
his “capable friends” at the S.D.F. Booth thereupon resolved that “he himself intended to make, at
his own expense, an elaborate inquiry into the condition of the workers of London,” and that he
would do it to prove the SDF “wrong.” Hyndman retorted that he “welcomed this as a very useful
thing to do[.]” It is too bad that historians have been deprived of such a stirring confrontation. If
both Booth and Hyndman had respectively shouted “fine!” and doors had slammed, a more
dramatic encounter could not have been hoped for. Hyndman, Adventurous Life 331.
145
1880s (despite Mary’s insistence of Positivism’s ephemeral presence in Booth’s
“wistful,” semi-spiritual mind).363 It is implied that Booth’s “discussion” with the
three men did not leave him “unaffected.” “In the light of” the Hyndman
“controversy” (a strange name for a debate that has amounted, historically, to
nothing – do they mean, in the light of its passing into oblivion?), we are told that
Booth’s discussion involved a “rare glimpse of a debate between capitalist and
socialist[.]” This “glimpse,” they earnestly suggest, might reveal something new
about the “development of Booth’s thought.”364
As it turns out, Booth is not seen to undergo any sort of conversion.
Although he is told of men with low wages, un- and underemployment, and poor
housing, he reaffirms, with some conviction, his faith in the idea there was a
“system of natural selection” in the world of labour, in which men of “intelligence
and capacity and determination” rose to the top. Nevertheless, O’Day and
Englander affirm that the discussion brought Booth “face to face” with a socialist
analysis of the problems of society. They contend that it “sensitized” him – even
if he “rejected socialism and collectivist solutions” – “to the picture of the world
which [the workmen] had painted.”365
Perhaps aware that such evidence cannot really be seen as causing Booth
to “declare his hand” (as they later write) in support of “structural explanations
for poverty” rather than “moral ones,” the two authors posit that simple contact
with working people may have caused such a conversion. “[Booth’s] close
association with working men in the East End in the 1878-1884 period,” they
write, “should be seen as crucial to the development of his ideas and inquiry.”366
Booth and his associates, at this time and indeed through the three series of the
Life and Labour Inquiry, “drew considerably upon a pool of friendly trade
unionists,” as well as many other working people.367 These people provided
363
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 15. See above, Ch. 1. Simey and Simey, Charles
Booth: Social Scientist 48.
364
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 15, 16, 16.
365
Ibid., 15-19, 17, 19.
366
Ibid., 25, 19.
367
Ibid., 19.
146
“perspectives” that Booth took to his works, and these perspectives revealed to
him a world in need of progressive change.
As will be discussed in Part IV, this demonstrates rather a poor
understanding of working people’s minds – what they talk about, what they joke
about, and what they hope for. Englander and O’Day tell us that Booth wanted to
“lay open [working people’s] memories and understand [their] hopes.”368 They
note how Booth wrote in his Poverty Series that inequality affected people’s
contentedness because men (and women) always related the conditions of their
“present life, whatever it may be, to the ideal or expectation.”369 Yet Englander
and O’Day do not seem to know what sort of working-class culture this encounter
with inequality produced. Booth’s survey revealed working people’s (rather
conservative) response to social and economic inequality. It stressed working
people’s status consciousness. Speaking of “hopes and dreams” and a “sensitive”
Booth, it is not clear either author knows this. Indeed, overestimating proletarian
idealism, the two historians suggest that the hopes and dreams of working people
in a world of stark inequality amounted to a hatred of that inequality. From this
(quite false) logic they suggest that Booth, if he listened close enough, would hear
precisely this hatred (in perhaps a muddled form, this “socialism”), and that he
would take it as his own – even suggest remedies, like old age pensions, as a
result of his conversion. This, however, is to put far too much stock in how the
middle and upper classes react to tales of injustice, inequality, and poverty. As we
will see in Part IV, moreover, while Booth heard a working-class response to
inequality, this was not it.
Booth’s “encounter” with socialism, moreover, seems a feeble rival to
Booth’s crisis of faith, an emotional crisis which nearly killed the man, and which
drove his wife, in trying to care for him, nearly to despair. This crisis took him a
decade from which to recover. All the midnight conferences in the world could
not compete with the years, around 1880, when Booth finally retrieved a sense of
moral certainty – thanks to one of the most “moral” families in London.
368
369
Ibid; O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 54-56.
Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 173.
147
Historians need more than a twenty-four page ledger book to shift this
interpretation of “the turning points in the life of Charles Booth” from its rocksolid foundations.
As significant as the progressive tendencies of men like Booth may be, a
refocused understanding of the rather unorthodox strains of religiosity which
reigned in his mind may be more so. At bottom, when Booth saw improvement in
the London working classes, he saw a moral improvement (in their hard regular
work and status consciousness) which, to him, made everything else possible. In
the end, what Booth found in London was a working people who had become –
spiritually speaking – middle class. However much they paled in comparison to
their bourgeois counterparts, working people now aspired to the same moral
duties (thrift, industry and decency) as Booth’s middle-class ancestors had fifty
years’ previously. Using the same criteria as Thomas Chalmers, Booth saw a
working people substantially independent, despising charity, and capable of moral
self-control. In his Poverty Series, he told the world about it. Yet he now wanted
to gauge how effective the self-ascribed “maintenance men” of this moral selfcontrol – the ministers of Christian religion – were in maintaining such morality
in the population. Thus began the Religious Influences Series.
148
Chapter 3. From Poverty to Charity:
Behind the Religious Influences Series
A.H. John’s underused history of the Booth brothers’ shipping firm
provides us with a wholly new conception of the “origins” of the Booth Inquiry.
While the Simeys found the Inquiry’s beginnings in Booth’s identity as an 1870’s
business statistician turned budding scientist, and while O’Day and Englander
have found them in Booth’s brief “experiences” of the 80’s socialist perspective,
it is on neither science, nor socialism, but on Sunday School that A.H. John puts
his emphasis:
Like their father and grandfather, the young Booths took an active share in
the affairs of the Renshaw Street Chapel. Their names appear in its
contemporary records and many of their father’s surviving letters are
given over to news of its activities. ‘Over at the Dukenfield yesterday,’ it
was written in June 1858, ‘as a delegate from our congregation to the 209th
anniversary of the Lancashire and Cheshire Presbyterian Association. The
chapel was handsome but decorated with flowers which was nice but
Puseyistic.’ The youthful Charles Booth, on the other hand, had, so he
informed his brother, ‘been doing the quarterly characters of my Sunday
School boys this week…Bell, of course, had a capital character. He has
not been late or absent once in the whole quarter and his mother seemed
very much pleased. Osman is, I think, my worst boy, but I dare say I shall
get over him in time, and he had a rather bad character. However, his
mother promised to see that he learned his hymns and brought his book for
the future. I manage the class very easily when there are not more than 6
or 7, but when it comes to 9 or 10, it becomes very difficult to keep them
quiet. I think it is too many in one class, but I suppose if I lose any it will
be my best ones.’ In this and in the work among the poor of Liverpool
undertaken by the Unitarian chapels, lay the origin of what later was to be
the enquiry into London life and labour.370
For so peculiarly religious a man as Booth, the only finale appropriate to a
study of the working people of London was a study of the religious influences
among them. The Simeys in their Charles Booth: Social Scientist (1960) note how
in 1870 Booth concluded that “the only way in which the thoughts and habits of
370
John, Liverpool Merchant House 22.
149
the people in general could be influenced for the better was by means of an
organized religious influence.”371
He probably never changed his mind. By 1897, Booth, now a Liverpool
shipping magnate, philanthropist, and social scientist, had spent a considerable
amount of money and more than a decade of his life studying the poor of late
Victorian London. His investigators had compiled their notes into ten detailed
volumes devoted to conditions of poverty and the current state of London-based
industries. It was after all this, after interviews with employers, unionists,
labourers, teachers, clergymen, councillors, vestrymen, ministers, doctors, priests,
and Poor Law Guardians, that Booth found himself, in the final years of the
survey, and amidst the social wreckage of Blackfriars Road, asking this question:
“What role can religion play in these conditions?”372 Over the next six years
Booth and his team collected 1800 interviews with a wide range of London’s
religious and secular leaders. He mined the team’s unpublished notebooks to
produce the seven volumes that made up the “Religious Influences” Series
(published 1902-3).
As he stood studying the working people of Blackfriars Road, Booth
spoke of them employing his characteristically moral-religious language.
Waterside labourers here made up the “lowest casual and loafing class, including
thieves and prostitutes.” It may have been precisely the “lowness and wickedness”
of the place – even more than its poverty – which impressed Booth most.373 It was
religion Booth had always believed which might provide a civilizing effect upon
such people, prompting a steadier, more regular lifestyle, as well as more decent
habits. “The moral question,” he wrote in his Poverty Series, “lies on the bottom.
On it rests the economic; and on both is built up the standard of life and habit.
They all act and react on each other, and to be attacked, must be attacked
together.”374
371
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 47.
Booth, “Religious Influences” 4: 14.
373
Ibid., 4: 8-9.
374
Ibid., “Poverty,” 1: 193.
372
150
With the opening of the interviews of the “Religious Influences” series,
Booth at last had a chance to demonstrate the influence of religion and morality
on daily life. Booth’s primary “concern with the matter of religion,” he said in his
published work, was “solely with the extent to which people accept the doctrines,
conform to the disciplines, and share the work of religious bodies, and the effect
produced, or apparently produced, on their lives.”375 He was disturbed, in his
wife’s words, “because…immense efforts were being made” on the part of
religious bodies “to give people uplift and were not succeeding.”376
This climactic moment in Booth’s career should give the historian pause.
Historians have noted a new confidence in the “New Booth” (as the media would
call his Religious Influences Series). This was quite uncharacteristic of the man.
Booth’s enthusiasm to carry out the survey demonstrates how important it was for
him that religion be understood as a social influence (an influence making for
popular “uplift”), and perhaps how important religion was in his own life. It was
March 1897 – only a month after he had finished his Industry Series – that Booth
began to request the cooperation of religious leaders all over the metropolis. He
requested they contribute to the undertaking of a new Series – one which would
ultimately prove to be the finale of the Life and Labour project. The Simeys note
how energized Booth became at the thought of the new study, writing: “the speed
with which he set to work reveals the enthusiasm with which he regarded the
subject of his new inquiry.”377 This spirit contrasted sharply with the aimless,
hail-mary approach he had taken in previous series, always hoping for some
revelation from the data, always finding none. Booth’s tone in the new series
stood in stark contrast to that of the previous two. The Simeys noted throughout
the published volumes “a frankness of speech [he] seldom extended before or
since.”378 O’Day and Englander added that – however ignored by historians – the
Religious Influences Series was “absorbing in the extreme to Charles and Mary
Booth,” and that it “was unique in that it was the only one of which Booth was
375
Ibid., “Religious Influences,” 1: 5.
Quoted in O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 163.
377
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 138.
378
Ibid., 147.
376
151
sole ‘author’.”379 Again, Mary provided a crucial support we may never have the
evidence to appreciate in full. To write an accurate account of the Religious
Influences at work in an entire city would be a complex task, and Booth hoped
especially that the finished product would have the “right effect.” But as he told
Mary: “…you and I are a match for anything when we are put to it.”380
Booth’s negative appraisal of the churches as bodies “not succeeding” in
their metropolitan effort at popular uplift should make us question what Booth
believed the churches ought to do in order to influence the working classes for the
better. We can recall here Booth’s discontent with the Methodist revivalists on the
New Jersey shore (Chapter 1). Booth had clearly never ceased to think about how
religion might most broadly influence people morally.
Although he was not speaking solely in terms of church philanthropy, it
loomed large in Booth’s mind. As he himself noted, “immense efforts” by a wide
variety of church auxiliary agencies were insufficient for the people’s moral
uplift. At the close of his Industry Series, religion and philanthropy competed in
his mind as ameliorating influences among the people:
We have to consider what the State or private enterprise might do in
London for the young and for the old, for the morally weak and for the
sick, as well as for the unemployed; and what religion and philanthropy
are doing or might do to form public opinion to supplement or modify the
influences of legislation, and to disseminate wholesome views of human
life; or what other action, public or private, may assist in eradicating the
causes or softening the hardships of poverty.381
Interestingly, in the opening passages of the Industry Series, Booth’s idea of such
moral welfare was much more ephemeral. The final series to follow his previous
379
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 11
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 145. O’Day and Englander note that Mary’s
“role in relation to the third series is by far the best documented.” She continued, as always, to
read important scholarship for him, and played a “crucial role” in its authorship. O’Day and
Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 11-12 “Charles confessed that a rigorous programme of
reading was beyond him,” notes O’Day, and “the Booth children agreed that his rooms were
almost devoid of books and that he did not work from them.” “Effectively,” she concludes, “Mary
often did his this work for him. They discussed his work in the light of her reading and opinions
both in person and by letter….Sufficient traces of this interchange of ideas remain to make it clear
how important Mary’s support was to Charles Booth and his inquiry into religious influences.”
Ibid., 180; Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 31.
381
Booth, “Industry,” 5: 318.
380
152
studies of material poverty and trade (Religious Influences), he forewarned,
would be “of a different character, being to estimate the forces for good or evil
that are acting upon the conditions of the population before we can arrive at that
balancing of hopes and fears that will form our final judgment.”382 Ernest Aves
(in his contribution to the Industry Series) tried, not very successfully, to edge
closer to a definition of what these moral influences were, and the effect they
should have. “A stage had been reached beyond the recognition of the need to
live,” he wrote. “The modern world is ready, not only to see the necessity of life,
but a life worth living….” “Almost every social and economic question,” Aves
concluded, “derives its ultimate practical importance from a more widely spread
and more human care for the individual life. John Smith is a ‘free’ man, and so
also is his employer, and it is perhaps the highest social aim to realize, maintain,
and develop the freedom of both, in their mutual as well as in all other
relationships.”383
Sounding much like Aves, Belinda Norman Butler paints the Religious
Influences series as an assessment of “the effects of Church and Chapel on human
welfare.” She writes that Booth and his investigators touched on the subject of
metropolitan “happiness” with “the same cool pen that noted the kitchen sink and
the daily wage.”384 In another time, a hundred years’ hence, such questions (of
individual and social “wellbeing”) would lead (as they have in studies like that of
Richard Wilkinson) to large-scale, costly welfare proposals encouraging the
development of less unequal, less status conscious societies, and putting a priority
on personal “wellbeing.” But Aves and Booth were a long way away from that
time. Booth’s lifelong approach to a very religious sociology (and its attendant
“forces of good or evil”) was in one way or another, going to spoil such a study,
miring it in contemporary moralism, and historians need to ask how his moralreligious ideas affected the Series’ aims and outcomes.
Before we can give free rein to the evidence of Booth’s religiosity, it
needs to be explained why historians have not approached Booth from this angle.
382
Ibid., 9: x, 136.
Booth, “Industry,” 199-200; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 135.
384
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 118.
383
153
The reasons are not hard to find. Indeed, our largely secular view of Booth is
largely due to the fact that his sons and daughters, when questioned in the late
1950s, refused to countenance any possibility that their father was religious in any
way, orthodox or otherwise. Booth was simply and plainly a scientist interested in
studying London society, they told the Simeys, he was Charles Booth: Social
Scientist.
In a rather muddled way, the Simeys produced a picture of Booth largely,
but not entirely, fitting this bill in 1960. In a rather forceful, clunky way, they
insisted that Booth was unhampered by religious tendencies, and that he was
indeed, in every way, a “scientist” in his work – even on the Religious Influences
inquiry. Interestingly, however, the theme of Booth’s “religiosity” (rather
confusingly) reappears on a regular basis in a narrative ostensibly written to
exorcise it. We must recall that the Booth children’s caution to the Simeys not to
paint their father as religious came mid-draft, and that up to that point, the authors
held Booth up (proudly, it seems) as a man who would reunite religion and social
science (as they hoped was about to happen in the decade of the 1960s).
There are, for example, a number of strange admissions, forced by the
evidence in hand. “Religious ceremonial and the practices of public worship,” the
Simeys admitted, may have “held an absorbing interest for him a considerable
part of his life.” They mention (as I do above) his experiences of 1878 and 1880
in New Jersey (though, strangely, not Italy). In his account of a religious
“watering place” known as Ocean Grove, they note, too, his “uninhibited”
description of the “strange scenes” and liken it to those he made in the survey a
quarter century later. They also quote the introduction of the Religious Influences
series, in which Booth argues plainly that, more than any other “influence”
forming “part of the very structure of life” – and these included poverty,
crowding, low wages, education, employment, recreation, local government,
policing, marriage, housing, health, drink, prostitution and crime – religion
claimed the “chief part” that would “complete the picture” of working-class life as
154
it was in 1897.385 These are strong words to use about religion’s power over
working-class life. Equally strong is Booth’s resolute statement (on the second
page of the Series) that his interest was “solely with the extent to which people
accept the doctrines, conform to the disciplines, and share the work of religious
bodies, and the effect produced, or apparently produced, on their lives.”386
Further contradictions arise in attempts by the Simeys to make Booth’s
interest in religion more ambivalent. The two biographers suggest three times that
the Religious Influences Series was not, originally, to be a survey about religion
alone, before they finally admit that the “sheer weight of the numbers of
[Christian] organizations” led to the “eventual decision to concentrate on
religion.”387 Booth “had no intention of restricting [inquiries] to religious
institutions,” they write, because he was “interested in the whole complex
problem of social influences and motivation…” “None of his subsequent
references to his intention to resume investigations,” they repeat, “suggest that he
had it in mind to limit himself to religion.”388
The Simeys also make a sustained effort to keep Booth “scientific” in their
biography. Booth studied religion scientifically, they argued, but he was not
religious. Despite such affirmations, this logic, too, becomes mired in
contradiction throughout their chapter. They admit that “every sort and size of
agency which endeavoured to improve the moral welfare of the people received
his interested attention.” But this focus on the moral is followed by their
insistence that Booth was only interested in objective, factual information. Four
times the Simeys’ stress that his interest was “disinterested”: that of a scientist
385
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 138, 138-139, 147; Booth, “Religious
Influences,” 1: 4-5.
386
Ibid., 1: 5. That Booth narrowed his most significant social influences to three was clear in the
map he submitted for viewing at the Paris Exhibition in 1900, in which he demonstrated the “three
most important social influences” by highlighting (on a large London map) every place of worship
(in scarlet), every house licenced to sell intoxicating drinks (in black) and every Board School (in
blue). The moral basis for what was essentially an attack on morally degrading influences (drink)
and “influences” making one tidier, more regular and more self-disciplined (through religion and
Board School curricula), seems, nevertheless, to underlie each “influence.” Simey and Simey,
Charles Booth: Social Scientist 144; “Religious Influences,” Final, 119.
387
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 139, 140, 140. Of 1800 interviews,
ministerial informants numbered 1450.
388
Ibid.
155
and not a moralist or religious enthusiast. His interviews reveal him, for example,
to be a “natural reporter who could write, quickly and accurately, a detailed
account of whatever scenes he had just observed,” and that he had a
“photographic eye for detail…” They stress that he made “no deliberate
attempt…at this stage to evaluate what he saw.389 Later we see Booth, similarly,
“intellectually” striving “to remain detached.”390 “His interest in the services” it is
said, “was transparent and genuine,” but what this means is no more clear than the
previous remark that Booth was an “unevaluative” sort of man.391 In an attempt to
purge the man of every moral (never mind religious) tendency, the Simeys turn
Booth (using a number of forceful, discontinuous sentences) into a transparent,
fact-finding beat-cop, without any subjective side at all.
Strangely, Booth is portrayed as being “defeated” – though only for a few
pages – “by the intangible nature of the material with which he had to deal.”392
Yet here, again, contradictions are apparent. What happened to Booth’s
unparalleled “frankness of speech” in his discussion of religious “social action”
and influences? The Simeys now downplay that confidence. They tell us his
interviews were “essentially personal impressions,” that impressions of religious
influences lacked “any common standard of measurement,” and that Booth was
“deprived of the means of translating them into impersonal and comparable
statistics.”393
It should be asked: who is speaking here – Booth, the Simeys, or a more
hidden editor? Booth, in this chapter, suddenly cannot find a “common standard
of measurement,” he has a sudden “difficulty in writing up the results,” and he
becomes mired in methodological crisis. The narrative truly takes a turn for the
illogical when this “crisis” lasts no longer than a few pages. Suddenly, Booth
389
Ibid., 142-143. This claim to superhuman detachment seems all the more contradictory when it
is contrasted with the Simeys’ take on Booth’s discussions of poverty, which they say he “could
not describe without evaluating. [my italics].” Ibid., 191.
390
Ibid., 143. Booth has a “disproportionate calm” in his discussion of church efforts. (148) They
note how the Methodist Times (April 1903) greeted his published volumes as a “singular
combination of detachment and living interest. The writer avoids exaggeration, cynicism and
favouritism.” 152
391
Ibid., 144.
392
Ibid., 157.
393
Ibid., 148
156
seems, quite easily, to overcome his empirical “defeat.” He finds a London – in
terms of church attendance – full of religious middle classes and irreligious
working classes, a city where the bourgeois “go” and the blue-collar do not. The
Simeys note that Booth’s (rather pessimistic) account of working-class religiosity
was empirically borne out by a survey of the newspaper The Daily News and they
conclude that this therefore constituted a triumph for him as a social scientist.394
Even in their garbled attempt to tidy up this narrative mess, the Simeys
cannot end their chapter without leaving a kind of “blank” in their text. We are
never told what, in Booth’s mind, “Religious Influences” amounted to. Booth is
said to have triumphed in his account of church “social action,” but we are not
told why. The Simeys attempt to deal with Booth’s largely favourable reviews in
the religious press by repeating that the Edwardian press’s praise was for his
empirical, or scientific, or detached genius. No adequate explanation is offered for
“the friendliness of the reviews in the religious press,” save for the impossibly
oblique statement: “Booth’s genuine interest in the subject matter proved to be a
strength to him, as it gained a respectful hearing from an audience that might
otherwise have been hostile.”395 Booth is greeted with equal praise by the
scientific community, but (other than his vindication by the church attendance
figures of the Daily News survey) the Simeys do not tell us the basis for the
work’s “scientific” integrity. Puzzling the reader further, they quote an article in
the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, a review of Booth’s work, which
commented (rather reverently) that those “who exclude the mighty factor of
Christianity” from their sociological calculations are victims of “childish
obstinacy” or “unhistorical hallucinations.”396
Rosemary O’Day intrepidly discovered why evidence of Booth’s
religiosity was never fully explored in Charles Booth: Social Scientist. She writes
how the Simeys, in 1957, asked Booth’s son George and his daughter Meg the
394
Ibid., 154.
Ibid., 152-153.
396
Ibid., 237; Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1903), 237. Norman-Butler also notes
Mary’s letter to Booth at the time of the series’ publication: “The Religious Series continues to be
enormously reviewed. Most of the reviews are very good and appreciative and others simply
laudatory and unintelligent.” Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 135.
395
157
important question of why Booth’s Poverty and Industry surveys were followed
by the (rather enormous) Religious Influences volumes. “Was he turning from
Positivism to more orthodox views? Why the Light of the World episode?397 did
he sense that Science was not enough?” Was Booth’s scientific approach
overwhelmed, the Simeys’ asked, by his “personal interest”? And why was it
written in the first person? It read more like a “personal quest,” they told George
and Meg, “than a scientific inquiry.”398 Were they right, the Simeys asked, to see
a hidden religious sensibility behind the series?
The Booth children flatly answered “no.” His inquiry was not meant to be
a “personal quest for spiritual truth.” Their father “probably” had been disturbed
by questions of religion early in life, they thought, and they recalled how he
dabbled with Positivism. But, they said, they were “convinced” this was not the
case at the time of the Inquiry. They concluded, in their short letter, that Charles
was “deeply interested” in his survey’s subject, but only “in an impersonal
way.”399 This must have come as a disappointment to the Simeys. In their writing
(what was to become Charles Booth: Social Scientist), they had, as we know,
already begun to seek a “personal explanation” for the series. The Booth
children’s unequivocal stance on the subject meant, however, that they were
forced to quit that search, and to revise what they had already written about
Booth. “As a result,” Rosemary O’Day writes, “the offending sentences implying
that the survey was a personal search for a religious creed were removed from the
early drafts of the Simeys’ book.”400
397
Mary describes how Booth “bought Mr. Holman Hunt’s great replica of ‘The Light of the
World’ and sent it on a tour round the Empire, following its course with the keenest interest, often
speaking of his desire that our fellow-subjects in those distant regions should have better
opportunities of seeing great art….Later, when the picture returned to England, he had the further
pleasure of having it accepted by the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s to take its place in the Great
Cathedral, to which he had a special devotion.” This passage occurs only sentences before her
remarks that: “In any leisure hours, when in the city, he loved to go into one of Wren’s churches,
and to talk afterwards of his pleasure in the beauty which never disappointed him.” Booth, Charles
Booth 28, 29. Norman Butler notes that it was very much Charles and Mary’s “plan” to send the
painting around the world, that the painting and its tour cost the Booth family £6,000, and that the
painting “embodied” Hunt’s “ideas on religion and life.” She also notes that Booth himself “was
one of the pall-bearers” at Hunt’s funeral. Victorian Aspirations 162, 163.
398
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 163.
399
Ibid., 163.
400
Ibid., 163, 164.
158
I would argue that these revisions were not done terribly well, and that this
is why we are left with the Simeys’ rather tangled chapter on the Series (and a
biography which opens and closes on proposals to reintegrate religion and
sociology, while making sure to note that if Booth had anything to do with this,
that his stridently “scientific” approach made it purely accidental).401 I would also
argue that O’Day has put too much stock in the remarks of the Booth children
(sixty years after the fact), and that she has ignored the variety of religiosities
which may have come from the late nineteenth century “rapprochement with
religion” – religious sensibilities which do not conform to phrases like “orthodox
views” (Simeys) or “personal quest for spiritual truth” (George and Meg
Booth).402
O’Day writes how the Simeys’ questions “rang no bells.” She believes she
“lays to rest the theory” of Booth’s religiosity in her Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry.
Yet, as in the case of the Simeys’ conclusions in regard to what religious
401
Although the Simeys had had their hopes to reveal Booth’s religious-scientific tendencies
quashed by the Booth children, they remained inspired by his half-scientific, half-moral approach.
The opening pages of their book see them quoting Lord Lindsay’s Religion, Science and Society
(1943) in which the author notes that the physical sciences “cannot apprehend goodness, pity and
love…” In the final pages they bemoan the fact that sociology lost its “moral” element until after
World War Two. For decades, they write, moral-religious approaches to society had become to
social scientists “so intangible an aspect of behaviour in complex societies of the western world”
that they were abandoned as an object of study. It was a “revealing fact,” they said, “that
investigations of [the] social functions of religion” were, until the late 1950s, left only to
“anthropologists working with non-literate or ‘simpler’ peoples.” Charles Booth: Social Scientist.
By 1960, however, the two authors believed they were seeing a return to a social science that had
“begun once more to study the network of beliefs in which the energy making civilized life
possible has its origin.” They noted Britain’s first sociologist, Leonard Hobhouse, who had
proposed in 1918 (vainly against an increasingly positivist mainstream) that social science should
always consider idealism, moralism, or religion as a “working factor” or “force” among those it
studied [Leonard Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918), 15]. The Simeys end
their chapter on the “Religious Influences” series on a strange note, renewing Hobhouse’s
(originally Booth’s) call for a moral social science. “Since Booth explored with courage and
energy those aspects of human experience of which the inner and fundamental realities are
eternal, and endeavoured to develop methods of understanding their nature and significance in his
own society, and since his writing is clearly related in historical perspective to our own, his work
may well be regarded as of even greater importance in the second half of the twentieth century
than was affirmed when it first appeared.” Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 2,
239, 240. Margaret Simey died in July 2004 aged 98, but it seems that the social sciences are
finally answering her request. In the year this dissertation was completed, philosopher Charles
Taylor of McGill University called for secular social science and religion to be further unified or
merged. On March 14, 2007, Taylor was awarded the $1.56M Templeton Prize (for scholars
aiming to promote “research into spiritual matters”).
402
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 163.
159
influences truly were to Booth, O’Day fails to fill the blank spaces. She notes:
“The children of Charles Booth were quick to assure the Simeys that their view of
Charles Booth as a man searching for personal religious assurance was far from
the truth. Charles Booth was a ‘reverent unbeliever’, his wife, of a more spiritual
bent, held unorthodox views but conformed outwardly.”403 O’Day, however,
never arrives, in her own work, at any real position on what Booth did believe.
Like most, O’Day questions why Booth veered off in 1897 from his
studies of poverty and industry to complete a seven-volume inquiry into
Christianity’s influence in the metropolis. Like the Simeys, she assumes that the
Series was a positive development. Her major effort is to emphasize (quite
correctly) that religious and social influences were, for Booth, related phenomena.
In Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry, she notes that “Booth saw religious influences as
a social influence” – that religious and social influences, in his mind, were not
separate things.404 However, beyond the fact that Booth exhibited an interest in
the “consideration of moral questions,” and that this interest led him to attempt a
measurement of the “civilizing” influence religion brought to bear on the poor,
403
Ibid., 163, 164. Observe how different O’Day’s account of Booth’s “reverent unbelief” is from
the Simeys’: “Though he never lost his intense interest in every form of religious belief, and in
fact became more rather than less convinced of the importance of its influence on human progress,
from now onwards he was able to rest content with that philosophy of ‘reverent unbelief’ – to use
a phrase of his own – which sustained him until his death.” Booth, Charles Booth 60.
404
After a discussion of Booth’s moral and religious sensibility, this suggestion should not be
surprising, but O’Day’s more confident assertion was one which took the Simeys, in 1960, the
entirety of their biography to properly develop. At first, the Simeys seem tentative: “If the RIS is
examined with care, it will be found that one of the chief foundations on which the argument rests
is this contrast between the ‘religious’ on the one hand, and the ‘social’ on the other.” Soon after
this statement, however, they decide that Booth often made no real distinction between the two
aspects, which left them, as readers of his published volumes, always “in doubt as to whether
Booth was dealing with the religious or the social aspect of church.” Soon enough, however, they
suggest that “religious behaviour is in one sense also social,” and therefore, they conclude
(particularly in view of increased focus on the religion in the field of sociology in the fifties) that
Booth “added to sociological knowledge by extending the boundaries of social research to the
point at which the more strictly ‘social’ became closely related to the ‘moral’ and the ‘religious.’”
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Scientist 226-228, 233-235, 256; see also 259-260. As with
O’Day, however, this is seen with an entirely uncritical eye: “In his work, social, moral and
theological thinking were brought together in a mutually supportive relationship with a success
that has still to be equalled. In a few years’ time, the greatest value of the Inquiry may well be to
lie in the fact that so successful an endeavour was made in it to mend the dangerous rift that has
sundered scientific explanations of man’s behaviour, from moral and theological discussions of
human obligations. If this rift caused concern in the Victorian era, it profoundly disturbs both
scientists and philosophers a century later.” Ibid., 259-260.
160
little more is asserted.405 O’Day repeats her “religious influences were social
influences to Booth” mantra throughout her chapter on the series, but in the end, it
is not clear that she actually knows what this influence amounted to.406
It is only in the Simeys’ reproduction of Canon Samuel Barnett’s thankyou letter (for the free copy of the Religious Influences Series he was sent in
1903) that Booth’s real criteria for effective social action becomes clear. The
Canon recognized that it was in a church’s charitable methods – in the way it
provided both social and spiritual services – that it encouraged the development of
“decent, independent life” among the working classes:
Thank you for such a present to myself, but thank you more for such a
contribution to the needs of London. The value of your gift to London is
not only the facts you have provided but in the start you have given to
another way of considering the poor. Every charitable person is doing
better work because of you, and so the poor have a better chance of
escaping the wounds inflicted by blundering kindness.407
What Barnett was alluding to here, and what gained Booth the praise of
most religious leaders across London, was the fact that the Religious Influences
Series had provided an audit of metropolitan charity methods just as much as it
had inquired into the influence of religion.408
No historian has arrived at this point. “No modern scholar,” writes
Rosemary O’Day, “has been able to reconcile the printed Religious Influences
Series with the ‘old Booth’ of the Poverty and Industry Series, which saw their
beginnings in the Mansion House statistical inquiries and papers for the Royal
405
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 164-5, 188, 194, 195, 196. Paul Johnson
has noted the “surprisingly uncritical tone of the book,” one which sees the authors stress “the
reflective, humble and humane” approach of Booth, while giving only “passing acknowledgement
that [he] consciously processed and selected material and no coherent analysis of the extent to
which either the published or the manuscript material exhibits a systematic bias in terms of the
residence, occupation or class of interviewees and respondents.” Paul Johnson, English Historical
Review 111 (Feb. 1996): 244-245.
406
“It was not the ‘spiritual impact’ of religious effort which engrossed him,” she writes, “but its
social impact.” O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 170. But what, besides being
part of an “ambitious aim,” did this effort amount to? Booth “ruffled the feathers” of a number of
churchmen at the publishing of the series (171), but for what reason? One of his co-workers
(Duckworth) calls Mile End Old Town ministers “‘rather a poor lot,’ worse rather than better than
their fellow men.” (192) But why?
407
Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 155.
408
Englander and O’Day, in their Retrieved Riches only quote Barnett to “considering the poor.”
161
Statistical Society.”409 Doubting perhaps the empirical value of any study of
“religious influences,” many historians have dismissed these as a relevant
historical source. W.S.F. Pickering calls them “useless,” Owen Chadwick rules
them out as “impressionistic,” and Ross McKibbin finds them “redundant to most
of the questions the historian might ask.”410 “What was Booth up to?” O’Day asks
in her discussion of the Series in Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry. Clearly even she
was not able to answer this question411 – yet it has lain underneath historians’
noses for a hundred years, and it was bound to be arrived at the more we explored
the unpublished Series notebooks. Booth cared most, as he had always done,
about the proper charitable relief of the poor: providing charity to the right sort of
poor revitalized a spirit of decency and discipline in them that made them moral
and good; while withholding it punished their excesses and their immoralities,
(again, paradoxically, revitalizing their self-discipline and making them good).
The subject of charity and charitable disbursement had interested Booth
greatly from early on in his life. Booth had maintained a hatred for charity since
409
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 162.
W.S.F. Pickering, “Abraham Hume (1814-1884): A Forgotten Pioneer in Religious Sociology,”
Archives de sociologie des religions 33 (1972): 33-4; Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church vol,
2 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1970), 234; R.I. McKibbin, “Social Class and Social
Investigation in Edwardian England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 28
(1978): 176. All are quoted by Rosemary O’Day in O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s
Inquiry 161-162.
411
O’Day makes no mention of charity when she gives a standard list of questions Booth’s men
asked in a typical interview of the survey (Ibid., 167) (the charity question is only referred to in an
appendix (Ibid., 213)). Quite wrongly, she notes that there were “no questions” in the Booth
schedules which related to the “effectiveness” of church “activities in terms of spiritual life either
of participants or non-participants.” (167) Later she notes that Booth selected material for the
series “using unknown criteria” to support “particular lines of argument” on which she will not
elaborate. (192) In two instances O’Day’s quotation of Booth’s notebooks and survey include
actual mentions of churches “bribing” their congregations to attend. (171, 196) But O’Day seems
unaware of them, giving them no comment, and ending her chapter with the caution to doctoral
students not to “discard” the Religious Influences series, but also not to expect to find anything
like a thesis in its endless “particularization and localization.” 197-198. Two years later, in
Retrieved Riches O’Day repeats the same conclusion (and there are the same interview question
omissions of the charity question). Rosemary O’Day, “Interviews and Investigations: Charles
Booth and the Making of the Religious Influences Series,” in Englander and O’Day, Retrieved
Riches. For 148-149. “Equally we search for and do not find a critical assessment of the
organized Christian ministry in the metropolis, which employs detailed, specific information and
names names,” O’Day writes. (159) Here accidental mentions of charity occur five times (151,
155, 157, 158, 158). By 1995 O’Day doubted the possibility that we might ever properly
summarize Booth’s results: “Clearly it is impossible to give more than a flavour of the 1,800
interviews.” (151)
410
162
his early days working for working-class emancipation movements in the 1860s.
Celebrating the working-class attempt at independence at the time of the Second
Reform Act, he increasingly ridiculed what he called “the patronizing
philanthropy of Lady Christian Consolation and the Reverend Ebeneezer
Fanatic”412 – charity that came from unselective sentimental women and
proselytizing clergymen bribing the poor indiscriminately to fill pews. Mary
likely encouraged her husband in this view. As a Macaulay, Mary was related to a
member of the original Clapham Sect (Lord Macaulay) and this meant that a
hatred of indiscriminate charity (without any doubt religious at the core) simply
ran in the family.413 Vacationing with her daughter in Florence, Mary ridiculed
dissenting ministers who, she exclaimed, ended services with “a distribution of
coals and roast beef afterwards!”414 She openly despised the ineffectual, gossipy
middle-class women she believed were increasingly involved in the philanthropic
work in the period, women “covered by the sense of charity and the fluff of
flannel.” Unlike charity control proponents like Octavia Hill, Mary was convinced
these women were accomplishing little by their work in the working-class
community.415 Celebrating and sympathizing with the “ways and means by which
the working classes might be led to assert their independence and to assume their
fair share of responsibility for the management of their own affairs,” Booth and
his wife saw no contradiction in espousing a hatred of patronizing, dependencecreating charity.416 As he celebrated 1867’s Second Reform Act he disavowed
heartily such doles: “not for him…philanthropy in any shape or form which
involved the patronage of the poor by the better-off, or their dependence on the
412
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 37. Norman-Butler names the former “Lady
Christina Compassion.” Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 35.
413
For more on the Clapham Sect’s and the early nineteenth century evangelical approach to
charity generally, see Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement esp. ch. 3, “Poverty and Passionate Flesh,”
pp. 71-114.
414
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 104.
415
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 39. Mary’s distrust of women’s philanthropy
was symptomatic of many educated women at this time, for which see Part III. At the time of the
recruitment of women for Booth’s East London poverty survey, Mary wrote a “rueful account of a
meeting with a group of earnest women whose eagerness to undertake inquiries was not matched
by any idea as to what they might inquire into.” Whatever information they might glean from
investigations, Mary spitefully wrote, would only be “worth a rotten apple.” Ibid., 101.
416
Ibid., 42-43.
163
charity of others.”417 Mary recalled how, over the course of his Inquiry, Booth did
not want to be associated with philanthropy, and hated being referred to as a
philanthropist. We might recall her opening words of her chapter entitled
“Interests and Pursuits” (the same chapter in which she detailed Booth’s several
religious retreats from the seventies to the nineties).
He has been called a philanthropist, but he disliked this view of his work
and aims; and in truth the appellation does not describe him. As he wrote
in a sentence which he prefixes to his pamphlet on Industrial Unrest and
Trade Union Policy: ‘All life rests upon a balance of forces. We stand or
fall, morally and economically, as well as physically, by management or
mismanagement of conflicting forces.’418
Booth’s hierarchical (and statistical) portrayal of respectable, poor-butrespectable and loafer classes, in his early inquiries into poverty had been praised
by charitable workers (as subsequent volumes were by Barnett) as a tremendously
useful tool in philanthropic work.419 Booth’s inquiries into East London poverty,
both for the Royal Statistical Society and for his Poverty Series, were praised by
certain newspapers as unveiling a new “science” of giving. The Morning Post of
26 May 1887 remarked:
It is extraordinary that a private individual should not only have dared to
take in hand, but should have been able to successfully carry out, an
elaborate investigation as to the occupations, earnings, and social
condition of half a million of persons, or no less than one-eighth of the
inhabitants of the Metropolis; and this in the very poorest streets, where
the circumstances of the population present more difficulties. Yet this is
what has been done by Mr. Charles Booth, and we venture to say that the
facts and figures which he laid before the Royal Statistical Society last
week, as the first results of the inquiry in question, are more valuable than
a ton of Blue Books on Pauperism, or an ocean of sensational writing on
progress and poverty…such hard facts as have been collected in this
inquiry form the basis for the efforts of both the legislator and the
philanthropist.420
417
Ibid., 42.
Booth, Charles Booth 33.
419
One COS official, W.A. Bailward, in an article in which he proposed, through the vehicle of
the COS, the “gradual elimination” of a chronic beggar class in England’s large cities, noted how
“Mr. Booth’s latest volumes” most clearly articulated the “difficulties” of untrained philanthropic
work. W.A. Bailward, “Upon Things Concerning Civic and Social Work that may be Learnt in
Charity Organization,” Economic Review (July, 1904), 289, 298.
420
My Italics. Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 92.
418
164
Two years later (April 17, 1889), the St. James Gazette commented likewise.
Philanthropists across London were witnessing the advent of new hierarchical
guidelines for work in the working-class community – deserving and undeserving
classes that they could (theoretically) discern for themselves in the giving of all
kinds of charity. The Gazette, therefore, predicted that aspiring philanthropists
would have to pass a competitive examination in order to practice their profession
and that Life and Labour would become the textbook of the new “science of
philanthropy.”421 An American reviewer, seven years later (in 1896), noted that
any Englishman could
say, and truthfully, it is a full portrayal of London’s population in its
poorest districts. Herein are its wage earners classified, their relation to the
life line shown, their homes and character disclosed, whether their
children are at school, and in what condition. The sociologist says it is
invaluable; the civic reformer gets from these books pointers for his work;
the philanthropist is guided by them in his efforts, and the charitable in the
dispensation of their gifts. The churches learn through them where the
districts of religious destitution are situated, and the London County
Council discovers by means of them the unsanitary spots and the
congested neighbourhoods, and thus to all who are working for the social
betterment of London, Charles Booth has been a well-nigh indispensable
help.422
Booth’s “Religious Influences” survey was carried out in order to subject
the London philanthropic community – in large part a church community – to this
very examination. There was only continuity in his interrogation of the London
churches in regard to charitable practices. By the time Booth had published his
Poverty and Industry series, he had rough answers for the first problem (Poverty)
– discrimination of the disreputable poor from the poor but respectable, and
internment of the former in labour colonies.423 For the second (Industry), his
421
Quoted in Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion 161.
Dana, “Charles Booth and His Work,” 196.
423
Perhaps still waiting for a governmental response to his labour colonies scheme, Booth, at the
close of his “Religious Influences” series, “committed himself to a fuller consideration of his ideas
considering the elimination of Class B.” Simey and Simey Charles Booth: Social Scientist 158 n.
1. Booth’s conclusion, likewise, advocated a “principle of action…unchangingly the same: to
interfere by administrative action and penalties at each point at which life falls below a minimum
422
165
rather bland conclusion was to simply celebrate the moral influence applied by
great engine of capitalist competition. Because he wanted this engine altered only
slightly, he recommended only continued enlightened entrepreneurship by
London’s industrial and commercial elite, and limited organization and regulation
of labour and industry, respectably (in terms of tackling inequality and low wages,
not really a recommendation at all). The Religious Influences interviews saw him
advocate an applied version of the poverty distinctions he had created almost a
decade earlier. The poor constituted a group who were 20 percent poor-butrespectable and 10 percent loafer. Those, therefore, who distributed charity in the
metropolis should not only be able to see a hierarchy of working people in their
visiting districts, but should be able to give, and withhold, charity accordingly.
This interpretation of the Series categorically places Booth among
advocates for charity control, among societies practicing what they thought was
“scientific charity” – societies like that of the Charity Organization Society. This,
however, is to head into rough waters, historiographically-speaking, because
Booth historians have arrived at precisely the opposite conclusion. Englander and
O’Day make too much of an alleged awakening, by Booth, to socialist ideas, and
they therefore ignore his (far better documented) hopes for responsible charitable
practices and aid to the poor-but-respectable.
The moment comes as Englander and O’Day show Booth ruminating, in
1883, over the ethical difficulty of distributing ₤500 of his own surplus income to
working people: “He worried about the best course of action,” they note, and they
quote him saying, “I would rather, if it could be so, that ₤500 should go towards
equalising the lot of poor and rich – Can I do anything whatever towards this? If
not, what must I do instead?” Then, they repeat his immediate answer, that,
“Indiscriminate charity,” in Booth’s mind, would do “more harm than good.”424
standard, while offering every opportunity for improvement.” Booth, Final volume, 95; quoted in
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 159.
424
Retrieved Riches 12-13. The two authors noted, a page earlier, how Booth “rejected charity as a
cure and Christianity as a creed,” but that he was most strongly against indiscriminate, unselective
charity, is more accurate. We can again note here the theoretical, but not practical, differences
between old, spontaneous and “unorganized” evangelical charity of Thomas Chalmers in the
1820s, and Booth’s “organized” idea of charity in 1900. See Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement 8889.
166
Strangely, it is here that these historians launch into a defence of Booth the
Humanist. “What have we here,” they write – “a conventional COS rejection of
money doles?”425 Their answer should have been – “Without a shadow of a
doubt” – but it isn’t. Instead there is a very noticeable attempt on their part to
distance Booth from associations with charity organization. The case of Booth’s
connection with the COS, however, is a difficult one to close, and, perhaps for
this reason, Englander and O’Day’s strident disassociation of the man from the
organization produces an ambivalent conclusion. They insist that the links
between Booth’s inquiry and the COS were “shadowy” at best, and offer a
number of two-sided points. Booth and his associates, for example, had
connections with the COS – but he himself was never a member. Octavia Hill was
a lifelong, close friend, who contributed to the Inquiry – but both she and C.S.
Loch426 “disagreed fundamentally [with Booth] over the issues of Old Age
Pensions and Pauperism[.]”427 It is admitted that Hill personally contributed to the
Poverty Series’ section on ‘Model Dwellings,’ but it is also “worth noting…that it
was George Arkell and not Octavia Hill who provided most of the material on
blocks of dwellings included in the Poverty Series.”428 Next, the COS “considered
[Booth’s] methods of social research suspect and his conclusions dangerous,”429
but his team of investigators included members of the Society – including
Beatrice Potter, Arthur Baxter, and eighteen-year member, Clara Collet.430
Finally, a jaw-dropping detail dropped into the narrative in passing (occurring
indeed, directly preceding the remark that Booth would “declare his hand” and
suggest structural reasons for poverty) is the fact that even Booth’s daughter
Imogen achieved the rank of secretary in the COS offices at Hoxton.431
425
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 25. Even with Loch, the plot thickens. In a footnote, Englander and O’Day admit Booth’s
selection of Loch as one of his four vice-presidents when he became President of the RSS in 1892.
Ibid. 44, n. 83. In the same year Booth invited his co-worker Jesse Argyle into the Society
membership, and he accepted. Ibid., 24.
427
Ibid., 25.
428
Ibid., 28-29.
429
Ibid., 15.
430
Ibid., 25. Potter was a member of the COS, as was Clara Collet, from 1888 to 1906.
431
Ibid., 25. It may also be significant that Englander and O’Day, while they also quote Samuel
Barnett’s “value of your gift to London” letter to Booth in 1903 (the same I quote above), only
426
167
Englander and O’Day insist that “Booth did not share [the COS]
conviction that the poor were entirely responsible for their own lot,”432 but it was
not clear that either the man or the Society were so cut-and-dry in their
individualism. It was hardly the case that Booth believed in some form of poor
relief while the COS limited itself to moralized advice. As was emphasized in the
previous chapter, both Booth and the COS agreed that only the poor-butrespectable deserved charity (just as they agreed the loafer deserved labour
colonies). One presumes that the over ₤26,000 the Society spent in relief (in 1887
alone) went to precisely those of the poor its officials thought were part of this
group.433 As we will see, moreover, Booth and his Team, during the course of the
Religious Influences interviews, proved themselves as hard as any COS official in
their interrogation of churchmen on their charitable methods. In the end, Booth
probably had much more than a “shadowy” connection with the COS – but then,
Mary had insisted this back in 1918.434 Most peculiarly, Englander and O’Day
caution historians not to believe Mary Booth’s recollections that Booth’s concern
about the poor was borne of ideological and associational links to the world of the
COS. This is a strange and rare moment for the two scholars, in view of the fact
quote half of it. Booth is thanked for giving London another way of “considering the poor,” but in
Barnett’s mind, he (more specifically) helped “charitable people” to do “better” work and to avoid
“wounding” the poor with “blundering kindness.” For this omission, see Englander and O’Day,
Retrieved Riches 32.
432
Ibid. Norman-Butler overstates her case drastically by arguing that COS ideas were
“diametrically opposed” to Booths and that, indeed, he “came to abominate the Charity
Organisation Society…” Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 110.
433
Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society 87.
434
Speaking of the late 1870s, Mary recalled how “[p]eople’s minds were very full of the various
problems connected with the position of the poor, and opinions the most diverse were expressed.
The works of Ruskin, the labours of Miss Octavia Hill, the principles and practice of the C.O.S.,
all contributed to this great upheaval of feeling….These various views, and many others, were
listened to by Charles Booth, and ever more earnestly did he seek an answer to the question. Who
are the people of England? How do they really live? What do they really want? Do they want what
is good, and if so, how is it to be given to them?
He made acquaintance with many of those who were engaged in attempts of all sorts to ameliorate
the life of the people, whether by actual work and experience among them, as in the case of Miss
Octavia Hill and the Barnetts, or by seeking in the study an intellectual basis for an improved state
of things [Mary mentions among these “sections of opinion among the Socialists, and at Toynbee
Hall and Oxford House”].” Booth, Charles Booth 13, 14-15.
168
that other testimony from Mary (when presented in either Mr. Charles Booth’s
Inquiry or Retrieved Riches) is rarely questioned by them.435
Would any of the qualifications historians have strewn in his path truly get
in the way of Booth’s “rejection of money doles”? Not a chance. Preventing, at all
costs, the more relaxed kind of life that came with getting something for nothing
was a principle Booth believed in his entire life. In fact, according to A.M.
McBriar, rather than the intellectual property of Booth, or the COS, or any other
group – to be opposed to “doles” or “indiscriminate charity” was likely
“commonsensical” to most late Victorians and Edwardians. I would argue that
most thought this way because of their evangelical heritage. Booth, therefore, was
not a special case. In fact, according to McBriar, he was more alike to the COS
(and the rest of his generation), than not.436 Englander and O’Day’s conclusion,
therefore – that the COS was inevitably opposed to Booth’s line of thinking once
he “declared his hand” and “suggested structural explanations for poverty” –
provides us only with half-truths.437 It leaves us thinking that the COS opposed
Booth’s kind of thinking because they believed it was divorced entirely from
moral assumptions; and it suggests that Booth’s new structural explanations made
moral aspects of poverty (aspects still rattling around in his mind in 1900) largely
insignificant. Neither was true and a harder line, edging Booth firmly back into
his moral grooves, can be taken by the historian.
I would argue that every major debate in which Booth was involved, from
the beginning of his work on the Tower Hamlets investigations, to the
classification of the working classes in his Poverty Inquiry, to his engagement
with the Old Age Pensions campaign (and his supposed epic clash with
traditionalists in the Charity Organization Society), to his work on the Royal
Commission on the Poor Laws, revolved around how certain sections of the poor
should be provided money for free, while certain others should not. Rosemary
435
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 15.
MacBriar writes that there was a “wide acceptance of basic COS views in informed circles in
Edwardian times; indeed, it is probable that those views were widely accepted without being
thought of as being the peculiar property of the COS – they were thought to be ‘common sense’.”
A.M. McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The Bosanquets versus The Webbs: A Study in
British Social Policy, 1890-1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 194.
437
Ibid., 25
436
169
O’Day and David Englander have noted a “very underestimated” moment of
Booth’s life was his work, with Jesse Argyle as his hard-working secretary, to
determine how the moneys of the Mansion House Fund should be provided to the
East London poor.438 This was in 1884. In the event, the Lord Mayor was
convinced by a variety of advisors to take a “conventional COS programme”:
“charity for the thrifty, the modified workhouse test for the improvident, and the
workhouse for the vicious.” “[T]he loafer and the casual man,” as The COS
Review noted at the time, “can be benefited by no philanthropy…”439 From 1886
to 1902 (the period of his East End and Life and Labour inquiries), Booth used the
same charitable distinctions in his classification of Classes C and D – his “clients”
and people he thought were ideal candidates for charitable help when they ran
into trouble – while Classes A and B had no claim to aid save through the
workhouse or labour colony incarceration. The indiscretion of the “charitable
world,” he wrote, only caused the numbers of beggars and bullies in Class A to
grow.440 Labour colonies were meant, moreover, not only to “discipline” Class B,
but “to check charitable gifts” wastefully provided this class.441 On the other
hand, because Classes C and D were “victims of competition” with their immoral
inferiors, their classes provided “the most proper field for systematic charitable
assistance; provided always some evidence of thrift is made the precondition or
438
Englander and O’Day, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 29.
“There could be no economic solution to genuine unemployment except the free play of
economic forces,” writes Gareth Stedman Jones in a discrete passage of Outcast London. He
quotes the report of the Mansion House Committee, which concluded that the loafer class “was
one of the major causes of the [poverty] crisis” at the time, competing for work and charity it did
not deserve.” Stedman Jones, Outcast London 297-8 quoting the Report of the Mansion House
Committee, appointed in 1885 to enquire into the causes of permanent distress in London and the
best means of remedying the same (1885), 10-11. O’Day and Englander note the existence of a
note (dated 20 October 1886) to Alfred Marshall, wherein Booth announced he had just received
“‘the scheduled results of the Mansion House relief given’ in the neighbourhood of St. Paul’s subregistration district.” Mr. 29. O’Day and Englander miss the significance of such evidence, saying
no more than the platitude that “[t]he Mansion House inquiry demonstrated what type of
information could be extracted and some of the problems involved in extracting it” and that it had
possibly led Booth to adopt the use of both official statistics combined with questionnaires in later
survey work. O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 29-30.
440
Booth “Poverty,” 1: 37-39.
441
Ibid., 1: 167-169. Booth’s first Poverty Series volume sees him elaborate on the “problem of
the work-shy and, ultimately the unemployable, who were a bad influence in society at large,
besides absorbing the charities of both rich and poor, and being “a constant bother to the state.”
Ibid., 1: 149-155; Booth “Condition and Occuptions of the People in East London,” 297-8. Quoted
in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 194.
439
170
consequence of such assistance.” If one gave a penny to Class D families, Booth
believed, one was giving to families who kept up respectable appearances and
who had a “make-the-most-of-everything” kind of thrift.442 Booth’s clashes with
Octavia Hill and Charles Loch of the COS, and with the “socialists” Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, moreover, have been exaggerated by historians as a clash between
traditional COS views and socialist ones when really they boiled down to how
best to distinguish and relieve the “good” poor from the surrounding “bad” poor.
The (much-acclaimed) Booth-COS “break” over pensions seems a lot less
dramatic when it is noted that the COS in the 1880s and 90s not only advocated,
but even distributed, pensions for the “deserving.”443 While, officially, the COS’
Central Office was distributing no more than 1,100 pensions in 1895, Charles
Loch Mowat admitted (in his 1961 history of the society) that “the total value of
the pensions arranged by the [District] Committees was much larger than the
sums which each reported that it spent on pensions.” This was because of the
activities of the decentralized District Committees. Each of these was a satellite of
the “Central,” and each farmed out pensions through individual donors. These
pensions were advertised in the Charity Organisation Review, and Mowat listed
the numbers of such advertisements at this time (1895-1896) as being over
18,000.444 Finally, in his 1905-1908 Commission work, the epic struggle between
Booth and the Webbs dissolves blandly into Booth arguing for “strict
administration” of out-relief,445 and the Webbs arguing for more “drastic action” –
442
“Poverty,” 1: 50-51. At about the level of Class E, Booth believed charity was no longer
acceptable to notions of working-class independence. “Those in this class ‘take readily any
gratuities which fall in their way, and all of those who constitute it will mutually give or receive
friendly help without sense of patronage or degradations; but against anything which could be
called charity their pride rises stiffly.”
443
Booth’s advocacy of universal, old-age pensions was alike to his belief that widows and
orphans should be aided (if only “adequately”) without discrimination. These were no longer
economic agents in his mind, and state or charitable aid to them (if small) would actually prove an
aid to their sense of thrift. See Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 176.
“Extravagant” government spending Booth (Booth estimated that his pension plan would cost ₤17
to ₤20M) was also appropriate in the field of funding for Board Schools. “Nowhere more than in
the East End,” he said in the first volume of the Poverty series, “does the work done by the
‘extravagance’ of the Board School stand justified.” He was “glad that no niggard spirit interfered
at the outset,” believing “we have full value for all the money spent.” Booth, “Poverty, 1: 129-130.
444
Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society 99-100.
445
Booth believed, as he always had, that such people had blown their savings and exhausted their
credit: their energy was “sapped” and too often, their “character” was “lost.” Strict administration
171
through a multi-labour colony plan – to separate once and for all an undeserving
class they called loafers, the idle and recalcitrant, the workshy, and so on.446 The
issue of help – and withdrawal of help – to deserving and non-deserving classes (a
COS vision) – never goes away here. And welfare socialism – which does not
punish those who do not work, but rather attempts to aid every man and woman in
a society, working and non-working, to an optimum living standard – is on no
one’s mind.
The persistent charity-focus in the unpublished interviews of the Religious
Influences Series, Booth’s own discussion of philanthropy in the published
volumes of the latter, and finally the kind of men he employed as his London
interviewers, each demonstrate that charity organization was never far from
Booth’s mind.
Although historians have certainly tried,447 we can no longer ignore
Booth’s repeated attempt to ground the data – contained in over fourteen hundred
meant little or no money for these people. It would “strengthen physical and moral fibre, form
good habits or break bad ones, and…keep under control those whose unrestrained lives cause
injury to others as well as themselves.” The Simeys quote Booth on this in his Poor Law Reform
(1910), 65-6, 79. Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 176. As the Simeys note,
Booth was only repeating the views he had expressed in the Religious Influences Series.
“Religious Influences,” 1: 108; 7: 303, 311. Authors like Belinda Norman-Butler, who most stress
Booth’s break with the COS, are at a loss to explain why “He wanted to go back to the principles
of 1834 and start afresh from those principles.” Norman-Butler blames Booth’s heart attack of
August 1907, for Booth’s harsh stand. Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 174-175.
446
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 175. The Simeys quote the Majority Report
of the Poor Law Commission (534 and seq). For the Webb’s labour colony plan, see Searle, Quest
for National Efficiency 242. See also for Sidney and Beatrice Webb English Poor Law Policy
(London: Longmans Green and Co., 1910), 306-7. See McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles
for an analysis demonstrating the similarity of viewpoints between these supposed “archenemies.”
447
In Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry, O’Day and Englander refer to the society only five times (7,
14, 53, 83, 93). In the first instance, Booth’s data, with Rowntree’s, is denounced by the Society,
and in the second, Octavia Hill and Charles Loch’s associations with Booth are admitted, though
this is downplayed by stressing their opposition to his pensions campaign. The fourth is a lone
sentence listing COS visitors who among a score of other sources “also gave their views” for the
Poverty Series. Finally, Clara Collett and David Schloss (co-workers on Booth’s series before
Religious Influences) are each mentioned as having had memberships or written articles for the
Society, the former’s eighteen-year association (1888-1906) only of note because it was a possible
avenue through which she may have met Charles Booth. The COS receives the same treatment in
Retrieved Riches. They admit that “Booth’s world, and therefore that of his inquiry, crossed those
of Toynbee Hall, of the Royal Statistical Society, of the Charity Organization Society, of the
Royal Economic Society and so on.” The two historians continue (omitting mention of the Society
this time) that it is important to “resist the corollary that Booth’s Inquiry was, in some sense, the
child of Toynbee Hall, or the Royal Statistical Society or the Royal Economic Society.” Englander
and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 21.
172
interviews with religious leaders – in the “facts” provided him by the Charity
Organization Society representatives. Booth and his men separated the Series’ one
hundred and forty-seven interview notebooks into the categories of Clergy,
Nonconformists and Missions, Roman Catholics (though these interviews were
quickly combined with the Nonconformists), and Jews (though this group was
abandoned as a focus of study after the East End was completed). But Booth
attempted to cross-examine this evidence. He did so through his “Miscellaneous”
and “Local Government” interviews, and prominent in the former notebooks were
over forty interviews with the COS – one for almost every part of London, from
Poplar and Limehouse to Battersea.448 Sixteen of these were women, a sizeable
minority.
The audit of London church charity that Booth called his “Religious
Influences” series eerily coincided with the COS’ campaign – from 1897-1903 –
to popularize its message and professionalize its officers. From 1897 to 1901,
representatives of the COS, the Woman’s University Settlement (led by Miss
Sewell),449 and the National Union of Women Workers, gave lectures all across
the country. Mowat notes that
some were single lectures, but most of them were a series of four: Miss
Sewell, of the Women’s University Settlement, gave the first series, on
‘The scope of charitable work’, followed by Miss Miranda Hill on ‘The
family and character; personal work; co-operation in charity;
thoroughness’. Later subjects included the history of the Poor Law, the
care of women and children under the Poor Law, the standard of Life (Mrs
Bosanquet), the Co-operative movement, and a series by different persons
on the children under the Poor Law, in Reformatories, asylums and special
schools.450
Because the COS’ ideas of charity control had created an intellectual
consensus across the political spectrum, it should come as no surprise that they
448
According to one COS official, here were forty district committees of the COS in London by
1904. W.A. Bailward, “Upon Things Concerning Civic and Social Work,” 291.
449
For a discussion, by Sewell’s deputy, of the contribution of the Women’s University Settlement
to South London charity work, see below, Part III.
450
Mowat, Charity Organisation Society 105-106. Mowat follows the progress of the lecture
circuit throughout the country over several years, through such cities as “Birmingham,
Cheltenham, Gloucester, Malvern, Manchester, Bradford, Norwich, Tunbridge Wells and
elsewhere.” (106)
173
had intellectual shares in the ground floor of British academic sociology, which
had its origins at this time. Booth’s friend, Professor Alfred Marshall, would
deliver the “stirring speech” (“Economic Teaching at the Universities in Relation
to Public Well-being”) that opened the October 1902 conference (organized by
the COS’ Committee on Social Education) that would “discuss the possibilities of
combining practical training with university work...”451 According to Mowat, the
Committee at this time sketched its first report “suggesting how instruction in the
universities in moral science, history and economics” might be combined with a
Trust (providing lectures, teaching and practical work). Sketching a possible
syllabus, the Committee would ultimately propose
a two year course of training drawn up by E.J. Urwick, Combining
practical work with lectures and reading on principles, economics and the
theory of the structure of society. Poor Law history, theories of the State,
and special work in such subjects as sanitation, education, the sick and the
imbecile, or in political or economic theory, would form part of the
second-year work.452
The School of Sociology that opened in 1903, therefore, was an “off-shoot” of the
COS, though it would become an independent body as of July of that year (on a
motion by T. Mackay of the Society453). E.J Urwick was appointed Lecturer and
Tutor, G.F. Hill Honorary Secretary of the School. “Lectures were given by
Urwick, and by various visitors, and practical training provided in the District
Offices of the C.O.S.” Four summers later, we might also note the advent of L.T.
Hobhouse as the first man offered the Martin White Chair of sociology, “the first
(and for a long time the only) Chair of sociology in Britain.”454 In the field of
academic sociology, the moralists reigned supreme.
451
Ibid., 111.
Ibid., 111-112.
453
Mackay, according to Jane Lewis, was one of the “rank individualists” of the period. Mackay
argued for the outright abolition of outrelief through the poor house, an extreme position even at
this time. Lewis, “The Boundary Between Voluntary and Statutory Social Service in the Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” The Historical Journal 39, 1 (March 1996), 160. For
Mackay see his Public Relief of the Poor: Six Lectures (London: John Murray, 1901).
454
Ibid., 112-113; Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 209. Hobhouse and Booth never met, though
their ideas are compared in the Simeys’ Charles Booth: Social Scientist. For a discussion of
Hobhouse, see above.
452
174
Finally, in May 1897 the COS also instituted a Committee on Training.
The 1896 Annual Report for the Society recognized that, “as the inutility and
harmfulness of ill-regulated relief is acknowledged, a large number of persons
desire to learn good methods.”455 There were four types of students to be taught
the methods of charity control: “those who come from philanthropic curiosity,
those who are ‘bona fide doers’, those who are already workers with the Churches
or with other charities, and may be won to co-operation with the C.O.S., and, the
last small group, those who will continue to work for the Society and may become
its leaders.”456
Significantly, philanthropists and Church workers (all up and down the
church hierarchy) were precisely the men and women grilled by the Booth team
over the course of the Religious Influences Series. On the June 1897 Committee
appointed to handle this problem were W.A. Bailward, A.H. Paterson, R. Sharpe,
H.V. Toynbee, A. Wedgwood, H.L. Woolcombe, Miss Bruce and Miss M.
Sewell. In 1898 this Committee distinguished two kinds of training: “the
proselytising of the clergy, district visitors and ‘outside workers’ of every sort,
and the training of the executive members of the Society...”457
Initiatives to train both clergy and COS executives were not new things in
1898. Steps had been taken from the late 1870s to establish a vanguard of paid
Secretaries and District Secretaries – “officers of the Council, liable to transfer
from district to district by the Administrative Committee, but otherwise under the
direction of the District Committee which they were serving for the time being.”
From 1889, prominent personalities began to emerge in this vanguard in the form
of H.V. Toynbee (then stationed in Fulham), A. Eveleigh (Bow), C.P. Larner (St.
Olave’s, South London), H.L. Woollcombe (Battersea), Miss Sewell
(Camberwell), C.H. Grinling (Woolwich), and others. By 1897 there were twentytwo in this elite, ten of them women. These established a charity control
455
Mowat, Charity Organisation Society 108.
Ibid.
457
Ibid., 109.
456
175
“standard” in each district to which they were sent, and organized church
representatives, as far as they were cooperative, as best they could.458
The closeness with which charity control was related, in Booth’s mind, to
“religious influences” – disciplining, and civilizing the recipient – is borne out in
how many of these paid secretaries were interviewed by the Booth team. Though
some had changed their districts – and one his affiliation, for C.H. Grinling was
now secretary of the Woolwich, Plumstead and Charlton Nursing Association –
all of those listed above were interviewed for the Series.459 Harry V. Toynbee (the
brother of Arnold Toynbee, after which Toynbee Hall was named) was
interviewed three times, and proved a rather ubiquitous South London secretary in
the late 90s.460 Of the officials on the Committee on Training, Radford Sharpe (in
Poplar and Limehouse, and later Stepney) and Bailward (Bethnal Green) were
likewise interviewed for their “knowledge” of the “character” of both working
people and charitable work in their respective districts.461 The “very young” man
458
Ibid. Also listed by Mowat in this 1889 set were H. Davison (St. James’s, Soho), A.H. Paterson
(Clerkenwell), Miss Stewart (Poplar), and W.I. Brooke (St. Saviour’s, Southwark). Over the next
ten years, these men and women were dropped into COS Committees commonly to tighten the
reigns of charity control in each district. Ibid., 104, 102-105.
459
In chronological order: Eveleigh (still in Bow): 8 May, 1897, B 178: 1-17; Miss Bannatyne
(Acting-Head of the Women’s University Settlement, while Miss Sewell was away ill): 22
December, 1899, B 273: 158-175; H.L. Woollcombe (still in Battersea), 22 April, 1900, B 296: 121; C.P. Larner (now in Woolwich): 17 October 1900, B 290: 154-181. C.H. Grinling, originally
an Anglican parson, had left the church to join the COS, but had retired from the COS, handing
the Woolwich secretaryship to H.V. Toynbee when he “took the same line” as Booth against the
Society he worked for. “‘Mr. Booth came and spoke for me’, at a time when the C.O.S. were
fighting on the other side,” Grinling said in his interview (117). The conflict does not seem to have
amounted to much animosity on Grinling’s part. He worked with Toynbee for two years following
the conflict “to show there was no hostility on his part,” and his remark about the COS’ veteran
secretary, Charles Loch, is interesting if only for its pleasantness: “‘It was not Loch’s fault, he is a
good and honest man and if he had seen me personally, all w[oul]d have been explained.’” (117)
COS official or not, George Duckworth interviewed Grinling as if he was a bona fide
representative of the society, asking details regarding the charitable practices of local clergymen.
The interview, which proved rather enormous, took place the day before Larner’s, 16 October,
1900. Grinling, B 290: 106-153.
460
Mowat, Charity Organisation Society 104-105. Toynbee was in charge of the St. Olave’s and
Walworth Committee when he was interviewed on both 13 and 19 July, 1899 (B 273: 16-25; 92103). On 2 February, 1900, he was again questioned as a representative of the Society for
Newington (B 283: 1-9).
461
Sharpe, 24 May, 1897, B 173: 122-129, 160-163, and 17 January, 1898, B 225: 24-27;
Bailward, 6 February, 1898, B 225: 132-145.
176
who was to become the first lecturer at the School of Sociology, E.J. Urwick, was
interviewed for the Hampstead Committee in mid-September, 1897.462
Last, our insufficient focus on the closeness with which Booth related
religious and charitable influences is demonstrated most strikingly in the hitherto
minor emphasis we have placed on the person of Arthur Baxter.463 While all the
other interviewers – Argyle, Arkell, Aves and Duckworth – were veterans from
the previous series, Baxter was brought in especially for Booth’s audit of the
churches. Baxter was COS-trained, but only discrete hints, in the pages of the
Battersea notebooks, tell us so. This explains why Baxter was dealt most of the
interviews of the Anglican clergymen. Anglican Churches, on average, had the
most resources to spend on charity, and therefore it should be no surprise that a
former COS official became the unofficial Anglican interviewer for the Series.
Aves was a rival for Baxter in a sense, taking a large percentage of the Anglican
interviews, just as he did for the officials of COS themselves, but Baxter always
kept his lead (a surprising fact, since Aves had proven Booth’s “right-hand man”
from early on). In both cases, the reason lay in Baxter’s “expert” understanding of
the “facts” at hand.
The kind of evidence ministers and clergymen gave the Booth Men
appears as impressionistic and impossible to measure as Owen Chadwick and the
Simeys have claimed. But we must read on, despite this. To men who believed in
such things as the “science of charity,” and in Class C, after all, this was the stuff
of “experts.”464
Miss Davis (for women’s first names were often never mentioned465) was
the “bright, intelligent; exceedingly energetic” secretary for Hackney and
462
Urwick, B 288: 162-169.
Baxter is not mentioned as having any specific role in Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry. Other than
non-specific editing minutiae (often with Mary) to do with the Religious Influences Series,
Baxter’s only specified action in the book is his abstention from the Industry Series in order to
start a cab-owning business (115). As with Jesse Argyle, Booth’s leather business became a mealticket for Baxter after the Survey. A.H. John mentions Baxter in 1910 as a part-manager of Booth
and Company (London) Ltd. During the war we again find him at “the Bermondsey office and
leather warehouse,” an enterprise “almost completely run by women under the management of
Arthur Baxter.” John, A Liverpool Merchant House 72, 73, 76, 111.
464
Chadwick, The Victorian Church 234; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 148.
465
After Stepney and Limehouse’s Jane Burrell (B 174: 48-55), the Booth Men hardly ever
referred to women’s first names again.
463
177
Homerton. She had “strict COS views,” but this did not appear to prevent her
from being a member of the Christian Social Union.466 Arthur Baxter interviewed
her at 4 High Street, Homerton on 20 July, 1897. As he and other members of the
Booth team would do in every borough of London, Baxter “went through the
parishes with Miss Davis one by one and got some estimate of the clergy and the
character of the district.” The latter was accomplished in a single sentence: “As to
the district taken as a whole the verdict is that Hackney is gradually getting
poorer, and that there is not a single parish to which this does not apply to some
extent.” 467
Davis then gave her professional estimation of every prominent Anglican
and nonconformist minister in her district, specifically in terms of their charitable
practices. Adopting a very typical trope, Davis’ comments were largely divided
between men that were “sensible” and cooperated with the Charity Organisation
Society (sharing lists of recipients, inviting representatives to sit on church charity
committees, or simply sending applicants Davis’ way), and those who were
somehow negligent in this respect.
Four clergymen received top marks for their charitable work. South
Hackney’s Rev. Lennard was an “active, sensible man very careful in his methods
of relief: his opinion is always worth taking. His curates work well.” Rev. Walker
of Christ Church had taken ill, “but his curates Mr. Cook and Mr. Steimetz”
seemed to Davis “excellent men. They have a relief committee and cooperate with
the COS.” Rev. Knapp (Holy Trinity, Dalston) was “about the most sensible
person in the district: he is very active and works well with the COS.” Rev.
Gardner Brown (St. James’ Clapton) had triumphantly brought “organisation” to
the parish, and was “a good, sensible man.”468
There were others who seemed to work with the COS, but, curiously, not
to Davis’ satisfaction. St. Luke’s was apparently a “very active parish,” whose
466
As the Christian Social Union was a prominent arena for Anglican proponents of incarnational
economics, Davis’ COS membership demonstrates a continuity, in terms of ideas of moral
poverty, between incarnational theology and the atonement-centered economics that came before
it. See Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement 273-290, 331, 334-335.
467
Miss Davis, B 188: 1. After personal estimations, Davis gave more in-depth accounts of which
streets had become poorer since the 1889 maps were made.
468
Ibid., 3,5,7,11.
178
church regularly sent “cases to the COS” and even had a curate on their
committee. “But give a great deal on their own account.” This was a bit unfair.
After all, how could Davis know whether the St. Luke’s staff had “strict” methods
or not when they gave charity on their own time? Rev. Blatch (St. Barnabas,
Homerton) was another example of perhaps overexacting expectations on the part
of the COS. Blatch was “a sensible man with a good steady head.” It turned out
that it was Mrs. Blatch who worried Davis. She was “very vigorous and probably
worth two curates, but she is not so sensible as her husband. They work with the
COS but often help cases which could help themselves.”469
Sometimes Davis admitted ignorance as to what, charitably speaking, was
going on in certain parishes. Rev. Bankes at St. Augustine’s was known to be
short on cash, and she saw little of his charitable work in any case. Rev. Morcom
at St. Michael’s Miss Davis simply did not like (she called him a “rather pompous
person”), but his parish work seems to have been redeemed by his Scripture
Reader, Mr. Pennell, and this (short as it was) seemed a sufficient description.
About one evangelical clergyman (a Dr. Hamilton), Davis’ only words were:
“Does not work with the COS.” Nonconformists received small and innocuous
accounts like that of one Baptist minister who did a “great deal” of work but
would not work with the COS, and one Presbyterian church-worker (a Mrs Corby
of 203 Mare Street) who was an “active worker and knows her people well.”470
This lack of knowledge, in the case of Hackney and South Hackney’s
Nonconformists, was the result of a local conflict between Anglicans and
Dissenting ministers in the region. Nonconformists often refused to participate on
the committee because it was dominated by the Anglicans. Snobbishly, they
added that their members were part of the wealthier working classes and did not
require charity.471 This was a regularly reoccurring comment, all across London.
Davis nevertheless gave praise to the Lower Clapton Congregational Church
which did a “tremendous amount of work” and was “very sensible” (even though
it had “two missions in Homerton” – institutions whose methods Davis did not
469
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 3, 5, 9, 15.
471
Ibid., 11-13.
470
179
typically trust). Rev. Williams of Gravel Pit Unitarian was a “capital man” and
Davis told Baxter that “two good people to give information” included helpers of
the church by the name of “Miss Gibbs and Miss Green, Thedon House, Darnby
Road.” Clapton Park Tabernacle’s minister was “active, energetic and easy to
work with.” Finally, “[o]n occasions when the committee has had to refer to the
[Salvation Army]” Davis said, they had “always found them strictly upright…”472
Davis, like typical COS representatives, lambasted the negligent for giving
“doles” rather than careful charity. She described One man, Rev. Sanky, as being
“fairly active, but not strict in his methods of relief.” Another Baptist she called a
“typical minister,” who gave “much” in doles.473
Criticism, when it was criticism of this kind, was not without fairly regular
instances of contradiction. In the case of Rev. Gardiner at St. John’s, the vicar had
had a stroke that had paralysed him. It was fortunate, then, that his curates had
leapt to his aid, taking the helm of charitable matters. Yet Davis’ statements seem
contradictory. Gardiner’s curates, she said, were “fairly good,” and the Church
had a “parochial council [where recipients were chosen by clergy and visitors]
nominally on COS lines, but,” she decided, they nevertheless did “very bad
work.” To blame for this lack of care, it was revealed, were incautious and
untrained lady visitors. The latter, commonly called “silly” and “sentimental” by
charity control proponents of all kinds, were common culprits for such crimes in
the Booth interviews. “Have a large band of lady visitors who go about giving 1/doles,” Davis claimed.474
At Eton Mission, Rev. Donaldson was another of the alleged “negligent.”
But Davis’ account seemed ambivalent in many ways. She was very positive
about the pluck of these Anglican missioners in carrying out their social auxiliary
work. Donaldson’s district was the “poorest and most degraded in Hackney.”
Baxter and Davis agreed that no change in the colouring of the Booth Map of the
area was necessary, even though the maps were approaching eight years’ old.
472
My emphasis. Ibid., 13, 15. This was, she added critically, “more than can be said for many
members of the churches.” (15).
473
Ibid., 11, 15.
474
Ibid., 7-9. See Part III.
180
Despite Donaldson’s efforts in the parish, however, Davis could always find
charitable fault, and her see-sawing statements baffle the latter-day reader.
Donaldson and his clergy apparently were “tremendously active,” there was “a
great deal doing,” but in Davis’ opinion it was “very doubtful whether the effect
is great.” Donaldson and his men worked “a good deal with the COS and in cases
which they have once brought toward the Society are always loyal to its advice,
but,” she said again, “they give a great deal in doles without reference to the
Society.” Though she hardly seemed to have proven her case, she concluded her
account of the Reverend by saying: “In fact here as is usually the case with
mission work ‘the worse you are the better you are treated [meaning the most
morally defunct applicants for relief were treated best].’” Baxter did not dissent
from this view, and took down Davis’ words verbatim.475
The vicars of All Souls’ and All Saints’ (Revs. Fletcher and Hawkins)
were “much alike”: both were “active” and both were said to “know their people
well.” This was an important characteristic in a clergyman. Knowing a people
meant knowing them morally, and such statements are repeated throughout the
Booth archive. To know a parish people was to be able to distinguish, in the
language of the day, good from bad working people. Nevertheless, this was not
enough for the exacting Davis. Despite noting that both men sent “cases to the
COS,” and, incredibly, despite the fact that Mr. Fletcher was chairman of the
local Charity Organisation Society Committee (upon which she sat), “both,” she
thought, gave “a lot in doles.”476
Davis concluded her discussion of church charity work in Hackney on a
distinctly pessimistic note: “As to the general question of the influence of
religion…the religious bodies were evidently tremendously active with apparently
a rather small result.” She called her own Committee “mainly clerical” but said
nevertheless that she believed it “weak.”477 Such words were a harsh verdict for
the work of the churches at this time. In several pages the efforts of over twenty
men and women, and easily several thousand church-going working people, were
475
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 11.
477
Ibid., 15-17, 21.
476
181
cast as failures and half-failures (in terms of the clergymen) and charity-mongers
(in terms of the church-goers themselves). This was characteristic testimony from
the COS. Booth would hear such an account, either personally or through his
investigators, at least forty times from 1897 to the time he submitted the Religious
Influences series for publication in 1902.
We should note here how little time Miss Davis spent in her discussion of
“religious influences” and how much she devoted to charitable influences. As
social workers and theorists had believed since Thomas Chalmers’ day, Davis
knew that careless charity ultimately affected one’s spirit, one’s moral control,
that self-disciplining spirit which most people understood as a “religious
influence.” She knew that the distinction between religious and charitable
influences did not need separate discussion, so closely were they related.
So did Booth. This is most clear in the space he and his investigators
devoted to charitable influences over religious ones, and it is why I have here, and
elsewhere, referred to the Religious Influences Series as, for the most part, an
audit of charitable relief practices:
From the praise afforded to certain clergymen over others, the Booth team
and the men they interviewed clearly accepted that in order to “form
character,” sometimes it was necessary to give little or nothing at all. To a
greater extent than they discussed the church’s “religious influence,” the
Booth interviews centred most persistently on the money doled out to the
poor and out of work. The Booth team even took time to interview the
local government and working-class community leaders on the subject of
district charity, making the Booth survey more like an audit of charitable
relief practices than one measuring the extent to which London was
“touched by religion.”478
Booth made sure his investigators knew what his priorities were, and this
is borne out in the appeasing words of investigators dealing with limited
interviews and hurried interviewees. Meeting J.W. Atkinson of Stepney’s Latimer
Congregational Church, Arkell wrote to Booth: “The interview was hurried as Mr.
A. had to go in half an hour so I did not attempt to get details as to the work of the
mission hall but confined myself to Latimer Chapel and the Relief Work.” Using
478
Thomas R. C. Brydon, “Charles Booth, Charity Control, and the London Churches, 18971903,” The Historian 68, no. 3 (Fall 2006), 495.
182
the same tone later that month (January 1898) Arthur Baxter turned to the subject
of “Visiting, Nursing and Charitable Relief” in his conversation with a deacon
(Mr. W. George) from Victoria Park Congregational Church. “[T]hese 3 subjects
bring us to the chief subject of my conversation with Mr. G.,” Baxter wrote,
“which was the ‘Christian Instruction and Benevolent Society’ (a printed account
of which Baxter pasted under this introduction). Even charitably insignificant
ministers such as W. Eddom of the Packington Methodist New Connection
Church, Islington, were grilled on their charity (and the charity of their
neighbours) to an extent that the time devoted to charity equalled questions
regarding everything else to do with their church, combined. In late October 1897,
the little Eddom, with his little church, was given a little (5-page) interview. Twoand-a-half pages of this were spent on the “population reached,” the “people
employed,” the “buildings used,” the “congregation and services,” Eddom’s tiny
“social agencies” and “Sunday school.” The remainder were devoted to how
much charity Eddom gave, who in the neighbourhood visited which streets, how
much relief surrounding religious organizations provided their poor, to the best of
his knowledge. Eddom, a “harmless,” “thin, almost insignificant-looking man,”
but a “striving little chap,” apparently from Hull, answered Jesse Argyle’s
questions as best he could.479
Booth’s assessment, when his team arrived in Bermondsey, continued to
revolve around his ideas of moral poverty – specifically, whether the clergymen
on the ground were making the right charitable decisions in their ongoing fight
against it. The first subsection of “Chapter III: Bermondsey” – almost a hundred
pages into Booth’s fourth volume of the ‘Religious Influences Series’ – was
entitled “Comparative Poverty.” It was something of a break in the volume’s
narrative continuity. Quite unpredictably, Booth launched here into a short essay
upon the great and “controversial” question (over which “the very best informed
479
Atkinson, B 183: 23; George, B 183: 123; Eddam, B 198: 67-75 [n.b.: notebook pages are
typically folio pages, ie. 67, 69, 71, etc.]. At an even smaller mission to the Jews in St. George’s
in the East, Baxter drew attention to one discussion by leaving great gaps between sentences.
Baxter asked the missioner if his flock of twenty-five “came of their own accord.” “Mrs. B[orst]
said ‘I visit among them.’ ALB ‘They are very poor I suppose?’ Mrs. B. ‘Yes, very poor.’ ALB
‘Do you have to give them relief at all?’
Mrs. B ‘What god sends us we give them.’” Mr. and
Mrs. Borst and a man with a black beard, B 224: 107.
183
people seem to differ much”) as to how much of a man’s poverty was his “own
fault.”480 Booth knew that there were a wide range of remedial efforts before the
clergyman facing destitute men and women, but he was most concerned in regard
the “principles on which philanthropic or public action should be based...” One
simply had to be so careful. Accurate moral appraisal, in a sea of loafers, poorbut-respectable, and respectable working South Londoners, would be no piece of
cake. A “moderate measure of exaggeration,” Booth wrote – or alternately – the
“slightest tendency to minimise” personal need, and one could have “wide gulfs
of...divergence” in the manner of “philanthropic or public action” applied.481
Discrete sections such as “Comparative Poverty” tell us that, in addition to
an appraisal of their religious influence, it was equally important for Booth to
provide churchmen, parish by parish, with an accurate picture of social
conditions, so that they might exercise their influence most profitably (through
encouraging moral wellbeing and uprightness among their parishioners). Booth
had appraised the moral worth of every parish in South London, so that clergymen
there would make more responsible decisions as to their choice of care. At the
very least Booth wanted to help them to distinguish – through consultation with a
map of London he would provide – between those streets and districts selfimpoverished or “pauperized,” and streets suffering from “genuine” poverty, so
they could treat their parishes accordingly. Though he recognized that the moral
status of localities could change over time, Booth’s coloured maps could at least
provide people concerned with London’s poverty problem with a moral context so
that they might avoid an exaggeration of local needs. “I cannot hope to close these
gulfs [of social understanding],” Booth said, “nor can I even expect to make the
real underlying conflict of view any less, but,” he wrote reassuringly, “I may be
able to set forth the bare facts and thus more completely and more clearly than has
been hitherto possible, how they differ in various parts of the district and how the
480
481
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 97-98.
Ibid., 98.
184
conditions of life here compare with conditions elsewhere in London, and
amongst these conditions I am able to include the efforts made among them.”482
In Booth’s typically convoluted prose, we see here a hope that by keeping
his maps morally accurate, he hoped to put right the London philanthropy of
which the churches were in large part responsible. As a side note, this act of
providing local social facts for local charitable practitioners, when viewed from
the perspective of the Religious Influences interviews, appears to have been an
end in itself. Repeatedly historians note that Booth was only providing facts for
others – that he was a bean-counter – a man who could produce statistics, but not
form a theory or course of social action from them. The Religious Influences
interviews show us that, in some ways, no theory was required, so variable were
the social and moral conditions in each parish. If Booth provided simply the facts
– and we should note that these facts gave detailed (if morally charged) data for
every parish in London – he was nevertheless providing a colossal and
“scientific” database for every follower of charity organization in the metropolis.
Most would have seen this as quite a service. They would have agreed with
Booth, moreover, that to provide an overall program for reform, when parishes
differed – socially and morally – so widely, was rather inappropriate to the
individual needs of London parishes. No wonder then, as we see in Canon
Barnett’s thank-you note above, that despite Booth’s pessimistic account of
religious influence in London, so many ministers were grateful for his survey.
As with his other surveys, Charles Booth did not carry out most of the
interviewing for the Religious Influences series himself. For the task of almost
two-thousand London interviews, Booth required investigators who would not
hesitate to criticize the work of the London churches, men who understood
Booth’s moral framework for London perfectly, and in some cases, men who
were themselves specialized in the “science” of charity control.
We know now that Booth “distrusted” philanthropy (looking about him for
“ways to encourage the working classes to stand on their own feet and assume
management of their own affairs”), but his co-workers were no fans of it either.
482
Booth, “Religious Influences” 4: 100-1.
185
They called it “spoiling.”483 The contributions of Arthur Baxter, Ernest Aves,
George Arkell, George Duckworth, and Jesse Argyle, were certainly “formative”
(as one historian has noted) in the making of the Religious Influences series. But
this should not imply a sense of varied and idiosyncratic contributions. Rosemary
O’Day seems to do this, stressing (without much evidence to back up her case)
the “independence of mind of all the secretaries.”484 For the most part, however,
and on the crucial issue of the survey (charity) all of the Booth men were in
agreement about what they were there to do. The colossal research work that was
the Religious Influences series went smoothly and by the numbers because
practically no ideological differences confronted the members of the Booth Team.
No one presented any kind of challenge to either the official agenda (vaguely,
tracing the civilizing, self-disciplining influence of religion among poor
Londoners) or the unofficial agenda (measuring the competence of church charity
administration from a COS point of view). They were, in every sense, “Booth’s
Men.” And Mary, who had proven the foundation of Booth’s mental, and to some
extent spiritual stability for decades, and who contributed greatly to the writing
and editing of the Series, was (ideologically as well as matrimonially) Booth’s
woman.485
Arthur Lionel Baxter (b. 1860) had the coolness of his colleague, George
Duckworth, but a patronizing condescension which no Booth Man could match. A
graduate of University College, London with a day-job as a barrister, Baxter only
interviewed for the final series. As he said in one July interview of 1899, he
resided in South Lambeth, in or near All Saint’s parish. Like Aves and
483
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 27.
Ibid., 176, 186. O’Day lists several instances when Duckworth and Booth argued over the
respective “influences” of education and government against that of religion; when Argyle
quibbled over the class focus obtaining in the North London chapter; and when Aves did the same
over the precise class constitution of a church congregation. Ibid., 175, 176. Englander and O’Day
repeat that the Booth men contributed “ideas” and had “formative influences” on the survey in
their Retrieved Riches 27. Since it is not clear, however, that O’Day can pinpoint the precise
purpose or motive behind the survey, her suggestions of “independence of mind” or “formative”
influences by individual investigators fall flat.
485
O’Day notes a letter from Mary to Charles (who was away on business in the final days of the
Series’ revisions), in which she notes: “Nothing has touched me more than to see the affectionate
almost reverent way in which the whole staff treats your text in your absence, fearing to lose a
shadow of a shade of your full meaning. They are nice people.” Mr. Booth’s Inquiry 182.
484
186
Duckworth, Baxter is called both a “nominal Anglican” and “evidently an
agnostic” by Hugh McLeod, though Baxter’s connections with an Anglican
church in Notting Hill complicate this somewhat.486
After being introduced to the work in 1897, Baxter blossomed into a fullblown editor of the Religious Influences series – and everything besides. He
logged hours with Mary Booth, looking over the 1902-3 draft of the Industry
series, put time in with Jesse Argyle on the final edition proofs, and apparently
even provided an abstract of the survey’s seventeen volumes.487 Clearly a late
start did not stop Baxter from achieving a high profile on the team. Indeed, if
George Arkell became the team’s unofficial Nonconformist interviewer, Baxter
was conspicuous for his dominant place in the interviews of London Anglicans.
Baxter’s handwriting was the most graceful of the team. During certain stages of
his journeys through London, Baxter’s inquisitive nature would draw him back to
a chapel or church (to see its attendances for himself) or to describe the “effect”
of High or Low services upon their viewers.
We know from a discrete mention in the Battersea interviews that Baxter
himself had been a Charity Organisation Society official about a decade before his
work with Booth on the London churches. While interviewing the clergy in the
East Battersea notebooks, Baxter (by now a veteran interviewer) wrote: “I was
486
Allen Edwards, B 272: 63; Hugh McLeod, “Working-class religion in late Victorian London:
Booth’s ‘Religious Influences’ revisited,” in Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 271. Baxter
also may have been connected with an Anglican Rugby Club run out of the Church of St. Clement,
Notting Hill. In a curious passage from April 1899, Baxter wrote: “Of the other agencies at work
the chief is the Rugby Club in Wabner Road: this is the Rugby School London Mission: though
there is no parish attached there is a parson at the head. He and his predecessors have always been
Broad Churchmen and have considered Mr. R. too ‘churchy’ to work with: and as usual when
there is no cooperation there is I think something approaching antagonism. As I (with Arthur
Wabrond) was the founder of the Club and worked in it for about four years before it was taken
over by Rugby I know that there has always been a strong feeling against allowing the Club to
become an appendage of the Church, and in the early days there was a strong difference of opinion
with Hoskyns, the then vicar (later of Stepney) who wished to be allowed to come and open each
meeting with prayer.” Roberts, B 261: 17.
487
It is noteworthy that, though Baxter was not involved in the original two surveys, he was
nevertheless given this job. The only hint of Baxter’s special character noticed by the two authors
in Retrieved Riches is when they note that Baxter joined the Religious Influences interviews as
part of a “select team.” Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 31; O’Day and Englander, Mr.
Charles Booth’s Inquiry 181, 185. With Argyle, Baxter was assigned to “check the tables, finalise
the maps, collect together the revised typescript, prepare the abstract and the index and send the
whole off to printers.” (185)
187
working in the parish of St. Andrew’s when [Rev. Isaac Tapper] came there in the
year 1888, and for the first five years of his pastorate knew him well, and was
able to estimate his influence in the parish.”488 In another interview (with a Rev.
A.G. Wilcox) Baxter compared a previous vicar (Rev. Whidbourne) unfavourably
to the new one (Wilcox): “though a genuinely religious man” the previous vicar
“was one of the most hopeless ‘softies’ I ever met and though he was in no sense
a scandal like his neighbour Mr. Tapper, his work as a pastor was almost equally
futile: Wilcox is much more of a man…”489 One can see how COS officials may
have influenced the creation and spirit behind the Religious Influences Series
from Baxter’s (apparently much-awaited) interview (22 April 1900) with H. L.
Woollcombe, secretary of the Battersea, Clapham and Wandsworth COS:
Mr. Woollcombe had the reputation of being the best of the COS
secretaries. I have known him well for 12 years, and served under him for
5 years on the Battersea Committee. He is not a man of any great
intellectual ability, but distinguished for common sense, tact and
sympathy. He is a glutton for work and an enthusiast who grudges no time
and trouble spent on his multifarious charitable labours.
I have passed a good many hours with Woollcombe nominally with
reference to our enquiry, but it was only for 2 ½ hours490 that we came so
to speak to close quarters: and so huge is Woollcombe’s district that nearly
the whole of that time was spent merely in going through the parishes and
in getting the names of people whom it might be desirable to see.
Taking the parishes in Battersea in order they are: - […]491
Importantly, as one of their own, Baxter did not require the help of former
COS superiors to gauge the character of men and methods in church charity work.
He was an old hand in this sort of work and perhaps for this reason his written
488
Tapper, B 292: 13.
Wilcox, B 292: 67.
490
We might note here that Booth spent an equal amount of time speaking to an East London vicar
at the opening of the Series’ interviews and complained apprehensively of what might be to come
if an interviewer had a tendency to be “gassy”! One can assume Woollcombe’s “expert” company
was enjoyed more by Baxter than that of ministers he so often sneered at. Chandler, B 169: 3.
491
Woollcombe, B 296: 1-3. After discussing the merits and failings of fifteen of Battersea’s
Anglicans, Woollcombe concluded in a typically puzzling fashion : “all to some extent cooperate
with the C.O.S. and the following parishes send representatives to the Committee: - St. Mary, St.
Peter, St. Stephen, St. Saviours, Ascension, St. Luke, and St. Mark; but with the exception of St.
Saviours nearly all give doles more or less through their visitors, though on the whole there has
been a great leavening of C.O.S. principles in recent years: most of the clergy believe in careful
administration but are too weak to keep their visitors in control.” (B 296: 9-11)
489
188
interviews for the Religious Influences series have been hailed by historians as
“models of the genre.”492 One example was his account of a Bow clergyman he
met in May 1897. Reverend Carroll, a High Churchman at St. Frideswide’s in
Bow, was a local favourite for Baxter. Even the poorest – assuming their best
clothes were not in pawn – came in considerable numbers to see Carroll preach. It
is important to note, however, that Carroll – this favourite of working classes both
high and low – was “very careful not to induce people to come by bribing.”
Carroll told Baxter that a previous vicar had done all he could to pauperize the
people, apparently moved “first and almost solely by pity.” He had “lavished
money” and “gathered round him a lot of old humbugs.” Carroll appeared to feel
that this was not the way to show one’s love for the poor. Upon his advent in
Bow, therefore, he had immediately taken steps to stop the doles of his church.
His “humbugging old women” had been, in Carroll’s words, “shed.” Like many
churchmen, he was blessed with a lady churchworker (Sister Constance). “She is
of the straitest sect of the COS,” Baxter wrote, “and often refuses to help when
Mr. C would like to.” For the Booth team, young Carroll was “the best type of
Oxford person, of those who take orders not merely as a profession, but from a
genuine devotion to the work.” He ran “essentially one of the most active
parishes” in the district – “both spiritually and socially.” Carroll was particularly
proud of his vigorous young people’s clubs. His boys’ club, run by his
enthusiastic curate, Rodney, could keep the lowest boys without driving away the
better class (a rare feat in working-class neighbourhoods). There were open-air
sermons and temperance societies, a number of mothers’ meetings, cricket clubs,
football clubs and lectures, a C.O.S. collecting bank, and Sunday Schools catering
to 900 boys and girls a week. “A great deal doing,” said Baxter and, importantly,
“all worked on sensible lines.” This “very cheerful, pleasant and genial young
man,” he said, “was nothing less than a first rate fellow,” “a man sure to be
popular both with women, men and young people.”493 To the residents of his poor
492
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 31.
Ibid., Rev Carroll, B 175: 99-115. Working-class leader Will Crooks described Carroll, a
former curate of Poplar’s Rev Chandler, as a man known for his superb auxiliary work. Crooks, B
173: 55.
493
189
Bow parish Rev. Carroll must have been something of a local celebrity, a
community leader, a holy man with a social conscience. In this time, and in this
place, such a status may have been quite compatible with the deliberate exclusion
of those “shed” from his church, those suspected of cadging, those blackballed as
unimproveable.
Ernest Aves (1857-1917), educated at Cambridge, began his investigative
career during his years of residency at Toynbee Hall.494 He, like Baxter, was
“religiously minded.”495 Mrs. Henrietta Barnett (wife of Canon Samuel Barnett)
remembered Aves as a kind of sage. She called him “the ‘Pater,’ so wise, deepvoiced, judicial, so steadfastly dutiful and strong in his slowness, so wholly
loveable and generally so tiresomely right[.]”496 Aves’ first task at Toynbee Hall
was to poke around the parish of St. Jude’s. In the almost comic language of
social investigation during this time, the rookie Aves was apparently “started on
one street” and “sent out to visit unknown people and ascertain facts.”497 He likely
met Booth at Toynbee Hall around the time Booth’s original coloured street map
was displayed there.498 Aves went from a research aid for Beatrice Potter in her
investigation into the Wholesale Clothing Trade, to a full-fledged contributor to
the Poverty Series’ sections on the furniture trades of the East End. With the
opening of research for the Industry Series, Aves had hit the big time. He became
a co-editor and prized deputy on the Life and Labour project, replacing Potter as
Booth’s “most intimate colleague.”499 “He spent three years researching and
writing up the Building Trades,” according to Englander and O’Day, “was
consulted at all stages of the survey and was responsible for such attempts as there
were to draw comparisons and formulate conclusions.”500 O’Day and Englander
write how Aves could be critical – indeed, a “thorn in the side” of some members
494
Aves was a resident at the Hall during the years 1887 to 1897, and served as its sub-warden
from 1890 to 1897. O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 105, n. 5.
495
Englander, “Booth’s Jews,” in Englander and O’Day eds., Retrieved Riches 291.
496
[Henrietta Barnett], Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends: By his Wife (London: John
Murray, Abermarle Street, W., 1921), 419.
497
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 22.
498
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 101 n.1, 124.
499
Ibid., 124.
500
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 29.
190
of the team501 – but this is to overstate things. Booth loved him and trusted him
with an enormous amount of work, both in the Industry Series (where he did the
“lion’s share” of the work) and in the Religious Influences Series (in which he
took a “major part”).502 There was a very sentimental correspondence existing
between the two men that demonstrates this well.503 Englander and O’Day suggest
that Aves was “without doubt, the single most important influence upon the
organization of the research and analysis of the data, next to Booth himself.”504
Yet what this meant we cannot know from a reading of either Retrieved
Riches or Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry. Aves is also discussed as a writer of
“penetrating researches,” as one who achieved a “reputation in his own day as a
man of progressive outlook.” Aves, it seems clear, was a union supporter. He
supported actively the extension of democratic association among
producers and consumers, welcomed the New Unionism, supported the
men in the 1889 Dock Strike, became the first president of the Trafalgar
Branch of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers Union, was
a leading figure in the anti-sweating agitation and tirelessly expounded the
virtues of the co-operative ideal. In the Edwardian period he was a Special
Commissioner on wage boards and compulsory arbitration in the
Antipodes [1907-1908] and also Chairman of the British and Irish trade
boards [1913]. Like most of Booth’s key associates, Aves exemplified the
commitment to social action. 505
501
This is only to say that Booth’s endless “tinkering” with the precise language of the Religious
Influences volumes drew the ire of Mary and Arthur Baxter. See O’Day and Englander, Mr.
Charles Booth’s Inquiry 173-187, esp. 179 and 182.
502
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 123. Mary writes how, “It is hardly the place
here to say how much he [Aves] was admired and loved by those who came in contact with him;
and…by no one were these feelings more strongly entertained than by his old colleague, Charles
Booth.” Mary said that Aves and Booth “collaborated throughout in the final volume of the
Industry Series, giving the views of both on the problems under consideration. Of many of the
chapters they were joint authors; and throughout the whole volume each submitted his work to the
other, and a constant interchange of suggestion and criticism went on between them.” Booth,
Charles Booth 130-131.
503
O’Day notes a letter in which Booth told him, “I do indeed not know how to find words that
will sufficiently recognise the value that your revisions have been throughout – so thorough in
things large and small, so endlessly patient and so necessary. How much the book owes to you no
one can ever know.” O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 178.
504
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 29.
505
Ibid., 29-30. The Simeys write that Aves “made a name for himself as Government
Commissioner on Wages Boards, and that he also served the Government of New Zealand as an
Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Adviser. Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist
125 n. 2. O’Day and Englander note that Aves’ work as a Special Commissioner extended to the
study of Australian labour conditions. Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 105, n. 5.
191
The task of squaring Aves’ professionalism or love of “social action,”
however, with conversations such as the one Aves had with Rev. Canon Palmer,
Rector of St. Mary Newington, Kennington Park, is not one with which either
author seems interested. Aves met Canon Palmer on 23 January 1900 in the
course of his Inner South London interviews for the Religious Influences Series.
Palmer told him twice of his annoyance with local lodging house “cadgers.”
Palmer consigned all of the men in one nearby lodging house (called a Rowton
House) to Booth’s loafer class: “The men in it ‘are nothing but cadgers’, and even
the Sergeant in charge admits that 90 per cent may be fairly so described….
Experience has shown that nothing can be done with the Rowton House class of
man and they have nothing to do with them[.]” This begging class of men were a
particular bother for Palmer on Sundays, because “[t]he House is a stone’s throw
from S. Gabriel’s (the parish Chapel-of-ease)[.]” “[H]ardly any one comes to
church from it,” Palmer said, but if any were seen there, “the curates always
expect[ed] them to stay behind to cadge for something.” The result was that only
the clergy at St. Mary’s were permitted to give relief. Not trusting his (likely,
women) visitors to the task, Palmer affirmed to Aves: “they do not administer
relief in any case.” Aves was impressed with such systematic supervision of
charity work. “A propos of the way in which Visiting was organized, and the
evident care given to it,” Aves wrote, “I said something about the quiet methods
on which the parish appeared to be worked, and elicited a little flush of pleasure,
and an acquiescent laugh from the Rector. He clearly has no sympathy with
showy ways or with self-advertisement in any form; and ‘fireworks’ as he said
‘come to an end’.” For Palmer’s diligence in such charitable matters (and we
should note, without having at all seen Palmer’s parish workers at work), Aves
said: “There is every reason to think that what is given, is given well.” He also
expressed his great liking of Palmer as a person:
He had been described to me by Mr. Keesey [minister of Sutherland
Congregational Chapel, Walworth Road], as a very courteous gentleman,
quiet in his own work, not at all forcing himself to the front. He proved to
be all this, and to combine charm and distinction, with vigour and
capacity. He is by no means one of the unassuming men who can be easily
overridden by their fellows. In appearance, he is tall, with white hair, a
192
clean shaven face, and in manner full of energy and very spry. He gave
signs of likes and dislikes, but never spoke an unkindly word, and,
altogether, proved one of the most attractive clergymen I have seen –
fitted to his post and doing his own work and not other people’s.506
Because they ignore these crucial moral hang-ups on the part of Aves,
Englander and O’Day’s discussion seems very much an Avesian extension of the
Booth-as Humanist-thesis. Aves clearly stood as much for charity control as for
union rights – something entirely compatible in this period though insufficiently
attended to by historians. To O’Day and Englander, from the time of his work on
the Poverty Series (and in working on the Booth and Shoe Industry before
handing off to David Schloss and Argyle) Aves “displayed the perceptiveness and
sensitivity which he was later to demonstrate as Booth’s right-hand man on the
Religious Influences Series.”507 From such a description readers are left
wondering whether Aves was even brought up in the Victorian period.
Behind Aves “spidery handwriting,”508 in reality, was a man typical of his
pseudo-scientific intellectual milieu. Aves was typical because he was one of
many fighting for the legitimacy of a discipline – social science – so marred by
moral assumptions that scientific consensus among its practitioners was only
rarely achieved. From academics like L.T. Hobhouse, to social statisticians like
Booth, to clergymen and church-workers on the ground like Canon Palmer and
his visitors, the moral appraisal of working people always produced different
estimates from different people, but this did not stop any of them, at least in this
period, from continuing to appraise people this way. Perhaps Aves believed (like
Charles Booth) that he could resolve this dilemma by being excessively zealous in
his collection of the facts: his interviews were by far the most lengthy of the team,
506
Palmer, B 276: 197-199, 203, 205, 193.
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 94. They add that his contribution to the
Religious Influences Series was “enormous.”29
508
Aves handwriting must have become as frustrating for the Booth Men as it is for scholars
today, because from his interview with Bethnal Green vicar G.H. Woolley 25 February, 1898, he
no longer writes, but types his interviews. Even up to December 1897 when the Bethnal Green
interviews began, Aves continued to write his interviews, and these are, at first glance, illegible.
Aves’ Nonconformist interviews became typed 1 March 1898 with his interview of Bethnal Green
LCM D.J. Neugevitz. Woolley, B 228: 166; Neugevitz 229: 99.
507
193
and upon the introduction of his typed interviews, his tendency to longwindedness only increased.
Aves could be found interviewing almost anyone in the Religious
Influences series. His signature (E.A.) is ubiquitous in the Anglican,
Nonconformist, Roman Catholic, and Local Government notebooks, as well as
(that grab-bag of respondents) the Miscellaneous notebooks. Aves, to the end, was
the earnest social reformer type of the late nineteenth century – grubbing and
voracious for facts, eager for recognition. His titles (union supporter, special
commissioner, trade board chairman) fail to tell us whether he was ever satisfied
with the gains of the social movements he was committed to, or even what that
success might have been in his eyes. Several poor or lukewarm reviews in
response to his last publications leave his life ending with only a whimper.509
Only a year after Booth, Aves died (when only sixty), in 1917.510
George Arkell (?) became an experienced social investigator in Booth’s
initial poverty surveys, and from early on played a “crucial” role in data
management.511 He was an occasional reader of papers at Toynbee Hall, though
he was not a resident. Working closely with Octavia Hill, Arkell is well known
for his research on the subject of block dwellings (a discussion of which one finds
in the Poverty Series). Argyle and he worked to prepare a statistical framework
for the Poverty survey, and O’Day and Englander note that it was he who was
509
One example is C.R. Fay’s scathing review of Aves’ Co-operative Industry (1907), in which
typical remarks see Aves analysis as “not very deep” and “but slightly developed.” His book is
described overall as one which “cannot hope to replace” a previous work (written by Catherine
Webb) completed in 1904. C.R. Fay, “Review: Co-operative Industry by Ernest Aves,” 18, 69
(Mar. 1908), 79, 80.
510
His colleague, Hubert Llewellyn Smith (who Englander and O’Day also describe as a “key
contributor to the Poverty Series), achieved greater success (“Here was no mere research
assistant,” as the two authors note). Writing the history of the dockers’ strike, he left the inquiry in
the early 1890s to pursue a career as a Commissioner of Labour in the Labour Department of the
Board of Trade (until 1919), and the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government (until 1927),
whereupon he wrote a sequel to Booth’s survey (the New Survey of London Life and Labour).
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 29, 30. Prior to 1914, however, success did not dull
Smith’s moral approach. As one of the architects of the National Insurance Act of 1911, he could
be heard to say: “Armed with [the] double weapon of a maximum benefit and a minimum
contribution the operation of the scheme will automatically exclude the loafer.” Harris,
Unemployment and Politics 312-313
511
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 28. Searching for Arkell’s rather shadowy beginnings,
O’Day and Englander speculate as to whether Arkell “was the young assistant for whom Booth
had to find other duties in July 1886.” Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 66.
194
commonly “in charge” (with Argyle’s help) of the inquiry’s second map –
showing every church, Board School, and pub in the metropolis. The Simeys also
note how he was “set on” the Poplar records in order to gather material for
Booth’s campaign for old age pensions.512 Arkell’s handwriting is the easiest to
read: his letters are huge, and the length of his interviews is often belied by a
paucity of lengthy analysis or real content. Nevertheless, Arkell saw the most
action with the Nonconformists interviewed for the survey – indeed, he was
probably its unofficial “Nonconformist” specialist. A discrete mention in the Mile
End Old Town notebooks tells us Arkell was married. Arkell was having trouble
with a building’s architecture and after a short description, wrote: “[I read this
description to my wife immediately after writing it and asked if she could
recognise the kind of building. She replied ‘It is just like an old strict Baptist
Chapel.’] GEA”513
As with Booth, evidence of Arkell’s work on pensions may appear,
ideologically, to clash with his quite amicable work with Octavia Hill on London
housing. Perhaps predictably, O’Day and Englander find Arkell “long overdue”
for a “bouquet” from historians because of his “enormous and important work.”514
The task becomes easier, and our picture of the man gets more complicated, when
we encounter interviews like the following, between Arkell and Homerton
missionary, J. Neville. One can see that Arkell admired the missioner and as in
the case of Aves with Palmer and Baxter with Caroll, one can see precisely why.
Arkell busily scribbled away as Neville told him about an ostensibly poor
neighbourhood made up of builders’ labourers, masons and market gardeners. But
Neville, like many in this period, differentiated the poor from the poor-butrespectable. “There was not a lot of poverty in Lower Clapton,” Neville said –
512
Ibid., 13, 66, 169; Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 29; Simey and Simey, Charles
Booth: Social Scientist 160-161.
513
Ashdown, B 223: 135.
514
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Booth’s Inquiry 66. Throughout his work with Beatrice Webb on
the tailoring trade, Arkell’s vast workload and organizational skills are stressed, but sentences like
– “There is every evidence that she had taken Arkell’s advice to heart and taken a list of questions
with her. He had lent system to her brilliance” – tell us only what the Booth Men and Women did,
not why they did it. (68) Nearly twenty pages later Arkell is working with Clara Collet, doing
“most of the groundwork” compiling a “lengthy and detailed list of places of women’s work” in
London, and becoming a “seasoned interviewer.” (87)
195
denying the clear economic realities of the district in favour of moral ones –
“[p]eople are fairly comfortably off and they would be well off but for the drink.”
Opposing a respectable working-class against an immoral one, Neville added that
there were “a good many loafers who will not work.” Arkell’s response, quite
unproblematically, was to subtitle this section of the interview, “The Loafer
Class.”515 Neville explained:
There are always loafers and they take advantage of winter to sponge upon
the mission. “You may take as a rule that those who cry out are not hurt
very much.” “A perfectly safe rule.” They do not give much. Quoted case
of a man who told him that he had just come from Portsmouth – walked –
no work, etc. Looked at his hands – quite soft. After a few questions found
he had been 2 years in the neighbourhood. “These loafers not only sponge
on you but on your people.” They avoid the mission now and we get a
better class of people. Have had a new president to their Mothers’ Meeting
(Miss Muller) who is strict and have lost a number of spongers through
that. Good to get rid of them: they drive better people away. “They go to
All Souls or Clapton Road Tabernacle.” “This is a fact.”516
Arkell reserved a quiet reverence for “strong” characters such as Neville, who he
described as “a tall, spare, elderly man with iron grey hair and short beard. He has
a grave yet strong and kindly face and is evidently a very earnest and capable
man, with a kindly word for anyone in trouble but little likely to be fooled by
impostors. While I talked with him my first impressions were deepened and
strengthened.”517 Like the rest of the Booth Team, there was no doubt in his
reports as to what he was there to investigate, no “independence of mind,” a fact
borne out in sentences like this one to an East Greenwich lay evangelist (R.C.
Thurley of Rothbury Congregational Hall, Mauritius Road): “I referred to the
pauperization of Greenwich by charity, and he said he thought Rothbury Hall had
done too much in that way in the past. The regime is evidently stricter now.”518
As with “nominally Anglican” Baxter (see note above) there are signs that
the Booth men were no more “secular-minded” or “agnostic” than their “chief.”
Just as Baxter was the founder of a Church Rugby Club in Notting Hill, Arkell
515
Neville, B 190: 85, 77.
Ibid., 77.
517
Ibid., 76.
518
Thurley, B 286: 37.
516
196
frequented J. Felmingham’s Northcote Baptist Church in Western Battersea.519
Interviewing Felmingham in April 1900, Arkell wrote that, typically, the church
was two-thirds full Sunday mornings (it held 950), while during the evenings, it
was so full that late-comers were always disappointed. There were slightly
smaller congregations in the summer, and while the people of the chapel called
such attendances “preaching full,” their somewhat strict minister did not: “‘We
should be exact in these things,’ said he.” At this point Arkell revealed his own
familiarity with Battersea’s Northcote Baptist: “He is undoubtedly right in his
estimate of attendance. I have frequently attended this chapel and know that after
6.30 on Sunday evening it is often difficult to get a seat. The stewards may often
be seen craning their necks to see whether there are any vacant seats.”520
George Herbert Duckworth (1868-1934), after Cambridge, tucked
immediately into the research of the Industry series. He was an Anglican.521 With
ten years at both Eton and Cambridge under his belt, Duckworth married the
daughter of an Earl (Lady Margaret Herbert, daughter of the 4th Earl of
Carnarvon). He enjoyed living well. Perhaps unlike his colleagues on the Booth
Team, Duckworth was a bit of a dandy. “He was a man of distinguished presence,
exceptionally companionable, a delightful talker and a connoisseur of good
living.”522 Like Argyle and Aves, he presented papers and frequented Toynbee
Hall.523 His writing was rather middle-of-the-road: in form, it lacked Baxter’s
elegant slant, but in content betrayed a playful interest – Duckworth often directly
quoting an amusing comment during or at the close of his interviews.
519
Because Hugh McLeod writes that Argyle and Arkell “tended to keep their opinions to
themselves,” this is an addition to our understanding of the latter. Hugh McLeod, “Working-class
religion in Late Victorian London: Booth’s ‘Religious Influences’ revisited,” in Englander and
O’Day, Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840-1914 (Aldershot: Scolar Press,
1995), 271.
520
Felmingham, B 295: 73-75. Arkell’s church was frequented by the middle and lower middle
class, with “a proportion” of the working classes as well, people described as – “City people,
clerks etc, some railway men, prison workers, shopkeepers, half a dozen who could put down a
₤10 note comfortably.” (71-73) In Greenwich Arkell also admitted to having a long acquaintance
with a member of the Plymouth Brethren by the name of Jordan, in his passing statement: “I have
known Mr. Jordan for some years.” Jordan, B 286: 239.
521
Englander, “Booth’s Jews,” in Englander and O’Day eds., Retrieved Riches 291.
522
O’Day and Englander quote the historian H.A.L. Fisher, who remembered that Duckworth had
a “genius for happiness.” O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 107.
523
Ibid., 13 n. 44.
197
Englander and O’Day speak of Duckworth much like they do the rest of
the Booth Team. He was “curious about and responsive to the problems of
Londoners.” In Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry, Duckworth’s contribution to the
survey was of “singular importance,” because he was “capable and
industrious.”524
But such descriptions are unhelpful. This error of uncritical treatment of
the Booth Team is compounded in the later collection of essays, Retrieved Riches,
when Englander, O’Day, and the book’s other contributors describe themselves as
brought together “on a day in April 1989 to celebrate and study the work of
Charles Booth.”525 Like the rest of the Booth Team, however, Duckworth’s worst
moments – such as his admiring account of Will Crooks’ ruthless rejection of
poor applicants to the Poplar Church Unemployment Committee – are hardly
worth celebrating.526 Nor was Duckworth’s disagreement with Father Whelahan
(21 September, 1900) over the character of tenants in one of the poorest parishes
in Deptford, St. Nicholas’. Defending the admittedly low moral standards
prevailing among the Irishmen in his district, Whelahan said: “But there is not a
loafer among them; I won’t have it.” Duckworth may have allowed this in the
interview, but his report followed the priest’s words with his own bracketed
assessment: “[But loafers or no many of the houses in the streets N of the High
Street have the uncared for look of the ‘casual’ tenant: GHD].”527 This reminds us
to avoid the often dangerous attachment with men and women in the past that
sometimes comes with historical research. Booth said Duckworth had “a quick
eye observant of details, a cool counsel, judgment, plenty of determination and
conciliatory manners.” Englander and O’Day remark that, indeed, “anyone who
has the pleasure of reading his reports to Booth and his interviews will find
themselves concurring with this assessment.”528 I would add – not if we read all
of them. In view of Duckworth’s and the rest of the Booth Team’s moral attitudes,
524
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 30; O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s
Inquiry 107.
525
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 40.
526
Crooks, B 173: 53. See Part IV for a discussion of Crooks as a working-class proponent of
charity control.
527
Whelahan, B 289: 55-57.
528
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 30. Booth’s quote is not documented in this text.
198
I would also point to the disturbing nature and implications of Englander and
O’Day’s concluding statement, that – “As with so many of Booth’s ‘team’ he
became a distinguished public servant.”529 The Simeys note that he became
private Secretary to Austen Chamberlain, but O’Day and Englander give a more
in-depth account of his distinguished career at the highest levels of government.530
Booth Men, believing strongly in moral segregation, rose to the top echelons of
the British government, and Duckworth was only one example.
Lastly, the cockney Jesse Argyle (?) had served longest with the Booth
project. Like Arkell, he was adept at separating data into separate, workable
subjects, a man fellow investigators early on (especially David Schloss) surely
appreciated. Originally a clerk in the Booth Steamship Company he had been a
secretary and social investigator since the mid-1880s. Mary said he shared
Booth’s “zeal for the good of the people,” and that he did a “great work in
connection with various movements of the time among the artisan class…” “In all
such work his help and influence must have been most beneficial, for the devoted
work of a man, able, sympathetic, and independent-minded cannot but be fruitful
of all good.”531 Mary appeared to admire him a great deal: “I have been surprised
to find how very ready Mr. Argyle is; and how conciliatory; he has got something
quite big about him and never makes a fuss about little things and he has no
vanity. He doesn’t care a bit whether a thing is settled in his way or no as long as
529
Ibid. Equally alarming are the heights reached by investigator Hubert Llewellyn Smith, for
which see note above.
530
Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 172. Duckworth began as Secretary to the
Royal Commission on Historical Monuments 1908-1918, but during the war became Deputy
Director of Munitions Finance 1915-1918 and Controller of Labour Finance 1918. Following the
war Duckworth served as Controller of the Munitions Housing Scheme 1919-1920 and Chairman
of the Irish Land Trust for Re-Settlement of Ex-Servicemen in Ireland. He returned to social
surveys with his former Booth Team colleague, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, for work on the latter’s
New Survey of London Life and Labour in 1929, and eight years later, was knighted. O’Day and
Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 107, n. 14.
531
Argyle, for example, aided Booth in his first work on the 1881 census, in what was probably
Booth’s first attempt to deflate “exaggerations” about popular poverty. Simey and Simey, Charles
Booth: Social Scientist 67. For Argyle’s work, with David Schloss, on the London boot and shoe
industry, see O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 93-96. Booth, Charles Booth 20.
Mary mentioned the club, convalescent home, reading room and library movements as Argyle’s
preferred areas (ibid).
199
he thinks it will do; and do justice to what you want to say.” Argyle was married,
had, Mary said, “a little girl” at the end of the Religious Influences Series.532
A discrete mention by Argyle in his interview with F.E. Tozer, Secretary
of South Hackney’s Bruce Hall Mission, 15 September, 1897, tells us also of
Argyle’s past involvement in working-class education: “I found Mr. Tozer to be a
former acquaintance we having served together as evening school managers for
Stoke Newington and Clapton; one of his chief helpers, Mr. Smith, is in
Donaldson’s office, and sometimes collects the rent of our Dalston rooms.”533
According to Englander and O’Day he was “an active and perceptive interviewer”
“with a good knowledge of the East End,” but these words (perceptive,
knowledgeable), again, are given a humane colour in their account.534 He
organized the Adelphi Terrace offices, took part in the original Tower Hamlets
investigations, studied poverty in Walthamstow, West and North London, Silk
Manufacture, and London’s drawing power for provincial labour (a paper he
presented in Toynbee Hall).535 Such facts can paint him simply as one of many
social investigators of the metropolis (except perhaps, that he was paid to do it),
and tells us little of his personality. More important probably was his role as one
of the original architects (with Booth) of the poverty classification system to be
used in the interviews of the first Series.536 Argyle, like the rest of the Team, was
a man crucially involved in the hierarchicalization of London, the separation of
the city into moral and immoral working-classes. To understand him, therefore, it
is better to begin with a picture of him and Mary in 1892, together seeing “The
Pauper” (as they called the Poverty series), through proof and press.537 His writing
is sometimes frustrating to read, the huge black curves of his letters rendering
them almost illegible and making them look as if they were written with chalk on
532
Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations 136.
Tozer, B 190: 15.
534
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 27.
535
O’Day and Englander’s Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry also notes Argyle’s papers at Toynbee
Hall. One of them – “On the Limits of Municipal Enterprise” – was delivered in April, 1898. 13,
n. 44. Argyle is also noted for his work with David Schloss on the Boot and Shoe industry, in
which he demonstrated himself to be a “practised interviewer.” 94-95.
536
Ibid.
537
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 11.
533
200
a chalkboard. One wonders if Booth and his colleagues forced him to hire a
secretary to rewrite his inteviews, because from May 1897, Argyle’s writing
becomes clear, legible and obviously not of his own hand.538 His interviews in the
Religious Influences series were most often with authorities in local government,
his writing often predominating in the Survey’s eight Local Government
notebooks. His comments, however, in the Religious Influences Series, once
again let us inside a Booth Man’s head. Demonstrating Booth’s concern that
public and private relief authorities were fostering the moral health of their
recipients, Argyle can be seen interviewing the Clerk of the Stepney Guardians,
S.A. Lewis, in late May 1897, telling him about the dilemma of distributing free
dinners through the Princess of Wales Fund:
His Board and he himself think the affair injudicious, and that the money
would be better spent in permanently benefiting a small number, but as the
matter is to be carried through they were trying to arrange it as wisely as
possible. Their institution is, so far as is possible, to distribute the material
for the dinners to the very poor in their homes, and only to provide for the
homeless in a public way. A general public spread to which the loafers
were invited would keep away the genuine respectable poor, and perhaps
those who really were most in need.539
That Argyle was fluent in such language was clear in his interest in the
suggestion, by the Clerk of the Poplar Guardians, Fred Butler, that the “pauper
taint” (the moral disease of the undeserving so prominent in Booth’s description
of Class B) only affected the children of paupers slightly, and did not “stand in the
way of their advancement in life.”540 By the time Argyle reached the closing days
of the survey, he spoke like an expert. Of the Camberwell Provident Dispensary,
Argyle’s brief judgment (signing it with his initials) was that “it has all the
cadging air of a charitable institution! J.A.”541
These were the men that Booth unleashed on unsuspecting church, chapel
and mission staffs across the metropolis. As adept in their peculiarly moral
science as their “chief,” they knew that one’s religious influence had very much to
538
See Mills interview, B 173: 180.
Lewis, B 181: 67-69.
540
Butler, B 181: 127.
541
Camberwell Provident Society, B 309: 1.
539
201
do with producing the morally disciplined, and at the same time disciplining
(what L.T. Hobhouse called) the “morally uncontrolled.” Christianity was
ostensibly a religion of self-sacrifice, and at the end of the century (as at the
beginning) ministers were depended upon to instil a spirit of thrift in working
people, even if this caused them pain. In 1897, as the interviews of the Religious
Influences series began, Booth and his men wanted to know if the Christian
ministers were accomplishing this task, if they were “scientific” enough to follow
Booth’s moral guidelines (graphically illustrated in his maps and statistically
detailed in his classification of London workers). The religious and scientific
“accomplishment” of these holy men will be the subject of Part II.
Part II. The London Churchmen
Chapter 4. “Ordinary Mortals”:
History and Holy Men
1. Introduction
One of the Booth Team’s South London snapshots of a Christian minister
in the vestry of his Church – in this case an Anglican clergyman – was W.H.
Hornby Steer, Vicar of St. Phillip’s, Kennington Road, in Lambeth. Aves’s
202
picture of Rev. Steer 6 July 1899, was vivid and unembellished. It was a simple
depiction of a holy man freshly immersed in the dirt and sweat of churchwork in a
South London neighbourhood.
On arrival I found Mr. Steer just finishing a Baptism Service, and my first
sight of him was as he left the font and walked slowly up the central aisle
to the Chancel on his way to the Vestry, the impression given being that of
a tall man with a good profile, strong in cut-line, clean shaven…a
dignified ecclesiastic. When I was shown into the Vestry a few minutes
afterwards the surplice had been thrown on one side, the cassock was half
unbuttoned, and, still with a good strong face of his own, he was just an
ordinary mortal sweltering, like everybody else on that hot July afternoon.
We began to talk, but one of the women who had brought her children to
be baptised was still waiting, and bethinking himself that our conversation
might last some little time, he asked if I would excuse him as the woman
was waiting to be churched. Of course I agreed, and on went the surplice
again; the man vanished (or was obscured) the cleric reappeared; and a
moment afterwards I could hear the words, the reading of which is
apparently valued so much as a safeguard [among working people] against
a miscarriage next time. In two or three minutes he was back again, an
ordinary, hot, untidy man. His age is about 32; he has only been in the
parish for about a year, and has made the plunge into it from the wealth of
S. Jude’s, S. Kensington. He looked a little harassed by his new
responsibilities, but appears to welcome them on the whole, excepting the
worry of raising funds.542
I would wish to trap Rev. Steer in this historical moment, as simply a man,
“an ordinary mortal, sweltering, like everybody else on that hot July afternoon” in
1899. This allows us, as with Charles Booth, to start fresh in our analysis of what
precisely made Steer, as well as his Nonconformist and Roman Catholic
colleagues, tick during this period. We have stamped him, much like Booth, with
so much presentism – confidence, compassion – as to erase the cultural context in
which he lived.
Even the basic facts, as provided by scholars like D.B. McIlheney, Jeffrey
Cox, and Edward Norman, bear our contemporary mark. The facts are, very
simply, that Christian ministers of all denominations adopted a new, generous,
social and philanthropic approach to their urban parish work after 1850. Most
scholars, moreover, Alan Bartlett, Hugh McLeod, and Booth historians Rosemay
542
Steer, B 272: 129-131.
203
O’Day and David Englander, have added that the generous new approach these
ministers took was one of which Charles Booth and his Religious Influences
‘Team’ were sceptical.
Appealing to their new “social” approaches, writes Hugh McLeod, all
Christian denominations alike “found themselves sooner or later providing food
or clothing, or other kinds of material help [to the poor].”543 From the 1850s the
Anglican Church provided an example clergymen of all denominations would
follow by late century. Charles Kemble’s Suggestive Hints on Parochial
Machinery (1859), notes Jeffrey Cox, set out as the object of all Anglican
clergymen the diffusion of “Christian influence through all classes”: the “moral
improvement” of society through the institution of new social functions for the
Church.544 Following Kemble’s instructions the Churches created a battery of
church auxiliaries responsible for poor relief, thrift societies, temperance societies
(or Bands of Hope), medical services, education, clubs, recreation and
entertainment.
Most historians agree that the introduction of these institutions signaled a
change of attitudes among London churchmen. “It is impossible,” Cox writes in
his study of turn-of-the-century South London,
to identify one motive which outweighs the other motives for collective
action in this case. There was guilt, certainly, and fear and compassion,
but also piety. Late Victorian churchgoers heard a lot about the Parable of
the Good Samaritan. Evangelicals wanted to save souls, but almost all of
Lambeth’s Christians wanted to do something for their fellow man. Large
numbers of ordinary people in churches and chapels rejected the theory
behind the Victorian Poor Law – that those who cannot make it go to the
workhouse – and those who did not reject it were repeatedly told that they
should. Social control was one, but not the only function of religious
philanthropy and liberal out-relief by the Guardians did not usually entail
the rejection of the need to distinguish, as a matter of policy, between the
deserving and undeserving poor. But by 1900 some religious
philanthropists, usually liberal Nonconformists, were strenuously urging
upon their hearers the evil consequences of that distinction.
543
Ibid., 143-144.
Kemble’s instructions were to “diffuse Christian influence through all classes; to present
Christianity under its practical aspect; to gather out God’s people; to effect a moral improvement
in society; to edify God’s church.” Quoted in Cox, The English Churches 50.
544
204
“Both Christian compassion and Christian universalism,” for Cox, combined
thereafter “to produce the attitude behind much of Britain’s welfare state
legislation in the twentieth century – that everyone should be taken care of with
dignity.” Christianity now demanded “the protection of the weak” – it was now
“the spirit of kindness which does not break the bruised reed.”545
A number of historians of Christian social work have interpreted
contemporary conceptions of Christian compassion as compatible, generallyspeaking, with the spirit of generosity. Leonard Cowie, for example, cites Canon
Samuel Barnett’s 1897 pledge to “trust all men more” and to “give to the poorest
more responsibility,” and argues that “the Barnetts, rather than Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, might be considered the founders of the modern welfare state.”
This is echoed by D.B. McIlheney and Jeffrey Cox. Both Cox and Hugh McLeod
agree that churchmen’s efforts “made a small, but none the less significant
contribution to alleviating poverty” – a “genuine expression of Christian concern”
until “central and local government took over most of the churches’ functions in
education and charity.” Prominent Christian Socialists such as Stewart Headlam
are discussed as pioneers of social care. Edward Norman in a discussion of
Headlam’s Christ-centered theology emphasizes how – in a more materialistic
sense and in opposition to contemporary material conditions – thinking
surrounding Christ’s miracles “prefigured social welfare.” McLeod notes how
dissertations such as that of Alan Bartlett “went even further in correcting
[Charles] Booth’s negative evaluation” of church work, stressing “how much
church-based health care, youth clubs, savings banks, and so on, met real human
needs and how much these efforts were motivated by an admirable
humanitarianism.”546
545
Cox, 89.
Leonard Cowie, “Recalling 2 True Founders of the Welfare State,” Church Times (15
December, 1972): 11. McIlheney’s work was based on his 1977 Princeton University dissertation
of the same name (“A Gentleman in Every Slum,” (PhD Thesis, Princeton University, 1977). D.B.
McIlheney, A Gentleman in Every Slum (Allison Park: Pickwick Publications, 1988), 48; Cox,
The English Churches; Hugh McLeod, “Working-class,” 269-70; Edward Norman, The Victorian
Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 108. Although he does not,
in the end, challenge Norman’s generally optimistic thesis, Gerald Parsons was clearly surprised
that, to Norman, Christian Socialist thinkers from Maurice to Hugh Price Hughes, to B.F. Westcott
“are rightly to be regarded as prophetic voices, calling the church of their day to a reappraisal of
546
205
Clearly we can see here a propensity among historians to give positive
assessments of church auxiliary activity. All of those mentioned above, with the
exception of McIlheney, have studied the Booth Archive, yet their optimism
about the humanitarianism behind auxiliary activity doggedly persists. One of the
archive’s earlier scholars, Rosemary O’Day, wrote how, in the face of “practical”
urban problems of Christian ministry, the “ministers concerned drew upon their
personal qualities of human understanding, tolerance and compassion, together
with a certain pragmatism.” But what would this “compassion” mean in turn-ofthe-century terms? More recently, S. C. Williams has suggested that South
London holy men transcended their middle-class values and contributed prayer as
well as charity to strengthen a (vaguely defined) cockney “mutuality and
communality” in South London’s working-class neighbourhoods. Ministers
contributed to a (equally ill-defined) “communal [working-class] life” which was
composed “not only of indigenous institutions such as the pub and the music hall,
but also a series of religious institutions and agencies which were no less
integrated with communal life.” In Williams’ rather acontextual South London,
indeed: “The goodness or holiness of the religious man was determined above all
by his care of the poor and his neighbourliness within the community.”547
This sounds an awful lot like the Simeys in 1960, in their discussion of
Charles Booth. The Simeys’ range of universalisms, embodied in words like
“public,” “society,” “social” and “citizenship” (as well as mentions of Charles
Booth’s vaguely expressed “new optimism”), are matched here by the Christian
ministers’ “social” approach, their “Christian compassion,” “their Christian
universalism,” their “humanitarianism,” O’Day’s “human understanding,” and
William’s “goodness” and “holiness.” Do these words truly tell us the anxieties
and motivations of the sweaty and sweltering Rev. Hornby Steer above? Do they
tell us where his convictions came from? Unless “Christian compassion” counts
its stance on contemporary social issues.” Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” in Parsons
ed., Religion in Victorian Britain 41; Alan Bartlett, “The Church in Bermondsey, 1880-1939”
(Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1987).
547
Rosemary O’Day, “The Men from the Ministry,” in Gerald Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian
Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 275-276; Williams, Religious Belief
and Popular Culture 100, 53, 44, 110-111.
206
as an answer, they do not. Steer, like his Nonconformist and Roman Catholic
colleagues, has been wallpapered with sufficient essentialisms to almost remove
his personality from view.
The clergy of all denominations, we must recognize, were simply late
Victorian men. They were men engaged in a totally unregulated profession
requiring training in practical social work. Rosemary O’Day helpfully notes that
while many clergy were highly educated men, they were not educated to minister
to the practical problems facing the urban and often poor parishes to which they
given charge.548 Leaving aside the range of abuses an unsupervised, untrained
vicar, pastor, minister, priest, or missioner was capable of committing (and indeed
inevitably committed without ever leaving a trace for the historian), we can
nevertheless point out that the Booth men were to encounter a wide range of
defective ministers in their interviews, and that this would affect the way they
appraised their moralizing, civilizing and spiritualizing abilities. As we will see
later, many if not most clergymen would surprise and impress the Booth Men
with their pseudo-scientific ability in parish social work – a field in which more
and more clergymen were interested from mid-century, and which began (as we
saw in Part 1) in such famous examples as Thomas Chalmers’ St. John’s parish, in
Glasgow. For the moment, however, we should focus on those who buckled in the
face of the physical rigours Christian social workers were required to overcome at
this time. For these physical reasons, but also for more moral and theological
ones, many South London clergy would fall short of the Booth team’s
expectations.
However Booth would disapprove of ministers’ philanthropy, we must
treat them as we treated Booth. They were men with powerful insecurities who
were forced, in this period, to seek a source of conviction. This section, without
appealing to contemporary essentialism, will attempt to locate the specific sources
within which they found it.
2. Insecure ministers
548
O’Day, “Men from the Ministry.”
207
In a world before social workers were trained in the ways of universal
compassion (often by the British government), the Christian minister one found in
charge of a parish or neighbourhood was not infrequently too old, or too sick, to
fulfil the practical duties of urban social work. Even when they were physically
able, the moral disorder of poor working-class communities, and the sense of selfdoubt that the Christian churches could do anything to re-moralize these
communities, combined – in a time when cultural trends threatened the authority
of holy men – to increase the anxiety of Christian ministers to the point that their
mental stability was threatened.
Booth’s men found ministers too old and too sick to carry out their work.
Ernest Aves’ initial estimation of R.C. Kirkpatrick of St. Augustine’s, Kilburn
(Marylebone), was doubtlessly affected by the man’s age: “Mr. Kirkpatrick
proved to be an old gentleman of 76, tall, bearded, rather dignified in impression
and quite so in manner, courteous. Within a year or so he has suffered from severe
illness, and it is perhaps through a legacy of this that his hands shake, and that the
impression is given at first of even an older man than he is.”549 Aves found the
same decrepitude in Rev. Arthur Woods of Christ Church, Somers Town, a parish
quickly “being eaten up by railway extensions.” Speaking of Woods in an article
for Parsons’ collection on Religion in Victorian Britain, David Englander harshly
noted: “Wimps better suited to pleasant curacies in eligible situations, continued
to be presented to tough inner city parishes for which they were quite unfitted.”
But Woods was not a wimp. He was too old for his job. Aves referred to him as
“cadaverous.”550
If there were elderly vicars, there were elderly curates. At St. George’s
parish in Blackheath Henry Kendall was one example. “Mr. K proved to be that
probably common species among curates, an elderly failure. His appearance
549
Kirkpatrick, B 219: 143.
Englander, “The Word and the World,” in Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain 34;
Woods, B 215: 79. One South London minister, Rev. Leary of St. Philips, was described as bent
with age, “becoming decrepit,” and rather beyond work. B 281 Leary p. 1. In East London another
example was St. Mark’s Rev. Davenport in Whitechapel. He was “in ill health and ought probably
to be put on the retired list.” Davenport, B 222: 79. Rev. Loveridge of Bethnal Green was “an old
man of about 70 getting rather toothless and deaf and blind in one eye.” Loveridge, B 228: 155.
550
208
would form an admirable make up for the rascally attourney in an Adelphi
melodrama: probably he looks belie him but at the last he is a poor creature.”
There were never more than thirty adults at the church’s evening service and Aves
could get little parish information from a man who was too old to walk through
his own neighbourhood (“K’s opinions on general questions,” Aves wrote, “were
of no value”).551
Predictably, the Booth men were most concerned that age might be
accompanied by a softening of the instinct to careful charity. Arthur Baxter
alluded (under the subtitle “Charitable Relief”) to as much, when he interviewed
Congregational minister Rev. J. Ellis: “Give a little through visitors, but not
much. Mr. E. professes to believe in the principles of the C.O.S. but I fancy he is
a kind hearted old man who is rather easily imposed on. He says that dozens of
cadgers from the district come to his house in Highbury Park.”552
Often the Booth men had mercy on elderly ministers. Even from the hardnosed Ernest Aves, only pathos could be reserved for the plight of Rev. G. Barnes
of St. Barnabas, Bethnal Green. For the historian Barnes provides an instance, not
uncommon among elderly ministers, of a man’s physical and financial exhaustion.
Speaking to Aves in early February 1898, he was let to plead his case:
On money matters he said that the stipend was ₤200. Of this he had never
been able to reserve more than ₤100 for himself, and really it would
appear that this was an over-estimate. When he came he had ₤3000 of his
own and this was gradually spent. By 1893 it had gone, and he knew that
when it had all been expended he would have to go too. Without some
reserve to carry on the work at all “I have felt like a man on a rock, with
the tide rising around me, and the knowledge that sooner or later, I should
be swept off.” However, in 1893, a relative left a small legacy and by this
means he has been able to stay on.
551
Kendall, B 287: 87, 93, 95.
Ellis, B 195: 113. Baxter’s description of the Ellis, a minister, was odd: “Mr. Ellis is a man of
60 or over: plain but with a rugged honest face surrounded by a gray Newgate fringe. Quite rough
and uncultured; in appearance manner and speech just like the typical farmer.” (111) It was
common to speak of older ministers like this, however. Baptist Missioner Edward Smith in
Bethnal Green spoke of the elderly Rev. Loveridge (see footnote above) as “a dear old gentleman
but with more heart than head, whom cadgers of all kinds marked out as their prey.” Smith, B 229:
189.
552
209
Aves, in this instance, could not fault the man. “Mr. Barnes,” he said, “is a poor
and good man unfitted, perhaps by temperament, certainly by his present
physique, for his present post.” Knowing that Barnes’ words would reach his
editor-in-chief, Charles Booth, moreover, he allowed Barnes to make an
additional plea. Urban parishes, Barnes said, meant that the work of the
clergyman was more challenging than ever, and too much for old men. “The
districts are often new;” Barnes began, “the work is new; and requires new efforts
of an evangelistic kind. Old men cannot undertake this. Their physical weakness
alone would make it impossible.” Barnes put it flatly to Aves: “I hope Mr. Booth
will tell the Bishop of London to portion off in some decent way the old
incumbents.”553
If the Booth men infrequently faced old men, more often they interviewed
sick men and men debilitated by previous illnesses. A man of about seventy, one
Bethnal Green vicar (E.P. Green) was “getting very feeble, and owing evidently
to a paralytic affection, speaking slowly, indistinctly, and with some difficulty.”
Rather unfairly, for this was his first meeting with Green, Baxter judged him an
incompetent, “old-fashioned Anglican”: “Even when he had health and vigour,”
wrote Baxter, “Mr. Green I imagine was never active: now at all counts the whole
thing is asleep.”554
Green’s neighbour at Victoria Park Wesleyan, Rev. Arthur E. Gregory,
was only forty, with “bright eyes” and decided, rapid speech, but “evidently a
keen active and cultured man” in Arkell’s words (though he had only met him
once). Nevertheless, church work had wore him down and left him bedridden: “I
found Mr. Gregory confined to his bedroom, suffering from a bad cold. He had
been unwell but kept at his work until he was forced to keep [to] his room.
553
Barnes, B 182: 159-161, 171-173. Through one oversight or another Barnes superiors answered
his plea with precisely the opposite of what he wanted, likely a quiet country parish far from
London. Aves wrote as a conclusion: “It was rather startling to be told that this gentle and retiring
man, whom it appeared ought to be ministering to some quiet country village and freed from the
pressure of all monetary cares and the strain of urban life, has just been pressed by the Bishop of
London to succeed Ingram as Rural Dean of Spitalfields.” (173) A sympathetic neighbour, Rev.
Harris of St. George’s in the East, said Barnes would be a good parson in a parish demanding less
of him. Barnes was “an excellent man in the wrong place now.” Harris, B 222: 163.
554
Green, B 182: 79, 97.
210
Evidently he did not believe in being idle. He was seated in an easy chair with a
small table by his side cumbered with several books and on the bed lay a bundle
of proofs.”555
Influenza also seemed to run the rounds of Christian ministers. Over lunch
(and beers!) with two Roman Catholics priests (in Kensal New Town), Charles
Booth sized up the men with the Booth Team’s characteristic (and wholly
subjective) character-typing,556 noting that illness, and overwork had recently
brought social work to a halt: “They reach their own people I suppose but perhaps
their work outruns them and they have both suffered from influenza lately.”
Likewise, Bermondsey vicar Rev. J. Ainsworth, had just recovered from the
illness, which, striking him at sixty-two, had kept him bedridden for several
weeks: “Mr. A,” wrote Baxter, “was downstairs to-day for the first time after
three weeks of influenza, and seemed at first scarcely fit for an interview.
However he livened up, and eventually kept me for two hours, but he was often so
long winded on comparatively unimportant points that I came away with still
rather a hazy idea as to what is doing here.”557
Near-constant parish visiting work could not always have made for strong
immune systems among London’s Christian ministers. From the bottom of the
Christian hierarchy (Nonconformist working-class missioners, London City
Missioners) to the richest Anglicans, men prided themselves on “getting round
their districts” or parishes (with the help of staff and volunteers) every six weeks,
three months, or six months, depending on the size of their 10 to 20,000-person
parishes.558 Salvation Army officers particularly knew this strain, and often
555
Gregory, B 183: 209.
The older Father Green was “getting on in years,” “not very much of a Priest – “More of a
scholar though in spite of this and all the books I should doubt his being one – a very gentle quiet
manner – A man easy to get on with – no maker of enemies. I should think a slow builder up in
what he does”; while the younger Father Baker was “a big rubicund school boy of a man. Not
looking the very least a priest. More like a minor official. Both men are very simple and direct.”
(71-73)
557
Green and Baker, B 262: 175; Ainsworth, B 275: 111.
558
I am simplifying somewhat here. District Visiting staffs in Anglican and Nonconformist
churches could be as small as a single minister, but could reach as many as twenty-five or thirty
visitors, and excepting the (no more than three to five) clergy these were typically women. All
worked a very regular round and when statistics of yearly visits were published, they were always
in the thousands.
556
211
looked weak, thin, and sickly in their interviews. Weak immune systems were
more liable to succumb to whatever plagues were going round working-class
neighbourhood at the time, diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria and
scarlet fever. Hackney Wick Captain (Miss) Smith (as Arkell called her),
described how she had only recently visited a lodger at her Sgt. Major’s house
who had scarlet fever, and that yesterday one of her cadets had gone and
“scrubbed a woman’s rooms. It took her three hours. The woman was ill and her
husband was suffering with bronchitis.” When Arkell met Captain George Fowler
in Limehouse (18 June 1897), he was already “thin and wiry” and devoting
eighteen hours a week to district visiting. Redeployed in Mare Street, South
Hackney, the Captain looked worse (on 23 September 1897): “Since we met, the
captain has had an illness and a three weeks leave to recruit. He still bears some
trace of the illness, being thinner than before.” Captain (Miss) Such in Stepney
had a face that was “pinched and dark rings around her eyes told of exhausted
physical powers.” By mid-1899, Arkell was starting to see an army “type.”
Adjutant T.H. Christmas of the Notting Hill Corps was “[a] lean, wiry man of 40
to 45,” wrote Arkell, “with not an ounce of superfluous fat and a mind as active as
his body, Adj Christmas represents a type not uncommon in the S. Army.”559
Constant physical strain in a poor urban environment contributed to a
cumulative mental and bodily stress as one grew older, and this meant that
ministers’ lives were always liable to sudden ends. This could mean, at the least, a
temporary end to one’s professional life. Rev. Peter Williams described how his
predecessor at Lower Clapton Congregational Chapel “had filled his church but
his health had failed and the congregation fell to pieces – down to ¼ of what it
had been.” Miss Davis of the Hackney and Homerton COS said the same of St.
John’s Rev. Gardiner, who “had suffered a slight stroke of paralysis and is
physically quite unfit for the work. He never answers letters and is very difficult
to see.” Likewise, attacks of illness, brought on by long years of social work
could contribute to one’s outright end. Borough London City Missionary James
559
Captain (Miss) Smith, B 190: 41; Captain Fowler, B 171: 50; Captain Fowler, B 190: 48;
Captain (Miss) Such, B 223: 53; Adjutant Christmas, B 262: 235.
212
Caine told Arkell that St. George’s Presbyterian Church did not visit, only leaving
religious tracts in one street of the district. It was because “Dr. Raitt the minister
has gone – had [a] softening of the brain.”560
Surrounded by poor people who were always sick, it was (personallyspeaking) difficult enough for ministers to bear the ever-present threat of illness
and possible death. But often there were others – family – at stake for the minister
to the urban poor, and here we cross into more psychological territory. Many
Christian social workers would be rendered unfit for their work by age and illness.
More still would question their convictions when family members (some of them
brought into slum areas) died from diseases from which they might have been
spared in a London suburb. Tuberculosis was rampant and particularly dangerous.
“Constantly meeting cases of consumption,” said a South London Bible Christian
minister. “A scourge in this locality.” The old, half-deaf and portly, London City
Missionary of Greenwich, John Saberton, had lived seventy-five years as a
missioner to the poor only to see his son die from just this disease. He was telling
Duckworth how he had, throughout his life, “collected religious books regularly
and has a library of several hundred volumes.” He wanted Duckworth to see
them. “He showed them proudly ‘and I have as many more upstairs and have read
them all.’” Duckworth thought Saberton “a kindly old man and must be a good
influence,” but as he was leaving Saberton’s last words to him were: “My son
John was just such another as you; he died last week in this room of
consumption.”561
The Booth men found that hard, often anxious work, took its toll on more
than the body. The moral disorder of the metropolis – a combination of moral and
social factors –affected Christian ministers’ minds. London’s poor, urban
environment was an indignity and a shock to educated, upper-class men of God.
For ministers, the city’s ever-present examples of public intoxication, public sex
and violence were also symptomatic of their own moral impotence. Perceptions
here mattered more than facts, and the statements and experiences of South
560
561
Williams, B 190: 112; Davis, B 188: 7; Caine, B 270: 129.
Rounsefell, B 270: 39; Saberton, B 286: 225.
213
London ministers tell us they perceived that their authority had, in many cases,
been rather seriously undermined in generally poor, working-class communities.
Leaving Oxford, or following their conversion and commitment to some form of
Christian ministry (for the route to Christian ministry varied considerably) these
men believed they had the most sacred calling of all. Yet often they were faced
with their own impotence in spreading gospels, elevating communities and raising
characters. And purposelessness easily led to despair.
In addition to crises of professional and spiritual legitimacy as holy men,
life for the Christian minister in 1897 was full of inner struggles. As Richard
Dellamora suggests, the masculinity of all of these men had been violently thrown
into question at almost precisely the moment the Booth team reached their doors.
As Aves or Baxter arrived in their vestries, or ventured up the stairs of their
backalley missions, they were armed with the toughest of questions (does your
ministry have influence, does your religion “touch the people”?). They asked
them, moreover, at a moment when every man in London faced an era seeing the
liberation of a female elite, working-class emancipation, and homosexual
scandal.562 Most ministers of Christian religion (simply because of who they were
and what they represented) were engaged in a counterattack against feelings of
class, gender and sexual disorder. As Dellamora, Robin Gilmour and Norman
Vance have noted, middle-class ministers responded with a reaffirmation of their
authority as manly holy “men.”563 Yet they were not the only ones in this
counterattack. Lower-middle and working-class ministers asserted their
competence and equality with these “gentlemen” – preaching the same masculine,
even combative Gospel of Improvement with the same fervency.
Already dealing with this fluctuating masculine baseline, it was difficult
and despairing for distinguished, Christian-serious and self-important ministers to
subject themselves daily to the vulgarities of working-class life. In the case of one
562
Dellamora, Masculine Desire esp. ch. 10 “Homosexual Scandal and Compulsory
Heterosexuality in the 1890s,” pp. 199-219. Dellamora helpfully suggests that we focus on the
insecurity and defensiveness of the gentleman in this decade.
563
For the late Victorian “crisis of the gentleman,” see Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the
Victorian Novel (London: George Allen, 1981). For the newly assertive and “manly” clergymen
of late century, see Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian
Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
214
Lambeth Baptist, this meant listening to workmen – too hung over to attend
services on Sunday – provide their minister with casual anecdotes of how
precisely it was they “got drunk.” One can only imagine the voice of Lambeth’s
William Williams – a fifty-year old preacher who had watched his South London
neighbourhood, in recent decades, turn from middle to working-class – giving his
best imitation of a “working man’s explanation” to George Arkell: “We have a
pint of beer and then two of rum; then another fellow asks you to have a
whiskey.” One can only imagine Bethnal Green Wesleyan Rev. Gregory
explaining to Arkell how “Fear of burglary keeps the better people at home in the
evening. Mentioned a family living in the same road as himself. They started to
go to church but meeting friends returned home to find burglars at work in the
house.”564
In addition to old or sick ministers, therefore, the Booth men also found a
group of Christian ministers in the late 90s whose social authority was under
attack. The tragedy of this loss of status, indeed, would be comic if it had not had
such a grievous effect on minister’s self-esteem and psychological stability. One
Greenwich vicar (in an entirely labouring class parish) said that in visiting his
reception was “nearly always friendly” – a judgment he based on the awkward
premise that a working-class woman had “only once” told him, at the doorstep,
“‘to go to Hell.’” In one London City Missionary’s account, the words were only
somewhat less hurtful: “The people receive him very well and he has very few
rebuffs. Occasionally ‘Don’t want to see you to-day, Governor.’” And there were
also the rather pathetic words of the emaciated Captain Fowler, now stationed in
Hackney, who told Arkell:
“People receive us very decently.” If it were not for the ignorance of the
children they would be alright. The mannishness and cheek of them is
awful. In the streets they will gather round or stand some distance off
shouting “hallelujah” or singing at the top of their voices. Their language
is very bad – disgusting. Think that some of them know the meaning of
the words they use. At the Hall they have trouble to keep the children
off the doorstep. Try to keep them down a little and they don’t like it. To
show the class of children, he said that he saw two girls about 12 years old
standing on their heads along with some other children. They get more
564
Williams, B 270: 13; Gregory, B 229: 33.
215
insults from the children than from any others. Notwithstanding this, he
said that he liked the children’s meetings.
Fowler’s stiff upper lip in the face of abusive children, however, could only hold
for so long. “Captain Fowler likes the prospects here,” wrote Arkell. “‘Such a
lovely place for work.’ With the exception of visitation, he welcomes his work. It
is hard when the people show that they do not want to receive you.”565
One can divide ministers’ fairly constant round of indignities into two
areas (each mingling with the other): anxieties revolving around popular lack of
respect, coupled with the (generally shocking) social experience of poor urban
London; and anxieties that revolved around a loss of faith in the moralizing power
of the church and its representatives. The first almost certainly started with the
persistent and public drinking to intoxication one found in poor neighbourhoods.
One Lambeth vicar was momentarily pleased when a Kennington working man
told him that he had decided not to join a men’s drinking club – an institution
hated by clergymen across the metropolis, particularly so by those in North
London.566 The reason for the man’s disavowal of the club, however, was rather
deflating: “I find it difficult enough to keep sober on six days in the week!”567
Jarring for many clergymen was the simple quantity of alcohol consumed
by working men and (more shockingly) working women in the metropolis. They
seemed to dwell in a boozy haze disrupting irrevocably any possibility of
maintaining, or being taught, “decent” domestic morals. One London City
Missionary, in his 1897-8 Mission Report, straightforwardly put his worst cases
under the title “SOME CASES – The Bible was no good to them”:
In January I visited Mr. M. ______ in his illness. In the family there are
father, mother, and three children. Not a single member of his family
could read a word. They had no bible, and had not been in a place of
worship for many years. The man was very ill in the last stage of
consumption, which had been accelerated by hard drinking. I read and
565
Hills, B 287: 107; Conners, B 270: 189; Captain Fowler, B 190: 51-52. Rotherhithe’s Captain
Parris must have kept a stiff upper lip when he told Arkell: “He visits constantly in the district,
taking some streets consecutively. Has only had the door banged in his face twice, although a
good many have said they are catholics or go to church.” 280: 237-241.
566
See Bird, 262: 189.
567
Bromfield, B 272: 111.
216
prayed with him and pointed him to the glorious Cross. He died rejoicing
in Jesus. His wife neglected him, while she went about drinking with her
friends. A christian woman in the same house attended to many of his
wants.
Two days before his death, I visited him. I found, in the room where the
dying man lay, his wife and six other friends with three quarts of beer,
having as she put it, “A last good jollification with poor Will.”
No one was present when he died but his drunken wife came in and found
him half in bed and half out with his head on a chair – dead.
I know that he is in heaven, for his was true repentance.568
Another LCM in East Dulwich poured out his heart to Duckworth, fearing for
children “born drunk.”
Drink ‘the worst curse of all’ Women when bad are worse than men and
can be seen on any Monday in the public houses. For the class above the
poor the grocers’ license has been the worst influence. ‘Of course I know
cases in plenty where it is put down as grocery.’
‘Then look at the children sipping.’ He w[oul]d forbid by law their
fetching or being taken there by their mothers.
The taste is inherited. Was told the other day by a mother of a baby who
had always fretted until a neighbouring mother had suggested a drop of
gin to send it to sleep. The mother said it had been a diff’t child ever since
so good tempered and quiet [sic]. “The reason was that its inherited
craving had been satisfied.” Mr. S. knows four generations of drunkards in
one family –he spoke of children ‘who are born drunk.’569
Ministers found themselves in bizarre positions trying to negotiate their Christian
message of self-sacrifice amidst the haze of a drug culture. An LCM in
Rotherhithe, hoping he might be able to convert intoxicated pub-goers on their
way home, set up a kind of aid station in his mission (see Part IV), where drunks
(many of them working women) could vomit in his foyer, and be attended by
mission workers armed with saw-dust and soda water.
Drinking, for many, prevented the possibility of early rising on Sundays,
and ministers could watch each step of the process of intoxication – from
568
Friar St. Mission Hall (London City Mission), 56, Friar Street, Borough, S.E. The Annual
Report For the Year ending 1897-8. 11-12. This example reminds us of the near-constant death,
from a variety of sources, which ministers would have to confront in an atmosphere of absolute
poverty. A Bethnal Green Congregationalist, “Mentioned a case in Derbyshire Street of a family
living in one room. A dead child was in the room another child lying ill and the mother also ill.
Father had got work and was out.” Davies, B 229: 97.
569
Saberton, B 286: 221-223.
217
Saturday afternoon, to Sunday morning – from the vantage point of their South
London residences. Some of them would hide behind venetian blinds to count
how many men, women and children bought beer Saturday afternoon and
evening. Another Borough LCM spoke of: “Much noise in the streets and a good
deal of drink. On Sunday afternoon, there is a rush from almost every house for
cans of beer.” As if living amongst latter-day college residences, a cacophony of
hollering, crashes, shouts, shrieks and vulgar laughter followed until two or three
in the morning. One Anglican emphasized “the barrier to religious observances
that was created by the late hours habitually kept on Saturday night. The whole
place is all agog at midnight, and just as still and sleepy the next morning.”
Another in Bethnal Green emphasized of his own impotence in the face of loud
pubs nearby:
Columbia St. in front of the Church and Vicarage has two Public Houses
at each end and is the great thoroughfare from Shoreditch to Hackney
Road: at night the noise and language are unbearable and loathsome. Mr.
F. has several times had to get out of bed and go for the police whom he
has found talking to one of the publicans at the corner.
A Roman Catholic said what all these ministers were thinking. Nothing could
block the practice of religion more effectively than drinking did: “boozing on a
Saturday night is the most fatal thing.”570
Worst of all for these men of God, working people brought their Victorian
“drugs” into the sanctified walls of the church and its services. Whatever the
motives of the intoxicated working men and women, themselves, it was
something of a disappointment for Notting Hill’s Adjutant Christmas to see his
Hall, “On Sunday afternoon, get full of ‘boosers.’ The public houses turn out at
that time and the people turn into the Hall, many of them under the influence of
drink.” In South London the possibility increased simply as a result of the number
of pubs there were to turn out of, one Waterloo Road Bible Christian minister
citing forty-seven within four-hundred yards. An East Dulwich vicar who
described his people as two-thirds “unemployed” said that, at meetings of his
church workers, members of the staff were sometimes tipsy. “Even church
570
Conners, B 270: 189; Weigall, B 272: 93; Fawcett, B 228: 151; Newton, B 270: 169.
218
workers attend meetings, not drunk, but excited,” he said. “The idea of hospitality
here is ‘to produce the whisky bottle.’”571
Another shock to middle-class sensibilities, and if not that, then at least an
indignity to men trying to preach a religion of sexual repression (or “purity”) was
poorer London’s affront to “respectable” (rather than bourgeois or proletarian)
sexual morals. Rev. Donaldson mentioned that “intercourse before marriage and
seduction are very rife. The large open space at their door leads to much
fornication.”572 There were the very commonly mentioned “early” or forced”
marriages, as one Anglican noted:
Forced marriages are almost universal, and are thought nothing of. The
respectable people (e.g. at least two of Mr. H.’s communicants) marry
about six months before the child is due, the less careful of appearances
just in time “to save the child.”
When Mr. Hills’ first child
was born eleven months after marriage, an old woman in the parish in
offering her congratulations said “You have been slow about it: my son’s
child was born two months after marriage:” she did not at all see the point
of the reply that this argued indecent haste.573
There was also the spectre of incest, a subject mentioned fairly frequently
amongst ministers, but for the historian, often difficult to tell from
unsubstantiated, sensational moralizing. “Case recently reported of a girl (13) who
gave birth to a child by her father,” said two Bethnal Green City Missionaries.
LCM James Caine, in one of the worst neighbourhoods of South London, told
Arkell: “As to morality two or three examples will suffice altho’ many could be
given. In one tenement a brother and sister are living as man and wife. They have
three children and their mother lives with them.” A Lambeth vicar was pleased to
tell Aves that the working-class families of his neighbourhood would not tolerate
such conduct. “There is much co-habitation,” he said, “and he told me of some
terrible cases of incest.”
571
Christmas, B 262: 239-241; Rounsefell, B 270: 39; Jennings, B 308: 33.
Donaldson, B 185: 209.
573
Hills, B 287: 111. In Bethnal Green two London City Missionaries (typically of a lower class
than clergymen and ministers) seemed less shocked by pregnancy before marriage. “Girls are
frequently in the family way when married,” they said. “When referring to this subject,” wrote
Arkell, “they mentioned the names of some dozen or more young women to each other, more to
ensure being right in their answer than to enlighten me.” Lockyer and Robins, B 229: 137.
572
219
In one case, where the man is a widower, he is living with his daughter,
and the latter has confessed the relationship. In another case, where the
wife was living, a daughter had a child by her father. In the latter case
however, public opinion was outraged; the effigy of the man was carried
about and held up to public scorn, and the family had to leave the
n’hood.574
As common as the complaint of early marriages were ministers’ frequent
hand-ringing over the powerful prevalence of the sex trade in central London. “At
an early period of our interview,” wrote Baxter, Rev. Asker of St. Andrew’s
Lambeth “began upon it, as anyone who lives in Stamford St. is sure to:”
he said it was worse than ever, the street swarming with brothels: asked as
to the work of the Free Church Council he said they certainly had closed
many houses and “done a lot of good”. He however thought there were
more women in the street than ever, and that they are more brazen and
persistent: he himself is frequently accosted. The brothels are many of the
perfect hells: shrieks and cries, ‘murder’ and so on, frequently are heard:
The house next to Mr. A’s was at one time opened as a brothel, but he
wrote to the landlord who cleared it.575
Asker’s neighbour, Rev. Bainbridge Bell said that “most striking feature” of his
parish was “the prostitution.” As they are today from Eastern Europe, women
were shanghaied abroad and transported to Britain, likely with promises of
employment, only to find themselves forced into the position of unwilling sextrade workers. “Stamford Street is the greatest centre of organized prostitution in
London,” Bainbridge-Bell told Baxter, “and York Road is not much better:”
in that part of Stamford St. which is in the parish only 5 houses are not
brothels, while of the Hotels and coffee shops which swarm in the
neighbourhood only three are not used as brothels (the York, the
Waterloo, and Savage’s are respectable) All the worst features of the
traffic seem to be prevalent here: the women are of an abnormally debased
type, robbery and violence is a constant accompaniment, bullies are
numerous, husbands are living on the prostitution of their wives, fathers
and mothers on that of their children, child prostitution is common, and so
574
Ibid; Caine, B 270: 123-125, Barraclough, B 270: 165.
Asker, B 269: 153-155. Asker felt particularly powerless to stop the trade, citing corruption (as
many did) among the police. “I am much disappointed with the police,” said Asker: “they will
take no steps against the curses of the parish, prostitution, drink and gambling. Mr. A “would not
say so publicly” but has no doubt they are squared by publicans, prostitutes and bookmakers.
Apart from this they avoid the rougher courts.” (151-153)
575
220
recently as two years ago one brothel had only girls under 12, numbers of
German girls are brought over from Hamburg for the trade and respectable
Germans are met at the docks and trapped into the brothels.576
For ministers in South London, the sex trade was something that went on
all around them, sexual acts often occurring just outside their doorsteps, and often
directly outside the walls of their churches. One Greenwich LCM was not certain
that open spaces were sites of prostitution, but he was sure of “a great deal of
immorality” nevertheless. “The open spaces just behind the Mission Hall used to
be the scene of disgusting sights at night: but the police have effected some
improvement.” Sometimes these ministers would have been right to see instances
of prostitution. Parks and open spaces, however, often attacked as another
instance of the sex trade, were often simply dark places in which the workingclass youth of South London could fool around. This nevertheless caused holy
men much moral anguish. One Greenwich Wesleyan decried “prostitution on the
Heath,” a place which had a “very evil reputation,” and added: “you cannot cross
it at night ‘without stumbling over the couples.’”577
From poor St. George the Martyr, as well from Deptford, came accounts
from Anglicans who seemed more confident of what they were witnessing, either
because it was on their daily walking route – “Prost[itution]. Very rife, numbers
of prostitutes of the lowest class come from the slums of Deptford, is an alley
from the Church to Laurie Grove, where Mr. K[ennedy]. frequently comes on
couples fornicating.” Or because it was outside their window:
Prostitution of the lowest kind is rife. Harrow St. is inhabited mainly by
women of the most degraded type, who use all the courts and alleys to ply
their trade in: there are often four or five couples in the court just behind
the church. Mr. S[omerville]. on returning from a bicycle ride some days
since had occasion to go through the court and found them fornicating in
broad daylight. The open stairs in the Dwellings are enormously used by
the women.578
576
Bainbridge-Bell, B 169: 19-21. Baxter retorted, as he often did, that “some sort of regulation”
might be the solution for the reduction of prostitutes on London streets. It was a reference,
recurring in the Anglican interviews, to what appears to be Arthur Baxter’s wish to bring back the
Contagious Diseases Acts. To my knowledge no historian refers to this fact. (21)
577
Matthews, B 286: 93; Hawkins, B 286: 51.
578
Kennedy, B 284: 45; Somerville, B 269: 37.
221
Ministers were often propositioned by sex-workers, and this would have
reminded them of two things: first, of the sexual or “moral” disorder they were
failing to combat in their own parishes; and second, that there were ministers in
the city who, however surreptitiously, were taking these workers up on their
offers. Constantly one reads of men (like those above) who were “accosted,”
“frequently happening upon,” and otherwise encountering people engaged in, or
offering, public sex. One Congregational minister, for example, noted: “Drink has
been worse since the opening of the new theatre, which has also brought a number
of prostitutes into the district. Sees many of them along the road from Notting Hill
Gate Station to Uxbridge Road. They have even accosted him altho’ he wears
clerical dress.” A Bethnal Green Congregationalists repeated his colleague’s
words: ““He has been surrounded by a number of women on leaving his chapel
and has frequently been accosted altho’ in clerical attire.”579
In a time when clergymen felt they were engaged in a kind of “manly,”
heterosexual counterattack against ungentlemanly, effeminate, womanly, and
homosexual countercultures, a great deal of anxiety was borne of their simple
proximity to public sex. In the case of one curate, indeed, this anxiety came in the
form of a dread, during the night, that there would be a knock at the door. The
vicar of All Saints’ Lambeth said “his own curate has taken, with his wife and
family, a house that has had a notoriously bad name for 40 years, with the result
that at first he was pestered all night by people coming and knocking and ringing
at the door.”580 Interviews with the Booth men became frightened confessions of
ministers shocked by a sex-mad poor they did not understand. In the Deptford and
Greenwich interviews one Anglican minister seems to have associated the
“degraded” character and activities of such men with their work in the
slaughtering industry. Rev. Dr. J. Hodson (half-ill in his interview as he was
“unable to shake off the effects of an attack of influenza”) “mentioned the
579
Clarke, B 262: 217; Gregory, B 228: 37. There is, indeed, such a wide variety of “Even I was
accosted”-style statements in the Booth archive that clerical participation in the sex trade can be
suggested without more explicit evidence.
580
Lee, B 269: 59.
222
admission of a young fellow who had been caught in flagrante delictu ‘in a drain,’
(an admission made to show how constant the temptation was), that he could
never pass a girl on the stairway of the factory where he worked without being
caught in the privates.” The men were, in Hodson’s view, unnaturally sex-crazy,
“and of many the saying ‘A good drink and a woman’ describes all they ask
for.”581
Surrounded by what appeared to be a raw and savage working class
sexuality – yet another sign of working people’s moral uncontrollability –
Christian ministers were well aware that working people could be physically
uncontrollable too. Although anti-religious propaganda no longer encouraged
hostility to the churches, East and South London neighbourhoods were still
desperately poor, and ministers were always subject to the threat of violence. Poor
South London was full of people rough with each other, jostling and scuffling in
good times, and in bad times, and when the time was right, trading punch for
punch, or worse. Negotiating one’s way as a Christian minister among men and
women much more physical with each other than they were in middle-class (or
respectable working- and lower middle-class) suburbs, was not only difficult. For
some, it was terrifying.
Working-class violence, when it came, came at ministers suddenly, and
seemingly from nowhere. One Bethnal Green vicar said that, during the raucous
uproar of a new years’ eve service (a night when poor working people commonly
581
Hodson, B 284: 155, 157. Hodson was Rector of and a member of the Deptford and Greenwich
Board of Guardians. (165) Christ Church, Greenwich’s G.H. Reaney spoke of “‘a large number
unmarried’ and living with other people’s wives. A fearful amount of fornication among lads: Mr.
R knows one lad of 18 who is the father of three children in the parish this year by different girls.
Of the sexual morality of the people generally Mr. R has a low opinion and I imagine he is well
qualified to speak as he evidently encourages very free confidences on the matter, and told me
several stories in which he used quite freely the obscene words of his confidants: ‘it sounds
beastly’ he said ‘but you must let them talk like that if you want them to be confidential.’ In his
opinion the sexual instinct is growing stronger and more unrestrained, and efforts of the clergy to
lessen illicit intercourse and self abuse are almost futile. He discussed the question with Cardinal
Manning who admitted that the Confessional even was of little use in this matter.
In this
connection Mr. R. denounced the Sunday Band in the Park: numbers of men go there he says ‘to
find a fresh girl’ and it leads to numberless seductions.
Altogether Mr. R. thinks the
Sunday League ‘the greatest influence for evil in England’, but this is an opinion he would be
sorry to express in public. Reaney, B 287: 47-49 [Note Baxter’s characteristic large spaces
between sentences. Baxter uses these throughout his reports, I think, to underline the previous
statement to his browsing editor, Charles Booth].
223
packed churches across the metropolis) “the poorer class” flocked in “from the
public houses.” While the 700 seated (and the “500 or 600” standing in the ailes)
were “generally respectful and well behaved,” the vicar said that “on one occasion
a drunken woman threw a whisky bottle at the preachers head, which he avoided
by ducking.” One Salvation Army officer in Hackney Wick forgot to duck: “The
slum officers…dread Brady Street,” said Captain (Miss) Smith. One woman
“nearly lost her sight. She was hit by a number of flints placed in a paper bag and
thrown at her.” An East London Wesleyan comforted himself with the fact that
one of his churchworkers, because he was a Nonconformist, was free of the
“prejudice against parsons” (meaning: Anglicans). “On one occasion he was in a
row and some man was threatening to strike him, when some other man
intervened with “No, you don’t touch him; he’s no parson.” Primitive Methodist
minister J.M. Porter said that the immediate neighbourhood around his London
Fields Chapel in Hackney was inhabited by
labouring people, costers etc. as low as they can be. The police warned
people that a band of roughs in the neighbourhood were almost
uncontrollable and that they must be careful in leaving the chapel on
Sunday evenings. Exmouth Place and Helmsley Terrace esp. bad. People
get into the trees and drop things on wayfarers.
Like sex and drink, violence came to a minister’s very doorstep in poor South
London, sometimes farther. One Clapham clergyman, though armed with a pistol,
had his gun turned on himself in a scuffle with burglars and later died of his
wounds. The South London Press headlines read: A Clapham Mystery: Alleged
Encounter with Burglars: A Clergyman Shot: He Succumbed to his Injuries.”
Rev. Charles Aubrey Price, B.A., upon
hearing a noise in the lower part of the house, went down stairs, armed
with a revolver and a life-preserver, the latter of the usual iron-headed
sort….In the hall he came upon two men, who immediately closed on him.
The leather thong of the life-preserver was at once twisted round his wrist,
rendering the hand useless, and in the struggle that ensued the revolver
was discharged three times, one shot of which took effect and lodged in
the unfortunate gentleman’s abdomen.
224
The Press reported that “A sum of £175 which, in notes and gold, had been placed
on a table in readiness for transmission to the bank, was missing…” “Dr. Coryn
attended to the wound at once, but recognizing its serious character, he sent for
Dr. Golding Bird, of Guy’s Hospital, who is a specialist in such cases. Despite all
that could be done by these gentlemen Mr. Price died yesterday.”582
Historians outlined well the ways contemporary criminal law cracked
down against perceived working-class disorder, noting local brothel-closing
purity campaigns and severe criminal legislation such as the Criminal
Amendment Act of 1908,583 but here the moral uncontrollability of London is
meant to provide us with one source of the anxieties attacking Christian ministers.
As in any poor, downtown area today, there were screaming arguments, stabbings
and street fights; people seemed scarier and more dangerous than their suburban
counterparts,584 and ministers were afraid. The Booth men met ministers affected
considerably by what they were seeing. Ministers often presented themselves as
men anxious both from culture shock and from how the surrounding moral chaos
reflected on their ministry.
Some, it is true, attempted to take the working-class community head-on,
demonstrating a masculine overcompensation (sometimes amounting to brutality)
in enforcing what they believed was church morality. In East London notable
quotations included that of Rev. C. Vere Barly, who told Baxter in order to “form
character” it was “desirable that you should be able to knock a man down on
occasion.” Father Lawless of Bow – mentioned, in interviews from East to South
London, as a figure of authoritarian power in the Irish neighbourhoods
582
Lennard, B 186: 7; Captain (Miss) Smith, B 190: 44; Sanders, B 176: 209-211; Porter, B 187:
40. Interestingly, and rather insultingly, the Press spent some time contemplating the possibility
that Price’s death was self-inflicted, but ultimately decided that “such a wound, if self-inflicted
under the minutiae of circumstances connected with it, would require the most elaborate
preparation.” “A Clapham Mystery,” South London Press Saturday, 18 September, 1897, p. 7.
583
Judith Walkowitz, “Making of an Outcast Group: Prostitutes and Working Women in
Nineteenth Century Plymouth and Southhampton,” in Martha Vicinus ed. A Widening Sphere:
The Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Edward
J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 1977); V.A.C. Gatrell, “Crime, Authority and the Policeman State,” in F.M.L.
Thompson ed. The Cambridge Social History of Britain 308-309.
584
In the suburbs, it should be said, assaults and arguments, when they occurred, would have been
kept private to maintain domestic appearances.
225
surrounding his church – saw it as a point of pride that he had physically assaulted
a woman in order to enforce his own domestic ideal. Referring (truthfully) to
police who “don’t do much” and Anglican clergymen (less truthfully) who “have
no power” to quell rows in rough neighbourhoods, Lawless told Duckworth:
He can do it (said without boasting). Has only once struck a woman
himself and she hardly a woman. A brawny amazon whose husband was
dying. Went into public [house] and found her drinking. Took her by the
back hair, banged her as hard as he could, forced her out of the public and
pulled her along the street by her hair. “Had I attempted to do a thing like
that I should have been lost,” said a policeman to him at the time.
Duckworth innocuously, and perhaps even admiringly, described this assault (an
attack carried out with the full consent of the legal authorities) under the
ambivalent subtitle, “Father L’s personal influence.”585
Although most of the evidence of the fallout of such machismo in the
community is now lost to us, other examples of this overcompensation included
most interviews with clergymen dubbed “muscular Christians.” Speaking to
Fulham’s J. Sadler Philips, Baxter wrote: “Mr. P made me feel his biceps and told
me stories of his athletic prowess.”586 Most ministers, however, had neither the
biceps nor the mythical “personal influence” possessed by these more wellendowed (and almost assuredly boastful) London ministers. They were normal
men, unequipped to be either boxers (like Sadler Phillips, Rev. Osborne Jay of
Holy Trinity, Shoreditch or Rev.Woolley, curate-in-charge at St. Peter’s Bethnal
Green) or bullies (like Lawless).587 Taking on several thousand people in a poor
community, for them, was out of the question. All therefore, were faced with
serious professional insecurities, and all would have to find a source of conviction
to carry on their Christian ministry in dangerous (and they believed, “morally
degraded”) neighbourhoods.
585
Barly, B 175: 245; Lawless, B 180: 65-67.
Sadler Phillips, B 264: 65-67.
587
Jay had boxing classes in his church and to Baxter had “all the appearance of a prize-fighter out
of training.” Jay, B 228: 37. Woolley was “a good billiard player and boxer.” He remarked to
Aves how he “Had no trouble with the club [his Men’s Club] after it was known that he could put
the gloves on.” Woolley, B 228: 175.
586
226
Many simply could not do this. Among Christian ministers, there was a
“failure” in every part of London, a disgrace to the cloth, bringing shame on his
fellow ministers. With the weight of the pressures mentioned above (and those to
be outlined below) it is perhaps not surprising that such men succumbed to often
outrageous moral hypocrisies. The repressive personal burden of being so
terrifically “moral” may have simply been too great. Many ministers across the
metropolis, for example, turned to the same drugs so prized by the working
classes for escaping the slums: alcohol. Often all we have of such indulgences and
indiscretions on the part of ministers are references to “previous vicars.” One
Kensington Presbyterian told Duckworth he had had charge of his church since
1895, but that he had found a scandal when he arrived: “when he came there were
only 40 members: he hinted that his predecessor had given way to drink and
ruined the Church.” The vicar of the poorest parish in Deptford (St. Nicholas) had
had a more extravagant spree. The curate (a Mr. Wallis) holding the fort there told
Baxter how the two previous vicars had both been drunkards, the earliest one
“frequently drunk in the pulpit.” The current vicar had run up an enormous debt in
the parish, and the curate had only recently been given a newspaper cutting
detailing how he had an outstanding hotel bill in Scarborough to the tune of ₤200.
“Altogether, there is no wonder that here as Mr. W. says ‘it does not help one to
be a parson,’” wrote Baxter. Finally, though more will be said about Calcutt in the
next and following chapters, the drinking problem of Rev. Calcutt of St.
Alphege’s, Southwark was known to ministers quite beyond his Anglican circles.
“The late vicar (Calcutt) used to drink and had to be sent away suffering form
D.T.’s,” whispered a mission worker (Miss Martin) to Arkell, “at least the
servants say so.” Martin’s neighbour, LCM James Caine did the same: “Of the
Vicar of St. Alphege (Rev Calcutt) he gave the same reason for his resignation as
Miss Martin e.g. D.T’s. He was always drunk.” 588
588
MacGregor, B 262: 121; Wallis, B 284: 117-119; Miss Martin, B 270: 87; Caine, B 270: 129.
South-west in Wandsworth, the new vicar of St. Mary’s, Summer’s Town hinted at a sex scandal
that had “ruined” the church. Rev. John Robinson remarked of the vicar: “he pulled himself down
too, and had to be turned out by the Bishop.” Aves added: “Two words threw sufficient light on
the unpleasant situation – ‘immorality – governess’, but whether the girl was in his employ and
whether he was married or not, I did not ask.” Robinson, B 312: 153-155.
227
One interview provides a better idea of what it was like to live as a failure
or a scandal among ministers, and the vicious ostracism that fellow ministers –
already defensive in their cultural and urban situation – had in store for the man
who fell out of line. Rev. C.S. Coldwill of Christ Church parish on the Isle of
Dogs had given way to drink, and been inhibited by the clerical authorities for
seven years. He had returned, however, and his reception from both the Arthur
Baxter and his colleagues on the “Island” was thoroughly icy. Baxter sized the
man up on arrival as “weak faced,” “flushed and unhealthy looking,” and
“nervous and hesitating in manner” – but such descriptions could quite easily
have been put down, in view of his situation, to simple anxiety. He also used
vague phrases like “about so and so” to describe aspects of his parish work – very
much the wrong answer for the “scientific” Booth Men. Baxter came away from
the interview thinking the man “distinctly infamous,” “shifty and unreliable.”
Probably the only reason his parish machinery showed any signs of life, Baxter
thought, was because Coldwill had “returned married to a vigorous wife who very
largely runs the parish.”589
By a fortunate turn of events for the historian, Baxter then narrated an
encounter with a local curate named Free at a local bazaar he was requested to
attend (by a mission worker named Miss Price). Free told Baxter how the local
clergy had isolated Coldwill, and how they had tried to turn Free, a newcomer to
the area, against him. Free admitted that Coldwill was a “weak man who has
sinned in the past under terrible temptation, and who has been bitterly punished,”
but he felt he had paid his debts and there was no need to punish him further.
“[B]eyond a weak will he has no vice,” said Free. “He is a scholar and a
gentleman and is thoroughly popular among the people of the parish.”
Nevertheless, the Bishop of Stepney himself had “led [Free] to believe that Mr. C.
was cunning, malicious and deceitful,” and from “Miss Price, Cowan, and all the
other clergy he heard the same story.” The snobbish lack of sympathy of ministers
in this example is striking. What lay ahead for ministers who buckled under the
pressures of parish work Free explained to Baxter:
589
Coldwill, B 169: 185-187, 193, 185.
228
He [Coldwill] certainly has made a mistake in coming back to the parish
for it is impossible to live down the past: and in any case he is not suited
for such a place, but nothing can be more abominable than the hateful and
unchristian rancour with which he is assailed by people most of whom
have never spoken to him. It has done and is doing untold harm to the
work of the church in the district. But for the parson who once fales [sic]
there is no place for forgiveness; and Mr. Free cannot get others to believe
that his view of Mr. C. is right.590
Such men became outcasts and dirty little secrets among the London ministers.
The reality that they had failed in the churches’ moral project would have been
difficult enough for the men who ostracized them to save their own clerical
reputations.
If the pressure did not drive ministers to drink, however, it did cause fairly
frequent mental collapses. For the Booth men, this would be the third group
brought down by the physical and psychological ravages of London church work,
after old age and sickness. Like drinking ministers, the Booth men were informed
not infrequently of psychological casualties. A headmaster in very poor Hackney
Wick, told Charles Booth: “locally there are no signs of improvement. Life and
work in the Wick are disheartening. No one, parson or headmaster, ought to have
to stay long in such a district, and ‘I hope myself that I shall not die here.’ ‘A man
can only make little sprigs of effort: only an immortal can keep it up.’” Many men
probably collapsed. Some, despite mental incoherence, remained at their posts, as
in the case of Rev. Wallace at St. Luke’s, Bethnal Green. Baxter put Wallace’s
age between sixty and seventy and remarked: “He is quite mad and though I spent
2 ½ hours with him I came away without the faintest impression of what is being
done in the parish.” Wallace was “almost incapable of putting together a coherent
sentence,” and so, said Baxter, “the total effect of listening to him was like being
in a horrid nightmare.” Other men were simply removed. In passing the LCM
James Caine mentioned that he “succeeded an active earnest man, upon whom the
horrors of the neighbourhood pressed so heavily that he broke down.” Most
disturbing for the Booth men likely would have been their encounters with men
they thought close to collapse. Aves said of Kennington’s Rev. John Darlington:
590
Ibid., 193-197.
229
Mr. Darlington has been at S. Mark’s for something under a year, and is a
young man for his parish. He is fragile in appearance, and my interview
does not make me think that he is wearing very well. He seemed
somewhat nervous, kept looking at me furtively, and seemed a bit
disheveled both in coiffure and in mind. But he is very keen about the
work, and is a very good fellow, and should do well, if he does not break
down. In this he has two bad examples, as his immediate predecessor is
now “a wreck”, and the man before him died of brain paralysis.591
Despite the failings of these men, however, even able-bodied, able-minded
ministers presented themselves as failures to the Booth men. The problem was
financial. Some, like the old Rev. Barnes above, nervously spoke of coming
financial collapse and worse, the snobbery of surrounding ministers in the face of
their difficulties. “It may be a bold thing to say,” wrote the (quite successful)
Primitive Methodist Rev. Tolefree Parr (in the annual report for Surrey Chapel
Central Mission) “but we hold it to be true that the evangelization of the masses is
a question of pounds, shillings and pence.” For many ministers of every
denomination, these words had a cruel ring. Under the headline “Clerical
Poverty,” the South London Press noted: “The ‘Times’ published an article this
week on the subject of ministerial poverty in the Church of England, in which it
dealt with the suggestion made [repeated in the Press] that some readjustment of
the revenues of the Church is necessary in the interests of the poorer members of
the clergy.” The Rev. Anthony C. Deane, protesting the state of things, demanded
the state provide “fifteen million pounds to make every benefice in England
produce an income of £200.” Deane felt it was no great wonder “that Canon
Newbolt declared the other day from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral, that the
poverty…of the Church is a national disgrace.” There was simply insufficient
funds, said one Camberwell vicar, for an adequate staff at his church: “How can
you do the work,” he said, “with only one paid worker. I tell the Bishop that we
do a third of the work, scamp a third, and leave a third undone.” In St. Stephen’s
Clapham Road’s Rev. J. Grundy’s “story was one chiefly of the terrible
591
Gardiner, B 188: 81; Wallace, B 182: 49; Caine, B 270: 119; Darlington, B 272: 117. Rev.
Harris of St. George’s in the East complained how there was “no power of removal” for old
incumbents who had become “unfit.” Harris, B 222: 161.
230
difficulties with which he has had to contend owing to the departure of all the
well-to-do from this parish, complicated with the growing strength of ritualism
[the popularity of high church ceremony] in the neighbourhood.”
“We have no endowment” he said “and I really don’t know what we can
do: as the people move away we are left like a stranded wreck: and we get
no pity: people come here and see the large respectable looking houses
and refuse to believe that we are poor: But such a parish as this is really in
a much more difficult position than for instance St. Thomas: Barraclough
is always complaining but he gets ₤300 a year from the Commissioners
and is at least sure of his own bread and butter, while here one has a
constant struggle for one’s own existence” (Mr. G.’s income is given in
the District as ₤160. He was dressed in the most threadbare of coats and
looked half starved).592
Ministers who fell into dire straits often could not look to their own
establishment for help. In Rotherhithe, Revs. Lees Bell and Benson Walsh felt
that they were among the abandoned. Aves said of Bell: “has been at Christ
Church for 24 years and is the incumbent mentioned to me by Mr. Walsh, as a
man, a gentleman, of small means, and on that account passed over. There is some
truth in this description.” Bell was “about 65 years of age; rather tall, but getting
feeble, and not in good health.” Bell had pleaded with his Bishop to move him,
but had been offered a worse parish (financially) than the one to which he had
charge:
He said plainly that it was “bad for the Church for a man to be kept for a
long period in these dog-holes”, and then, in a gentler mood, “But perhaps
it is as well – to move on the younger men”. It appears that the present
Bishop did offer him a living, “the other side of Gravesend,” but on
reckoning things up, Mr. Bell found that he would have been ₤50 a year
out of pocket. So he declined it. “If I had been a man of property, I should
not have stayed on.”593
The Walshes (for Rev. and Mrs. Walsh participated equally in their
interview) were equally strained, financially. Interestingly, Aves noted:
592
“Surrey Chapel Central Mission: Annual Report, 1899,” 5; “Clerical Poverty,” The South
London Press Saturday, 5 September, 1903, p. 4; Anthony C. Deane, “The Falling-Off in Quantity
and Quality of the Clergy,” The Nineteenth Century (June 1899), 1030; Jennings, B 308: 37;
Grundy, B 272: 165-167.
593
Lees Bell, B 279: 139-141;
231
… doubtless, straitened means have a good deal to do with explaining the
exclusiveness of the family, as described by Mrs. Walsh. The Vicar said
that he had no private means, and that last year his income from all
sources, fees, stipend and everything, came to just ₤308. Rates are high
and the Vicarage is assessed at, I think, ₤60. “No, sometimes when we
have paid insurance charges, rates [local taxes] etc. we have rather a
difficult task to make both ends meet”. In addition to the two daughters,
there is a son preparing to be an engineer, and for him “we must have a
home.” I saw no sign of a servant, Mrs. Walsh herself letting me in, and
the room in which we talked was a little bare. It is easy to understand that
the lady in any case would not find it easy to be intimate with her two
well-to-do clerical neighbbours, on both of whom she is inclined to look
down. For she is as proud as she is poor.594
As the Walshes spoke of their neighbours, they revealed another
ministerial face, commonly witnessed by the Booth men: one threatened not
simply by their own sense of status consciousness, but by the class erosion of
their profession. Mrs. Walsh told Aves that while the studies of her nineteen yearold daughter at Trinity College gave her some “outside life,” it was a concern that
she may have to take to violin-playing (her area of study) “professionally”
(something the Walshes’ clearly wished their offspring to avoid). Mrs. Walsh told
Aves: “Here they are practically isolated, as, except for the local clergy, there is
no one to know.” Also, there was much that was unappealing in the clergy
hereabouts: “And even these we can’t know around here. Mr. Stobart is a snob,
and Mr. Ainsworth a cad, and as for the wife of the latter! she is an obnoxious
person, impossible.” Mr. Walsh (more charitably) tried later to clarify their true
opinions of their neighbours. “Mr. Stobart is a “hard-working man”; has private
means. Mr. Ainsworth also “busy”; has large schools.
Mr. Coulthard has
“lots of missionary work going on.” Ultimately the Walshes did arrive at their
point, both husband and wife explaining that they found distasteful the class of
594
My italics. Walsh, B 279: 55-57. Mrs. Walsh appears to have had class connections to place
her, socially if not financially above her clerical neighbours, as was evident in her revealing
conversation with the admiring Aves, about Alfred Milner and the South African War: “A propos
of the reservists the War was mentioned, and Milner’s name. He is a cousin of Mrs. Walsh; they
had been children together, and always been friends. She had had a line from him only the
previous week, written in the middle of the trying time through which he is going at this moment,
and we both sang his praises for five minutes.” (53)
232
men taking positions as clergymen in the area. Aves noted that “praise and
recognition,” of their clerical neighbours
so far had lacked cordiality, and [Mr. Walsh’s] tone was different in
speaking of Mr. Lees Bell, the Rural Dean: “a very nice man, and a
gentleman”. He described him further as one of the men who had been
passed over, and as being also a poor man. I noted the difference of his
tone, and he admitted it, [when speaking of other ministers] saying that
Mr. Stobart was ‘rough.’ Mr. Ainsworth ‘a National School master who
had married money,’ and making it clear that personally he did not care
for the tone of either, Mrs. Walsh chiming in with the remark that it was
no longer possible to assume that a clergyman was a gentleman.”595
Middle-class notions of status consciousness caused “gentlemen” and
“gentlewomen” like the Walshes to turn on their own colleagues, and the same
status consciousness, in a time of moral as well as financial chaos (with sexual
and gender norms in flux) made middle-class ministers ostracise any religious
man with an immoral past. The examples of two Salvation Army members,
Captain Broad and Mr. Topham, moreover, demonstrate this moral status
consciousness. At a Salvation Army “Elevator” (essentially a paper-sorting
workshop for the unemployed), Aves met the deputy of the place, “a choicelooking ruffian with a pasty face, an unshaven chin, a Salvation blazer, and six
feet of flesh. He puzzled me immensely, and was certainly the queerest specimen
of a Salvation Army officer that I had come across.” But Aves character-typing,
this time, had failed him: “As soon as he began to speak it was clear that his looks
to some extent belied him, and that he was a man of some education. The truth
soon came out. He belonged to a well-known Nottingham family, engaged in the
lace trade, where he had at one time managed a much ‘bigger affair than this’ and
ruled a rougher set of men.” While abroad, Topham had suffered a moral fall. He
explained to Aves:
“Then he had gone to France, in connection with business, and it was in
France that he had gone to bits. “Drink?” said I; “Yes” said he “and
skirts”. Last July he was on his beam ends, and went to the Blackfriars
Road Shelter. From there he went to the Bermondsey Elevator, and about
three months ago, was offered promotion. He accepted it, and thinks he
will “stick” to the Army. But he is not sure yet, and in any case does not
595
Ibid., 49, 57-59.
233
want his people to know where he is. In confidence, he told me his name –
Topham.596
While taken in by the Salvation Army, Topham knew his social position
was marred by his moral crimes, that it would be so indefinitely both among
Army Officers, and indeed among all middle-class ministers in South London.
Only outwardly was he “one of them.” As historians, to bow to the universalist
rhetoric of “salvation” or like notions of Christian community would be to
underestimate the reality of middle-class classism at this time. Men like Topham,
or Coldwill, above, could never really “come clean.” In middle-class, Christian
circles a shadow always followed them. Importantly, as is hinted here (“he at one
time…ruled a rougher set of men”), and with Broad below, these men reproduced
the classism from which they suffered, and trained it on those they felt were
“below” them. In a rather pathetic, but poignant episode that Aves recorded,
Topham knew that this middle-class ostracism might very well come from Ernest
Aves himself: “When I left, Topham walked with me a little way, to show me
where the busses stopped. He had offered to do so, ‘If I did not mind’ this, I
suppose, thinking that I might not like to be seen with him.”597
The same middle-class divisions could be seen in the testimony of an
officer of the Salvation Army, Captain Broad. Again, Aves interview turned into a
confession of moral impropriety:
Capt. Broad is a Wiltshireman by birth, age 45, brought up a Wesleyan,
preached as a boy of 16 and had hoped to become a minister. This made
impossible owing to death of father, and a lasting disappointment. Made a
grocer’s assistant; became a manager; had experience also in various kinds
of institutional work, for boys as well as men. Is married. About ten years
ago [Captain Broad] gave way to drink; got very low indeed, and had
d[elirium].t[remens]. Went to the Salvation Army and they were kind to
him. When others had not much to say to him, they gave him a good word.
He is their critic now598 but “The kind word they gave me then, I can
596
“Notes of visit to the Salvation Army Elevator and Elevator Home in Bermondsey,” B 283:
131-135.
597
Ibid.
598
Broad, B 278: 83-5. Broad believed that William Booth (General Booth) was defrauding his
own Salvation Army of considerable sums. Part of Broad’s statements, in which he accusing “the
General” involvement in an elaborate scheme of kick-backs, I include here: “As stated, he thinks
that the General is ‘all right’ but, under him, he thinks that there is a great deal of wire-pulling and
234
never forget or repay.” It is not so, as he said, with most denominations
and he clearly had his own most in mind, “It is all very well while you are
going along all right, but when you go wrong people can’t see you; have
their faces in their pocket handkerchiefs, influenza or something!”
The Army put him on his feet again, and, at first, he was enthusiastic
about it, but his point of view has changed, both in his own feeling, and in
his estimate of the work. As to the former he compared himself with a
physician in a hospital, who walks through the wards untouched by the
diseases around him.599
Classism was a plague which beset Londoners of all classes, as we will see in Part
IV. But we can see here especially the middle-class aspect of this plague, how it
extended into the ranks of middle-class ministers of religion, and therefore
contributed to the divided and uncooperative impression Christian ministers gave
the Booth Men.
The majority who steered clear of moral improprieties (or kept them
secret) dealt endlessly with the maintenance of the “independence” of their
churches. Ministers earnestly proclaimed their independence of their churches
(from begging for church funds) with the same fervency as status conscious
working people at this time. From their own colleagues they continuously
expected charges of “begging” and misuse of donations. A strong example was
the elderly Rev. Lee of the (soon to be demolished) All Saints’ parish in Lambeth,
who when asked where he procured his funds for poor relief, responded: “Most of
worshipping of the golden calf. When we got to this point, he shied at particularizing, but gave me
a parable of the man who preached on Sunday on the temptation and worthlessness of riches and
on Monday morning went to the bankers and paid in a substantial sum to his credit. “I need say no
more.”
Later, he explained the method of catering for “The Ark”, and said that he bought nothing directly,
except meat and vegetables. Everything else has to be requisitioned from the Department, and is
charged to them by the Department at Head Quarters. He mentioned the prices of two or three
things, in every case he said, something like 25 per cent, or even more than that at which they
would have been purchased. “But where” I asked “does the profit go?” To the Department, I
suppose.” “But why doest the Department want to make a profit?” and all the reply that I got was
“Ah! there you have it!” Later, he showed me some of weekly financial returns of “The Ark”,
and all showed a “nominal loss” of amounts varying from ₤6 or so as a mean. Many of the heavier
recurring charges, such as rent, repairs, etc. were fixed by Head Quarters. “It would not do to
make a profit” said the Captain. Asked if he saw the annual statement of accounts and the analysis
for the places that he looked after, the reply was “No, and I don’t want to; they brought me one
once when I was in charge of the Home Department of the Farm Colony, and I told them to take it
away.” According to Captain Broad it showed a fictitious deficit of some hundreds of pounds: ‘I
don’t want the result’ he told them ‘to be made worse than it is.’”
599
Ibid., 73-75.
235
the money, about 100 pounds a year, come from himself and some few friends. ‘I
am not a clerical mendicant’” Others, like Fulham’s Rev. Rowland Cardwell,
protected their own reputations by accusing others of philanthropic malfeasance.
“When I was leaving Mr. Cardwell,” wrote Baxter, “he said ‘Do you see us all?’”
“Yes” I said “as far as possible.”
“Then I hope you will remember” he
said “that we are not all accurate: some of us are great beggars: and to be a
good beggar is to be a good liar”. Perhaps it is scarcely fair to fit the cap,
but there is little doubt that Mr. C. had Mr. Phillips [vicar of St.
Etheldreda, Fulham] at all events in his mind, for Mr. P. is certainly a
good beggar, and has a great gift of exaggeration.
The suspicion that a minister employed donors’ money for personal benefit was
another cause of ostracism in the clerical community. Old Ford’s Rev. Adamson
(St. Stephen’s parish, Bow) was singled out both by local clergymen, the COS,
and Ernest Aves, for “criticism and antagonism” on this basis. A local
Congregationalist neighbour hinted not-so-subtly: “Mr. Adamson is practically
dead now. Gives no relief. Wonder where the money goes.” Arkell wrote then to
himself: “Mr. and Mrs. S[chnadhorst] evidently regarded Mr. A. as a great beggar
and themselves as particularly virtuous in this respect by contrast. Cannot work
with Mr. A.” It was Baxter who got the “facts” from, in his opinion, the everreliable Charity Organisation Society. In what now seems a spectacularly vague
appraisal, Mr. Eveleigh of the Bow and Bromley COS told Baxter:
Rev. W. Adamson, St. Pauls, has a standing quarrel with all his brother
clergy. In his charitable work is a despot; is willing to give information to
the C.O.S., and occasionally works with them. He is better than some but
not good. He is a great beggar and issues exaggerated appeals; there is no
suspicion that he ever uses money for improper purposes or private
purposes, but he certainly does not always use it for the specific purpose
for which it was asked.600
A worse insult to gentlemanly independence was class invasion of their
profession from below the middle-class level (a more serious class erosion, to
middle-class minds, than that the Walshes’ simply ungentlemanly examples). Of
the Anglican clergy, Rosemary O’Day has written that “three quarters of all
600
Lee, B 269: 49; Sadler Phillips, B 264: 51; Adamson, B: 175: 147; Schnadhorst, B 176: 75;
Eveleigh, B 178: 7.
236
ordinands in the late nineteenth century were graduates [of Oxford and
Cambridge University].” This meant that fully a quarter were paying ₤100 for a
two-year course at theological colleges like Trinity College, Dublin; Durham;
Kings College, London, and Queen’s College, Birmingham, and were likely from
the “respectable lower middle classes.” Rev. Anthony C. Deane (a popular writer
of Christian literature in this period), in an article in The Nineteenth Century,
cited “official figures published in the Guardian” for the last half of the 1890s.
Deane entitled his article, “The Falling-Off in the Quantity and Quality of the
Clergy”:
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1,428 of whom 62
per cent were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge
1,420 ”
60
”
”
”
”
”
1,321 ”
58.4 ”
”
”
”
”
1,296 ”
58.7 ”
”
”
”
”
1,276 ”
57.9 ”
”
”
”
”
Deane, repeated, almost word for word, the Walshes sentiment that “In former
times one could safely assume that a clergyman was a gentleman, but such an
assumption is no longer possible.” This “very marked change” was “surely to be
deplored.” When clergymen were expected to be leaders “of every social
organization,” it was necessary for them, Deane thought, to be recognised as
“superior” to their parishioners – “someone who by social rank as well as by his
clerical position is entitled to take the lead among them.” It now seemed that,
“generally speaking, nearly half the men who nowadays take orders belong to the
lower-middle classes.” “And most certainly,” Deane concluded, “an ill-educated
and lower-middle class clergy will be an uninfluential clergy.” Without a
“ministry of gentlemen” the clergyman would get no more respect in workingclass communities “than…for the Dissenting minister.” Nonconformists were
even more of a mixed-bag, in class terms. While the Baptist and Congregationalist
clergy moved, like the Anglicans, towards more intensive (academic and
theological) training of ministers, “nonconformist ministries were dominated by
non-graduate recruits.”601 This meant that men were vying to be ministerial
601
O’Day, “Men from the Ministry,” 264, 265, 267-270; Deane, “The Falling-Off in the Clergy,”
1024, 1029, 1030. Deane admitted that “artisans” in Britain’s “great cities” had an impressive
237
gentleman who were not from the middle and upper classes, and this was noticed
both by metropolitan ministers and the Booth Men.
Among Anglicans, there were many instances when the organizational and
auxiliary skills of clergymen and curates were unfairly criticized owing to the
absence of an ‘h’. A newly arrived curate at St. John the Evangelist, East
Dulwich, told Aves: “Mr. Joyce and his fellow-curate came early in the year,
following two curates who ‘could never speak the Queen’s English’ and who only
had occasional hs between.” The men may have been “popular with individuals in
the parish,” said Joyce, “but [they] were failures in the church, and congregations
were poor. The Vicar was often away ill (he is said to have suffered from
tubercular pleurisy for 18 years) and things generally were hopelessly
disorganized.” In Old Kent Road, Baxter noticed a similar class dialect in another
vicar. Like the famous East End vicar, Rev. Watts Ditchfield, Baxter noted, Rev.
H. Pitt “has come from a lower social stratum than the bulk of the clergy, as is
shown by the not infrequent dropping of the H.” Characteristically, disdain for
such men came in the form of an attack on lower class clergymen’s charity.
Speaking to his COS colleague, Harry Toynbee, about the Old Kent vicar, he
received this short summary: “St. Mary Magdalene, Mr Pitt: ‘hopeless’: ‘says he
must help those who come to church.’
Was a working man.” Finally, in the
same way that lower class ministers were deplored as incompetents, socially
prominent Nonconformists were cheekily spoken of as Anglicans in disguise.
Lambeth’s Canon Allen Edwards discussed of F.B. Meyer, the hugely successful
undenominational minister of Southwark’s Christchurch this way: “Speaking of
Mr. Meyer the Canon said ‘What an excellent man. He ought to be a churchman:
he’s too good to be a Non-conformist.’” Arthur Baxter said the same of John
Howard of the East London Wesleyan Mission. He was such an energetic, “first
rate fellow” for Baxter: “indeed I felt that if he had been born in a different social
stratum (he drops an h occasionally) and sent to Oxford he is the sort of man who
“acquaintance with subjects such as political economy, history and the like, which is by no means
to be despised.” However, he continued to believe that many being ordained were “inferior both
socially and intellectually to their predecessors, with the result that the influence of the Church
upon the people is likely to be weakened.” (1024)
238
would probably be a devoted and hard working Anglican like his neighbour
Dalton.”602
Among Nonconformists there was a less common class establishment to
lean on, and therefore, more defensiveness in regard to the subject of lower class
ministers and their impact on the clerical profession. One Presbyterian (Rev.
MacGregor) “spoke strongly about the position of a minister in the Presbyterian
Church. ‘We believe strongly in the laying on of hands and ordained ministers.’
‘Tom, Dick or Harry cannot become ministers as in some Nonconformist
bodies.’” As for himself, the minister said: “‘We do not care to call ourselves
Nonconformists.’ He uses the lessons and psalms of the English Prayer Book. The
Presbyterian congregation elects their minister but once there they cannot dismiss
him: dismissal can only come from the Presbytery.” The minister insisted on
training to differentiate educated from uneducated, superior from inferior. “Every
minister must have had a theological University training: he himself was 8 years
at the University.” Interestingly, at this point spilled out the minister’s own class
skeletons (note Baxter’s emphasis in the space he leaves): “He said his father was
a poor clergymen in Scotland: he himself has made his own way.
‘Since
I was 12 years old my father has not paid a penny for me.’ He delegates all the
church work he can but keeps the headship of everything. ‘the minister is apart
and above.’”603
It appears that the Booth Men largely shared the ministers’ disdain for the
class corruption of the profession (though there were notable exceptions).604
602
Joyce, B 308: 65; Pitt, B 275: 179; Toynbee, B 283: 5. See Part IV for a more accurate
depiction of working-class ministers, including Mr. Pitt, in charity work. Allen Edwards, B 272:
63; Howard, B 184: 45. According to a clipping attached to Howard’s interview, he “started life as
a Lancashire mill hand, and little by little he climbed up until he reached the Richmond Training
College and became one of the most successful students of his time. He is tall and clean shaven,
and still in his early thirties.” (Ibid.)
603
MacGregor, B 262: 131-135. Father Highley of Bow was spoken of by his investigator as two
things. He was “a COS convert” and he was “rough spun.” According to Cardinal Vaughan
himself, Highley’s father had been a carpenter. Highley, B 180: 9, 17.
604
Booth investigators were always sure to mention dropped h’s, as with one Strict Baptist
minister in Camberwell, and also a Bermondsey missioner, who, when asked about attendances,
responded with “we get our share from all I can ‘ear.” Dolbey, B 277: 125; Spencer, B 280: 133135. For many ministers, moreover, the Christian ministry was their second job. Bermondsey
Baptist Rev. B.T. Dale was a clerk in the City, and Rotherhithe missioner H.F. Morriss was “a
239
When the former judged the moral strength of lower class ministers, such as
London City Missionaries, they always spoke of them as if expecting to find
inherent character flaws. Arthur Baxter, for example, spoke of a London City
Missionary “type” (although many LCM’s he interviewed did not fit it). Long
Lane missionary E. Davies Baxter called “a strange little man: thin, pale,
anaemic: red hair: large staring eyes. By birth and education the usual L.C.M.
class.” As often happened, however, a neighbouring Bermondsey missioner, A.H.
Salter, was “above the average of the L.C.M.’s, a cheery, pleasant fellow whose
visits are likely to be welcome, and who is likely to be much more tactful than
many of his brother Missionaries in approaching the spiritual side of his task.” In
J. Lelliott, another Bermondsey missioner escaped his class profile because of a
strong personality and a seemingly scientific mind. J. Lelliott had “a thoughtful
and strong personality – stronger than the ordinary type of L.C.M.’s,” according
to George Arkell:
Very thorough in all that he does and enthusiastic in his work. He goes in
for microscopy in his leisure moments. A microscope was standing on the
dresser – the interview took place in the kitchen. As the fire was burning
there – and as I was coming away he said “Oh! I have something to show
you.” He then put some waterweed from a glass jar into a small tank
(homemade) and placing it under the microscope showed me some
specimens of vorticella which he was cultivating_and remarkably good
and active specimens they were. This is characteristic of the man. GEA605
Most damaging to ministers’ reputations, however, was the fact that the
Booth Men found them succumbing to a fatalism in regard to the drawing power
of their churches. Many thought that South London itself was to blame, that it was
a hotbed for self-indulgence, indifference, and stunted spirituality. A slightly
exasperated Canon Allen Edwards (vicar of All Saints, South Lambeth, and a
popular holy man according to his neighbour Rev. Grundy of St. Stephens)
“Why don’t they go to church?” said the Canon “for the same reason that I
don’t go to race meetings: it does not interest them, they know nothing
about it. I have had the Bishop of Rochester here to preach but it does not
clerk at Messrs. Stedman and Crowther’s in the City (metal merchants).” Dale, B 280: 163;
Morriss, B 280: 199.
605
Davies, B 274: 101; Salter, B 274: 241; Lelliott, B 254: 165.
240
attract them: they know no more of the Bishop of Rochester than I know
of Dan Leno.” This indifference the Canon thinks is growing: “I think
there are waves and never did the Word of God seem to have less power
than now: even worse than the indifference of the mass is the slackness of
the so-called church people: on the smallest excuse they will stay away
from church: a shower of rain, or the visit of a friend for instance.”
In the face of such despair, Baxter’s response was one of disappointment.
“Personally, though not a bad fellow,” he said, “the Canon is less attractive than
many less successful men. I have a feeling that he has a touch of irritability and
insecurity.”606
Canon Allen Edwards’ neighbours Revs Darlington and Steer saw South
London as a spiritual sink-hole, for which the only remedy was more middle class
volunteers with strong characters. The former “repeated the common complaint of
indifference, adding that South London was, perhaps, the worst spot for this in
England. Moreover it is and feels itself to be neglected. It lacks grit, and has
neither sentiment nor a tradition to help it: great personalities and great
institutions are alike wanting.” The latter “complained as others have done of the
exceptional irresponsiveness of South London to religious work, and emphasised
a great need in the Church of more living agents.”607 A curate who had transferred
into a poor parish in Deptford from Walworth reinforced the point: A.T. Wallis
“compared them most favourably with dwellers in Walworth where he was 8
years at Lady Margaret, ‘there…you had the ordinary apathetic South Londoner
who was incessantly shifting and it was almost impossible to get hold of them:
these people [of Deptford] are not ordinary South Londoners’ and here Mr. W.
believes there is material on which hard work is bound to tell in the long run.”608
From central South London Bible Christian D.J. Rounsefell spoke of a
similar situation in Waterloo Road, and had the same ineffectual remedies. “The
attitude of the people to religion has not been that of opposition but downright
indifference.”
606
Allen Edwards, B 272: 57, 65;
Darlington, B 272: 123; Steer, B 272: 135.
608
Wallis, B 284: 121-123.
607
241
They did not care anything about it. The people had been alienated by
those who represented religion. Believes Jesus Christ is popular but he has
not been represented in the right way: it has been a caricature. Condition
has improved because Christian workers are willing to go and live with the
people and show practical sympathy with them.
Neighbour and LCM Charles Wheeler also spoke as if the average working-class
man or woman was an atheist. “As a whole, Mr. Wheeler takes a gloomy view of
the district and the people. ‘It is an age of utter indifference and carelessness’ as
regards religion.’” “The people respect me,” Wheeler said, “but they don’t accept
my message.” “Indeed the only time the missionary is welcome is in times of
sickness.”609
Ministerial fatalism was equally apparent in their dismissals of workingclass attendance. Rev. DeFontaine of Christ Church, Southwark, when asked, told
his interviewer: “Not good; ‘you know how difficult it is to get a congregation in
South London.’” His attendances, during Sunday evenings, were 450, the church
typically two-thirds full. The Baptist minister of Lambeth’s Upton Chapel,
William Williams, complained likewise that owing to suburban migration that he
lost “‘a good sized church’ every year and have to make it up.” That Williams’
numbers were nevertheless quite regularly made up by fresh recruits, however,
seemed to contradict his and other ministers’ observations of popular indifference
to religion.610
Some ministers had no sense of what working-class religiosity amounted
to in an increasingly poor South London riverside. A rare few were paid enough
for their vicarages that they didn’t care. Bermondsey’s Rev. Hewlett, ostensibly a
popular church, drawing many to services, still wracked his brain as to why more
people did not attend regularly, and therefore questioned his own success: “At the
same time he seemed to think that for five years’ work in such a district his results
were rather good, though as I was going he said
‘I don’t want you to suppose
that we are satisfied with our work: we are only touching a fringe, the barest
fringe.’” Rev. Kelly of St. Giles Camberwell, was less concerned with
609
610
Rounsefell, B 270: 39-41; Wheeler, B 270: 185.
De Fontaine, B 269: 119; Williams, B 270: 5-7;
242
attendances and regularity. He had “one of the plums of the English Church. It is
what most are not: – a real and substantial living – with an income of ₤1600 a
year, and a quite palatial vicarage.” Kelly treated Baxter as if he were an
irritation, fobbing off his questions. His answer to Baxter’s question about drink
in the district was: “I think there is less: but I don’t think I really know.” To those
concerning prostitution, it was: “My wife tells me there is a great deal more than
anyone would expect.” “Finally Mr. Kelly as I was going said ‘You must not
think we clergy know much about our parishes: we don’t.’” Unused to being
patronized by his interviewees (it was typically the other way around) Baxter
seethed: “In his case at all events I think this is true.”611
None of these remarks accurately described the reality of working-class
religiosity. Paying too much attention to the words of these depressed ministers,
in fact, obscures the hundreds of men and women in every parish, attending ten or
twelve Anglican, Nonconformist and Roman Catholic churches within every one
of them across poor London. When, therefore, an East Dulwich vicar asked
Baxter – “what is 800 [the number attending his evening congregation] in a
population of 15000”? – we should think more carefully about our answer than
did either Baxter or his interviewee.612
In fact, eight-hundred attenders (much more than most South London
ministers had in their pews) was quite something. If only briefly, we should
underline the tremendous underestimation, by contemporaries and later,
historians, of churchgoing in poor South London. Only a rough account of
church-going statistics, taken from the most significant attendance-based survey
of the period – The Religious Life of London – tells us that each minister’s
“hundreds” became a hundred thousand when looked at en masse. As Charles
Masterman noted in his essay, “The Problem of South London,” there was less of
a churchgoing “problem” than he thought. In the area I call Poor South London, a
riverside strip of central London from Rotherhithe to South Lambeth, Masterman
saw encouraging signs. From East to West, nearly 30,000 men and women in
611
612
Hewlett, B 275: 103; Kelly, B 308: 1, 13.
Jennings, B 308: 23.
243
Bermondsey, out of nearly 130,000 went to church one Sunday in 1904. Added to
this were about 40,000 out of 200,000 in Southwark, and 60,000 out of 300,000 in
Lambeth. In total: 130,000 out of 630,000 went to regular church services, or one
out of every five women, and one out of every six men.613 As the day of the
survey was not that of the Harvest Festival614 or Watch Night (new years’)
service,615 and because it did not take account of attendance at infrequent “special
services” or at numerous social and religious auxiliary meetings, unnamed
thousands of irregular working-class churchgoers were left out of the account.616
The survey also did not take into account worship (for its middle-class authors
would not have seen it as real worship) the many working men and women who
simply prayed at home.617
613
C.F.G. Masterman, “The Problem of South London,” in Richard Mudie-Smith ed., The
Religious Life of London (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 27 Paternoster Row, 1904), 194.
614
Bethnal Green vicar Rev. R.H. Dinnis said that neither morning or evening services drew more
than 100 attendees. Every Harvest Festival, however, the church was always “full.” Dinnis’ church
held 1,200. Dinnis’ neighbour Rev. Green complained of the same difficulties, but likewise said
“the church is always crammed for harvest festival.” Dinnis, B182: 3; Green, B 182: 83. The
South London Press mentioned each year the great size of Harvest Festival Congregations. One
notices at St. Peter’s, Dulwich Common (Anglican), “very large congregations attended all three
services” and at Upton Chapel, Lambeth (Baptist), “attracted as usual large congregations.”
“Harvest Festivals,” The South London Press 16 October, 1897, p. 7. A year later, the small Friar
Street Mission reported “the building crowded, many being unable to gain admission,” and St.
Mary Magdalene’s, Bermondsey and Emmanuel Church, Dulwich, had several “large
congregations.” “Harvest Festivals,” The South London Press 15 October, 1898, p. 2.
615
Even in poor St. George’s in the East the superintendent of a sailor’s mission said: “Very few
people go to any place of worship,” but then corrected, “except once a year to the watchnight
service.” Couch, B 224: 67. S.C. Williams comments on what she calls Jeffrey Cox’s “slightly
derogatory comments,” namely, that watchnight and harvest festival services were “associated
with luck more than anything resembling Christian devotion.” Rightly she notes that “to state the
connection between the enactment of a ritual and the maintenance of good fortune did not
necessarily diminish the sincerity attached to the orthodox meaning of the ritual.” Williams,
Religious Belief and Popular Culture 94; Cox, English Churches 97.
616
Rev. Donaldson the poor Hackney Wick spoke of this irregularity when he said of his mission
attendance: “Quite five times as many come occasionally as represented by [the mission’s
attendance] figures: there is a fixed nucleus, but the congregation as a whole are very shifting and
irregular in attendance. For a special preacher or a mission service they will come in shoals.”
Donaldson, B 185: 189-191. Rev. Hawkins of poor (25/- wk.) All Soul’s Clapton said the same.
With the same attendance as Donaldson (100 AM/300PM), Hawkins said: “The congregations do
not represent the number in the parish who sometimes attend church: they are a very shifting lot
and far from regular in attendance. More than double the number of an average congregation
attend occasionally.” Hawkins, B 185: 223.
617
East End Congregationalist Rev. Thomas Sissons remarked: “The deaconess in her visitation
very rarely finds a house where no one attends worship and it is also rare to go into a house where
there is not a bible.” Sissons, B 223: 17.
244
One in five women, and one in six men: this figure has startled historians
as much as it did Masterman. Callum Brown (his focus, again on the Religious
Life of London survey), points to ministers’ underestimation of working-class
church participation at this time.618 In the past the most alarmist quotations have
been used by historians in their discussions of secularization. There are many of
these in the Booth archive, but a Spitalfields London City Missionary, W.B.
Murray, argued in January, 1898, that about “20% of the adult population attend a
place of worship.”619 Recent research has pointed out precisely this: that one fifth
of the working classes attended a religious institution in 1900.620 Masterman
italicized the shocking discovery of the survey, namely that: “In South London
one man out of every six, and one woman out of every five, attends some place of
worship at least once every Sunday.” Masterman added: “I must confess that this
is a far larger proportion than I should have anticipated….As a rough estimate I
should have given anything from one to four per cent. as the total actively
Christian population of South London. One is grateful to the census if for this
alone – the revelation of larger numbers of attendance than one has dared to
hope…”621
These statistics show us, therefore, that a minister’s insecurity hardly
made him a failure to draw working-class churchgoers. It simply meant that, on
most Sundays of the year, the church would not be packed as it would in a
middle-class suburb. At St. John’s, Southwark, even a man as luxuriously
confident as Rev. F.C. Bainbridge-Bell admitted to the Booth Men that
parishioner-participation in church work and worship was far from what he
wanted it to be. Bainbridge-Bell had it all. Baxter described how this burly,
athletic 35-year-old “received me in cycling costume, smoking his after luncheon
pipe.” With previous experience as a curate in poor St. Giles, the vicar was no
618
Brown, The Death of Christian Britain 148-161.
Murray, B 223: 105.
620
Discussing families with fathers who said they were regular attenders, Hugh McLeod put the
figure at 20% in London, the Potteries and the North Midlands, whereas attendance rates in
Scotland and Wales could be as high as 50%. McLeod, “New perspectives on Victorian workingclass religion,” 33; Callum G. Brown, Death of Christian Britian 140.
621
Masterman, “Problem of South London,” in Mudie-Smith ed., Religious Life of London 195.
(Masterman’s italics)
619
245
novice, and for his church work, he had cash in hand. “He appears to be a man of
means,” wrote Baxter, “with a number of aristocratic and wealthy acquaintances
and has secured the help financial and personal of a considerable number of West
Enders. Various clubs have been started, and there has been systematic visitation
of almost every house.”622 Bainbridge-Bell had even “secured an American
heiress to build the new premises” of his Roehampton girls’ club, a club which
prided itself on the fact that those who belonged to it were “of quite a rough
class.”623
Yet if the vicar was rich, and though his church employed up to date
auxiliaries and clubs, he was not satisfied. The result of his church work, he said,
had been “a greatly increased friendliness for the church and a distinct increase in
the numbers and church attendance.” This, for Bainbridge-Bell, was not enough.
He was discouraged with what he called the “frightfully slow” progress of his
Southwark church. The place could hold 1800 people, and on Sunday mornings
there were “perhaps 80” in attendance.
Bainbridge-Bell’s dissatisfaction, however, obscured the successes of his
church. Evenings, for example, services were better attended by his working-class
parishioners: 300 came weekly. The men and women “brought in,” moreover,
were a class most contemporaries would have thought lost to the churches. These
several hundred, the vicar said, were “not [of] the shopkeeper class, who are
stubborn, and almost hostile” to church-going (not at all a statement of fact).
Rather, said the vicar, they were “the dwellers in one and two rooms.” One
hundred and fifty of his attenders, many of them residents of the “promising” but
poor streets of the parish (Doon Street and Cornwall Street) were also
communicants.624
Nevertheless, we should note, these faithful men and women were not
sufficient for the vicar. In this, the minister’s commentary was typical. Generally,
an interview with the Booth Men saw a vicar present “his” hundreds, saw him
note the presence of the poor (or a grade of the poor) in church services and other
622
Bainbridge-Bell, B 269: 7, 9, 11.
Ibid., 13.
624
Ibid., 11.
623
246
agencies – and more than not, saw him break into bitter introspection. Several of
the parishes below Westminster Bridge conform to the trend appearing in most of
the twenty-eight parishes, from North Lambeth to Rotherhithe, daubed bluish (or
poor) on the Booth maps – what I am calling, Poor South London – that form the
basis for this dissertation. Rev. Bromfield’s St. Mary the Less had two-hundred
attendees Sundays, morning and evening (his mission of St. Anselm’s pulling in
sixty-five to sixty-seven a week). Was this level of attendance “good”? asked
Aves. “Mr. B. replied “Oh! no; as a rule, I should say that nobody goes to church.
It has always been so; a very small percentage goes. You can work up a
connexion, with comparative ease, but attendance at church is not the natural
sequel, is not the natural thing.” Bromfield’s northern neighbour, the “out and out
Evangelical” Rev. Lilly of Emmanuel parish, Lambeth, repeated the common
refrain by clergymen: that working people, for the most part, suffered from an
unconquerable indifference to religion. So did Rev. Weigall at Holy Trinity. He
gave the clergyman’s “usual complaint” (in Aves’ words) “of indifference,” but
added despondently that working-class life was already “full of interests for the
mass of his people.” People could “easily fill up their leisure,” he believed, and
because the church could not compete with popular amusements, it was always
“difficult for religion to get a look-in.” A particular disappointment for Weigall
were the tenants of one set of buildings: St. Thomas’ Mansion. These latter were
“of a good class,” yet “few [were] in any touch with the Church.” The Rector of
Lambeth, Rev. Andrews Reeve, highlighted the seriousness of the issue: “The
greatest difficulty…which they have to contend,” is “the loss of the sense of duty
to worship.”625
It was as if the two-hundred in attendance evenings at St. Mary the Less, the
two-hundred to three-hundred at Emmanuel, the three-hundred at Holy Trinity,
and the six-hundred at St. Mary’s underscored failure, and failure alone.626
625
Bromfield, B 272: 103; Lilly, B272: 37 ; Weigall, B 272: 93, 89; Andrews Reeve, B 272: 81.
Bromfield, B 272: “S. Mary Princes Road Lambeth; Returns for year 1898” ; Lilly, B 272: 37
[my italics]; Weigall, B 272: 89; Andrews Reeve, B 272: 73. All of the parishes were poor, the
Rector describing the parish of St. Mary the Less as home to “11000 poor and the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and nobody in between.” These attendance statistics do not include parish missions,
whose numbers rarely exceeded one-hundred.
626
247
Bromfield found little hope in the present circumstances. He thought that the
answer was to erect more buildings and pointed to what, he thought, was general
lack of confidence even among leaders of the Anglican Church. “[I]n South
London generally the numbers of churches built was terribly disproportionate to
the increase in population,” Bromfield thought: more churches would mean more
and larger congregations, and larger congregations would mean more demand for
religious office. “We want, he said, more forethought and more faith in the
church, and he cited the hopes of the Roman Catholics when they began to build
their new Cathedral that it might be finished in three generations.” There was no
such confidence among the Anglicans. Bromfield’s bitterness was sharp, and he
vented hopelessly: “Where do you find such an idea in the English Church? No,
we seem to be incapable of it. We think that we shall be disestablished or
something.”627
Amidst their moping, other Lambeth vicars admitted that all was not lost.
Lilly pointed out what many clergymen regularly forgot to mention – that “many
more than 300 of the parishioners come to church from time to time.” Echoing
Bainbridge-Bell at St. John’s, Lilly believed, too, that there was “greater
friendliness than there was, and apart from church going ‘the church is certainly
in touch with a much larger number than it was twelve years ago.’” He thought
that “bulk of the people” might be indifferent, but that this could not take away
from the fact that the poor who did attend the church were “extraordinarily warm
and hearty in their service…” Rev. Weigall’s comments were equally hopeful,
even pointing to the church’s instrumental nature in poor neighbourhoods. “There
is no adverse propaganda,” Weigall added, “and the general mental attitude of the
people is favourable and friendly.” Prior to Aves’ visit, Weigall’s “workers had
been talking things over…having a speculative discussion as to what would
happen if the Church and everything that emanates from it and its workers were to
stop, and there was a general agreement, (not an unnatural one [wrote Aves]) that
a noticeable decline would follow – in tone, in manners, and in morals.” Weigall
even had some fighting words for his interviewer: “though few come,” he said,
627
Bromfield, B 272: 111.
248
“when they do, “you’ve got’em.” It was the fewness of attendees, however, that
mattered most to the Anglicans, and this made them disregard the commitments
of the hundreds, and indeed, thousands, already attracted. The Rector of Lambeth,
therefore, might admit that there was “not the least opposition,” even that “the
clergy [were] popular,” but whatever these facts amounted to was not worth
discussing. The important fact, to him, was that “this does not make the people
religious.”628
In terms of attendance, then, Churchmen could not always get what they
wanted, and as a result, they did not know what they had. A century on, the
Churchman’s tendency to write off their churches’ working-class attendance has
biased – rather seriously – the historian’s accounts of poor church-people. With
our evidence drenched in churchmen’s despondency, we, today, have difficulty
imagining what working-class church-people were like. We can imagine them if
we try: poor men in threadbare jackets, women in bonnets with bags under their
eyes, and nervous children (somewhat inconsistently) making an effort to remain
still. As we will see in Part IV, all three were making a great effort, yet what they
symbolized to their vicar was only “frightfully slow” progress.
The seemingly incremental effect of their ministry also turned men into
fundamentalists, turning their religion more starkly Protestant (sermon-oriented
revivalism) or elaborately Catholic (focusing on the priesthood and the
sacraments in religious worship) in the hope of full pews. For both groups, Gerald
Parsons has noted the co-existence in Victorian religion “of an urgent sense of
intermingled crisis and confidence, revival and decline,” a phenomenon all the
more fascinating “because,” for ministers, “it was also self-concious:
Victorian churchmen and women sensed that they were involved
simultaneously in both crisis and opportunity. Often the sense of crisis and the
expression of vitality were the opposite sides of the same phenomenon: the
628
Lilly, B 272: 37-39; Weigall, B 272: 93-95; Andrews Reeve, 81. Over the border into the more
respectable working-class neighbourhoods of Walworth, Rev. Trousdale also thought his church
maintained a moral standard in the district: “The two bugbears [were] intemperance and
indifference. But he [was] confident that, were the staff removed from the parish, moral
deterioration would follow.” Aves noted: “He is not the first to emphasise the importance of the
“negative or deterrent influence” – the prevention of worsement. (Trousdale, B 275: 7-9).”
249
vitality and commitment of urban mission was the obverse of anxiety and fear
at urban irreligion and its presumed social consequences…
Parsons makes the important suggestion that Protestant, Roman Catholic and
Anglo-Catholic revivalism in the late nineteenth century was simply an anxious
man’s “reassertion of theological conservatism” in the face of feelings of loss of
control. Because Parsons focuses mainly what these anxious men did in
promoting a “variety of rituals and ritualized activities and devotional styles,” he
leaves the outward manifestations of their anxiety to our imagination.629
But these were myriad by 1900, and they provide more examples of
powerfully insecure men making desperate attempts to keep popular religion
alive. In Poplar Arthur Baxter had a good opinion of a Protestant Missioner and
revivalist but was dismayed by the fact his Cubitt Town Tent Mission distributed
(imperfectly worded and ungrammatical) copies of the “Protestant Banner,” a
pamphlet which called on all true Protestants to rally to the “principles for which
the Protestant Reformers died.” Baxter was also told of the terroristic influence of
the “Ritualistic Church” in this part of East London. One local curate had
apparently “told a woman who attends the [North East London Gospel Mission]
that the death of her children was God’s punishment for her doing so.”630 By
causing extraordinary emotional agony, the curate (one of the staff at St. John’s,
Isle of Dogs) apparently hoped to draw the woman from attendance at the
Protestant mission to his church.
In South London these miniature, rather childish, battles between
ministers often put their social and religious work in a counterproductive light.
The war between the sects revolved around a wide variety of local campaigns,
wherein battles over doctrine could mean the loss of one’s chapel. One missioner
in the parish of St. George the Martyr felt that the only reason the rector, Rev.
Somerville, wanted to “turn him out” was to “bid over his head for the rooms he
occupied in Scovell Road.”631 The stance of High Church parishes such as All
629
Parsons’ italics. Parsons, “Emotion and Piety,” in Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain
214.
630
Chorley, B 177: 3, 4.
631
Arnold, B 270: 209.
250
Hallows, Southwark, was clear in the testimony of John Coles, a London City
Missioner working in the area. Rev. Duthy, the vicar of the parish, was “Fearfully
dead against me,” Coles said. Like Charles Wheeler, a fellow missionary in the
parish of St. John the Evangelist, platoons of High “church ladies” were leaving
lone Missionaries hopelessly outgunned in the field of district visiting.632 Coles
described his clerical competitors thus: “[All Hallows’ clergy] [h]ave 7 or 8
Sisters. He [Coles] is friendly towards the Vicar and curate, altho’ the latter told
him that he was a heretic and said that he would do what he could to Keep Mr.
Coles out of the people’s houses.”633 A Bethnal Green LCM describing similar
difficulties said a clergyman’s simple stance toward him was: “I belong to the
Church and you don’t.”634 It was probably not without some relish, moreover, that
another ritualist – the otherwise rosy-faced and “cherubic” Rev. Denny –
discussed, with relish, the lack of influence by other religious agencies in the
parish of St. Peter’s Vauxhall. “Dissent is absolutely dead,” Denny said. He
haughtily affirmed that there was “a Baptist Chapel next the church which they
might buy for ₤2000.” Approaching a snarl, the vicar added that there was “a
beastly little Protestant place called Caine Hall which is purely political and does
no religious work at all.”635 In the main, of course, both Anglo-Catholic and
Protestant ministers tended toward brighter, more musical services – services that
all agreed were more modern and agreeable to urban audiences, but we can see
how fundamentalists may have clouded this picture with their doctrinal
insecurities.636
632
Coles, B 270: 53; B 270 Wheeler 181: A ten-year veteran in St. John’s, Wheeler complained
that, because “the church ladies” now visited a great deal, his work had become confined only to
the parish’s wharf district. More widespread visitation was possible under St. John’s previous
vicar, the Rev. A.H. Jephson. The advent of a more “definite churchmen,” however, had meant he
could no longer work under the church’s auspices. The vicar of St. John’s, in his own interview,
said that he had asked whether Wheeler might work with his church. He was told that while the
LCM was undenominational, and that they would send converts on only to churches “where the
Gospel is preached.” The vicar, the Rev. Bainbridge Bell, gave up on the LCM after this,
denouncing Wheeler as a “nuisance.” Bainbridge Bell, B 269: 17.
633
Coles, B 270: 53.
634
King, B 229: 121.
635
Denny, B 272: 9-11.
636
Englander, “The Word and the World,” Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain 24-26.
251
For some middle-class men, loud proclamations of doctrinal efficacy
masked another, more personal attraction they saw in High Churchmanship – an
attraction that had nothing to do with the working classes. At late century, High
Churchism provided a sanctuary for another middle-class movement altogether,
one for sexual dissidents. As David Hilliard suggests, “Despite the traditional
teaching of the Christian Church that homosexual behaviour is sinful, there are
grounds for believing that Anglo-Catholic religion within the Church of England
has offered emotional and aesthetic satisfactions that may have been particularly
attractive to members of a stigmatised sexual minority.”637
Importantly, and very much like the gender dissidents of Part III, this
movement for freedom of sexual identity had nothing to do with social justice.
Like the women in Part III – the gender dissidents who, wrongly, have been called
socialist feminists – it is too easy to tag high and ritualist priests in the Anglican
church as socialists. It is a nice idea to think that most gender and sexual
dissidents were also activists against social injustice and poverty, but most were
not. Usually, all that the minority of homosexual men in the High Church
typically wanted to do (in a post-Wilde trial England) was to explore their own
homosexual masculinity within the secure and “straight” identity of the clergyman
(an identity providing participation in an overwhelmingly masculine world). This
error on the part of historians will be discussed in subsequent chapters. For now it
is most important to emphasize that, in Richard Dellamora’s atmosphere of
masculine crisis, whispers of a racy undertone to High Church ritual only added a
further worry over ministerial authority in an already anxious atmosphere.
There is not enough evidence from the Booth Archive to know what
working people thought about this sexually-charged aspect of middle-class
religiosity.638 But if we take Robert Roberts’ account to be accurate, the working637
Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly,” 181; McLeod, Religion and Society 156.
Paz’s work stops at mid-century and posits that the anti-catholic movement petered out after
1870 (D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1992)). David Hilliard’s sources do not give a window on the working-class
reaction to Anglo-Catholicism. His often discrete (literary sources like the works of Compton
Mackenzie) sources tell us that mining largely middle-class literature for traces of the lives of
these sexual dissidents is difficult enough without the additional task of looking for popular
responses.
638
252
class world was at least somewhat “stirred” by the Wilde trials; working people
used words like “delicate,” “mother-bound,” and “nancy” to describe suspected
homosexuals in their neighbourhoods; and overall, they were “hostile” to these
men. It is difficult to tell, however, whether objections to ritual from one East End
church were based on personal preference, anti-catholicism, or a concern about
ritual’s sexual overtones at this time. One Bethnal Green vicar noted the
“exceeding touchiness of his people.” “The people don’t care a bit about doctrine,
but they hate ritual: Mr. G. has lately tried to introduce a Processional Cross but
has withdrawn it in deference to opposition.” The former head of Hackney Wick’s
Eton Mission, “a very high churchman,” was “given to fasting, rituals
asceticism,” and his successor found the people around the church “had
practically struck against religious observances.”639 Another South Hackney vicar
in a poor parish, Rev. Bankes, probably described working people’s approach to
church doctrine best. “The working man generally does not care in the least about
church doctrines: as a rule he likes a service to be bright: but given that he does
not care a bit whether his church is High or Low. But when he has got used to one
or the other he dislikes a change.”640 As we will see in Part IV, poor but
respectable working people were more interested in the way churches, High or
Low, catered to their respectable aspirations.
Middle-class ministers would have known or at least worried that sexual
dissidents of the High Church were tampering with the already fragile popularity
of the church, and their language in discussions of High Churchism was often
antipathetic. The language of certain Protestant protesters leans toward a silent
though hateful acknowledgement that there was something (in Victorian
language) “morally” inappropriate in High Church practices. One wonders
whether one could speak of a heterosexualization of Protestantism in response to a
period of homosexualized High ritual. Rev. Grundy told his interviewer that his
Low, Lambeth church, “met a want” in the district because of “its thoroughgoing
evangelicalism.” It kept local Low Anglican residents, he thought, “from lapsing
639
640
Roberts, Classic Slum 54-55; Gedge, B 182: 59-61; Donaldson, B 185: 179-181.
Bankes, B 185: 123-125.
253
to non-conformity those who want a simple service and plain gospel teaching”
(Low Churchmen always had to be on the lookout for Nonconformist sheepstealers). But Low services were also greatly appreciated, said Grundy, by “those
who hate to see men in coloured garments sprawling before the altar and
incensing the people.” Grundy, clearly disgusted with the “sprawling” men of the
High Church, “instanced a family living a mile away who after a year in the
district and a trial of many churches had at last found what they wanted at St.
Stephens.”641
Likewise the new superintendent of the South-West London Wesleyan
Mission, Robert Browell, in his annual Report, equally opposed the morally
suspect West Ender to the gospel-loving hard-working South London working
man. “One of the hopeful features in dealing with the thousands of South
London,” he wrote, “is the industrial element that has come to live in its area.”
As the West End is the recognised haunt of the gay and vicious, so the
South-West has become practically the workshop of the Metropolis.
Whilst we have the poor in great number and variety, a large proportion of
the regular wage-earning class – true those earnings are often small – but
the man who best appreciates the Gospel is he who knows the moral
bracing and physical blessing of honest toil.642
In South Bermondsey a Baptist minister spoke in less sensational, but still
disapproving terms. He hinted that some ritualists were more “men” than others.
Rev. Howe thought the clergy had “lost ground” in the parish of St.
Bartholomew’s. “A former vicar (Wells) was ‘more a man than a priest,’ and had
the people’s sympathies.” Rev. Richards, the new vicar, “was a different type of
man,” Howe said: “the people of the district not caring for ritualism, he lost
hold.”643 In a rare comment (and a not entirely accurate one, as so many High
Churchmen celebrated strength, manliness and virility with such figures as
641
Grundy, B 272: 169.
“Report of the South-West London Wesleyan Mission [1899],” 9. We should note that the term
“gay” in 1899 did not denote one’s sexuality. To use terms like “vicious” hinted at taboo
sexualities (as did “immorality” and “indecency”) without speaking of sexuality explicitly.
643
Howe, B 282: 77. A Kennington missioner said that working-class reaction to the ritualist
practices of St. Agnes’ Church had made the ground “hard” for all religious workers in the
neighbourhood. The people were seized with a kind of “churlishness” that, the missioner said,
renewed Protestant efforts were only “just beginning to melt (Heatley, B 277: 73).”
642
254
Hoxton’s “Father Jay”), a Hackney Unitarian, Rev. Fletcher Williiams, said that
only “effeminate” men were drawn to high ritual. “Most of the churches in
Hackney are high, and even some men who are low in doctrine (eg Cullin) go in
for ritual to attract the women. The result is that the churches are filled with about
90 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men with effeminate minds.”644
Farther South in Nunhead, Rev. Owen of the Cheltenham Mission
cryptically told Duckworth that he thought “working men” had “a strong and very
often ignorant prejudice against what they imagine to be Roman practises. They
object to pictures of the Stations of the Cross and one of his best men was greatly
offended when he saw a picture of the Crucifixion at a lantern lecture, saying that
it was not right that such things should be shewn nowadays.”645
Old Kent Road LCM C.A. Pavey had the same tone, and his working-class
background gave him away when he spoke distastefully of the other religious
agencies of his district. “Speaking as to other agencies Mr. P said “All Saints has
done us a lot of injury. It was all right when Mr. Phillips was there: but this Mr.
Harrison, we’re ashamed of ‘im, with his confession and his incense.”646
It was, indeed, an impression of old, sick, broke, anxiety-ridden, spiteful,
and sometimes barely coherent ministers which the Booth men formed in the
course of the London interviews. Accounts of “frightfully slow progress” by the
more able ministers were, moreover, all the easier to believe when ministerial
colleagues were constantly seen to be stabbing themselves in the back, over
donations, over their class, their pasts or their ritual. It all amounted to a colossal
indignity for ministers, forced on them by a changing metropolitan world, and we
can excuse the Booth men if their impression of the ministers was that of a
demoralized profession: one who had completely lost their authority in their
neighbourhoods and one whose representatives all seemed to be wallowing in
self-pity. W.J. Hurry, a worker in a South Hackney Baptist chapel was so nervous
644
Fletcher Williams, B 190: 73. Hugh McLeod, citing David Hilliard, notes that Fr. Jay (and we
might include Rev. Sadler Philips above and many others) were “a living refutation of one of the
most popular religious stereotypes of the time – that of the ‘effeminate’ Anglo-Catholic.”
McLeod, Religion and Society 155.
645
Owen, B 311: 7-9.
646
Pavey, B 277: 63.
255
that he was barely interviewable. Arkell said the man “was rather afraid of
making definite statements as to attendance etc, actuated by a fear of misleading
and a similar fear of misrepresenting [his church] made him equally cautious as to
opinion – consequently I did not obtain much from him.”647
The anxious nature of churchwork, and the additional stress of the Booth
men’s questions was perhaps the reason why a number of ministers were noted
smoking through their interviews.648 Historians avoid the image of holy men as
smokers, but they should not. Bethnal Green’s Rev. James Greaves was one of
these. “Smoked a good deal of the time we were talking,” wrote an unimpressed
Aves. “Of moderate intelligence, indolent. Not a teetotaller.” So was Rev. J.R.
Pridie, Anglican missioner at the Clare College Mission in Rotherhithe: “Mr.
Pridie received me in a room redolent of tobacco, but he had somewhat the
appearance of an ascetic. He is a little man, dark, closely shaven, quiet-voiced. He
was wearing a cassock; had rather a tired manner and did not give the impression
of a physically strong man.” As we recall from Chapter 4, Southwark’s Father
Buckley lit up with Aves immediately on meeting him. Rotherhithe was home to
several more smoking priests. Aves wrote in his interview – “After tea, Father
Sagessa produced excellent cigarettes, and everybody smoked, Father Mostyn
preferring a pipe.” There were also many ministers who mentioned how pleased
they were when they realized Ernest Aves was a smoker. Rev. Peatfield, a
Rotherhithe Primitive Methodist “[wore] slippers,” wrote Aves, “and is made
happier when he learns that you smoke, for he always feels that he can ‘talk
better’ then.” Likewise, Peckham’s “walrus-moustached,” German-looking, Free
Methodist, Rev. Mann, was both slippered and smoking. Aves noted that
Brixton’s Rev. Carnegie Brown “smokes vigorously, and did so while we were
647
Bennett, B 190: 54.
Smoking ministers, as an image of the holy men of this era, it seems to me, is not one of which
historians typically employ. But instances of them occur too often to ignore. Thus Rev. Morris,
vicar of St. Anne’s, South Lambeth: “We talked in the study, redolent of smoke, after the morning
meeting of the clerical staff. Two tall curates passed me in the hall, but I saw the Vicar alone. With
an apology for the smoke, and a reference to the talk he had with Mr. Booth some years ago, when
he was at S. Peter’s about clubs etc. he began to explain his position a little, describing himself as
‘a little bit of an agitator’ and a Fabian.” 272: 139. In Rotherhithe, Pastor Richardson of the
Rotherhithe Free Church lit up a cigar on meeting Arkell “[e]xplaining that it was the only
opportunity he had to smoke.” 280: 29.
648
256
talking.” The vicar gave a strange confession of his habit. “‘It’s my own house’ he
said ‘and I smoke everywhere, except in my wife’s bed-room. That is sacred’, and
then, as an afterthought, ‘unless I am laid up in it; then I smoke.’”649
Although sharing a cigarette with the Ernest Aves was not always
necessary to get the truth out of a man, it helped ministers to speak candidly. For
all the reasons discussed above, holy men felt that their ministries might be
having a doubtful influence on the working poor around them. This cut them to
the core. “I am glad you smoke,” said Rev. Longsdon of St. Michael’s parish,
Southwark: “I find I can get through a good deal of tobacco down here, but I can’t
stand anything but a pipe.” Longsdon was honest about the depression often that
came with Christian work in South London. “I go up and down a good deal,” said
Longsdon, “and if you had come a fortnight ago, you would have found me rather
down in the dumps.” A Greenwich vicar said of working-class attendance at
Prayer Meetings” “is constantly declining and it is increasingly difficult to get
people ‘to lead in prayer.’
Altogether, as Mr. L. said (with a cheerful smile) ‘if
one’s heart could be broken a dozen times mine would have been.’” A Homerton
vicar, speaking of his unsuccessful outdoor services remarked:
“It seems as though people were not very responsive. It is rather
depressing,” and then as though in confidence, and rather touchingly, “it is
very depressing, sometimes.” Then he added, brightening up a bit, that it
was very satisfactory to be sent for by people when they were in trouble,
as from sickness, even though they gave no thought to you or the church
and church services at other times. “Indifference to church and church
services is not, I think, a sign of unbelief. I think people believe in the
Christian faith,” and then, as though this was saying a little too much, “or
rather to put it another way, they are not prepared not to believe[”], adding
the final reflection, feeling that it touched on the whole question – [“]and
they live hard lives.”
Many, and perhaps the majority of vicars, however, gave the impression Canon
Allen Edwards did, ignoring their gains, concentrating on losses, and admitting
failure: “Altogether the Canon took a gloomy view of the position. ‘Though in my
649
Greaves, B 182: 115; Pridie, B 279: 65; Buckley, B 274: 59; Father Murnane and three of his
fellow priests, B 280: 248-9, fol. 13; Mann, B 307: 35; Peatfield, B 280: 221; Carnegie Brown, B
305: 213.
257
parish we have much to be thankful for’ he said ‘yet the discouragements are so
great that I often feel inclined to lie upon the floor and cry.’”650
Chapter 5. Incarnational Inspiration, Scientific Security:
The Social Science of the Metropolitan Minister
1. Introduction
If ministers were to present a good face to charity-obsessed social
scientists, to harden their middle-class Christian sensibilities to the constant
barrage of drugs, sex and violence common to working-class communities, and to
brace themselves against the erosion of professional status that went with the
introduction of “sub-par” holy men to the ministry, ministers needed a strong
ideological support to keep them going. Like Charles Booth, in order to carry on,
to be the Christian social activists that historians suggest they became after 1850,
these terribly insecure men required ideological sustenance to carry on. Like
Booth, what held them up was a strongly moral form of certainty. But was it a
scientific certainty as well – a moral-scientific certainty alike to Booth’s? The
generous tone of High Church Incarnationalism and the Nonconformist Social
Gospel concerned Booth and his investigators considerably (so concerned were
they about careless charity). But because their methods of measuring ministers’
moral integrity were so wildly subjective, Booth’s accounts often fail to provide
an accurate picture of ministers’ minds and methods in this regard. As historians
have noted, a minister’s theological language, by the 1890s, had taken a turn for
the universal, the humanitarian. It spoke of love and had a flavour of welfare, and
this irked charity control fanatics like Booth who were concerned that there might
not be, as one East London Congregationalist put it, “sympathy with
discrimination” in all church social work. Yet, as this chapter will show, focusing
650
Longsdon, B 269: 77; Love, B 287: 7; Andrews, B 186: 115; Allen Edwards, B 272: 59.
258
on the essentialisms of the late century “new love” theology causes us to ignore
what ministers themselves believed was the “scientific” basis of their social work.
This social science did not come from the church – it was a hybrid of old moral
notions and new social science. Whose social science served as their model? In
the absence of their own handbooks on the subject, the fascinating thing about
ministers’ pastoral and neighbourhood social work in this era – what one
contemporary referred to as the “golden age” of church social work – was that its
fundamentals (moral discrimination, selective charity) were probably borrowed
directly from Charles Booth himself.
2. “Universalism” among Ministers
Christians of all kinds were putting their faith in a kind of New
Christianity in this period. London’s High and Anglo-Catholic clergymen stood
out most prominently in this respect – men controversial not only for their
abandonment (in ritual, dress, and architecture) of evangelicalism’s aesthetic
blandness, but also for the exotic and ambivalently masculine picture they
presented to London parishes.651 A new language of human fellowship based in
Christ’s Incarnation had brought them into a closer relationship with the city’s
poor. Late in June, 1907, Arthur Stanton of St. Alban’s, Holborn, explained the
meaning of this “new love” for the poor. To his seven-hundred listeners – all of
them working men holding a town hall meeting in his honour – Stanton
proclaimed a brotherhood between himself and those before him, a love between
them. “God has given me the love of my fellow men,” Stanton said, and the men
burst into applause. “Amor vincit omnia,” Stanton cried, “love conquers
everything – and the one verse in God’s holy word that I pick out, which I should
like to be written over my grave is this: ‘God hath made of one blood all nations
of men.’” The men roared their applause. “Those words lie at the bottom of all
651
Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly”; Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society 156.
259
credal and social difficulties and differences to unite all men together. It is a blood
and a heart that make men one…”652
Boyd Hilton and Cheryl Walsh tell us that High and “ritualist” clergymen
such as Stanton were symptomatic of a theological shift in the Anglican Church.
Around the 1850s Anglican thought had moved from an insensitive era of
Christian anti-pauperism – what Hilton has called the “Age of Atonement” – to a
more socially responsible “Age of Incarnation.”653 In the 1830s and 40s
Atonement-centered thought had emphasized the divine nature of sinful men
suffering through poverty (or any other hardship) in order to achieve economic
and spiritual salvation. By the 1870s and 80s Anglo-Catholics like Stewart
Headlam, emphasizing the life rather than the death of Jesus Christ, could declare
that membership in a church and participation in its rituals (baptism, communion,
the Eucharist) was membership in a “social entity.” Like Stanton he repeated the
words “brotherhood” and “humanity” in his sermons and publications, refused
earlier evangelical notions of human depravity, and declared that his Christian
activism could be embraced by all. “The people,” according to Headlam, would
by these means make a Kingdom of God on Earth.654 It was in this way that
Anglo-Catholics acquired their “social” conscience by late century and by these
means that they “detached themselves” from an Atonement-centered
churchmanship emphasizing personal salvation. The salvation of the Church and
society, Anglo-Catholics said, was open to all, and it was through this universalist
stance that Christian Socialists were able to plot “a new course for the church in
its relations with secular society, particularly with regard to social reform and the
working classes.”655 In this interpretation Hilton and Walsh follow a long line of
652
George W. E. Russell Arthur Stanton: A Memoir (London: Longman’s Green & Co., 1917),
267-268.
653
Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement 5. Hilton connects a “new emphasis on Jesus…with the
growth of Christian social action during the second half of the nineteenth century.” According to
A.M. Ramsey and A.J.M. Milne, the age of incarnational theology (beginning roughly around the
time of F.D. Maurice’s popularity) “remained the mainstream in the Church of England down to
the 1930s.” See D. W. Bebbington’s review of Hilton in Bebbington, “Religion and Society in the
Nineteenth Century,” Historical Journal 32, 4 (1989): 1002-1003; Ramsey, From Gore to Temple;
A.J.M. Milne, The Social Philosophy of English Idealism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962).
654
Walsh, “The Incarnation and the Christian Socialist Conscience,” 366-370.
655
Ibid., 374.
260
historians, including A.M. Ramsey but also Peter d’ Alroy Jones, E.R. Norman
and scholars of homosexuals among the ranks of Anglo-Catholic Christian
Socialists, such as David Hilliard and Hugh McLeod.656
Be-cassocked Anglo-Catholics preaching “worldly compassion” may have
stolen the limelight from their evangelical colleagues, but historians such has
Hugh McLeod remind us that they were not the only sects “going social.” Gerald
Parsons notes that the Incarnational “shift of emphasis” among Christian thinkers
was neither the product or property of any one theological tradition.
Anglo-Catholic sacramentalism, Broad Church, Liberal Nonconformist
and Presbyterian moral critiques of hell and substitutionary atonement,
and the rediscovery (partly through the rise of biblical criticism) of the
ethical message of the prophets and Jesus’ preaching of the Kingdom of
God as a present reality, were all aspects of a theological reorientation
which rendered late Victorian Christianity as a whole more immanentist,
more this-worldly, and less doctrinally severe than its early Victorian
predecessor.657
Clergymen of all denominations were shifting their rhetoric toward what seems,
in retrospect, a kind of universalism. High and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans stressed
the incarnation as the foundation of their ideas of brotherhood (God had become
man, and so human life was holy), and Low Anglicans and Nonconformist
evangelicals found themselves likewise preaching a new Social Gospel.658
Richard Helmstadter speaks of the doctrine of the Atonement being “pushed
toward the sidelines in the last years of the nineteenth century.”
“[Nonconformists] began to doubt the supreme significance of the cross, and to
place more importance on Christ’s life than on his atoning death.”659 The
Congregationalist R.F. Horton attempted to “restate Evangelical theology” by
giving “a preeminent place to the Person of Christ in his 1888 Inspiration of the
Bible” and an enthusiastic R.W. Dale did so by emphasizing the “wonderful story
656
Ramsey, Gore to Temple 1; Peter d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival 85-94; E.R.
Norman, Church and Society in England 246-250, 318-323; Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly,”
181-210; McLeod, Religion and Society 156.
657
Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel: Victorian Christian Social Attitudes,” in Parsons
ed., Religion in Victorian Britain 59.
658
See McLeod, Religion and Society in England 140-144.
659
Helmstadter, “The Nonconformist Conscience,” in Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain
84, 83.
261
of the Incarnation.”660 Helmstadter notes a “new emphasis on God’s mercy”
among leading Nonconformist ministers in this period. There was a new stress
“on the Fatherhood of God” that became fashionable from the 1880s: “God as a
slightly indulgent Father began to replace God the judge who demanded the
atonement of Christ and required faith and moral effort on the part of man.” “The
Fatherhood of God,” writes Helmstadter, “became an immensely popular sermon
subject, attractive partly because it permitted preachers to speak loosely and
enthusiastically about the brotherhood of man.”661 Both High and Low, therefore,
wished to win the masses back to religious worship and both envisaged a new
brotherhood of man.
Low Churchmen and Nonconformist’s efforts, of course, drew much less
attention than a new generation of slum clergymen – young, energetic, High
Churchmen – some of them employing ritualistic services. A rising star among
such clergymen, Arthur Stanton felt he was bringing a new “social” religion to
parish work, one which would demonstrate how obsolete Low Church evangelism
had become. He wrote to his mother in the mid-1860s how “religious thought was
undergoing a great change.” He “despised the religionism of the old system,” and
while he “honoured and loved the good…who were brought up under it,” he
“believed that they had been good despite, and not in consequence of, the
system.” Such men as Stanton “loved ritual, and the visible vestige of the divine:
their aesthetic sense was strong and they entered with zest into every detail of
form and colour and material when planning a mission room or decorating an
oratory.” They tried to make it clear – to what was then a disapproving society –
that they “were no dreamy dilettante admirer[s] of an ecclesiastical past,” that
“they were firmly convinced that [their] form of Christianity was the only one that
could get a grip on living men and women – especially on the degraded ones
swarming around [their churches].” The basis of their ritualism, moreover, “was a
belief that all human flesh was loveable and venerable, because CHRIST had
660
661
Englander, “The Word and the World,” in Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain 28-29.
Helmstadter, “Nonconformist Conscience,” in Parsons ed. Religion in Victorian Britain 84.
262
worn the human form, and therefore, [that] the most depraved ought to be looked
after as” – in Stanton’s words – “saintly brethren in obstructed embryo.”662
The worry, for the Booth men, was that men like Stanton (or less
attention-grabbing Nonconformists and Low Churchmen), in their zeal for a “new
love,” would lose their sense of proportion. Charles Booth had argued since early
on in his life, and certainly in the aftermath of his work for the Mansion House
Fund in 1885 (see Chapter 3), that London philanthropists had to avoid at all costs
indiscriminate giving to an undifferentiated mass of poor people. Only the
manipulative charity scroungers of Class B would benefit from such charitable
carelessness, while Booth’s clients, the poor but respectable, would avoid the
shame of a church or chapel bread-line.
While Booth had had long contact with metropolitan ministers for his
Poverty and Industries Series, he could not be sure, as the Religious Influences
interviews began, whether clergymen had tempered their Incarnational theology
with a “scientific” understanding (i.e. moral division) of working people, or an
equally “scientific” application of charity to the most deserving.
In some cases ministers showed little sign of adhering to Booth’s methods,
conforming very much to the clueless and inefficient clergyman stereotype of
popular culture. Certain men baffled the Booth investigators as sentimental dupes
or unrealistic fundamentalists. Sometimes the Booth investigators failed to see
any kind of method in their parish social work. They saw not science but a harebrained spirituality in holy men’s charity policies. On meeting such men, Booth
feared such carelessness and overgenerous religiosity was widespread. He feared
that London’s ministers had gained no sociological and charitable understanding
of poor people from his work.
One example came from the South London interviews. On a Saturday in
April, 1900, Arthur Baxter walked into St. Luke’s Church in Bermondsey. There
he met the vicar of St. Luke’s, a man named Hugh Chapman. Baxter, a solicitor,
former COS official and by 1900, long-time interviewer for Booth, spent the next
three days with Chapman as a guest at the vicarage. He studied Chapman’s
662
Russell, Arthur Stanton 88, 100, 102.
263
philanthropic activities, and he interviewed his curates, but Baxter initially could
not determine the methodological implications of Chapman’s theology. Chapman
was certainly a High Churchman, one of the proponents of a “new love” and a
“living Christ” (and a priest who provided confession in his church), but what this
meant in practical (i.e. charitable) terms was not clear.663 The two men had stayed
up talking Sunday night, Baxter smoking the vicar’s cigarettes. Baxter later
recalled how, as both men said ‘good night,’ the vicar predicted what the Booth
Man’s personal assessment of him would be. Chapman said, “I believe you’ll go
back and make a note, ‘Here I met a hybrid. I can’t place him. Amusing chap’.”664
Assessing Chapman and the “influence” of his religion was to prove a
difficult assignment. Chapman came to Baxter “immaculate in his dress: very neat
and dapper, with the whitest cuffs and expensive gold and diamond links.” Baxter
described the vicar’s “character” as much as his physical appearance: “Mr. C. is a
man of 43: he is of medium height, thin, spare, getting bald, clean shaven with a
face which is a strange blend of the ascetic saint and the Piccadilly rake.” In a
time when the term “gentleman” had become an increasingly contested term,
Baxter noted: “Even in Peckham he always dresses for dinner so that he ‘may not
forget the gentleman.’”665
Thereafter Rev. Chapman was grilled by Baxter both on his theology and
its implications. Baxter’s description of the vicar’s study takes us to the eclectic
scene of their conversation. “On [a] table and elsewhere,” in the richly furnished
room, were “quite a number of images of Jesus” – pictures, Baxter wrote, “of the
kind that one sees in the windows of Catholic shops.” On the door, always
reminding Chapman of the importance of Christian self-sacrifice, was engraved
the single word: “Others.”666
663
Chapman, B 281: 133-135. Chapman’s High Church tendencies were also visible in the
elaborate decoration of his church: “This when he came was little more than a shell: he has spent
large sums on it, and made it one of the most beautiful churches in London: its chief glory is the
pews which are of mahogany with the outer part inlaid: they really are exceedingly beautiful, but
everything in the church is good, though the decoration is not yet finished. The next addition is to
be windows in the Baptistry given by some friend in memory of his mistress.” (119)
664
Chapman, B 281: 97.
665
Ibid., 97, 99.
666
Poking out amongst the portraits of divines were also several pictures of actors (Beerbohm
Tree and Charles Wyndham were mentioned), and on an easel close to his worktable, was a
264
Baxter wanted to know, in a practical sense, what this heavy dose of Jesus
amounted to for the minister, and especially if it amounted to irresponsible
charity. Chapman dreamily told him that he wanted to be a cross between a
spiritual juggernaut like Bishop King of Lincoln – “to whose teaching at Oxford
[he owed] his conversion” – and a bold muscular Christian like Charles Kingsley.
Baxter was likely more interested in how this translated into church charity
organization at St. Luke’s, but was told instead, “the ideal aimed at [is] the
complication of the mystical saint and the practical Christian.” At this point,
Baxter was left scratching his head. He wrote:
Indeed the religion which Chapman preaches and I really believe, with
many strange lapses, practices, is “altruism”, “sacrifice for others”
inspired by the example of Jesus: for this creed he himself admits that
perhaps “Jesusism” is a better name than Christianity, which has come to
connote a number of dogmas in which he no longer believes, except in the
spirit; the Incarnation and the Resurrection as physical facts are rejected:
their value is purely as symbols: they have a sort of mystical truth which
can scarcely be put into words, though Chapman ventures so far as to
speak of the Incarnation as symbolic of “Love born of innocence.”
“Of Jesus the Nazarene” he said “I know nothing: the story as such
is nothing to me; I only value it for its inner meaning.”667
This left Baxter stumped. Indeed, after quoting Chapman at length he
wrote frustratedly that, “All this subjective mystical side of Chapman’s creed is of
course hopelessly vague and unsatisfactory to the practical mind, and in spite of
or perhaps in consequence of his constant assertion that he is a ‘Mystic’, a
‘Devote’ one has a lurking suspicion that it is all a pose.”668
Baxter, however, was not through with Chapman. Tirelessly that weekend,
he sat through every service and meeting at St. Luke’s parish that he could. On
Sunday morning, he was present for the Early Communion and the parish’s
special Breakfast at the Vicarage that followed it:
On Sunday the day began with the Early Communion at 8 o’clock. Here
there were almost 120 present, of whom more than 40 were men: nearly
all were of working or quite poor middle class. Chapman, standing at the
portrait of his mother (Chapman said he constantly referred to it as the “guide of his life”). Ibid.,
99-101.
667
Ibid., 103.
668
Chapman, B281: 101, 103.
265
altar rails, meditated on the Epistle for about 20 minutes. On most
Sundays after the service there is a Breakfast at the Vicarage, but on the
first Sunday of the month, as this was, a larger function takes place at the
Institute. About 25 of us sat down (all men) the mixture of classes being
very marked. All those I spoke to struck me as bright, pleasant, manly
fellows with plenty of common sense who would scarcely be likely to fall
under the sway of a humbug [a term which sometimes denoted a man too
often mixing religion and church attendance with charitable rewards].
After a very cheery and sociable breakfast Chapman rose and spoke for
about 20 minutes, partly welcoming me, partly enforcing on those present
his usual lesson of “altruism”: “our object at this Institute” he said “is to
do our level best to help one another; that’s our local idea of what Jesus
means.”
Just as the party was breaking up an old working
man got up and asked to be allowed to say a few words: very simply and
with real emotion he thanked Chapman for “bringing him to Christ.”669
Finally, Baxter pinned his high-flying vicar down. Unfortunately their
conversation confirmed Charles Booth’s worst fears. Baxter wrote: “The question
of Relief came up during lunch. ‘We give whatever we can get’ said Mr. C. There
have at various times’ been Soup Kitchen, free dinners etc. Mr. C. objects to the
C.O.S. that ‘they have no guts and confesses that he ‘gives to everybody.’” Baxter
followed this, as he often did when clergymen said something he believed
outrageous, with a large gap between sentences. Thus: “
I do it with a
sort of splosh, I’m built like that,” said Chapman, clearly with no sense of shame.
Finally down to business, Baxter wrote:
The amount spent may be about ₤200 a year. [Subsequently I heard from
Mr. Morris [a guest at Chapman’s house] and others of the Vicar’s attitude
with cadgers, and they stood nine or ten deep as he came out of church: at
last it became necessary to take strong measures and all parochial
669
Ibid., 103-105, 123-125. At the evening service the church was full and the Christly message of
self-sacrifice largely the same. Baxter recalled the episode thus: “Evening Service was at 7. The
church was packed full: I was in front and could not see well the character of the congregation, but
as far as I could judge it was a complete mixture of all classes except the lowest. Sitting next to me
was a member of the Reform Club, and among the congregation were Beerbohm Tree and Owen
Seaman who both afterwards came in to supper. Chapman’s cantata “The Crucifix” was well sung
by the choir.
Chapman preached for 45 minutes, a sermon, never dull, at times very eloquent,
at times vulgar and sensational: when he was about to say anything particularly sensational or
outrageous he prefaced it with “You’ll forgive the expression won’t you.”
The sermon
which enforced his usual moral of self sacrifice was mainly on the necessity of getting Christ to
tarry with us: we must not “flirt with the Christ.”
Among other things he said “The curse of
our ideals is that they are so cursory.”
In his study afterwards he quoted this to
Morris and me as the best thing he had said: we both expressed the opinion that it was exceedingly
cheap. “Ah well” he said “banal perhaps.” (135-137)
266
administration of relief has been taken from his hands, and cent[e]red at
the Institute. But cadgers still waylay Chapman in the street and he falls an
easy prey. All agreed however that his charity did not stop at giving: no
trouble is too great for him to take to try and raise people out of the mire:
he will visit them incessantly, move all his friends to find them work, send
them to the seaside to recruit, spend hours at police courts in their interest.
Mr. Morris said to me “He never gives up a case” though in so saying he
was thinking of moral as well as spiritual assistance]670
Chapman’s brotherly religion clearly served as a powerful impetus to his
church work. But his methods of charity were clearly dangerous to Baxter. It is
rather interesting in this case that the vicar’s careless methods had caused his
curates (one of them, named Waldron, Baxter noted, who “freely” dropped his
H’s) to wrest control of relief from him. It was perhaps because of the presence of
more “sensibly-minded” curates, that Baxter – despite his clear reservations –
parted Chapman’s company graciously. In his final estimation of the vicar of St.
Luke’s, Baxter probably agreed with Chapman’s dinner guest, Mr. Morris, a man
he called “a sane, sober, serious man who has known him intimately for years.”
Morris told Baxter: “He is a mess of contradictions: but he is the most loving and
sympathetic man that ever breathed.”671
Nevertheless Chapman’s theology remained an ill-defined creed for
Baxter, appearing to cause “reckless” kindness likely to interfere with
“responsible” charity work. Appealing, as the Booth Men regularly did, to the
local COS official (Baxter’s former colleague Mr. Woollcombe, in this case),
Baxter was told that the local clergy sometimes both feared for Chapman’s
“sanity” (so unorthodox was his theology), they also had many stories of of the
vicar’s generous nature.672 To such an uncontrolled charitable authority, one
detects in Baxter’s conclusion a strong hint of indifference and dismissal (as well
670
Ibid., 113-115.
Ibid., 107. Historians must always be very cautious in quoting statements such as these. They
force us to culturally contextualize men like Chapman, and quote, for example, his support for the
re-instatement of the Contagious Diseases Acts, to properly place him in his incorrigibly classist,
sexist, racist and homophobic society: “As to prostitution – he has always publicly and in print
advocated the reenactment of the C.D. Acts and regulation.” (115)
672
Ibid., 139-141.
671
267
as the annoyance of his stricter, more “sensible” curates, to whom Chapman was
clearly a handful).
At breakfast on Monday morning the second curate Mr. Gooch was
present. He is a practical, sensible, rather thick headed parson of the
ordinary type, and I saw indicators that his vicar is a sore trial to him.
After breakfast as we said ‘Good bye’ Chapman said “Are you beginning
to understand my creed?”
“Yes” I untruthfully replied.
“If I
can help you one iota nearer Christ, [said Chapman] that’s all I want.”673
Another indication of the Booth Men’s concern over a potentially
overgenerous incarnational Christianity at late century was his harsh analysis of
certain ministers in his published volumes. It should be remembered that, most of
the time, Booth’s Religious Influences series volumes received praise by the
religious press. But his dismissals of charitable work in certain parishes
sometimes brought a reaction. Often he kept his criticism of individuals secret in
the unpublished interview handbooks of the series, but when his criticisms
reached the printed volumes of the Religious Influences series, individual
clergymen (or their spokesmen) protested at being unfairly judged. Arthur
Stanton’s memoirist, for example, wanted to change the image Booth had given
the High Churchman. G.W.E Russell, author of both Arthur Stanton: A Memoir
(1917) and Saint Alban the Martyr, Holborn: A History of Fifty Years (1913)
made particular mention of Booth’s rather critical treatment of his subject. Russell
was a great admirer of Anglo-Catholic “priests” such as Stanton, and he defended
the parish against Booth’s accusations of charitable malpractice.674
Russell recalled the day the Booth Men arrived at St. Alban’s. His tone
was cautious when he came upon this subject, even cagey. “The first years of the
twentieth century,” Russell began, “yield no material for the historian of St.
Alban’s Church…” He finished the sentence with the hurried words – “the fact
673
Ibid., 137-139.
As with Chapman, Booth’s evidence for this malpractice was vague. Ernest Aves reported that
over £200 was spent in relief to the poor, and that an equal amount was spent in sending children
on summer holidays. Also, Stanton, like Chapman, enjoyed much the company of “disreputable”
people, calling them the “dearest people in the world.” “But the outcast lad or man is the special
care of Father Stanton,” wrote Aves (paraphrasing the words of Stanton’s colleague, Father
Suckling): “to have been convicted half a dozen times is the way to be sure of his [Stanton’s]
friendship.” Suckling, B 236: 207, 215
674
268
that Mr. Charles Booth’s judgment on the state of the parish (contained in his Life
and Labour of the People in London) was published in 1902, justifies its insertion
in this place.” Russell clearly did not want to quote Booth. Booth, after all, had
had little praise for St. Alban’s. He said the congregation at St. Alban’s was not
gathered from the parish, but (rather damningly, as it was a working-class parish)
that its flock was composed of middle-class High Church enthusiasts “from far
and wide.” This was rather a blot on the record of places like St. Alban’s where,
doctrinally-speaking, the High Church Movement and its ideals of brotherhood
were “nowhere better represented.” Booth’s verdict was short and harsh: those
parishioners who did come to services at St. Alban’s were, essentially, paid to be
there. There was also a hint that more respectable working-class residents steered
clear of the church675:
the hold which the Clergy obtain on the neighbouring poor, they owe
much to the work of the Clewer Sisters – work which, although devoted,
seems to be based to some extent on gifts. The character of the people
reached, and, perhaps, to some extent, the character of the work itself,
appears to be reflected in the complaint that the power of the Church does
not make its power felt among the inhabitants of the Block-buildings, who
are described as being ‘too respectable’ to be amenable to the influences
brought to bear upon them.
The best that could be said for the parish was that the church’s “failure on these
lines, and [the] hollow advantages obtained (which are only another form of
failure)” were “accompanied by an extraordinary success in personal relations
between the Clergy and many individuals amongst those who form the
congregation, and with the men and lads who join the Clubs.”676
Russell tried to rebut Booth’s attacks. He countered that “When Mr. Booth
spoke thus warmly of the personal relations between the Clergy, and many
individuals amongst those who form the congregation,” he rather underestimated
than overestimated the truth.” Russell then listed a number of instances of the
675
One clergyman Aves spoke to for the Religious Influences series said that the more respectable
deliberately avoided the church: “Since seeing Father S. I have seen Canon Shuttleworth and he
quoted a remark made to him by Father Stanton that the parish of S. Alban’s ‘was getting too
damned respectable.’” Suckling, B 236: 205.
676
G.W.E. Russell, Saint Alban the Martyr, Holborn: A History of Fifty Years (London: George
Allen & Company, Ltd., 1913): 239-42.
269
“liberality” of parishioners’ offerings to the church, and he made sure to point out
that these offerings came from many kinds of attendees – “even including those
who are not habitual church-goers.” He said that such offerings were proof of a
“practical” form of affection on their part – an affection which Booth, perhaps,
did not understand.677 Russell’s was a defensive explanation of the reciprocality
between the clergy and the people of St. Alban’s. The priest of St. Alban’s,
Russell urged, held a real and practical love for the poor, one borne of altruism,
one reconciling the classes and rendering them finally members of a single
brotherhood.
Both historians and contemporaries have largely supported the argument
that a new, more compassionate social Christianity spread through the churches
after 1850. Boyd Hilton, citing W.E. Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind,
1830-1870, sees an end to a harsher “Age of Atonement” among contemporaries
from this time, and suggests a revolution in church social strategy:
‘That Dickens could identify this Romantic benevolence with Christian
benevolence marks the decline of the older and sterner faith on which the
latter had been placed’, comments Houghton, who goes on to cite
Fitzjames Stephen’s condemnation of the period’s ‘vapid philanthropic
sentiment’ – ‘a creed of maudlin benevolence from which all the deeper
and sterner elements of religious beliefs have been carefully purged
away’.678
By the Edwardian period, literary men from Nonconformist families like
Edmund Gosse believed themselves to be witnessing a new era of benevolence. In
a particularly exuberant moment at the close of his Father and Son: A Study of
Two Temperaments (1907), Gosse concluded:
At the present hour, so complete is the revolution which has overturned
the puritanism of [my father’s generation] that all class of religious
persons combine in placing philanthropic activity, the objective attitude, in
the foreground. It is extraordinary how far-reaching the change has been,
so that nowadays a religion which does not combine with its subjective
faith a strenuous labour for others is hardly held to possess any religious
principle worth proclaiming….[T]his constant attention to the moral and
677
Ibid. I have called this form of “liberality” – often described by ministers – “money
participation” and it may have been an important part of poor-but-respectable working-class
culture. See Part IV.
678
Quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement 279.
270
physical improvement of persons who have been neglected, is quite recent
as a leading feature of religion, though indeed it seems to have formed
some part of the Saviour’s original design.679
As the next section will demonstrate, men like Arthur Stanton and Rev.
Chapman were not representative of the majority of churchmen (however they
stoked Charles Booth’s fears of irresponsible charity). Historians have
exaggerated contemporary declarations of benevolence, as well as the generous
potential of doctrinal rhetoric. Most importantly, they have ignored a very large
group of exceedingly “responsible,” “sensible” and “scientific” holy men, more
concerned about charitable distribution than ever.
3. Scientific Holy Men
The history of the metropolitan minister and his church social work
reaches an uncritical dead-end if it keeps its focus on Incarnationalism’s, or
Anglo-Catholicism’s, or indeed the Social Gospel’s “new love” at late century.
Booth’s clash with G.W.E Russell over philanthropy at St. Alban’s appears to tell
us that Booth’s science of moral discrimination was incompatible with (even in
opposition to) the “new love” and “generosity” of late-century Christian religion.
The only way out of this interpretational cul de sac, is to draw further attention to
two things. We must explore again what many historians have discussed as the
merging of “science” and “religion” in this period. Ministers spoke of their parish
social work as “practical Christianity.” However, was this new “practical”
Christianity truly a break with past evangelical precedents, or, as with Booth, was
it an extension of them? Had a Darwinian, scientific revolution at mid-century
convinced ministers to oppose scientific approaches to parish work with their own
moral ones, or, as with evangelicals earlier in the century, was their practical
Christianity a combination of the two? A closer look must be taken both at
leading Anglican and Nonconformist ministers, and also at precisely what the
respondents of the Religious Influences series believed this merging of science
679
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (London: Penguin, 1907),
239-40.
271
and religion in parish work amounted to. Evidence given by Booth, his men, and
over a thousand ministers of London, does not bear out what historians or
contemporaries say about late Victorian parish and neighbourhood church work.
Booth and his men had too much agreement with ministers enthusiastic about
participating in the Religious Influences survey, to bear out either Jeff Cox’s
Nonconformist “Christian universalism” or Cheryl Walsh’s “social” Anglicanism.
The Booth archive tells us that the new social approaches and the charity of the
High Church and Social Gospel movements were strongly linked to Booth’s
religious science and his ideas of moral apartheid than we give them credit.
Booth developed his own religious science at the same time the ministers
of London developed what I would call a “scientific religion” – a scientific
approach to social work (however described in doctrinal terms) that accompanied
pastoral duties in the metropolitan chapels and churches at this time. Before we
can see this “scientific religion,” however, we must move through the fog of
optimistic, progressive accounts of church social work in the nineteenth century.
Jeffrey Cox’s work on late century Nonconformist social work is paralleled by
Gerald Parsons’ discussion of a pastoral revival between 1830 and 1890, a revival
“intimately connected with the Victorian Church of England’s deeply-felt sense of
mission to the poor, and especially the urban poor.” Parsons notes that it was a
member of the hard-nosed Clapham Sect, J.B. Sumner, who would be the first (in
the 1830s) to organize the parishes of an entire diocese (Chester’s) along new
social and civilizing lines. Sumner’s work followed Thomas Chalmer’s
experiment in Glasgow, but on a grander scale. Sixty years later, a sophisticated
form of parish social work had spread throughout the country. Parsons suggests
that [t]he particular rationale of the mission to the poor could take a variety of
forms.” He explains this “variety,” somewhat confusingly, as a collection of right
and left-wing approaches to parish social work:
…from the Victorian Evangelical concern for religion as an essential
element in the ordering of life and disciplining for self-improvement of the
poor (a view held for example by J.B. Sumner), to the more general sense
of a civilizing mission bringing literacy, charity, morality and education to
the poor, to the liberal individualism and local self-help of a Harry Jones,
the moderate Christian Socialism of the Christian Social Union or the
272
Settlement Movement in the 1880s and 1890s, or the full-blooded
Christian Socialism of many late Victorian Anglo-Catholic slum priests
such as Arthur Stanton, Stewart Headlam or Thomas Hancock. What all
these approaches shared, however, was the recognition that successful
mission to the urban poor required pastoral discipline and devotion of the
highest order.680
Yet to dwell too long on Christian universalism, Anglo-Catholic
Incarnationalism, or even Parson’s “variety” of rationales for social work,
obscures the similarities to be found in ministers’ methods – methods which make
their varying doctrines and their political leanings less relevant.
In fact, it may be more profitable to approach the late Victorian minister
very much the same way as we approached Charles Booth. Ministers may have
experienced the same crisis of doubt as Booth did after 1860, the same moralscientific renewal, and likely many of them claimed the same Spencerianism
“with a heart” that Booth did in the aftermath of Darwinism. As Stefan Collini
notes, religious thinkers like the ministers of London were only one group of
religious, political and moral writers and thinkers who faced Darwin and
Spencer’s evolutionary theories. Armed with an Anglican Incarnational theology
(from the 1850s), and a Nonconformist Social Gospel (from the 1880s and 90s),
ministers of all kinds “tried to restate the lessons of evolution rather than to deny
their relevance.”681
Indeed, if social statisticians such as Booth practiced a “science” (late
Victorian “sociology”) open to spiritual, metaphysical explanations for poverty,
urban clergymen in the period likely practiced a religious social work buttressed
by the most recent sociological findings. Samuel Hynes describes this “odd
mixture” of science and metaphysics as a “striking feature” of end-of-the-century
thought in his The Edwardian Turn of Mind.682 Heirs of the Victorian crisis of
belief, the churchman-sociologist of the 1890s had, as his “principle motive” the
680
Gerald Parsons, “Reform, Revival and Realignment: The Experience of Victorian
Anglicanism,” in Gerald Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988), 27; H.D. Rack, “Domestic Visitation: a chapter in early nineteenth
century evangelism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 24 (1973), 357-376.
681
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 158.
682
Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968),
132-137.
273
same aim as the rather metaphysically-inclined “sociologists” or “psychologists”
of the period – which was to reinforce and “to restore the consolations of religion
that Victorian science had denied.”683
Ministers, paradoxically, solved a crisis of belief caused by scientific
discoveries by appealing to science itself. There are many examples of this
merging of science with religious morals, though historians are not always clear
on what this new, moralized science was meant to do. Importantly, we see that, as
they had in Thomas Chalmers’ day, scientific beliefs interlocked with religious
ones. Gerald Parsons repeats the point of Gareth Stedman Jones in regard to the
increasingly pro-scientific stance of Anglican clergymen from the publication of
Essays and Reviews (1860) to Ecce Homo (1889). Behind this ongoing
reconciliation of Christian religion with scientific discoveries, Parsons and Collini
note, there was always a strong “preservation of the moral,” settling all
controversies and reconciling what seemed the irreconcilable. From the 1860s to
the 1890s Anglicans increasingly “accepted scientific and literary criticism” but
(as an early doctrinal innovator, Henry Wilson, did in 1860) they always kept
before them “the moral quality of Christian life rather than doctrinal
orthodoxy.”684 As Parsons writes, by the 1890s, it was in a wide range of
orthodoxies – from the Evangelical, Low Church, to the Anglo-Catholic, to the
particularly science-friendly Broad Church schools – in which grudging steps
were taken to accommodate evolutionary science.685 H.R. Haweis, discussing a
“New Clergy” in the 1890s, hinted at this wide range of commitment to a new
religious-scientific orthodoxy. Not only the Broad Church, but the High Church
and the Nonconformists had achieved an “intellectual respectability.” Not only
Broad Churchmen, but High Anglicans like Canon Gore and Nonconformists
(now famous for their “upt-to-dateness”) were “desirous not only to welcome all
683
Ibid., 145.
Stedman Jones, Outcast London 5-6; Collini, Liberalism and Sociology 49-50; Parsons,
“Reform, Revival and Realignment,” in Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain 40.
685
Ibid., 43-47.
684
274
new knowledge, but…to weld it into the religious thinking and the religious life
of the day.”686
Economic and social science, especially, merged with religious morality in
this period. Writing to the Economic Review in 1894, E.S. Talbot (member of the
Christian Social Union and later, the Bishop of very poor Southwark) explained –
“[f]or the thought or truth is this, that those things which we call social and
economical are greatly governed and influenced by those causes and influences
which we call moral; or more simply that the things of getting and spending,
buying, selling, paying wages, and earning them, are influenced by the things of
character and conduct.” Talbot admitted, like Charles Booth, that political
economy was too mechanical to be a viable model for society. But like Booth,
Talbot felt that competitive forces in society were also moral, spiritual forces, and
he used these very words.687 Talbot’s thoughts were those of the society around
him, one which hoped for a rapprochement of new notions of “physical science”
with the old morality of religion. “Physical science is more and more breaking up
the illusions of matter,” Talbot confidently concluded, “making its ‘too too solid’
substance ‘melt,’ till spirit which knows and feels and causes seems more real
than it.”
And in the economic and social world we need to bring the warmth of
moral conviction with us to the handling of phenomena and its laws. Then
we shall find more and more that what seems a cold relentless iron
mechanism is really a framework which can glow red and white with
moral heat, or, rather, is an organism of fixed, indeed, and ordered
structure, and yet in all its parts the shrine and instrument of life.688
It is important to stress that Anglicans and Nonconformists did not oppose
each other on the subject of this new re-moralized science. “Almost all
[Nonconformist] ministers,” according to Richard Helmstadter, “accepted the
validity of using the latest and most scientific techniques of historical and literary
686
H.R. Haweis, “The New Clergy,” Contemporary Review (October 1895), 594-596.
Using Booth’s language of “forces” he said that “Competition is the very breath of economic
life” but that there was room in it “for a higher standard of public opinion, and the forces which
push up that standard, when we trace them, are always the moral convictions of individuals.” E.S.
Talbot, “Moral Threads in Social Webs,” Economic Review (April, 1894), 153, 164.
688
Ibid., 165.
687
275
analysis in order to better understand the Bible.”689 In the case of social work, or
what they called “practical Christianity,” they were able to do it through an
emphasis on the re-moralization of Christian social work in a scientific world.
Interviewed by Ernest Aves in early January 1899, the famous London Baptist Dr.
John Clifford spoke of a rapprochement, in roughly the period 1880-1900, with
formerly opposing notions of “Religion” and “Science”:
He considers that some 20 years ago men were almost invariably inclined
to assume a conflict between Science and Religion. This has passed by,
and, teaching as he does and as he always has done, an “applied
Christianity”, he now finds that when men come to him it is rather to ask
of what use to them the religious life can be, and they come with some
expectation that he will be able to show them that Christianity is
something that will give them help and add to the brightness of their life.
Specifically, in Clifford’s opinion, social work had been re-moralized: “As
regards the power to get work done and people to help, things have greatly
improved. Applied Christianity comes in, and has helped to make people more
ready to recognise their social duties than they were 20 years ago. The ‘social
idea’ is abroad now, in quite a new fashion and to quite a new degree.” Aves
noted a powerful optimism in Clifford, whose “own faith did not appear to be in
any way dimmed, and he remains, as he appears always to have been, a zealous,
optimistic Christian Socialist.”690
Congregationalist R.W. Dale was much like Bishop Talbot in emphasizing
not simply the moral, but also practical basis of his Protestant religion. “From the
1860s onwards,” writes David Englander, “he pressed the case for an ethical
revival” among ministers which would provide individuals with “a proper
conception of practical righteousness, and an appropriate moral training.” After
1860, Dale wanted more than men’s salvation. Focusing on Jesus’ life, he argued
that it was now the minister’s job to make men morally perfect in the here and
now.691 Like Talbot’s, Dale’s ideas resembled Booth’s discussion of “spiritualized
capitalism.” Once again, moral “forces” reinforced and combined with those in
689
Helmstadter, “The Nonconformist Conscience,” in Parsons Religion in Victorian Britain 86.
Clifford, B 249: 55, 57.
691
Englander, “The Word and the World,” in Parsons, Religion in Victorian Britain 29, 18.
690
276
the social and economic world to produce moral men. Dale’s collection of
sermons entitled The Laws of Christ for the Common Life asserted the “relevance
of Christian morality to everyday life and of the sacredness of commercial,
municipal and political activities.” As Gerald Parsons notes, Dale’s first sermon
in the collection was entitled “Everyday Business a Divine Calling.”692 Hugh
Price Hughes called his ideas “social Christianity,” but importantly, his thought
put a “greater emphasis upon the ending of wrong personal conduct rather than
wrong social structures.”693 Dale and Hughes, like many Low and Nonconformist
ministers at work in poor city parishes, were many of them theological “radicals,”
but they had a kind of mixed theology. Many still clung to old evangelical
doctrines dwelling on the fall of man, on the “atoning death of Christ,” and on
men’s salvation, but increasingly they tempered these notions with more
“modern,” social and incarnational ideas – ideas Jeff Cox has called “liberal
Nonconformity” (and rather optimistically, “Christian universalism”).694 They
spoke of a new social love, inspired by Christ, but often tempered this language
with a hard edge. Again, doctrine was less important than the common aim to
morally improve a man. Rev. J. Piper of Upper Holloway, though a Low
Churchman, probably stated the views of men from a variety of theological,
sacramental approaches. Piper said it did not matter if Evangelicals like himself
continued to preach in black gowns as long as they kept their moral stance front
and center. He did not “care a dump” what men preached in, and always told his
people such questions were “utterly trivial.” He added: “as long as a man leads a
Christian life I don’t care a rap about anything else; a good many R.C.s [sic] are
better than their creed and will go to heaven, and lots of Evangelicals will go to
hell.”695
Whether one was a ritualist Anglo-Catholic or a black-gowned
evangelical, ministers of all kinds were preaching a new social – but still very
692
Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” Parsons, Religion in Victorian Britain 48.
Ibid., 56; Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists 159. In 1963 K.S. Inglis flatly admitted
that most church leaders, in all denominations, were convinced that capitalism and their own
moral ideas of social justice were entirely compatible. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes
320-321.
694
Cox, English Churches.
695
Piper, B 205: 171-173.
693
277
moral – Gospel, and it underpinned their social work in poor urban
neighbourhoods. To be sure, this was a messy and subjective moral science, one
which could seem very inclusive one moment, and very strict and oppressively
moral at another. Yet it tells us that if evolution played havoc with various
doctrinal truths, it could not dent Christianity’s moral bedrock, and that in the end,
it actually came to rest upon it. Personal moral control, or the formation of
“character,” survived (as did the villainization of its ideological opposite – the
loafer). For both groups, as it had for Charles Booth, the opposition of moral and
immoral men remained – even in the face of the scientific revolution of midcentury – a strong basis for parish social work.
If, however, the only problem facing practitioners of applied Christianity,
practical Christianity or Christian socialism was the differentiation of the moral
from the immoral in any given community, who did ministers turn to to help them
do this? Put another way, if church social work during this period was a
combination of cutting-edge theology and “scientific” social theory – whose
social theory was appealed to? Whose “science”? It is certain that ministers had
chosen one, for they were more organized than ever in their parish and
neighbourhood work. Cosmo Gordon Lange could remember of the period: “I
have always considered that the years – say 1890 to 1914 – were the Golden Age
of parochial work in the towns of England….The work of the Church had grown
both in the intensity of faith and worship and in the extent of its range. There were
able and devoted men in charge of industrial parishes everywhere; and the public
schools and universities and theological colleges were still sending out supplies of
keen and healthy young men to help them.”696 But if ministers had a golden age of
parochial work after 1890, from where had these ministers found their methods of
dealing with the poor? Their training in the Universities and Theological Colleges
certainly did not prepare them for it. At those places they learned theology,
learned to preach, and learned to defend themselves against secularist and
Darwinist critics. In a very helpful essay, Rosemary O’Day, following Alan Haig,
696
Quoted in Desmond Bowen, The Idea of the Victorian Church: A Study of the Church of
England, 1833-1889 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1968), viii.
278
tells us that “a body of expertise for the parochial minister was not developed
until the last years of the nineteenth century and that it was not systematically
communicated to new clergymen until after the First World War.” Historians
looking in the curricula of the universities and theological colleges for a strong
course in pastoral theology will not find one. Citing complaining ministers
bewailing this rather embarrassing flaw in their training, O’Day writes that “it
was not until after World War I that all ordinands (including graduates from
Oxford and Cambridge) compulsorily undertook a preliminary training year in a
residential theological college.” Rev. Anthony C. Deane, knowing there was no
guide to be found in 1899, simply demanded (in the periodical, The Nineteenth
Century) that a clergymen be “well-read,” that he be “a thinker,” and that he
“command respect, if not as intellectual leaders, at least as conversant with the
developments of modern thought, and with the literature as well as the life of the
present day.” Despite these calls, no text was issued. In 1912 “handbooks and
guides for ministers were singularly contentless,” devoid of “systematic, specific
approaches” to parish and neighbourhood social work.697 Moreover, according to
O’Day there is no Nonconformist progressive wing to oppose the methodless
Anglicans against. They, and the Roman Catholics, were also without a guide to
pastoral care.698 It must be asked, therefore: if not from their own guides, from
whose play-book were ministers reading?
The answer comes from O’Day, in her Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry. She
quotes one tribute from the religious thinkers who so heartily praised Booth’s
Religious Influences series (just as they had praised his series on Poverty and
Industry). Owen Chadwick cited this tribute first in his classic The Victorian
Church and it comes from J.M Wilson’s Six Lectures on Pastoral Theology
(1903), one of a number of churchmen’s publications calling for a more
sophisticated training-book for pastoral care. It was the same year Booth
published the Religious Influences Series, and this was significant because
697
O’Day, “Clerical Renaissance,” in Parsons ed., Religion in Victorian Britain 203-204; Deane,
“The Falling-Off in the Clergy,” 1029; Haig, The Victorian Clergy. See also Russell, The Clerical
Profession 1-49, 253-257; Heeney, A Different Type of Gentleman 1-10, 13, 94-95.
698
O’Day, “Clerical Renaissance,” in Parsons, Religion in Victorian Britain 205-209.
279
Wilson (a Lancashire archdeacon) explicitly recommended Booth’s Life and
Labour of the People in London as the very text that could help them properly
care for the poor. Wilson’s recommendation was symptomatic of a wider appeal
to Boothian moral-social science. “In years to come,” O’Day concluded,
“clergymen of the Church of England were advised to read in addition to the
Scriptures, not the Fathers of the Reformation Divines, but Charles Booth on
London Life.”699 One clerical reviewer of Wilson’s work said the “most valuable
section” of the book (one entitled “The Influence of Scientific Training on the
Reception of Religious Truth”) was that in which Wilson dealt “with the
permanent effects of scientific training on educated minds. He holds that primitive
conceptions of God are no longer tenable; that the standard of religious
knowledge has been raised by scientific research…”700 Wilson’s tone, moreover,
was aggressive: “One of the indispensable functions of the church, and therefore
our ministry, should be to inspire men with a thought of God and man which shall
be utterly inconsistent with any acquiescence in any demoralizing condition of
life.”701 O’Day argues that this was a positive development, but if ministers’
social care was based on Booth’s social science, it must also have contained its
moral division of the poor.
Booth did not dictate parochial methodology to London ministers, but it
seems that he strongly influenced many of them. Booth’s understanding of poor
people and care strategies for them worked ideally with ministers’ own ideas of
morality, social evolution and the plurality of working classes to be found in the
modern city. Ministers felt themselves to be shaping social thought and social
work as the practitioners of their own religious science, and this is revealed freely
from our sources. High level church leaders, and especially the respondents to the
Booth survey after 1897, tell us that Booth’s inquiry may have served as their
principal “scientific” text. Booth, therefore, may have had a very special place in
699
O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 197; J.M. Wilson, Six Lectures on Pastoral
Theology (London: Macmillan, 1903), cited in Chadwick, Victorian Church vol, 2, 174.
700
T.H. Pattison, “The Minister for the Times,” American Journal of Theology 8 (Jan. 1904), 123.
The “general subject” of the lectures, the reviewer added, was “Science and Theology.” (118)
701
Wilson, Six Lectures 4.
280
Lang’s “golden age” of parochial care (its 1890 starting-point, we should note,
fitting pristinely with Booth’s first published researches).
Booth’s influence on churchwork can be found high and low on the church
hierarchy. At almost precisely the same time Booth began his Religious
Influences Series interviews the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Randall
Davidson, proclaimed a new era for church social work at the re-opening of the
newly renovated St. Saviour’s church in Southwark. At the time the Bishop of
Winchester, Davidson’s speech was recorded and published by The Guardian
newspaper, on February 7th 1897. Davidson’s speech came in advance of the
transformation of St. Saviour’s into a new London cathedral. The Bishop spoke of
a commitment to meet great costs, to educate the clergy to be versatile,
sympathetic and effective social workers, and to continue to attack the problems
of poverty from the centres of social care churches had strove to become since the
institution of social auxiliaries in the 1850s.
Brothers, to-day’s occasion is without parallel in the history of England. In
the words of the Jews of old, ‘We are the servants of the God of heaven
and earth, and we build the house that was builded these many years ago.’
But in that, thank God, there is nothing unlike what we have lived to
witness in hundreds of churches all the land through. Our restored church,
to be sure, is grander, our work more costly, our contrast more noteworthy
between the fabric of fifty years ago and the fabric of to-day….What is
unique in this, In the very region poorest in all London – poorest on the
careful testimony of a statistician more calm and competent than any
other of our day – we rebuild, at all this cost, the magnificent church of
ancient days, and rebuild it to be no longer a mere parish church, however
noble, but, as of yore, a collegiate, a quasi-cathedral church, with the
largest and most varied duties towards this whole great area of poverty,
and ignorance and sin, equipped with a staff of clergy so versatile in
strength, in character, in sympathy, in experience, as to maintain Christ’s
battle to the uttermost against the powers of wrong; a church the services
within whose walls shall day by day be such as to draw, albeit by slow
degrees, the weary and heavy-laden to bring here their needs and sorrows;
the glad and thankful to offer here their sacrifice of praise; the ardent
champion of every effort after new and better things to hallow here his
enterprise and set his heart aglow in the inspiring presence of the living
Lord, who, amid the world’s dark places, goes onward conquering and to
conquer.702
702
St. Saviour’s, Southwark, Collegiate Church and Cathedral, 1897-1905 (London: Longman’s
Green and Co., 1905), 19-20 (my emphasis).
281
In Davidson’s speech we find not simply a commitment to the training of
ministers in social work, and to the help of the poor of South London, but also a
nod to a “careful and competent statistician” – who could only be Charles Booth –
whose researches gave them the scientific wherewithal to face London’s poverty
problem. For Christian ministers of all kinds Charles Booth became an important
educator of the ministry in the ways of metropolitan care. After Incarnational
theology, the clergyman’s second intellectual support, in an anxious atmosphere
of working-class “uncontrollability” and professional dilution, was Booth. As
with Booth’s own rapprochement of science with religion, Booth’s intellectual
support was likely a psychological support as well (in what often seemed a
hopeless urban situation, where church resources were finite). Booth provided
ministers with a handbook for social work, clarifying precisely the urban
hierarchy of the poor in the text and maps of his ‘Poverty Series.’ According to
their regularity and respectability, everyone in London was classified A to H. A
coloured map of London graphically displayed this hierarchy, its hues staining, or
brightening streets from a vicious, criminal black to a rich and respectable red.
Nine out of ten Londoners, according to Booth’s scale and city maps, were
deemed capable of respectable citizenship. The remaining tenth were loafers,
largely unemployable people for whom Booth advocated immediate incarceration,
preferably in some form of labour camp, and these, he advised were to be denied
charity at all costs.
References to Booth’s critical role in church social work in the poorer
districts of London did not stop at prominent leaders in the churches. The
“middle-management” of church social work in the metropolis – the
Nonconformist ministers of its neighbourhoods, and the vicars and rectors of its
parishes – repeatedly spoke of the new understanding of poverty that the Poverty
Series had granted them. The value of Booth to the clergymen was clear in
ministers’ mentions of previous work for the Booth surveys, their familiarity with
Booth’s maps and volumes, and their outright praise for the new understanding of
working people, parish by parish, that the Life and Labour survey had provided
282
them. What this tells us is two crucial things: that clergymen in London felt that
Booth had established himself as an authority in the realm of sociology, and also
(because Booth fairly constantly appealed to ministers for changes to the
colouring of his maps) that ministers believed in the science and contributed to
the project of “hierarchicalizing” working class London into six different working
classes (four moral classes, and two immoral). To them, such a division made as
much “scientific” sense as it did to Booth, and they wanted to help him in the
interest of moral accuracy.
Of course, one should not paint too uniform a picture of the London
minister. Not many, but certainly a few clergymen wanted nothing to do with
Booth’s surveys. We see this, for example, in the rather dismissive letter from one
North Kensington vicar, that the Booth Men tucked into the last pages of the
Kensington Town notebook (B 261). Written to three times by the Booth men
(who underlined “three times” twice), Rev. H.P. Denison apologized, writing: “I
am afraid I am not much in sympathy with the tabulating and pigeonholing of our
people. It seems to me that there is not much to say about the life and labour of
the people in this parish. There is no special industry that is particularly
represented here, and many of the questions on the form you sent are quite
unanswerable. The parish has been a good deal neglected in time past and is now
quite under manned. I should not say that any form of Christianity has any hold
upon the bulk of the population here.” Denison said he worked “quietly along”
and did what he could with his staff of helpers, but that beyond this tidbit, St.
Michael’s would not be providing Booth with any help with his survey. South
over the river another vicar remarked that he was simply uninterested in the Booth
survey: “Mr. Grundy was originally written to some months since, and as with so
many of the clergy whom there is some difficulty in seeing he showed little
interest in our work, never having heard of Life and Labour and connecting the
name of Booth only with the Salvation Army [Grundy became more affable after
some time with Baxter and ultimately completed his interview].” Finally, a
Peckham minister seems to have found Aves’s visit to be rather an inconvenience.
Aves pleaded Life and Labour’s case, but to no avail:
283
[Rev. A.W. Drew] remembered the communication, but had not been able
to see that an answer would have been of any use, or that the Inquiry was.
He had “dozens” of requests of the same kind, and was an extremely busy
man. I pointed out the unique character of Mr. Booth’s work; mentioned
the fact that many people had thought it of very considerable use, and
drew attention to the Bishop’s letter. Mr. Drew was unconvinced; repeated
the formula “I don’t see that it is of any use”, but said that he would look
at the papers again, which he thought had not been destroyed, and “If I
find anything can be done, I will write.” I did not, and do not, for a
moment suppose that we shall hear from him, and fancy that he is rather a
hopeless person.
Somewhat offended by the snub, and excusing himself to Booth for coming away
empty-handed, Aves said that Rev. Drew had the reputation of being “impossible,
grumpy and boorish withal.”703
These dismissals aside, more often there was a sense of respect and praise
for the Booth project from London’s holy men. This made sense, because some of
them had been involved in the Booth Survey nearly as long as Booth had. In some
instances Booth investigators noted how churchmen of all kinds had been
consulted for the “Poverty” and “Industry” surveys conducted by Booth up to a
decade before. London City Missionary, Charles Wheeler, it was noted, “[h]as
been here considerably over 10 years as we saw him respecting the district when
revising the poverty map.” Rev. Bainbridge-Bell of St. John the Evangelist had
only had charge of his South London parish four years when Arthur Baxter
interviewed him for the Religious Influences survey, but the latter remembered
when, as “a curate in St. Giles,” he had “helped in the earlier volumes of “Life
and Labour.” Finally, as the vicar of Emmanuel parish, Lambeth for 12 years,
Rev. Lilly likewise told Baxter how he had “[seen] Mr. Booth at the time of the
publication of the earlier volumes.”704
These precious quotes remind us that Booth’s idea of an urban workingclass hierarchy of moral and immoral classes had not come from his mind alone,
but from the men who had had constant and close contact with working people
703
704
Denison, B 261: 173; Grundy, B 272: 163; Drew, B 311: 75.
Wheeler, B 270: 175; Bainbridge-Bell, B 269: 7; Lilly, B 272: 35.
284
since the mid-century parochial revival. Their participation, praise and practical
use for a hierarchical conception of London, moreover, went beyond politics.
Direct praise for Booth from what appears the Christian ministry’s “left”
appropriately modifies our picture of Nonconformist Social Gospellers. As one
Hammersmith Congregationalist affirmed, the Social Gospel’s “social
Christianity” was easily compatible with Charles Booth’s moral-religious science.
Argyle specifically noted Rev. Adam’s “Social Christianity”:
Mr. Adams, who has been at Oaklands for 7 or 8 years and has a
flourishing church and congregation, is a strong believer in the social side
of religion, holding that Christianity is for this world and is closely
concerned with the material welfare of the people. To this end he
identifies himself and his church with the Liberal and Progressive
movements, fighting against any attempt at the introduction of priestly
[High Church] doctrine on the School Board, and for the best education
for the children of the poor: and for a Liberal and Progressive spirit in
Parliamentary and municipal affairs because he believes they most stand
for purity in public life, for improved housing and public health, and
generally for social and humanitarian Christian principles.
Here are all the notions we find in historians accounts of an ostensibly universalist
Christianity, but with a crucial qualifier, namely, Argyle’s observation that “Mr.
Adams is an almost devout believer in our work: makes frequent allusions to it in
his discourses and preached a course of 6 sermons upon it, which were afterwards
published in a religious magazine.”705
The Wesleyan Hugh Price Hughes was a more famous member of the
Nonconformist “left” also interviewed by Booth’s investigators. It was clearly
flattering to Arkell that the author of Social Christianity, and a man seen by one
historian as among “the most outstanding examples of the [Nonconformist]
clerical elite who advocated Christian Socialist or social gospel ideas,” also had
such a complete knowledge of the Life and Labour volumes.706 Arkell’s perhaps
overawed description of Hughes was of a man close to the cutting edge of
705
Adams, B 268: 17, 19. “The minister “produced a letter from one of his congregation who is a
Guardian,” to show the progress toward intensive classification of working class inmates in the
local workhouse: “This stated that the Guardians of the Fulham Union had adopted classification
as far as possible: that they favoured out door relief, cottage farms, and boarding out and objected
to the ‘barrack system.’” (31-33)
706
Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” in Parsons, Religion in Victorian Britain 52.
285
Nonconformist social theology, who tempered his work with the latest in
(appropriately moral) social science:
Mr. Hughes personal appearance is so well known that description is
unnecessary, yet clad in a dark cycling suit with knickers and stockings, as
he was this morning, he looked unlike the minister with whose face and
portraits we are familiar. Just a tall, straight, well-knit muscular middle
aged man, in the full vigour of health.
As soon as I had introduced
myself, Mr. H. was quite cordial and asked me into his study. H knew and
had got all Mr. Booth’s books and was quite willing to help.707
Rosemary O’Day calls the High Churchman, Rev. C.E. Escreet of St.
Mary Magdalene’s Woolwich, a “left-wing, reforming clergyman” in her Mr.
Charles Booth’s Inquiry. But this is a reminder of the dangers of treating late
Victorians like “us.” “Mr. E. calls himself a Socialist,” wrote Baxter, “is a
member of the [Stewart Headlam’s] Guild of St. Matthew, and has always aimed
especially at the working class.” However, Escreet’s interview also sees him note
the “general tendency to a low moral standard” among Woolwich’s working
people. It also sees him admit his position as chairman of the local COS
Committee. Eight years previously, when Escreet had been a clergyman in
Stockwell, “he saw Mr. Booth during the original inquiry, and gave information
he told me for one of the sample streets described in the book.” Without hesitation
or qualification Baxter approved strongly of Escreet and his religious work: “I
suspect that here as at Stockwell he has won more than the usual success by his
sweetness of temperament, his hard work, and his self denying life. No one can
doubt that to him his religion is something very genuine.”708 We must balance
Escreet’s so-called “socialism,” therefore, with his view, quoted by O’Day and
common to many clergymen, that “Mr. Booth’s books [were] the next most
important thing for a clergyman after the Bible”709
T.C. Fry, another prominent member of the Christian left, and a regular
contributor to the Christian Social Union’s Economic Review had more praise for
Booth. In an essay rallying the “town and the younger clergy” to continue to the
707
Hughes, B 242: 1.
Escreet, B 288: 1-3, 9-11, 13-15.
709
Quoted in O’Day and Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry 197.
708
286
cause of the Christian Social Union – “[the] common study, by men of all parties;
mutual discussion; patient, tolerant, serious pursuit of economic knowledge;
comparison of experiences, and even of disappointments” – Fry thanked Booth
for localizing the problem of poverty into an immoral, but manageable, tenth of
the working classes. As to “the hordes that threaten modern civilization,” wrote
Fry, Booth had shown them to be not (as Gareth Stedman Jones has written) a
“political threat” but rather “only a social problem.” Fry wrote how “the statistics
of Mr. Booth (not the ‘General,’ but the philanthropist)” were especially
“comforting” to social reformers like himself. Rallying respectable working men,
clergymen and laymen to the cause of social reformers, Fry attacked what he
called the apathetic and “permanently degraded” “casual worker, just the class
which the author of Labour and Life of the People so rightly wishes to wipe
out.”710
All across London, average Nonconformists (especially those new to the
metropolis, for whom it gave a crash-course in social science) spoke of the value
of the Life and Labour survey. In East London, Poplar London City Missionary
John Galt was (in Arkell’s words), “one of the most interesting men that I have
met. He was familiar with our books and evidently took a keen interest in the life
of the people around. Upon most of the questions that arose he was at home and
had his own opinions which he often expressed in pithy sentences.” Arkell offered
one of Galt’s gems, which he found, one supposes, a wise bit of quite factual, if
moral information: “The very worst class of people go mothers’ meetings.” Galt
described the “character of the people” precisely the way Arkell might:
Character of the People: Of the people in his district, he reckons about
1/3rd are born Londoners, another third the children of countrymen and the
remainder immigrants, the greater part (say ¾) employed in connection
with shipping. This means irregular work, the men being ‘in and out’; they
earn good money when at work but have no reserve for other times….
Just as Charles Booth had spent thousands of pounds and hours to find the elusive
but deserving Class C, Galt ended his description of the largely “pink” and
710
T.C. Fry, “Some Causes of Social Apathy,” Economic Review (July, 1892), 318, 325, 327,
328. Stedman Jones, Outcast London 321.
287
“purple” streets surrounding Grundy Street, Poplar with the sentence: “They are
just the ordinary people of London: not the best or the lowest.”711 Bethnal Green
missioner Edward Smith was even more keen to use Booth’s language. “Was
familiar with ‘Life and Labour’ and the poverty classification,” wrote Arkell,
“and when asked about the people said they would mostly come under the classes
B and C. Poor labouring class – bricklayers, costers, loafers etc.”712 In another
interview Arkell and a London City Missionary clashed over class colouring:
“Mr. Lockyer would be inclined to make district poorer than light blue but I do
not think that is so, except possibly Middle Row.”713
East London harboured more ministerial students of the Booth survey.
One was a recent arrival from Bournemouth. Working in the desperately poor
Hackney Wick, Congregationalist E.E. Cleale was a “rather gloomy type” but
nevertheless “very much in earnest about his work.” Social questions, Aves wrote,
competed closely with theology in his mind. There were “[l]ots of books in his
study, and he was probably something of a student,” Aves added, noting
(probably with some pride) “possesses one volume and has read others of the
Inquiry.”714 Not far away, Primitive Methodist John Fletcher Porter presided over
a “dark blue” neighbourhood off of London Fields, Hackney. Arkell noted that
Porter had a long history of involvement with the Booth inquiry. “He was one of
the first persons seen in the school board inquiry and he has had a lively interest
in the inquiry since.
An old man, stout and turning grey, he seems to
have followed the course of social reform with much interest.” Porter complained
to Arkell about the low pay of a minister (Porter’s income was ₤120). He was a
special example, on the one hand, of the vulnerability of ministers in metropolitan
social work, and on the other, of the confidence a strong grasp of social “science”
gave a minister in 1897. Arkell said “Mr. Porter talked confidently on most
points”: “the people living in the immediate neighbourhood of the London Fields
711
Galt, B 172: 17, 8-9.
Smith, B 229: 179.
713
Lockyer and Robins, B 229: 127.
714
Cleale, B 190: 32, 26.
712
288
chapel are labouring people, costers etc. as low as they can be.” “No Catholics or
Irish,” Porter said. “A rough English population.”
A different character was ascribed to Porter’s own congregation –
“artizans, second and third class clerks” who earned “about the same as those
living in the immediate neighbourhood but,” the minister said, “don’t spend their
money in the same way and are consequently better off.” Working his church, its
visitation route, and its social agencies with this picture of the world gave Porter
strength. Otherwise, both to Arkell and historians, he may have been a much more
pathetic figure. “One of the most pathetic points in his story was the intense
loneliness of the minister’s life,” wrote Arkell, “especially on the intellectual
side.”
His congregation are entirely workers with no time for thought even when
they have the inclination so that apart from his family there is scarcely a
person he can speak to on anything beyond current topics. He cannot make
allusions to new books or topics of thought for fear of going over the
heads of his audience. Nor is there the opportunity for meeting with other
ministers: all are so busy with their own affairs. Mr. Coad [another P.M.
minister] altho’ so close has only been once or twice to his house in the
three years and then to make enquiries.715
In the perhaps under-mentioned poor neighbourhoods of the West End
were more nods by preachers to the Booth survey. The Kensington interviews
included one with a Swedenborgian minister who combined socialism with
Boothian science: “Mr. Child is a man of about 60, who has been for about 13
years the minister of this Swedenborgian Church. He is a Socialist and takes a
keen and intelligent interest in ‘Life and Labour,’ so that our conversation was
friendly and pleasant[.]” Kensington Presbyterian Rev. Anderson Scott “who was
previously at Willesden for nine years has only been here for nine months, and
only gave us an interview from a wish not to be discourteous to Mr. Booth in
whose work, in common with his brother ministers, he took a lively interest.”
Earning for Presbyterians the title of the most “moral” and scientifically “expert”
of Nonconformist denominations, Scott’s neighbour Rev. Macgregor “was writing
his Sunday sermon when I interrupted him, in shorthand. The first thing he did on
715
Porter, B 187: 50, 52, 40, 41, 51-52.
289
coming to London was to study his district with the help of Mr. Booth’s maps and
books and will be most glad to give any further help or information in his power.”
What Booth’s maps may have helped him with, of course, was an accurate picture
of the social composition of his parish. Macgregor hierarchically explained a
neighbourhood he now understood well:
The neighbourhood is going down: Jews coming in in Ladbroke Square: It
is well to do E[ast] of Clarendon Rd and between Lexbridge Rd and
Blenheim Crescent: [it is a good red district]. In Cornwall Rd, subletting
begins and in Lancaster road. The poorest streets are Talbot Grove and
Mews and Portobello Rd and one or two streets off it.716
In South London, Greenwich Congregationalist Thomas Morgan was
described by Arkell as “well cultured and was quite familiar with ‘Life and
Labour.’” East into Deptford and Brockley, explicit mentions of Booth came from
the Wesleyan Isaac Parker, who ended his interview saying “‘how anxious he was
to help in making Mr. Booth’s work continuous,’ and how useful it had been to
him and others.” Parker had formed a confident five-level picture of the social
composition of his neighbourhood – middle, lower-middle, working-class, and in
his words, “almost slum-level” people. He suggested that Baxter take “short hand
notes” of his thoughts on the matter: “people in neighbourhood divided into Villa,
Commercial, Clerks and Working Class, the latter not in large numbers[,]…a
contingent of medical students from Guy’s. The only poor street is Foxwell St.
which reaches almost a slum level.” Enthusing over his Deptford Mission,
Brockley Presbyterian H.M. McIntosh said “He was familiar with ‘Life and
Labour’; has the early volumes, was possessed with a fixed idea that we only
wanted to know about the poverty of Deptford and was determined to talk about
the People’s Hall.” A perhaps gratified Arkell concluded the interview, saying:
“As I came away Mr. M. explained his willingness to help and asked when the
new volumes would be ready and hoped that Mr. Booth would send him a copy as
was done when the map was issued!” Lambeth Wesleyan Chapel’s Rev. J.
Surman Cooke, was also “most friendly and spoke most warmly of our work and
of the great assistance it had been to him.” “‘Whenever I want to stick a man with
716
Child, B 262: 97; Anderson Scott, B 262: 69; Macgregor, B 262: 123-125, 135.
290
a statistic’ he said ‘I always quote Charles Booth.’” Finally, the Peckham Baptist
J.W. Ewing said he was not only “familiar with ‘Life and Labour’” but had “the
first three volumes in his library. ‘The only thing when you want to know
anything about London’ said he.” Nonconformist ministers agreed with Booth’s
moral methods of measuring working people’s worth because they used the same
methods in their social work. Battersea Baptist Rev. Felmingham (Arkell’s own
minister) confirmed the thoughts of many ministers: “Going over the map of this
area Mr. F was astonished at its accuracy in detail and commended it highly.”
Finally, in Balham and Tooting, Roman Catholic Father James V. Warwick did so
as well: “He reads ‘all Mr. Booth’s books he can get hold of and is constantly
referring to them for facts and to ‘get a standard.’”717
Anglicans gave similarly hierarchical accounts of their parishes, stressing
equally the “slummy” element when it stained their neighbourhoods. Commonly
they referred to men as “loafers.” Fulham’s Rev. Johnson, a popular High
Churchman, was both “most friendly and much interested in our work,” and said
of his parish:
With the exception of a few middle class people in Margravine Gardens
and some small shopkeepers the people are entirely working class, and in
Field Road and the streets off, especially Chelmsford St, Melton St,
Hatfield St and John St of the poorest and roughest class, with a good deal
of squalor. Among the women are many laundry workers, and among the
men a large number of loafers. Mr. J was for two years at the Mission in
Pentonville, and finds the people here poorer, more casual and generally
more unsettled in their habits and morals than the poor about Chapel St.718
Over the river, south, and then east, into much wealthier Blackheath, the
Evangelical Rev. Barnes-Lawrence stressed to Duckworth that he “knew Mr.
Booth’s work and anxious to give all information and help in his power.” North in
St. John’s Woolwich, a much “higher” churchman, Rev. J.M. Lester seemed to
717
Morgan, B 286: 105; Parker, B 285: 117, 117-119; McIntosh, B 285: 237, 243; Surman Cooke,
B 271: 105; Ewing, B 310: 61-63; Felmingham, B 295: 71; Warwick, B 313: 187. Peckham
ministers were particularly impressed by the Booth maps’ accuracy. For a Congregational
example, see Buckland B 310: 198-209, and for one from the Salvation Army, see Cook, B 310:
210-225. As far south as West Norwood Duckworth found “a student of Life and Labour” who
“expoused [sic] a deep sense of gratitude to CB for his work” in the popular minister (formerly
Baptist, now undenominational) Rev. Fuller Gooch. Fuller Gooch, B 313: 167.
718
Johnson, B 264: 87-89.
291
know Booth personally. Lester was “from Shifnal in Warwickshire where he
answered questions for C.B. [sic] about pauperism and old age and was much
pleased at being sent the book [probably Old Age Pensions and the Aged Poor
(1899)].”719
As one moves around the periphery of the poorest neighbourhoods in
South London (in Rotherhithe, Southwark and Lambeth) talk of the Booth
survey’s academic value became a discussion of its positive practical use in
churchwork. In the furthest Southern reaches we find cheerful statements of praise
by Stockwell’s Rev. J.B. Sharp (“Knows and has studied Mr. Booth’s books”) and
East Dulwich’s Rev. H.E. Jennings (“we are all so grateful to Mr. Booth that I
will tell you all I can”) emphasizing the instrumentality of Booth’s books to
Anglicans ideas of parish work.720
The testimony of the head of the Trinity College Mission in St. George’s
parish, Camberwell, Rev. R. Appleton, especially had the tone of a man working
closer to the poor riverside. He said he “would of course, be willing to help in any
way that he can with information etc. He feels particularly grateful to Mr. Booth
for the map, which had been, he said, of great practical use to him in the parish.”
The nearby warden of the Cambridge House Mission in Cambridge Road
(interestingly, the former head of Trinity College Mission) had been involved in a
rather public argument about his personal comprehension of the Booth survey.
The fact that the argument even occurred is testimony to the familiarity with
which so many Anglicans were speaking of Booth and his researches by 1900. In
the midst of his 14 February interview with Arthur Baxter, the young Rev. W.F.
Baily interrupted the men’s talk with a special confession:
719
Barnes-Lawrence, B 288: 51; Lester, B 288: 81.
Sharp, B 305: 77; Jennings, B 308: 27. One can see how North Peckham’s Rev. Fisher actively
helped Duckworth correct the tiniest details of his parish’s street colouring. “(Character of
District) The parish is p[in]k in the map, p[ink]b[arre]d between Montpellier and Asylum Road,
purple in the cul de sacs east of the Asylum Rd: li[ght]b[lue] in Leo St and Homton St. Mr. Fisher
agreed with the colouring as to the degrees shewn, but thinks that the p[ink]b[arre]d might be
p[in]k and some of the p[in]k eg Meeting House Lane sh[oul]d be purple. Very few servants in
Asylum R[oa]d and a great mixture of poor in Meeting House Lane. (There is not much in it I
think except that like the rest of Peckham N[orth] of the Queen’s Rd all the p[in]k is tending to
purple GHD).” There were only two poor streets in the district, Homton St. and Leo St (“in map
l[ight]b[lue]”), Fisher said. These were inhabited by a “labouring poor” – typically “unthrifty” and
spending too much of their wages on drink. “Fisher, F.N. Woolley and Miss ?,” B 311: 53-55.
720
292
Though the matter did not arise till half way through our interview, it may
be well here to give Mr. B’s explanation of a personal matter as to which
he was somewhat concerned. Though he says he knows all about Mr.
Booth and knows “Life and Labour” “almost by heart” yet a year or so
since in a moment of controversy with [Rev. A.W.] Jephson [social
reformer and Walworth vicar St. John’s Larcom Street]…he, by a lapsus
calami, referred in the Westminster Gazette to “General Booth’s poverty
map of London.” He was so rebuked in the same paper by “that ass
Horsley”, but on principle made no reply. He now however wished to
apologize and assured me that it was a pure slip made late at night when
he was tired out. His letter to the Westminster was in reply to one from
Jephson complaining that though Cambridge House boasted of the help
which it was giving to poor parishes in South London it had never sent
anyone to assist him. Mr. B. replied that if Jephson would look at “General
Booth’s poverty map” he would see that his parish was one of the least
poor in the neighbourhood.”
After making an embarrassed apology for his faux pas, Baily told Baxter that his
interest in Booth’s method of morally appraising the work and lives of working
people had prompted him to undertake a similar local study of local working-class
children. “He is engaged in a particularly interesting inquiry suggested by Mr.
John Gorst: a certain number of children in elementary schools have been chosen
and, without the knowledge of them or their parents, a complete record of their
lives is being kept.”721
If we look in the annals of the The South London Press, we find that
Booth’s maps and his hierarchicalization of the poor could become a contested
issue among ministers. However much they agreed with Booth’s moral methods
of discrimination, clergymen spoke publicly in the defence of pockets of poor
respectability that they believed the Booth Men had missed. Thus, whereas the
editor of the Press initially repeated Booth’s dire assessment of one poor
district,722 he later changed its mind, quoting Rev. Baily, himself, who offered a
721
Appleton, B 281: 23; Baily, B 283: 39-41, 47. Gorst served in the third Salisbury
administration of 1895. He was a major proponent of Tory Democracy and expressed a great
concern in the education and welfare of working-class children.
722
Interestingly (and like a wider late Victorian and Edwardian public), the editor had been
confident in Booth’s analysis for some time. On 27 February, 1897 he referred to the Poverty
series with the words, “The neighbourhood is, indeed, the ‘black-spot’ of Camberwell, and it is
described in the following terms by Mr. Charles Booth in his ‘Labour and Life of the People’: ‘Of
the bad patches the most hopeless is the block consisting of Hollington-street and Sultan-street,
293
dissenting view of the neighbourhood in question. Initially, the Press agreed that
many areas of Central South London had sunk socially to a “dead level.” The 4
April, 1903 edition of the Press noted how Booth had accurately catalogued “the
moral-economic problem that will have to be solved if this mass of humanity is to
be saved.” He had found a poor South London people living lives “almost totally
apart from religion.” The article concluded using a social cancer analogy to
describe these neighbourhoods of the very poor (one which Stefan Collini notes
was so much used during this period, and which saw great prominence in Booth’s
solution to surgically remove an immoral group from London to the labour
colony):
With such sores as these on the festering upon the body politic – and they
are found in all our large towns as well as in London – it seems nothing
less than a holy mockery to talk about building an Imperial race. It is
grossly inconsistent with the general Imperial idea for a people to remain
passive spectators of a state of things under which peradventure wealth
may accumulate in certain hands, but also under which men unmistakably
decay.723
A few weeks later (25 April, 1903), in an article entitled “Not so Black as
Painted,” the editor changed his mind in regard to Booth’s assessment of one area.
Importantly, the newspaper did not challenge Booth’s moral economy, but it did
discuss the possibility that he had erred in one instance of moral-social analysis.
The Press was responding to accusations, made by the Daily Mail newspaper,
“which recently, relying on the authority of Mr. Charles Booth, published a map
of the ‘plague spots’ of London, and told the world, in the boldest of bold
diagrams, that the Hollington-street and Sultan-street area of the Borough of
and a few more lying to the West of Camberwell-road. It stands alone in an otherwise well-to-do
district, acting as a moral cesspool towards which poverty and vice flow in the persons of those
who can do no better mixed with those who find such surroundings convenient or congenial. It is
the despair of the clergy, who find it impossible to put any permanent social order into a body of
people continually shifting, and as continually recruited by the incoming fresh elements of evil or
distress…” “Camberwell Slums: Facts About the Sultan Street Area,” The South London Press 27
February 1897, p. 5.
723
“The State of Central South London,” The South London Press Saturday, 4 April, 1903, p. 2.
As was noted in Part I, Booth’s recommendation for this foul class reflected “a wider context of
assumptions about poverty in which it was often treated as an excrescence, a cancer on the
underside of society which could be removed without any fundamental alteration of that society.”
Collini, “Sociology and Idealism,” 45.
294
Camberwell is ‘irreclaimable.’” Rev. Baily, it appears, had stood up to refute
accusations that “there were none [in the metropolis] whereon the word ‘outcast’
is so deeply branded,” and that “There has been no improvement.” The Press then
let Baily have center-stage:
We understand that the Rev. W. Falkner Baily, who, as head of Cambridge
House and chairman of the Camberwell Borough Council is deeply and
doubly interested in the welfare of the inhabitants of the Hollington-street
area, wrote to the ‘Daily Mail’ denying the truth of the serious imputations
cast upon the moral and social condition of the inhabitants, and supplying
certain data in proof of the denial, but that so far no notice has been taken
of his communication.
Baily had challenged both Booth and the Mail, and, interestingly, the Press –
giving some credit to Baily and his social analysis – was made to question who
precisely had their facts right. If there were poor-but-respectable people in the
Hollington-street district, it was possible Booth and the Mail had been unfair. “To
give a dog a bad name and hang it” was “uncharitable,” the editor mused:
“objection may be urged against the somewhat irresponsible and off-hand manner
in which the poor people of the Hollington-street area are dismissed as ‘bestial’
and ‘irreclaimable’ by authorities who do not appear to have, so to speak, verified
their references.” Baily, moreover, was a qualified social observer. He was a
“very worthy and practical exponent,” had “abundantly supplied” “evidence” of
the poor respectability of his people, and, even if he was wrong, the Press
believed he was an authority on the social and moral condition of the people here.
Tentatively, therefore, the Press came to Baily’s defence with this statement
(perhaps paraphrasing him): “For it happens that far from being worse than the
inhabitants of other London slums, the people living in this particular district have
been steadily progressing in the march of civilization for several years past.”724
That Booth and Baily crossed swords over the Sultan Street area did not mean
they challenged each other ideologically, of course. It simply meant that
ministers, as much as social investigators, saw themselves as legitimate
724
“Not so Black as Painted,” The South London Press Saturday, 25 April, 1903, p. 5.
295
practitioners of a very moral, perhaps religious social science, and more than this,
that they believed in a diverse morally-defined working-class hierarchy.
As the Booth men traveled into poorer and poorer central South London,
most striking was the clergyman’s sense of local hierarchies. High Churchman
Rev. E.H. Bell had arrived in London from a previous parish in Wimbledon
“where he spent the first 12 years of his clerical life.” Now in much poorer
Walworth, he told Baxter that he had organized the parish on modern lines.
“When he came the church was quite dead: not ten people even in the church, no
district visitors: there were rumours of a Sunday School, but it resolved itself into
one boy and one teacher.” Bell said he
was quite familiar with ‘Life and Labour’ and produced his own copy of
the map, which he thought was still wonderfully accurate, though there is
a distinct downward tendency: as the older inhabitants of the red streets
die or go further afield the houses are always tenemented, and taking the
parish as a whole there are now probably “three lots in each house.” But
the parish is still in the main respectable and “distinctly above most of the
surrounding parishes.” There are however two streets (Horseman,
Goschen (late Chatham St. and Chatham Rd) which have been affected by
the overflow from the Sultan St. area, and “will never harbour anything
but a low lot.”
B. analyzed his parishioners as 1/3 clerks, theatrical and musical people:
1/6th labourers and costers: and the remainder of various trades, but mainly
compositors, who have convenient trains to Fleet St. Among the women
are a great number of needlewomen, mantle and tie makers.725
In Southwark and Lambeth, the heart of poorest South London, Booth’s
‘Poverty’ series had for a long time been an extremely valuable source for the
London clergyman-social worker. Churchmen of all kinds regularly began their
interviews with a quick perusal of Booth’s poverty maps, and it was with their
help that the maps underwent revisions right up until the publication of the
Religious Influences Series in 1902/3. Early on in the East London interviews,
one finds Arthur Baxter with much-respected Hackney clergymen Rev. St. Clair
Donaldson agreeing that
All are poor and very poor [in Hackney Wick]: the colour of the streets is
scarcely if at all changed from when our map was made; though some of
725
Bell, B 276: 45-47.
296
the violet streets might now be blue. Homfray St. should probably have a
touch of black. This street is known as “do as you please street” and is
inhabited almost entirely of a shifting population who come in for six
months and then “shoot the moon” just before the bailiffs are to be put
in.726
Argyle, likewise, noted of one South Hackney parish: “Most of the visiting is
done in the poor district off Wells St Palace Rd and Priory Place are the worst
streets and Percy Rd is only a little better. Pool Rd has gone down, and is purple
now and the Havelock Rd is poor [I went over our map with the rector. The
colouring remains fairly accurate still.”727
“It was agreed,” wrote Arthur Baxter (in his interview with the Rector of
St. George the Martyr, Southwark, Rev. Somerville), “that so far as there was any
change since our map it was in the direction of greater poverty. The old courts and
alleys are as poor and degraded as ever[,] the Buildings are generally poorer.”728
Testimony like this could mean a block or row of houses might receive a “dark
blue,” a “blue and black barred,” or worst of all, a “black” hue, in Booth’s final
draft. Somerville cited Booth in annual parish reports as an expert on social
conditions: “The population,” reads St. George the Martyr’s “Report and Annual
Statement of Accounts for the Year Ending December 31st, 1898,” “is about
13,000, and of these more than 50 per cent. are described by Mr. Charles Booth,
the eminent statistician, in his “Life and Labour in London,” as destitute.”729
Churchmen like Somerville stretched his literary muscle in their parish
descriptions, but in most interviews and Reports one finds Boothian breakdowns
of the very poor (or Classes A and B), the poor-but-respectable (or Classes C and
D), and the bona fide or true working classes (or Classes E and F). Sommerville
described (in enormous paragraphs) both the classes and housing to be found in
his wholly working-class parish. “Roughly speaking,” he said, the parish could be
“divided into three groups.” Off of Borough High Street “all” were “very poor.”
726
Donaldson, B 185: 181.
Leonard, B 186: 13.
728
Somerville, B 269: 27.
729
St. George the Martyr, Southwark. Report and Statement of Accounts for the year ending
December 31st, 1898. (London: T. Cornell, 63 Borough Road, S.E, 1898,” 5.
727
297
Here, drunkenness, criminality and immorality abounded. The neighbourhood
was a “veritable maze to all but constant frequenters,” with a “multitude of short
streets of two-storied houses, running out of each other at all sorts of angles.”
“Even on a bright sunshiny day where there is a blue sky overhead,” Somerville
wrote, “the very spirit of dullness” pervaded this labrynth of courts. “One room,”
here, was “the holding of multitudes of tenants whose modes of living may not be
too closely scrutinized.” Importantly, this area was isolated both from the tenants
in the tenement blocks high above them, and from the artisans’ neighbourhood
several streets over. Somerville emphasized that only “[m]en and women of the
worst character haunt these places. In the daytime however, they are conspicuous
by their absence. They are rarely seen until nightfall. Couples of women may be
seen gossiping at the doors, and women are to be seen peering out of the windows
when strange voices and strange footsteps break the silence of the courts.”
“Every kind of social problem” was to be found in the huge tenement
blocks of St. George the Martyr, the home the parish’s second group of
inhabitants. Most occupants made no attempt to keep themselves clean. The
monotony of life, the vicar thought, likely made life “under the most pleasant
circumstances,” “intolerable” in these places. One got a “good idea of it”
“standing in one of the quadrangles and scanning the range of buildings, seven
storeys high, that block out the sky on every side, and render the lower floors
gloomy on bright days.” Children slipped, from time to time, between the bars of
the blocks’ stair-linked platforms, falling to the “asphalte” many stories below, in
their effort to “enlarge their lofty playgrounds.” Together a family here made
“about 25s. per week, the father outside, the mother and children at home (“at
matchbox-making, &c.”). This meagre amount kept the poor families over the line
of respectability, but, Somerville complained, it left “nothing to give to the
support…such up-to-date parochial institutions” as were provided by his Church.
“[B]etter-off artizans” – the third group distinguished by Somerville, were
distinguished not only by class but by their isolation in a small “district known as
the Triangle, i.e., the space bounded by three roads – Newington Causeway,
298
Borough Road, and London Road…”730 Their description, as seen here, was short
and sweet: there was simply nothing sensational for the vicar to add about this, an
independent, respectable class of working people.
In the same fastidiously exacting picture of a wide spectrum of working
people in their own parishes, Rev. Corbett of riverside St. Peter’s parish,
Southwark, also identified the best of the working class to be found near the
churches, and compared their own districts to other poor districts with a scientific
self-seriousness. Rev. Corbett – described as “bright and keen,” “sincere, straightforward and level-headed” – gave this immaculate account:
As a class, the parishioners are unskilled, (riverside workers, carmen, etc.)
with warehousemen, packers, porters, brewery men (Barclay and Perkins)
City police etc. The regular artisan class is mainly absent, those who work
in the district living away. Also there are many widows, charwomen etc.
employed in the City.
On the whole the people are respectable; some are rough; there is a good
deal of drinking at times, but “I shouldn’t run them down”. There are
some loafers, of course, and employment is often casual, but the houses
may be said to be occupied on the whole by a bona fide working class.731
The bona fide, of course, were a different set of working people in almost
every parish, distinguished by occupation, and sometimes by the building in
which they lived. Often they were described as the parish “aristocracy.” The “old
inhabitants” of St. Michael’s (Southwark) were its “decent set, with the police as
[their] aristocracy,” said Rev. Longsdon. “[P]eople who had cut their moorings” –
often poorer immigrants to the district fleeing demolitions elsewhere – were
apparently a “bother” to this set.732 St. Andrew’s Rev. Asker in Lambeth said
“The aristocratic bits of the parish are Roupell St. and the Peabody Buildings.”
These were likewise juxtaposed against the lowness of Stamford Street, where
“[t]hirteen years ago there were respectable houses” and where “now all such
houses as are not brothels or semi-brothels are let in tenements,” families
730
“St. George the Martyr, Southwark,” 5-7.
Corbett, B 269: 199-201. Booth repeated Corbett’s assessment, writing in 1902 that, “The
people here are more entirely of the bona fide working class, and some of the best of them are
touched by the religious influence of the Church, which is here an active parochial agency.”
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 15.
732
Longsdon, B 269: 69.
731
299
commonly living in their basements.733 There were now many block dwellings in
the parish of Holy Trinity (Lambeth), and the district was getting poorer on the
whole, but a parish in social flux was not beyond moral appraisal. Some blocks
were “good and some bad,” said Rev. Weigall: “of the former those put there by
the S.E.R. [were] a sample, and of the latter the Buildings in Carlisle St.” “The
former,” Weigall stressed, were “very good”; the latter “very bad.”734 Weigall
knew, like Rev. Denny of St. Peter’s (Lambeth), that when a parish became
poorer, the law of relative respectability always remained a constant. Denny was
new to his parish, and could not speak from his own knowledge, but he was “told
by his workers that the parish has become much poorer in recent years…” Denny
had watched the slow “decay” of the parish for nine months. So poor was the
parish now that the only “aristocracy of the parish” he could name were the
residents of “the large Guinness Buildings.” The latter apparently was hardly a
typical resort of the respectable working-class family, but with the bar so low in
St. Peter’s they were the best the parish could muster.735 A better example of the
“bona fide,” perhaps, were the respectable working-class commuters who caught
the eye of churchmen and church-worker in St. Mary’s (Lambeth). There, Rev.
Andrews Reeve commented “that nearly all Doulton’s [a bone china and
tableware manufacturer] good people lived at a distance.”736
Former contributor to the Poverty survey, Rev. Bainbridge-Bell of St.
John the Evangelist (Waterloo Road) not only gave a comprehensive class picture
of his parish. He had also long experience in the field of church social work
(having been a curate in East London). Bainbridge-Bell, therefore, was in a
position where he could (and probably knew he would be expected to) provide
both a parish class-breakdown, and also a comparative moral analysis of different
regions of the metropolis in which he had had experience. Bainbridge-Bell told
Arthur Baxter, “The tendency of the parish is to get poorer, rougher, more
733
Asker, B 269: 141-143.
Weigall, B 272: 87.
735
Denny, B 272: 3.
736
Andrews Reeve, B 272: 71.
734
300
crowded, and more disreputable.” Expertly did he enumerate the parish’s seven
social strata:
The population is just under 8000 consisting of (1) a few shopkeepers in
Waterloo Road and York Road, either big people who live away or very
small people who are no good to the church” (2) Lodging House keepers
letting lodgings to the poorest and shadiest members of “the Profession”
(3) A few hotel keepers with genuine hotels (4) a number of hotel keepers
of the lowest character (5) a 9 number of undisguised brothels (6) a very
few artisans [Baxter left a large space here]
foreign waiters etc (7)
a number of labourers, costers, Hooligans, roughs and criminals mostly in
the streets off Bond St.
Bainbridge-Bell described his parish as being “‘as poor or poorer than St. Giles
and much harder’ indeed the Bishop has described it as the ‘hardest parish in the
diocese.’” Feeling especially for the poor-but-respectable and respectable of his
parish (his parish’s own Classes C to F), Bainbridge Bell spoke of respectable
working parents who were forever asking him, “How can we bring up our
children with Stamford St. at our door?”737
Rev. Barraclough, his parish of St. Thomas’ on Bainbridge-Bell’s eastern
border (in Lambeth), also compared East with South, giving special attention to
the class Charles Booth made such an object of discussion in this period. The
South, Barraclough thought, had a poorer moral tone than the East. “Previously,”
the vicar said, “he had been for some years in the East End, working a good deal
among the Jews, and at the head of the establishment (Chapel, Home etc.) that
formerly existed at Palestine Place, Bethnal Green.” Barraclough “compar[ed] his
present parish unfavourably from all points of view from the East End,” Aves
wrote, and he “profess[ed] to know the latter well.” East Enders, he felt, were a
step above his own people. Most here were “unskilled [workers] (porters, etc.
etc.) with any number of loafers.”738 In an expose by the English Churchman
(included in Barraclough’s interview notes), Barraclough commented that “The
state of things here is as bad as anything found in Whitechapel” (the reporter
writing parenthetically that “he spoke from several years’ experience of work in
737
738
Bainbridge-Bell, B 269: 7-9.
Barraclough, B 269: 163.
301
both neighbourhoods”). Among the “lowest strata,” however, the vicar still found
a “badly attired” but “respectable costermonger class with their wives and
daughters” willing to attend mission services. Any Booth investigator or journalist
of the period could tell you that to spot this class among the light blue and dark
blue neighbourhoods of St. Thomas’, took a perceptive eye, and clearly minister
and Booth investigator had been looking – together – for this class, for some
time.739
If they used Booth’s language of “bona fide,” “true,” or “good” working
classes, however, they were proficient, too, with his language of the “loafer.”
Since 1889, Class B had been granted scientific reality, the idea of the residuum,
as Jose Harris has noted, having a longer pedigree.740 Ministers referred to the
“loafing,” “cadging,” “casual” class as often as they discussed the classes further
up the working-class hierarchy. Rough could also be included here, though
“rough but respectable” was subtly different from this often entirely pejorative
term. We can see that a large group of ministers familiar with Life and Labour
employed such terms, but many more did besides, demonstrating a popular
knowledge of the London working-class’s “submerged tenth.” In the Bow and
Bromley interviews we find a vicar affirming: “There are many loafers among the
men who will not work,” and also his suggestion that these should be
discriminated from “better men.”741 From a poor-but-West-End parish again there
is the passing comment: “Among the women are many laundry workers, and
among the men a large number of loafers.”742 Few religious men, despite their
new social approaches of the late nineteenth century, saw these people as
improvable. They were willfully immoral, and old evangelical ideals combined
with Booth’s moral-religious science so well as to permanently render these men
and women the scientifically as well as and morally-defined dregs of society.
739
“A Visit to St. Thomas’, Lambeth (From our Special Correspondent.) Reprinted from the
“English Churchman,” in “In Lambeth Slums. (From our own Correspndent.) Reprinted (with
corrections) from “Church and People,” for September, 1898,” p. 5, 8.
740
Harris, “Between civic virtue and Social Darwinism,” in Englander and O’Day, Retrieved
Riches.
741
Barly, B 175: 229.
742
Johnson, B 264: 85-87.
302
Back across the city to Woolwich, one vicar described a famous local slum known
as “The Dusthole”:
As to the denizens of the Dusthole (Mr. W. by the bye objects strongly to
the name) he regards them as practically hopeless: here and there there is a
fairly respectable family, but the dwellers in the Lodging Houses are
merely tramps, cadgers, loafers and prostitutes, and Mr. W. regards all
efforts to influence them as futile: practically all that is attempted among
them is the rescue where possible of young girls who are drawn into the
net of prostitution.743
Ministers from a variety of denominations wished that something could be
done about the undeserving, lazy, manipulative and malicious loafer poor.
Camberwell Ragged School Missioner John Kirk (who was situated near the
Sultan Street district), Father Newton, whose church was in the epicenter of
Southwark poverty (Red Cross Street), and Captain Broad of the of the Southwark
Salvation Army Metropole (a shelter for the very poor), each spoke of drastic
solutions. They hinted, sometimes strongly, that some ministers wished something
could be done about the undeserving, loafer poor. Kirk said the Sultan Street poor
were a lost cause. “Speaking of the work among them he said it was almost
hopeless. ‘Of course’ he said ‘from the religious point of view one should always
have hope: but humanly speaking the best thing to do would be to put them all
under the sea.’”744
Father Newton commented that the streets off of Red Cross Street, and
especially Red Cross Court, was “by far the worst spot” until one reached
Bermondsey’s Tabard Street area – “perhaps,” he said “the worst spot in the
whole of the Borough.” Booth agreed in his published works. He painted the area
dark blue, with one side-street black barred on both sides.745 With this kind of
poverty, said Father Newton, one worried less about the “terrorism” of gang
warfare (or Hooliganism as the contemporary press called it) and more about a
class that many simply knew as “loafers.” “[T]here is a vast amount of loafing,”
Newton said, and for them nothing short of a centralized brand of behavioural
743
Wragge, B 288: 101-103.
Kirk, B 282: 35-43.
745
Newton, B 270: 173.
744
303
modification was required. “[F]or the young loafer,” Newton thought, “there is
nothing for it but discipline and the Army.”746
Aves’ scribbles from his initial interview with a Southwark Salvation
Army Captain – Captain Broad – demonstrate again the widespread nature of this
brand of thinking, even among men bound to care for the most downtrodden.
Referring, but not mentioning Charles Booth’s 1889 plan for “State slavery” of
the unhelpable poor in semi-penal labour colonies, Broad’s thoughts were
recorded as: “Yes, he knows something of Mr. Booth’s plan; thought he was
partly on the right track; wants Government to take up the work, doesn’t he?” “I
do.” ‘I’ was underlined twice by Aves to give an idea of Broad’s strength of
feeling on the matter.747
Broad ran the Salvation Army Metropole known as ‘The Ark’ in
Southwark Street. On a stormy, snowy night in 1899 Broad told Aves that the
Salvation Army did not have the “power” to carry out such an operation out – but
that the Government could do it.748
Broad was too busy with the nightly business of his 200-man common
lodging house to talk much about it during Aves first visit, but he invited the
Booth Man to “come and have a private conversation with him in his room some
evening.” Aves complied. “He [Broad] seemed to want it and to be worth it, so I
made an appointment for the following Wednesday, and left a place that had
seemed to be first and foremost a well-managed Common Lodging House.”749
A week later Broad explained to Aves what he thought were the limits of
what the Salvation Army could do in this riverside parish of poor South London.
The captain had had a lot of experience in the social work of the Salvation Army.
He had “been at many of the branches of the Social Wing – at Shelters, Elevators,
Metropoles, and at the Farm Colony,” and he had concluded “that only rarely
have the men who come to the Army the grit that is necessary to recovery.”750
746
Ibid.
Broad, B 278: 69.
748
Ibid.
749
Ibid., 69-71.
750
Ibid., 75.
747
304
Broad had originally grown up in Wiltshire, had dreamed of becoming a
Wesleyan minister, but owing to the death of his father, had taken work as a
grocer’s assistant and risen to the rank of manager.751 Now a Captain in the
Salvation Army, his sympathies were nevertheless limited only to a certain brand
of working man:
‘I believe in breed’, he said ‘and if there is little or nothing to fall back
upon, there is little or no chance.’ Moreover, it is above all things
necessary to ‘catch a man while he is falling.’ But most of those who
come to the Army have already fallen very low, and have neither breed
nor back-bone.
If they have the latter, it is most likely to be the
wrong sort, and, although it may leave them energy it is likely to be
wrongly directed.
This was the problem with the Salvation Army’s Shelters and Metropoles: they
failed as institutions to separate the good from the bad.
Thus it comes about that the Social Wing provides a number of places
that, instead of having any kind of redemptive power, harbour together
those who ought rather to have been apart. They make a kind of club-life
among those who make the very worst kind of club-members – those who
learn the worst from the worst among them.752
Institutions like his “did more harm than good.” The Salvation Army had tried to
separate dependent from self-respecting men and it had failed. “[I]t has no
power,” Broad repeated:
It can’t keep a man, and in practice any one can come back again and
again should he find it convenient to do so. It is to deal with men of this
kind, who have had a chance and not used it, that you want authority – that
you want “government” to take the matter up and when have been tested
and found wanting, keep them under semi-penal conditions.753
These whispered demands were not the province of lone churchmen, but
the stuff of cutting-edge social science even among well-known Christian social
thinkers. This fact was borne out by a stream of proposals in the journal of the
751
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 77. Ensign Wills of the Nunhead Corps in Nunhead Green discussed the problems charity
and “cadgers,” saying he he wanted to keep these charity-mongers as far from his Barracks as
possible. Casually Wills remarked that cases of the “cadger type” “they send to the Shelters (B
310: 93).”
753
Ibid., 79-81.
752
305
Christian Social Union, the Economic Review, for the implementation of a
widespread labour colony programme in Britain. The CSU was “[t]he largest and
most influential of the societies formed during the ‘Christian Socialist Revival’”
that occurred in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The Union’s
founders were the same men who produced the new scientific and theological
hybrid found in the theologically critical essays of Lux Mundi, and, “by 1895 it
had already 27 branches and almost 3000 members and at its maximum reached a
membership of almost 6000, which included a number of bishops.” The “roll-call
of the section of the late Victorian elite which adopted a socially radical stance is
an impressive one,” according to Gerald Parsons: “The CSU numbered among its
leading and most ardent members B.F. Westcott, Henry Scott Holland and
Charles Gore.”754 Despite this, one sees in the pages of the Review a campaign,
led by Rev. J.C. Pringle (who in 1915 became the Secretary of the COS) to
institute a policy of detention for a class of the unemployed. Pringle, in one
article, debated the strength of continental colonies in Germany and Belgium. The
Belgian colony at Merxplas in particular drew his attention for its apparently
“ingenious arrangment for separating the honest man from the dishonest.” Pringle,
in a frightening “scientific” recommendation repeated a number of times in this
journal of Christian social activists, concluded that:
Given the habits they [the “sunken” loafer class] they have formed, it is
difficult to see how permanent detention, or some contract of a binding
nature, is to be avoided. At any rate, they must never come back to East
London. Probably, their settlement on the land, with a firm paternal hand
upon their shoulders, is the most feasible scheme.
“At all events, the present state of affairs,” wrote Rev. Pringle, “must be
recognized as intolerable, from the scientific and national point of view.”755
754
Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” in Parsons Religion in Victorian Britain 51, 52.
Parsons notes how prominent Anglicans including E.S. Talbot (the Bishop of Southwark from
1905) and Samuel Barnett (Booth’s dear friend) were among the most famous Anglicans going by
the name “Christian Socialist.”
755
Rev. J.C. Pringle, “Labour Colonies,” Economic Review (Jan. 1905), 65, 71-72. Colony
proposals were consistent in the Review during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Noel
Buxton, “Labour Homes,” Economic Review (July, 1898): 326-348; H.J. Torr, “The Belgian
Labour Colonies,” Economic Review (Jan. 1904): 55-63; H.V. Toynbee, “The Problem of the
Unemployed,” Economic Review (July, 1905): 291-305; Rev. C. Baumgarten, “The Problem of
306
What we see in the testimony of a wide variety of churchmen, is that the
purpose of church social work in this period, as in every other avenue of the social
reform movement, was to separate the few poor-but-respectable from the loafer
classes in the remaining social “garbage pits” of London. The loafer as an
immoral class existed apart from politics for ministers, and apart from their loving
doctrines. In fact, it may even have reassured London holy men that in the great
mass of working people (within which they felt they were making such
“frightfully slow progress”) there were some that could be discarded as spiritually
rotten. A Camberwell LCM said resignedly: “He has known this area for many
years, about 20 I think he said, and his chief work, like that of other missionaries,
consists of visiting the people. His knowledge is therefore intimate, and during the
whole of his time he says that there has been little change. ‘If I had to colour the
street on the plan of the map, I should put very much the same colours for them as
now; individuals have changed, and probably out of the 1000 families on the
ground, of whom I visit 800, not 50 are the same as when I came. But the type
remains.’”756
As with Booth and his men, it was an age when it was thought that people
were easily categorized, and despite a man’s otherwise well-meaning politics,
most did not question the moral basis of these categories. Even a proponent of
“Jesusism” – Rev. Chapman of St. Luke’s parish, Camberwell, was not above
them. Over lunch (and probably, cigarettes) Baxter was told by both Rev.
Chapman and his working-class curate Waldron that St. Luke’s was “exceedingly
poor: it contains few artisans, but almost every other class, labourers, carmen,
cabmen and loafers being most largely represented. There has been no marked
change in ten years: if anything a slight improvement. Tilson Road is the most
Poverty,” Economic Review (Oct. 1905), 423-433; Fred Mason, “The Elberfeld System of
Helping the Poor,” Economic Review (Oct. 1907): 421-434; J.C. Pringle, “The Belgian Detention
Colony at Merxplas,” Economic Review (July, 1909): 261-281.
756
Paginton, B 282: 103.
307
squalid street.”757 Despite even Chapman’s new love Incarnationalism, the
working-class moral hierarchy remained. Perhaps it was always there, since the
days of early Victorian evangelical preachers like Thomas Chalmers. Perhaps
Booth had simply given it the stamp of science.
The usefulness of the Booth survey to the ministers of London should be
clear. Not only were ministers of all kinds familiar with the survey, they owned
copies of its volumes, produced its maps from their own libraries and felt its
researches of “practical use” in social work. We can see here the varying nature of
the ministers’ hierarchical descriptions of their parishes and neighbourhoods. For
ministers facing every manner and mix of moral and immoral parish populations,
it must be emphasized again how useful Booth’s work was to men needing
confirmation of their moral measurements of the poor people around them –
people who, most men believed, morally corresponded to the colour pink, to
purple, to light blue to Class B’s dark blue, and to black. The essence of Booth’s
Life and Labour survey was a hierarchy-making project, and from this chapter we
see that Booth was not the only one interested in participating in making moral
and immoral working people. Many more, women and working people, were also
involved in the project, making it a popular phenomenon more than any manner
of class domination. But this is to jump ahead.
757
Chapman, B 281: 107-109.
308
Chapter 6. Charity Control in East and South London
1. Introduction
Charles Booth and the ministers of London, as we saw in the last chapter,
had been hard at work in the decades before 1914, not only formalizing a
moralized hierarchy of working people in texts of scientific social thought, but
encouraging ministers and scientists alike to arrive at the idea of moral
segregation when they spoke of social reform. In their support for controlled
charity under the aegis of the Charity Organization Society – in both selective
charitable provision, and rationalization of out-dated parochial charities – the
response of London’s ministers was extraordinarily positive.
Instead of a typical focus on London’s East End, this chapter will include
and extend our focus to the South bank of the Thames, where few historians have
explored London church philanthropy critically. For the East End, my earlier
work on ideas of charity control among Anglican ministers is helpful and deserves
a summary. An extension and complication of my earlier article on the subject is
to note how officials of the COS and ministers of London competed – not as a
COS “right” against a Christian “left” – but instead as professional groups equally
engaged in the field of charity control. What is revealed from this approach is that
while Booth was increasingly set against the churches because of his reliance on
the critical accounts of COS officials, the Anglican churches maintained a quiet
but earnest effort to keep their charity careful. When he assessed the ministers of
both East and South London, Booth grounded the accounts of churchmen in
“facts” provided by COS officials, and this has distorted our picture of church
charity in London.
309
A particular focus in this chapter will be on the interviews Booth used as
evidence for his fourth volume of the Religious Influences Series: “Inner South
London.” The South London Anglican clergy in the roughly thirty parishes I am
calling Poor South London demonstrates that a group of all-too-scientific
Anglicans were demanding charity control from their Churches, the registration of
charitable aid in a multi-church Registration Committee, and the reform of
parochial charities. In all of these areas, ten of the thirty ministers of Poor South
London – a charity elite – were a silent, but motivated minority, entirely
comfortable in their cooperation with the COS, who felt that moral segregation,
through charity organization, was to be their special contribution to social reform.
2. “Your Gift to London”
For the London minister, the most common activity in which one could
participate in the popular public effort to morally segregate working people from
working people was church charity. Charles Booth and the ministers of London
had constructed moral hierarchies in every parish of the city. It was through their
churches’ charitable institutions that ministers could apply what they had learned,
and what they had helped Booth to learn. There was no better medium than
charity for distinguishing the poor-but-respectable (Class C), from the loafers and
criminals (Class A and B) of the metropolis.
Life and Labour’s aid to charity work was likely behind most ministers’
congratulations at the publication of the Religious Influences series (with all new
maps). One of the most prominent clergymen to praise Booth for the help he had
provided metropolitan ministers – specifically in the area of charity – was Canon
Samuel Barnett. The Simeys reproduced his thank-you note (Booth gave him a
complimentary copy of the Religious Influences series) in their Charles Booth:
Social Scientist. Significantly, however, they did not comment overly about its
significance.
Thank you for such a present to myself, but thank you more for such a
contribution to the needs of London. The value of your gift to London is
310
not only the facts you have provided but in the start you have given to
another way of considering the poor. Every charitable person is doing
better work because of you, and so the poor have a better chance of
escaping the wounds inflicted by blundering kindness.758
After the Simeys, it appears, Booth historians lost sight of the importance
of praise like this from London ministers – for by the 1990s they were
misrepresenting Barnett. Englander and O’Day, while they also quote Barnett’s
letter to Booth in 1903, only quote half of it. Booth is thanked for giving London
another way of “considering the poor,” and the sentence ends on this praise. As
we see here, this is to miss the fact that Barnett thought the Life and Labour
survey specifically helped “charitable people” to do “better” work, and that
“better” work involved avoiding the “wounding” of the poor with “blundering
kindness” – by which he meant careless charitable methods.759
Ministers’ praise of Life and Labour as an aid to philanthropy, in the
unpublished interviews, came from all over the metropolis. One Fulham vicar,
E.S. Hilliard was himself a charity professional. “Mr. H. has been here for 8 years
and was previously Organising Secretary of the Bishop of London’s Fund for East
London, and mentioned how grateful he had been in that capacity for the early
volumes of Life and Labour which he ‘was always quoting.’”760 The
acknowledgment of the Rector of Bermondsey, Rev. Henry Lewis, moreover, was
almost a mirror image of Canon Barnett’s. Baxter wrote: “As I was going Mr.
L[ewis, Rector of Bermondsey] reverted to his great interest in the inquiry, his
desire to help, and the eagerness with which he and his brother clergy looked
forward to the coming volumes ‘which would be invaluable to politicians,
758
Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist 155. “The principles of the
Charity Organisation Society are the principles of the Christian spirit,” wrote Barnett in the
Christian Social Union’s journal, Economic Review. Christ, like the Society, Barnett wrote,
wished to help men “thoroughly,” thinking of their “futures,” and of their “characters,” and so
rejected “doles.” In this way did Barnett both promote “cooperation” among the churches and
chapels, and justify the COS’ selective charity. “The Charity Organization Society puts into force
the Christian spirit, and faces a great social danger,” which Barnett suggested was charitable
overlap and social demoralization from excessive relief. S.A. Barnett, “Christianity and the
Charity Organization Society,” Economic Review (April, 1894), 189-194.
759
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 32.
760
Hilliard, B 264: 105.
311
philanthropists and other workers, and above all would awake the Church to a
sense of duty.’”761
Ministers also approached Booth on metropolitan charitable issues. Rev.
Rosedale spoke of the people of the “bad mews” in Kensington Town, and
suggested that Booth’s Religious Influences Series would be a perfect vehicle to
warn West London vicars against careless charity:
In the bad mews, the difficulty is constantly drink; and drink and the
charitable weakness of the well-to-do are responsible for half the trouble
of the district. On careless charity he was emphatic, and his last words
were the expression of the hope that Mr. Booth would warn against the
relief that produces beggary in West London. “It is to this that the
Potteries district owes its existence.”762
Bermondsey Rural Dean Rev. William Lees Bell likewise complained of the
“lavish help” by donors to East End churches while those in the South languished
for lack of cash. The poverty in South London, many churchmen felt, was worse,
and more widespread than in the East. Charity in East London, therefore, going to
waste on people who did not need it. Lees Bell ended a letter to Booth (included
in the interview notebooks) on a note of utmost deference: “Pray excuse me
giving private opinions to one so well qualified to judge.”763
Clergymen felt Booth’s works an essential tool in their philanthropic
work, as well as a possibility for good press in their charitable endeavours. At
least since the early days of the Charity Organisation Society in the late 1860s
(the days when Sir Charles Trevelyan, Booth’s step-uncle, had founded the
Society), ministers had been abused for their lack of discrimination in charity
work. For men like Rev. E.N. Coulthard of St. James’ Bermondsey, it likely
seemed as if Booth intended his last survey of London to set the record straight.
The Religious Influences series, many clergymen may have hoped, would
measure once and for all the moral influence of the church to teach working
people self-discipline, just as his Poverty Series had the gauged moral strengths
and incapacities of the city’s poor. Preparing their charitable records for his
761
Lewis, B 275: 63.
Rosedale, B 261: 119-121.
763
Lees Bell, B 279: 149; Letter: Christ Church Vicarage, Spa Road, SE: Feb 15. 1900.
762
312
purview in every one of their interviews, clergymen were nothing if not grateful
that the focus was at last on their very careful methods of discrimination against
the unworthy poor of the metropolis. Booth kept a letter from the grateful Rev.
Coulthard in his Bermondsey notebooks:
Will you give my wife and myself the pleasure of your company to lunch
on Thursday or Friday at 1 o’clock?
Will you let me call myself a sincere admirer of your splendid work? And
what you are doing now is exactly what I have felt to be the first essential
– a rigid and scientific inquiry into the religious and social influences upon
the people. At the same time it is extremely difficult as you know to
estimate such influences fairly. Even to us it seems possible at times to
look at them in quite opposite lights.764
3. East London and Charity Control
Both religious and social at once, many contemporaries felt that the most
important “influence” exercised by clergymen at this time was the influence of
their charity on working people. Of course, there were many different “religious”
influences at this time – Low evangelical ones involving preaching in an oldfashioned black gown, or High and ritualist ones stressing the sacramental and the
symbolic through candles and incense in ceremonies. Equally, there were a wide
range of “social” influences emanating from the church – employing lawyers or
doctors in one’s church buildings or having lectures, dances, and theatrical shows
there. All of these caused the public to talk at the time – because fundamentalism
and social auxiliaries were relatively new in church work and life. But no social
and religious influence caused more scandal among a morally-conscious public –
among ministers, among COS charity scientists, among social statisticians like
Charles Booth – like the suspicion of bad charitable influences.
As I have discussed in my research of the East London interviews,
ministers repeatedly indicated to the Booth Men that their charitable methods
were beyond scrutiny. Most East London ministers agreed that real compassion
for the poor when distributing charity on their behalf demanded that one be
764
Coulthard, B 279 121-3: Letter: St James Vicarage, Bermondsey, S.E.: Friday, Jan. 29th, 1900.
313
selective. Targets had to be chosen carefully in the hope the respectable among
the poor might be “raised,” “elevated,” or “picked-up.” A churchman’s chief
anxiety was charitable overlap – the over-provision of charity to those already
given it by another organization and especially to those who (from the look of
them) would be demoralized or pauperized by its receipt. Over-indulgence of
certain of the poor – in Booth-speak, Classes A and B – would “corrupt” them,
would cause them “harm,” and so many churchmen of the survey saw to the
development of sophisticated church surveillance techniques coordinated around
the practice of house-to-house visitation and always described in terms of
“systematic” administration.
One technique increasingly proposed by clergymen was the parochial
relief committee. By the late 1890s churchmen were producing a 3d pamphlet –
with prefaces by the Bishop of Stepney, Rev. H.V.H. Cowell and Rev. Robert
Jamblin – detailing “Rules for a Parochial Relief Committee.” “It not only
relieves the Clergy from becoming distributors of doles,” wrote the Bishop, but it
would help to preserve working class character: “Character, after all, is the only
permanent possession of mankind, and ought not to be trifled with.” Charles
Booth could not have said it better. Cowell also believed it ended the “dealing out
of doles” encouraging “improvidence.” “It economized means,” the vicar added,
“by diverting them from the undeserving and applying them more judiciously,”
and it “prevented the overlapping of charitable agencies.” For Rev. Robert
Jamblin of Paddington it ended the clergyman’s concern of imposition by “ne’er
do weels of both sexes,” what he called the “wasting on the worthless the alms
which should go to the deserving poor.” Rules included regular contact of church
committees with members of the local Poor Guardians and the COS, and the
receipt of relief returns by both groups. The eleventh rule of a parochial
committee, regarding “Ineligible Cases” read thus: “Relief will not be given to the
idle and improvident, nor to persons of bad character. Ordinary out-of-work cases
314
will not be assisted, except in special circumstances, and where thrift has been
shown in the past. All ineligible cases shall be left to the Poor Law.”765
East London provides us with a great deal of evidence demonstrating the
commitment of clergymen to the ideal of charity control. Elsewhere I have
described the application of charitable control strategies in the East End, but a
summary of their work can be given here.766 In the East End, almost every
clergyman and district visitor knew the dangers of giving to the wrong people. In
the East London parishes of Poplar and Limehouse, Bow and Bromley, Bethnal
Green, Hackney and South Hackney, many and sometimes most of the population
were invertebrate, lazy loafers; a cadging or demoralized people; or a casually
employed people with no moral fibre.767 To all of these, because of the fragility of
their character, it would be ill-advised, many Christian workers believed, to
provide even a coal ticket.
Within such language one sees most clearly the uncompromising nature of
Anglican charity control discourse in the 1890s. Both High and Low clergy,
despite the “advanced” “social” pretensions of the former, employed the rhetoric
of charity control. Both, moreover, found common ground with Booth’s
investigators, all of whom were strong advocates of charity organization.768 From
the praise afforded certain clergymen over others, it is clear that the Booth Team
765
C.E. Charles, The Relief of the Poor, with Rules for a Parochial Relief Committee (London:
A.R. Mowbray & Co., 64 & 65, Farringdon Street, E.C., 1898 (PRICE THREEPENCE).), 2, 3, 4.
Headings included in the “Rules” included: 1. Constitution, 2. Applications, 3. Inquiry,
Overlapping, 4. Relief, 5. Employment Register, 6. Decisions of Committee, 7. Interim Relief, 8.
Accounts, 9. Records, 10. Poor Law, 11. Ineligible cases, 12. Provision against Sickness, 13.
Pensions, 14. Cooperation, 15. Suggestions for District Visitors.
766
In this section I borrow largely from my own work on the subject, now contained in Brydon,
“Charles Booth, Charity Control and the London Churches,” 493-496.
767
These were the pauperized “other” of the Anglican Churches - one which relentlessly studs
discussions of charitable practices in the Booth interviews. For “invertebrate” “lazy” “loafers,” see
Chandler, B 169: 3; Barly, B 175: 229; Gurdon, B 169: 95; Blatch, B 185: 5. For citations of
“demoralisation,” see Bedford, B 169: 183; and Dinnis, B 182: 11, who bemoaned how the “slums
are very much over-visited and demoralised thereby.” For accusations of a popular deficiency in
moral fortitude, see Barly, B 175: 241; Chandler, B 169: 3; and Hawkins, B 185: 217.
768
See Part I. We must remember that this was far from unordinary. A.M. McBriar suggests, in
her discussion of the 1905-9 Poor Law Commission, that there was a “wide acceptance of basic
C[harity] O[rganisation] S[ociety] views in informed circles in Edwardian times; indeed, it is
probable that those views were widely accepted without being thought of as being the peculiar
property of the COS – they were thought to be ‘common sense’.” McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed
Doubles 194.
315
and the men they interviewed accepted that, in order to “form character,”
sometimes it was necessary to give very little or nothing at all. To a greater extent
than they discussed the church’s “religious influence,” the Booth interviews
centered most persistently on the money churchmen doled out to the poor and outof-work. The Booth team even took time to interview local government and
working-class community leaders on the subject of district charity, making the
Booth survey more like an audit of charitable relief practices than one measuring
the extent to which London was “touched by religion.”
Strong opinions from the more extreme of these charity policemen are not
hard to find. “They don’t come for what they can get because they get nothing,”
said Bethnal Green’s Rev. Green. Plain services, “no attractions” and no attempts
to induce by almsgiving, said the Low Churchman, Rev. Sweetnam. Tickets for
“coal, bread, meat, etc. but no money” said Richard Free of Millwall (he avoided
the out of work “as much as possible”). “Never give to out of work cases,” said
Rev. Morcom of Hackney. “Money is never given,” said Rev. Mason and, he
added, “practically nothing is given directly.” Even Father Jay, the celebrity and
High Churchman of the Nichol (and Child of the Jago fame), told Baxter his “line
in the Nichol has been to give nothing himself and to discourage others from
giving.” “Give no money,” indeed, was the immediate response of a number of
clergymen interviewed by the Booth team: one that interviewers found not cold,
but sensible.769
Of course, someone was on the receiving end of the charity distributed to
the poor in cash or kind during this period. In an average Anglican Church, relief
(not including hospital letters) usually came to about ₤100 per year. In cash or
kind it was distributed by “thousands of visitors entering hundreds of thousands of
households each year in London.”770 To find the recipients of this charity,
however, one must wade through the “no money” rhetoric and the judgments of a
large number of churchmen, appalled by the charitable improprieties of careless
colleagues, churchwomen, and voluntary, municipal, and state authorities. Blame
769
Green, B 182: 83; Sweetnam, B 175: 85; Free B 170: 19; Morcom, B 185: 35-7; Mason, B 175:
37-9; Barly, B 175: 243; Jay, B 228: 49.
770
Booth, Religious Influences, 7: 412; Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy 106.
316
shot in various directions, but interestingly, women topped the list. Testimony
from nearly all the Low Churchmen of Bethnal Green, for example, saw women
church workers dishing out indiscriminate charity all over the place, paying backrents, believing everything the poor told them. The damage was endless: people
were calling Whitehead Street a “show slum” for these women.771 Others blamed
negligent state relief: for Revs. Mason, Parry and Hare, a “loose hand,” an absurd
lack of personal inquiry, and too many relief officers pushing retirement, were
producing abominable harm in Bow. It was all wrong, they said, it was heartbreaking!772 Churchmen even blamed themselves. Discussing weekly mothers’
meetings, two churchmen remarked how they were sure that they had drilled into
their people that “cadging [was] of no use,” but to no avail. “I don’t believe in
them a bit,” said one: “women only come because they expect to make something
out of it.” “I’m not gone on mothers’ meetings,” said the other – the women come
with a sense of “obliging you.” Several, on their death beds, had told him, “we
never came from the right motive, treats and teas brought us.”773
Low Churchmen, for their part, were not at a loss for solutions to the
problem. They repeatedly mentioned “clearing list plans,” “no money” policies,
and close collaboration with the dependably tight-fisted Charity Organization
Society. In Poplar seven out of ten clergymen, Low and High alike, explicitly
affirmed their commitment to the local C.O.S.774 Bow’s Rev. Mason, another
evangelical, “kept a complete receipt of all sick cases” and had a weekly
committee to discuss each case of need.775 Finally, Bethnal Green’s Watts
Ditchfield, to be safe, confined his relief entirely to the sick – no relief of any sort
was given without consultation among his staff.776
The Booth Men nevertheless believed that in East London the High
Churchman deserved the most praise for his church social work. As always it is
important that we understand what this meant. Most have taken High Churchmen
771
Hollings, B 182: 91-3; Watts Ditchfield, B 182: 141; Dinnis, B 182: 11; Morcom, B 185: 37.
Mason, B 175: 41; Parry, B 175: 65; Hare, B 175: 219.
773
Walker, B 185: 71; Hartley, B 185: 171.
774
Chandler, B 169: 25; Gurdon, B 169: 104; Elliott, B 169: 125, 127; Bedford, B 169: 181;
Coldwill, B 169: 193, 195; Beardall, 169: 240; Free, B 170: 19.
775
Mason, B 175: 37.
776
Watts Ditchfield, B 182: 141.
772
317
like Hackney’s Rev. Walker at his word when he remarked how without interest
in poor people’s bodies a congregation “won’t believe you care about their souls.”
The praise of the Booth investigators only adds to our positive impressions.
Booth’s men found Walker a “really good fellow” with a tremendously popular
staff of young, Oxford-educated sportsmen. It is important, however, that we
understand they did so at least in part because he made the poor women of his
parish understand – “very well” – that “cadging [was] of no use.”777
Anglicans were most often interviewed by the Booth team’s former COS
official, Arthur Baxter,778 and his admiration of High and Anglo-Catholic
churchmanship was obvious. Baxter affirmed that High Churchmen figured
among “the finest characters and the hardest workers among the clergy that we
have met…”779 Booth later added that “most of the young men who take Orders,
and especially the keenest spirits among them, ranged on the side of the High
Church.” “[T]he higher the ritual,” he noted, “the easier it [was] to obtain the
number of curates required,” and these “brought to their work an unequalled spirit
of devotion.”780 Booth juxtaposed the High Church with its guilds and
confraternities against the sometimes sleepy nature of Low Church social work.
“Amongst the Evangelicals,” he said, there was “something lacking” – a “want of
organized Church work.”781
777
Walker, B 185: 71, 83, 85. This was a common saying among holy men. Edwin H. Kerwin of
the evangelical mission, the Great Assembly Hall, used the phrase in a clipping he gave to Charles
Booth during his inteview (Kerwin, B 183: 105), and the Anglican Rev. Morcom of Hackney used
when speaking to Baxter. This compassionate language, however, was largely directed at a class
thought deserving, and withheld from a “loafer class.”
778
Baxter was the newest member of the Booth team, and conducted investigations only for the
“Religious Influences” Series. Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 31.
779
Quoted in McLeod, Class and Religion 252, n. 179. As Baxter spoke to a prominent Wesleyan
of the East London Wesleyan Mission, his energy reminded Baxter of a High Churchman. “Mr.
Howard is a first rate fellow, keen, emphatic, energetic, full of enthusiasm. He reminds me more
of some of the High Church parsons than most of the non-cons…” Howard, B 184: 43-45. Ernest
Aves, discussing the “well-worked” character of South Hackney’s churches, also noted these
churches were “mostly high.” Nettleton, B 187: 22.
780
Booth, Religious Influences, 7: 50. Unfortunately, their ascetic devotion was often a major
cause of ministerial burn-out among High Anglicans. The Matron of the East London Nurses
Association told Baxter that “many of the High Churchmen work too hard and would do better if
they would ease off sometimes…the result is that they break down and have to be shelved before
their work is done.” Miss Cairnie, B 227: 41. Bermondsey’s Rev. Hewlett (see below) was one
example of this unhealthy over-activity and self-denial.
781
Booth, Religious Influences, 7: 13.
318
It is certainly true that East London’s High Churches provided a wide
range of social agencies for the relief, religion and also recreation of often poor
urban populations surrounding them. Hackney’s Revs Donaldson, Fletcher and
Sanky provided local theatre, dances, concerts, and flower shows to spice up
people’s lives.782 “Throughout the winter entertainments, dances, etc. are
incessant,” Booth’s investigator wrote of Rev. Fletcher.
Mr. Fletcher is inclined to rebel against all trouble at times, but on the
whole thinks they work for the good: the respectable poor hate music halls
and it is the duty of the Church to provide them with decent amusements.
To those who are attached to the Church it is the chief interest in their
lives, and they are doing something in connection with it. The greatest of
the social functions are the boys’ and girls’ annual pantomime which is a
great success.783
As in the case of temperance and thrift societies, one cannot deny such
entertainments were a meaningful form of giving – giving through a variety of
new community services sometimes viewed with considerable suspicion by a late
Victorian public. But giving beyond this, “put-the-money-in-my-hand” no
historians can assume.
4. COS Critiques of the London Minister
Despite such an outpouring of support for charity control, however, one
of the startling things about the published Religious Influences series volumes is
Booth’s often uncompromising criticism of church charity methods. Doubting
their ability, in poor areas, to maintain strong discipline over charitable
distribution, we can often see Booth losing faith in the churches’ power to sociospiritually elevate poor working people.
This is particularly evident in his published, fourth volume of the series:
Inner South London. In South London’s unpublished interviews one finds an
often pleading language among ministers in regard to the painstaking care they
took with charity. Booth, however was unmoved. In his published volume, such
782
783
Donaldson, B 186: 197; Sanky, B 185: 47; Fletcher, B 185: 101.
Ibid.
319
strong-worded pleas of devotion to charity control were replaced with Booth’s
sometimes ambivalent, sometimes very critical stance on their charity work.
Booth even blamed churchmen for the low nature of the neighbourhood, arguing
that their careless relief methods had dragged the district down. Booth’s (mildly
obsessive) attention to careless relief is fairly clear early on in the book. There are
over ten references to “unwise” or “mischievous” uses of charity before the
volume’s thirtieth page (the tome had just over two-hundred and Booth was only
a third of the way through his account of West Southwark and North Lambeth).
By page ten, however, Booth registered his great disappointment with the
majority of church relief work. There could be “little doubt,” he wrote, “that the
measures adopted to relieve…poverty by the Church ‘in possession’ have
aggravated the evil.”784 “The clergy of the Establishment in this neighbourhood
[Southwark] do for the most part accept these valuable principles [of charity
organization] in theory though often not adopting them in practice.”785 In the end,
commenting on four sample parishes in Bermondsey, Booth’s verdict was one he
would repeat many times throughout the survey: that in terms of attendance,
religiosity, or any other effort to improve the “character” of the people, results
were “hardly commensurate with the efforts made.”786 It should be said,
moreover, that all eyes were watching when Booth criticized the churches charity
work. When the editor of the South London Press noted that some South London
neighbourhoods were “sores festering around the body politic,” it noted that
Booth had found one “corrupting agency” making the country fail to live up to the
“Imperial idea” and that this agency was careless charity. “Commendably” Booth
had dealt “with the district covered by the parishes of St. George and St.
Alphege,” and he had observed:
“it seems hardly to be questioned that the charity dispensed by the
missions here is mischievous in its effects.” “Incense and candlesticks
don’t matter,” one of the most outspoken among the clergy said; “the real
question is relief. If that is put on the right basis the Church will do some
784
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 22.
786
Rosemary O’Day and David Englander, the most prominent among recent historians of Booth
and his Religious Influences Survey, assign the same assessment, almost word for word, in their
Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry.
785
320
good; if not, not.” Never surely, was a counsel of despair more bluntly and
frankly given expression to!”787
In fact, it was likely the Booth investigators’ over-reliance on the word of
Charity Organisation Society officials, rather than the clergy themselves, that was
the source of this pessimism. As we noted in Part I, Booth and his investigators
put the most factual faith in “professional” charity scientists in each area of
London they entered. The Booth Men grounded the observations of Christian
ministers in COS accounts they believed were more objective and less partisan.
One imagines that Booth had more faith in the old certainties of his stepuncle, one of the founding members of the COS, than he did in the seemingly
over-kind clergy he and his investigators encountered in East and South London.
Sir Charles Trevelyan’s 1870 comment (published as late as 1887 in the London
COS’ Annual Report) almost prophesied the Booth’s assessment of London
clergymen. Before the COS could be effectual, Trevelyan had said, “every
clergyman and minister, and every congregation must be content to work in
subordination to a general committee of direction,” predicting further that “the
religious difficulty” (a clergyman’s Christian kindness) would be a particular
“impediment” to this goal.788
The “facts” behind the clergy’s apparently unsatisfactory attention to
charity organization are difficult to pin down. In East London, we can recall from
Part I Miss Davis’ strange analysis of Hackney Anglicans and Nonconformists –
how it boiled down to a vague assessment of the apparently multiple degrees
existing between an ideal or “sensible” administrator of charity, and a negligent
pauperiser. Despite the clear commitment towards the charity control ideal that
we see in the East London examples above, Davis’ East End colleagues were
equally dismissive. Poplar’s Mr. Martley found twelve parishes allied to the COS,
of which six were “active.” This left three who were “less active as regards clubs
etc. etc., but satisfactory.” Finally, three (two of them old, and one a former
787
“The State of Central South London,” The South London Press Saturday, 4 April, 1903, p. 2.
Robert Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity and the Poor Law in Victorian England (London:
Macmillan, 1995), 91.
788
321
drunk) were “unsatisfactory,” a complaint which might simply mean they did not
allow the COS to supervise them. Bethnal Green’s W.A. Bailward used the same
vague terms of “activity,” failing equally to give a clear idea of the criteria he
used to judge ministers’ charity work.789
In their comments on Nonconformists, it is clear that Nonconformist nonparticipation with the COS left officials clueless as to their methods of charity.
Martley complained that the dissenters were “friendly” but would not join his
committee, “or if they do join, don’t attend.”790 Baxter felt this was typical. “Of
the Non Cons.,” he wrote of T. Thornton of the Mile End Committee, “as usual
Mr. T. knew much less than of the Church: for the most part they stand aloof from
the committee, not so much he thinks from dislike to the principles, as from
antagonism to the clergy: it is impossible to get them and the clergy to sit round
the same table…”
Martley’s colleague Radford Sharpe seemed both critical of local
Anglicans but, paradoxically, was also aware of improvement among them. On
the one hand, “The Influence of the COS permeates slowly,” he said, and COS
meetings “in the long run” had an “educative effect.” Nevertheless, he was
unsatisfied with current performance: “the clergy start relief committees; they
profess to work on C.O.S. lines, but don’t.”791 Mr. Eveleigh of the Bow and
Bromley Committee gave the same two-sided commentary – commentary
scholars can probably extend to all metropolitan COS officials: some clergymen
had relief committees (though they should try more to avoid letting women
church workers and others interfere overly in their government); some were
789
Martley, B 173: 25. For Bailward Bethnal Green had four “active” clergy, with a further man
“waking his parish up,” and eight inactive, seven of which were “for the most part harmless” and
one a “beggar” with “sensational appeals” for donations. Bailward, B 225: 133-137. Bailward
wrote to Economic Review demanding more training of philanthropists by experts like himself,
and cited Booth: “Again, there are many who have taken up philanthropic work,” Bailward wrote.
“The development of philanthropic forces has been one of the leading features of the last century.
Everyone recognizes – in theory at least – its difficulties. It is only necessary to refer to Mr.
Booth’s latest volumes on this point.” W.A. Bailward, “Upon Things Concerning Civic and Social
Work that may be Learnt in Charity Organization,” Economic Review (July, 1904), 289.
790
Martley, B 173: 17. With Nonconformists Bow’s Mr. Eveleigh gave examples of a
Congregationalist minister with “very good charitable work” and a Baptist who was “jealous of
any interference,” and again the clergy were crowding out the ministers on the committee.
Eveleigh, B 178: 15.
791
Sharpe, B 173: 163.
322
“charity despots” (not allowing COS interference in their work); some, positively,
had “an idea of adequate inquiry”; and others, vaguely, gave charity on
“unapproved principles.”792 All officials, therefore, seemed to see something awry
in the ministers’ charity work, and yet none were willing to brand them wholly as
pauperisers (“Though far from perfect the administration of relief compares
favourably with many districts. Most people have some idea of the right
way…”).793 Of the group of officials interviewed in Bethnal Green and Mile End
there was the same testimony. One official felt that as a whole “the clergy [were]
about half good and half bad,” but that the younger clergy were the best.794 Most
intriguingly, most of the officials agreed that “The administration of relief
generally and especially among the clergy has improved greatly of late years”:
“the principles of the C.O.S. are permeating.”795
Harry Toynbee, the ubiquitous COS official of the South London
interviews, was perhaps more critical of his subjects,796 but continued to hedge his
bets in what seems a characteristically subjective, COS style. His interviews,
however, do provide us a more specific account of local ministers.
Nonconformist ministers, for example, if they were members of the more
established denominations, often received ambiguously positive assessments like,
“good worker” or “active man.” As elsewhere in London, few Dissenters were
actual members of a local COS Committee, perhaps due to the dominant
membership of overbearing Anglicans. Most, however, said they gave charity
only to members of their own congregations, which, to Toynbee, was a good sign.
Ministers of major chapels also appeared aware of the importance of responsible
792
Eveleigh, B 178: 5-7.
Ibid., 13-15.
794
Thornton, B 225: 3-5. Bailward of Bethnal Green said hopefully how “The administration of
charity has on the whole improved since Mr. B. first knew the district. The East End is being
covered with the young curates who have been at Oxford House and they have all served on
C.O.S. committees: thought most of them relax the severity of their practice when in the church
they never relapse into the hopeless state of the old school of clergy.” Perhaps happily, Bailward
added that “there is not a large amount of Relief in Bethnal Green. Most of the clergy are very
poor and cannot give much, and the Non-Cons are not very active in that line: there is little
overlapping.”
795
Thornton, B 225: 3-5, 7; Lilly, B 225: 85; Maclean, B 225: 111.
796
Was this a regional tendency for the South London COS? We can recall from my introduction
Mr. Warneford Moffat’s criticism of all the Battersea clergy for what he called their untrained,
“pitiable stupidity.” Moffat, B 296: 139-141.
793
323
charity. In Rotherhithe one Congregationalist (Rev. Linington) had already joined
the committee, and a Presbyterian was soon to join (Rev. Murray). In
Bermondsey a Congregationalist in charge of Collier’s Rents Mission was called
“active” but “rather tickety” (Rev. Cook), while another was “friendly” but had
been forced out of closer cooperation with the COS by his deacons (Rev. Docker).
The Wesleyan South London Mission did a “good deal,” but was “very tickety”
and would not cooperate (Revs Hopkins and Meakin). A particular bias was
shown against the Wesleyans: “give much; from the C.O.S. point of view,
hopeless.” One Southwark Primitive Methodist was “keen on” the local charity
registration committee and intent on joining the COS (Rev. Tolefree Parr). A
neighbouring Bible Christian was viewed as a “dole”-giver (though not in large
amounts), but at the same time a man who forwarded applicants to the COS
Committee (Rev. Rounsefell). Certain denominations were typically seen as
sound-minded charity professionals – Presbyterians and Unitarians were usually
exemplars.
The patchwork quality of COS records demonstrates their inherent
unreliability. Sometimes a chapel was followed not by any assessment but only by
the minister’s name (and possibly his address). Other times major chapels
(William William’s Upton Chapel, for example) were brushed off with the words
“little to say about these.” In Lambeth one entry read: “Mr. Goodman’s Mission,
and the Presbyterian Church were both little known.” Small, undenominational
missions were often dismissed out of hand. Many were “small affairs” without
adequate funds to concern the COS. A fortunate few with more money at their
command were called “careful.” But those with larger treasuries were almost
universally condemned with the words “unwise,” “indiscriminate,” or “relief
given too easily” (Mr. Young, Mr. Weston). Rashly tarring ten different men with
the same brush, moreover, the London City Missionaries of the district were all
tagged “unsatisfactory.”797
797
Agent of the COS Committee at 100 Borough Road, B 273: 11-15; Toynbee, B 273: 21-23;
Mackintosh Walker, B 273: 39-45; Toynbee, B 273: 99-101. Working-class missions, as well as
Roman Catholics, who received the same two-sided and ambiguous appraisals, will be dealt with
more thoroughly in the chapters devoted to the working-classes.
324
Roman Catholics were a mixed bag in terms of charitable relief, but
assessments tended to be positive. In Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, of three
priests, one was “friendly,” and one gave little and worked hard – but one was
“hopeless” (Frs. Murnane, Haynes and Buckley). In Southwark, it was said, “they
do not give much away.” In Lambeth, co-operation was apparently friendly, but
Roman Catholic “efficiency” depended “very much on the priest who has the case
at hand.”798
Anglicans in the Southwark region, according to Harry Toynbee and Miss
Hanson of the Borough Road committee, were generally viewed as competent,
but, puzzlingly, not competent enough in charitable matters. The method of
analysis was, again, the COS’s’/Booth men’s wildly subjective moral appraisal.
One was a drunk and had resigned (Rev. Calcutt). Another was “hopeless”
because of a lack of personal activity in parish affairs (Rev. Thompson), but
redeemed by his more competent curate – a man trained by a Greenwich
clergymen who Ernest Aves knew personally and approved of (Rev. Escreet, who
said Booth’s books were second only to the Bible). One’s charity work was
handicapped by (apparently, inherently generous) Anglican Sisters but ultimately
vindicated because he was “screwing up” (correcting the defect and becoming
stricter in charitable matters) (Rev Duthy). Yet another, new to the district, was
redeemed (instead of damned) by the work of a female church-worker who was
also a COS member. He was, therefore, in good hands (Rev. Somerville). Finally,
there were four men generally “sound” or “wise.” The first was “practical” (Rev.
Corbett). The second was Vice-Chairman of the local COS Committee and
“thought well of” by it (Rev. Longsdon). The third, weirdly, was a “good man,”
but “thought” not very wise (De Carteret). Finally, the fourth knew what was
“wise in matters of relief” but suffered from what was called “the double
conscience” of the clergy – a strong mind in the COS Committee room, but liable
to weakness in his own vestry (Rev. Vyvyan). In a separate interview, Toynbee
appreciated the latter clergyman’s “cooperation,” but derogatorily referred again
798
Toynbee, B 273: 101; Agent of the COS Committee at 100 Borough Road, B 273: 13;
Mackintosh Walker, B 273: 43.
325
to his “clerical bias.” It seemed that what most irked him about the cleric was that
the man had “his own independent relief” – a fact which enraged most COS
officials. Perhaps most contradictory was Toynbee’s take on a man who, as we
will see, was the most fire-breathing charity organizer of all in South London:
Rev. De Fontaine, Rector of Christ Church parish. De Fontaine was “judged weak
in practice,” who, most suspiciously to Toynbee, had a “very funny” relief
committee in which a Sister (women, again being seen as inherently unreliable)
took a prominent role.799
To the east, in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, Toynbee again gave his point
of view on what he saw were unprofessional men in a job they could not perform
properly (at least, not without his help). Importantly, in such judgments, the
clergy’s arguments stood no chance in the face of a COS official’s scientific
authority. As this passage by Aves proves, there can be no doubt on which side
the Booth Men’s (professional and personal) sympathies lay:
Combined with this lax administration of the Poor Law, the C.O.S. has to
deal with, or more often, to leave alone, a body of clergy who, from the
C.O.S. point of view, are a weak set. There is much giving of doles,
supplementary to the Poor Law, and altogether, the administration of
charity is at a low ebb in the neighbourhood. Toynbee rather gave the
impression of a man who felt himself to be ploughing the sands, although
he saw glimmers of a lasting furrow here and there. The following is the
Committee Report on the local situation: “ --- the Charity Organization
movement as a whole has made immense strides, and, even in S. Olave’s,
amid much that is discouraging, signs of progress are not wanting.
Whether we are popular or not does not much concern us. The chances are
that, in the present state of public opinion, the fact that a Charity
Organization Committee was popular would indicate that it was not doing
its proper work. Popularity may be pleasant, but we fear it is often only to
be had by a sacrifice of principle”. (Report, 1897.8, p. 6.) [sic]
Toynbee had his own private register of local workers etc. and we went
through it together. The following are his appreciations, from the point of
view of the administrator of charity.800
There was solid admiration in Aves report: the picture he gave of Toynbee
was that of a courageous, vigilant sentinel bogged down among the misguided
799
800
Toynbee, B 273: 17-21; Toynbee B 273: 95.
Toynbee, B 273: 93-95.
326
and incompetent. By his own character, Toynbee was raising ministers up to
decent charity standards, seeing glimmers of a “lasting furrow here and there.”
Everything Toynbee said to Aves was a certain fact, however unspecific and
indefinite it seems to the modern reader. The status-conscious, aging and hardworking Rev. Walsh, who we saw in the last chapter, for example, was, in
Toynbee’s words, “inactive,” “old and old-fashioned” – quite a different picture
from the struggling vicar, exhausted from visiting, who met Aves six months
later. Toynbee simply said he feared Walsh was “no good,” though, comfortingly,
he qualified the criticism by saying Walsh’s was “not a poor [working-class]
parish” (and thus requiring little charity anyway).801
One gets the feeling that Anglicans in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe did
not like Harry Toynbee. Mrs. Walsh called him “a terrible man” and another
clergyman, in more respectable working-class Bermondsey, called Toynbee a
“crank.” “[He] has his digs at the C.O.S.,” Toynbee said of the insulting vicar. As
with Rev. Vyvyan above, men with any independent relief work were distrusted
by Toynbee. We see that one man’s appraisal is: “friendly; uses C.O.S., mainly
for expensive cases; has his own relief; this [is] unsatisfactory; tickets etc.; no
system” (Rev. Lees Bell). Another’s assessment is: “own relief not well
administered; is friendly; occasional co-operation” (Rev. Hewlett). From this one
wonders whether Toynbee simply equated “independence” (relief not specifically
under his surveillance) with charitable carelessness. Most contradictory was his
take on Rev. Ainsworth at St. Luke’s: “Is on C.O.S. committee, and is a regular
member; own independent relief rather in the shape of doles.” More bizarre were
attacks on men who worked together with their church charity workers (district
visitors, curates etc.). Toynbee clearly felt a vicar should dictate charity policy to
these workers. One vicar’s description was: “A weak man; at a meeting, pitched
into by his own workers” (Rev. Wallace). Despite Toynbee’s initially negative
statements, clearly many were participating to some extent with COS procedure.
Four men were “co-operators,” often “friendly” (Revs Bristow, Bowden,
801
Ibid., 95. By this he meant that St. Anne’s parish did not present to Rev. Walsh any great
challenges of charity organization work.
327
Bardsley, Selby-Hele), and one was “nominally a co-operator,” though he may
have given too many doles and tickets, and apparently had a “doubtful” loan
society (Rev. Blakeston). The best grade was given to Rev. Coulthard at St. James
(who, as we see above, invited Charles Booth to lunch), but even this moment of
praise had an ambivalence: “has a parish committee; uses a case paper, and tries
for care; other relief given, however is friendly; co-operation occasional.” Two
men’s charity, on the other hand, received outright condemnation. One allegedly
gave thirty and forty shilling “doles” to families (an unlikely fact in view of parish
finances at this time) (Rev. Lewis), and another was tagged “friendly,” but with
“doubtful relief” (Rev. Beck).802
To the west, North Lambeth’s Honorable Secretary (Mr. MackintoshWalker) had the same mixed reviews of the Anglicans. One, because he did not
bother with the committee, was appended the words “no help” (Rev. Lee).
Another was “very difficult to get any information from” (Rev. Barraclough). One
had his own relief committee, and “hap-hazardly” worked with the COS, but was
also suspected of being “rather on the dole system,” giving free dinners, and
competing with a local Nonconformist boys’ home in the giving of tickets (Rev.
Asker, competing with J.W.C. Fegan, of which see more below). Again, there was
an example of a clergyman tending “to give half-crowns,” but who was held in
check by his curate and church workers, who ran all his social agencies (Rev.
Andrews Reeve, a similar case to Rev. Chapman of last chapter). Another,
although he had a relief committee, had COS representatives on it, and was a
member himself. Nevertheless, he was conspicuous for only receiving only halfhearted praise: “A certain amount of co-operation; fairly satisfactory and sound.
Above average” (Rev. Bainbridge-Bell). Others gave as much time as they could
to the Society, one doing relief “pretty well,” “interchanging” reports of those
relieved with the Committee, and keeping his relief amounts low (Rev. Lilly).
Often, however, one wonders if the amount of participation requested by the COS
was a little excessive. For example, Rev. Weigall at Holy Trinity sent his
deaconess to attend the Committee, and apparently he was “rather sensible,”
802
Walsh, B 279: 53; Toynbee, B 273: 95-99.
328
“but,” it was noted, “there is little co-operation with the parish.” What was meant
by this? Perhaps to resolve the unresolvable, there followed the impossibly vague
qualifier: “No opposition.”803
The quality and extent of a man’s adherence to the “science” of charity
control, as we can see, was a purely subjective affair. Toynbee did not have
twenty-four hour surveillance on the holy men he criticized, and if they were not
regularly at his Committee table (probably an embittering snub in itself) he could
not know what was going on in their parishes. He could have little idea of what
they gave or why they gave it. Historians should not attempt to find method in the
maze of critical COS pronouncements on ministers and their charity. They should
not, as one historian has done, take so seriously the dismissals and criticisms of
Society men and women that they paint Christian ministers as an opposing camp
of careless or generous charity providers.804 Predictably, of course, in his
interview Harry Toynbee did precisely this. He separated his own COS men and
women from South London’s Christian ministers as if the two groups were wholly
opposed to each other. Roundly dismissing the efforts of the Anglican clergy, he
affirmed:
There is very little genuine co-operation with the C.O.S. through an
accepted principle, and all clergy, ministers, missioners etc. are apt to have
one eye on their own cause when they administer, and not to think solely
and honestly on what the effect of their charity is likely to be on the
recipient. The purely subjective consideration – the desire to yield to the
kindly impulse, the ease with which it can be thoughtlessly gratified, the
unpleasantness of repressing it, and the difficulty of refusing are also
persistent obstacles to the spread of sound principles of relief.805
Basing his arguments largely on evidence from the COS journals alone
(full of the same dismissals of church charity work we see in the interviews with
Toynbee and others by the Booth Men), Robert Humphries, in 1995, had the same
conclusions as COS officials of the period in regard to the Anglican clergy. “Few
clergy participated actively in ‘scientifically’ organizing charity and some of
803
Mackintosh Walker, B 273: 39-45.
Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity and the Poor Law 90-93.
805
Toynbee, B 273: 23.
804
329
those listed as COS committee members contributed little or nothing in
subscriptions or donations.” Citing Calvin Woodward’s 1961 thesis, Humphries
argued that young “enlightened” clergymen, “old-fashioned” clergymen, and
curates alike “resented” the Committee’s interference – and, therefore, that they
also rebelled ideologically against the ideal of charity organization.806 In doing so
Humphreys has probably stepped too far into a COS man’s, or woman’s, world. It
is not by believing wholesale the dismissive accounts of a Miss Davis or a Harry
Toynbee that we will understand truly the charity ideals of London’s churchmen.
Rather than dealing with caricatures of hard COS men and women and
“kindly” clerics, historians should simply look for intent by holy men to be
“responsible” in or “careful” or “sensible” in their charity. Scholars should simply
look for ministers who felt it a valuable object to separate moral from immoral
men and women. Otherwise we will see the COS as an exception to more
sympathetic religious authorities, rather than a symptom of a broader charitycontrolling milieu – one, I argue, extended well beyond scientific churchmen, to
women church workers, women charity professionals, and even into the working
class itself.
5. Normal Men, Hard Lines:
Charity Elites and Charity Control in Poor South London
Booth’s uncompromising attitude toward ministers’ charity in fact hid a
great deal of effort in the field of charity organisation. Despite Humphreys’
arguments about the resentment young clergymen harboured toward the COS,
Booth and Toynbee might have given much more praise to a group of young,
motivated, and opinionated South London clergymen (most interviewed by the
Booth Team over the course of 1899). It is these motivated, interested men, who
stand out in the Booth notebooks, their views quoted at length, and these should
take up more of our attention when we appraise Church social policy during this
period. As we saw in the last chapter, there was a quite public despair voiced by
806
Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity and the Poor Law 90, 91; see also Calvin Woodward, “The
COS and the Rise of the Welfare State,” (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1961), 204.
330
old and overwhelmed clergymen, men either consumed by the hopelessness of
their task in “uplifting” poor neighbourhoods, or contemptuous of the
“indifference” of working people. But these men’s accounts should not serve to
cloud our picture of the “forward-thinking” Anglican charity activist in this
period, and what (nightmarishly, with the best of intentions) he attempted to
achieve.
Whether Booth knew it or not, South London became a battleground for
charity organization in the 1890s. The movement towards more systematic charity
manifested itself in numerous forms. It could take the form of explicit cooperation
with the COS (often through the introduction of a COS representative on one’s
relief committee), or less formally, by “working with” the Society, through
occasional consultation with a COS representative. Another sign of concern for
the responsible distribution of charity arose in clergymen’s efforts to reorganize a
number of endowed charities dotting South London. Yet another was visible in
the verbal attacks of Anglicans on surrounding Nonconformist churches and
missions, the latter commonly accused of being pauperisers. Lastly, informal
adherence to charity organization strategies could be seen among many
clergymen. These men, for a variety of reasons, were unwilling to work with the
COS, yet they were mindful, nevertheless, of the dangers of indiscriminate
charity. What is most interesting is the fact that all had something to say
concerning this most salient of contemporary “problems.” In the field of charity
organization, men led, men followed, or men failed, and when they did the latter,
too often they were seen as relics of another age – weaklings “weeded out,” in the
language of the day. As in the case of support for labour colonies, and in consent
for demolition policies by business and municipal authorities, we see here an
intellectual allegiance with, rather than any defiance against Booth’s ideas of
moral segregation. Every minister in South London adhered to the idea that a
loafer class, a Class B, required systematic discrimination, and charity work
became the main arena in which they adhered to this very religious science of
church-based social welfare.
331
Of course, few historians have tackled the rhetoric of charity control we
find among Anglican ministers in the South London interviews. The two
historians who have employed the Booth archive for their histories of popular
religion and church social work – Jeffrey Cox (1981) and S. C. Williams (1999) –
have instead avoided the ministers’ beliefs in moral poverty altogether, quoting
ministers selectively and somewhat superficially.807
Churchmen’s attention to controlled charity was a further indication of
their strong support for Booth’s sociological findings and their belief that such
findings had direct implications for charitable work. Ministers valued the
sociological findings Booth’s Poverty Series had provided them and they adopted
a similar language of working-class hierarchy that highlighted a small residuum
topped by a number of respectable-but-poor classes. Like the ministers
themselves, Charles Booth’s Religious Influences series presented poor, riverside
South London as a particularly high-risk area for the charitable provider. I do not
think it an exaggeration to say that South London was seen as a “poorer” area
than the East End by 1900 (with double the population of the East End it was
certainly larger). Indeed, in terms of its moral menace, it may have eclipsed its far
more famous counterpart.
To limit my discussion, however, I will focus only on an area I am calling
Poor South London. Left to right, from poor Lambeth and Southwark; to poor
Bermondsey; to poor Rotherhithe (the hump in the Thames in which the poorest
South Londoners lived), there were nearly thirty “bluish” parishes, with a
clergyman and his staff manning each. Of these riverside districts Booth said:
“Larger and more numerous blots of extreme poverty are to be found in this than
in any other map.”808 Pockets of poverty, of course, could be found in individual
streets or blocks in even the farthest stretches of the metropolis (Booth called
them “‘local rubbish heaps’ of degraded poor”809), but in these South London
parishes all, or much of the area, was shaded blue (black, dark blue and light blue
807
For Cox’s work on Lambeth, see Cox, English Churches; For Williams’ work on Southwark,
see S. C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture.
808
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 163.
809
Ibid.
332
highlighting the poorest of streets, with islands of pink streets indicating what
Booth called working-class “poverty and comfort”). To the west, more
respectable working-class neighbourhoods could be found south of Upper
Kennington Lane. Pockets of the poor-but-still-respectable families could be
found in North Lambeth’s riverside parishes at least as far north as St. Peter’s,
Emmanuel parish and St. Mary the Less. In the latter the parish population
(12,500) had little changed in thirty years and there was yet only a single block
dwelling there. “The parish is tending to get slightly poorer,” said the vicar, Rev.
Bromfield, “but the people are a very nice set and very respectable.” A “new evil”
had come to the parish in the form of betting, and there was “much drinking to
excess,” but there was “no professional vice in the district” (an important qualifier
of respectability in working-class neighbourhoods). Here, said Bromfield, it was
the “good qualities” – “especially the honesty of the people” – rather than their
vices, which “impressed” one most, and west and south of here appraisals of
working people would largely be the same.810
We can also delineate poor-but-respectable Eastern boundaries of Poor
South London. Respectable working-class neighbourhoods were a rare find along
the riverbanks of Rotherhithe. Instead, the parishes of St. James and St. Anne’s
served as the gates of a “comfortable, prosperous working-class district,” well
behind the waterside districts, and ultimately coming to adjoin Southwark Park.811
Wealthier working-class districts also lay to the South, (from west to east) in
Kennington, Camberwell and Newington. A southern boundary of working-class
respectability ran east roughly along Upper Kennington Road, north along
Kennington Road, east again along Lambeth and Borough Roads, north east and
south east along the triangle of Borough High and Great Dover Streets, along the
south border of St. Luke’s parish, and along the western borders of St. James’
parish, until, turning east along Abbey Street, one reached the parishes of the
Rotherhithe riverside (Jamaica Road, Union Road and Albion Street running
810
Bromfield, B 272: 101. Booth described the east to west strip from central South London’s St.
Saviour’s to Lambeth and Kennington as a “change from dark and light blue, with patches of
black, through purple and pink.” Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 101.
811
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 143.
333
through their centres). North of this boundary, much of it along the waterfront,
was Poor South London. It began in the east, at Vauxhall Bridge, on the west at
the Surrey Commercial Docks, and according to Booth, Southwark’s Red Cross
Street was its miserable epicentre.
According to Booth and his ministerial contemporaries, in few places in
London could one find a lower moral standard among working people. St. George
the Martyr parish in Southwark was roughly “the centre of the greatest mass of
poverty and low life in all London.”812 Booth reserved the most brutal and
uncompromising language for the area between Borough High Street and
Blackfriars Road. Here lay a densely packed maze of small streets and courts –
just as Rev. Somerville had described. Booth called the area a “terrible
embroidery” of poverty, dirt and sin. The “dregs,” the social “scum” of the
metropolis, lived here, he said, and while the people here were “not all bad, nor
all poor…to a great extent they are both.” Booth’s description was really little
different from Rev. Somerville’s (see last chapter): “the men are waterside
labourers and market porters and others of the lowest casual and loafing class,”
Booth wrote, “including thieves and the bullies who live on the earnings of
prostitutes.”813 The South London Press noted how Booth’s was “not by any
means an attractive or pleasant picture to contemplate” and that as areas with
“debased poverty aggravated by drink,” South London neighbourhoods “fell
below any other part of London.” To the east, towards Bermondsey and
Rotherhithe, lay a similarly depressing world of the worst, most hopeless poor. “I
know of no set of people in London who look quite so poor as those who do their
marketing in Bermondsey New Road on Sunday morning. I know no district of
equal extent so depressing as to spirit as that which lies between Long Lane and
Great Dover Street.”814
Among Anglican clergymen in the poor parishes of riverside South
London, there existed an elite of COS-minded charity reformers. The men of this
812
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 18. Here Booth was referring to one of the most central of
Poor South London parishes, St. George the Martyr.
813
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 8-9.
814
Ibid., 4: 101-102; “State of Central South London,” 2.
334
strict elite, despite Baxter’s preferences, were almost equally split between High
and Low Church. South London’s ten leaders in the field of responsible charity,
however, were not the mean-spirited, pinch-faced holy men one might expect.
Untidy, bearded, and rather a bohemian among parsons, W. Hook Longsdon (the
Vicar of St. Michael, Southwark) impresses one rather as a calm-thinking,
serious, but “sympathetic” man, in a time when poverty was still morally-defined.
In his interview (which Ernest Aves somehow recorded as a complete transcript
of the two men’s conversation), Longsdon related how Reverend Gage Gardiner
(the former Rector of the district) sought him out personally to take the difficult
charge of St. Michael’s:
“[B]ad luck to him,” I am some times inclined to say. But not always. I go
up and down a good deal, and if you had come a fortnight ago, you would
have found me rather down in the dumps. But I dare say it is all right. No,
I have never had a living before.
I had a school at Lewisham. I am glad you smoke. I find I can get through
a good deal of tobacco down here, but I can’t stand anything but a pipe.815
Longsdon was one of the “smoking ministers” in the last chapter.
Interestingly, his rather vulnerable, even depressed demeanor was accompanied
by a rigid commitment to Booth’s notions of moral discrimination, and to his
ideas of charity control. Longsdon’s endearing, self-deprecatory tone concealed
an active parish and an exceedingly warm personality. The vicar asked Aves, “Do
you mind coming round to the Church?” and it was this question which kicked off
Aves’ interview transcript. Longsdon welcomed Aves with the words, “I want
you to see things for yourself, then you will understand the position better.”
Aves’s description captured every aspect of the men’s stroll into St. Michael’s
church (the place, at the time, under extensive renovations): “Yes, this is the
Church,” he said. “We can get into the old Schools through here. This yard, just a
few square feet, my predecessor used to advertise ‘The girls’ playground,’ the
school was as bad as they make them, and everything had gone to pieces.” The rebuilding process had been hard on Longsdon. “I can’t tell you in what state of
815
Longsdon, B 269: 77.
335
neglect I found things,” he said. He told Aves of his hopes to decorate the church
and, soon, to have a stage.
‘All in a mess now, but we have to use it for a good many things.’ (To a
workman struggling to lift a heavy cupboard; other men standing by,
doing their own work, and not helping). ‘Want that out of the way?’ and
then we set to, and, with the help of a second man, got the thing where it
was wanted. (To me) “Thanks; shame to let you in for that sort of job.
Now lets [sic] go upstairs. Better room there; use it for clubs and so on.”816
One of an organized and self-conscious vanguard, here was the urban holy
man and care-worker of 1900 – genial, hard-working, and human. Facing a parish
of working people, Longsdon, like many clergymen, confronted, and strove to
understand, a harder world. At the very least he was forced to face the
contradiction of appealing to working men in a society whose social relations
were kept sharp and unequal by class and capitalism. Sometimes the task was
simply beyond him. Capitalism, he thought (rather wrong-headedly), could easily
kill a working man’s Christianity:
It is all rather up-hill work, but sometimes when I have got hold of a
fellow influences come in that, instead of helping as they should, make it
ten times harder. For instance, some time ago a man stopped away for one
day from his work to look after his father who was an old man very ill.
The son loses 5/6 – his day’s pay. The excuse is that it is a limited
company and the danger of precedent, but the manager is a churchwarden
and a Sunday School teacher at Hornsey or somewhere, and my chap
knows this; asks if this is what Christian practice means, and the whole
court talks about it. What is the good of my preaching Christianity in the
face of that sort of thing? An incident like that has more effect than I can
have in years. We want an association that will teach practical Christianity
to employers.817
This sort of discussion can too easily be taken as evidence of a new,
sympathetic and social “Christian love” among churchmen, but we should remind
ourselves that Longsdon was hoping here that the churches would not alienate the
“hard-working” working classes, the same working classes Booth called bona
fide, the classes that started at the level of poor-but-respectable. We should
816
817
Ibid., 63-5.
Ibid., 69-71.
336
remember, as Booth said in his published volumes, and as Longsdon said
personally, that the demolitions around St. Michael’s were a deliberate attempt to
destroy the haunts of the “black poor” of his area, to make room for the “poor, but
very decent set” that was his congregation.818 The attempts of Longsdon, and
other ministers to understand the harder lives of the poor rarely led holy men to a
complete departure from the widespread ideas that working people could be
morally segregated. This was clear when the tone of Longsdon’s interview turned
from humble and humane to serious: “The tone of the press about South London
just now is full of danger, Longsdon said. “In the matter of relief, we don’t want
South London to become like East London. More money is wanted, but it should
be spent on living agents, not perhaps on more clergy, but in getting the services
of competent district visitors.”819
Longsdon’s “Parochial Board Report for 1898” elaborated on these
opinions. There was the same solemn tone to this paragraph, which Aves
highlighted in pencil. “The Poor Fund shows a slight increase; this is by far the
most difficult Fund to administer. Many persons seem to think that a little money
to supply material wants is sufficient, whereas if they came and worked they
would see that the gift of materials either in money or anything else often does
more harm than good.” Neighbourhoods such as those in St. Michael’s parish,
Longsdon wrote, “will not be improved” if those working men who kept their
homes “wretched” and their children in “rags” “through bad management or self
indulgence,” were also “supported by charitable funds, [their] children fed and
sent away for holidays because they look so poor and forlorn.” Only if clergy and
district visitors exercised a real care in charity, Longsdon argued, could their
“personal influence” be realized among the poor.820
Aves also highlighted a paragraph in which Longsdon recorded the
rateable value of St. Michael’s 14-acre parish (₤17,000). “[I]f we take away the
Evelina Hospital and Lant Street Board School etc,” he noted, “we find that our
818
Booth, “Religious Influences Series,” 4: 17-18; For Longsdon on his “black corner,” see B 269:
67. For the vicar on his “decent set,” see Ibid., 69.
819
Longsdon, B 269: 69-71.
820
“S. Michael’s Lant Street, Borough, S.E.: Parochial Board Report for 1898,” 1.
337
6000 people pay, roughly speaking, in rates, through their rents or otherwise,
₤5000, about ₤2500 of which goes to support of the Poor.” The point of such
calculations, in Longsdon’s mind, was to drive it home to critical readers that
“Our little Poor Fund of ₤100 does not seem much compared with this.”821
This fascinating dualism – compassion for the good worker and caution
against indulging the bad – was a powerful component of the clergyman’s mind in
1900. As we have seen, there was at once an Incarnational inspiration to love
new, deserving classes in the metropolis, but this was simultaneously fortified by
a social science which made possible the segregation of a malicious and degraded
group of the poor. Longsdon (himself a High Churchman) certainly spoke like a
convert. “The great thing that we want,” he said, “is to change the opinion of
people on the question of relief, and to make them understand that people can be
injured and not helped by sixpence.” Longsdon was Vice-chairman of the local
Charity Organisation Society (COS) and such views, to him, were entirely
compatible with his ideal of “practical Christianity.” His words seem patronizing,
moralistic, and devoid of any understanding of structural poverty – and they were
– but they nevertheless had terrific salience to Anglican churchmen. In unique
contrast to the attendance-based insecurities we saw in the last chapter (voiced by
Longsdon himself!), there was nothing short of self-assuredness in Longsdon’s
words – words which were to be quoted by the editor of the South London Press –
“The real question is relief. If that is put on the right basis, the church will do
good; if not, not.”822
Rev. Sommerville (whose parish of St. George the Martyr lay immediately
to Longsdon’s east, and Revs Asker and Weigall (on his west and southwest),
were men cut from the same cloth as Longsdon: from the western border of
Southwark, to the northern neighbourhoods of Lambeth, the four men formed
821
Ibid.
Longsdon, B 269: 73. Longsdon seems to have convinced the Booth men of his genuine belief
in charity control. In his Inner South London volume, Booth explicitly noted of Longsdon’s
services, “no one is bribed to come.” Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 18. He also found his
slogans ideal to support his own case for charity control: both Longsdon’s “injured and not helped
by sixpence” and his “real question is relief” quotes went directly into his text. (Ibid., 4: 21, 22)
Also, as noted here, he was in turn quoted by the South London Press (“State of Central South
London,” p. 2)
822
338
something of an elite in charity work. Each incorporated the work of the COS into
their relief strategies – Longsdon by becoming an official of the society, his three
colleagues by inviting a COS representative to sit on their church relief
committees.823 To demonstrate the influence the COS had on local affairs in poor
Southwark, Sommerville even pointed to the election of a COS representative to
the Board of Guardians in his district.824
Again, in contrast to men lacking in strength, youth and inspiration to face
their poor metropolitan parishes, each of these men was young, motivated and full
of verve. Arthur Baxter dubbed Sommerville a “pleasant, genial man of vigour
and common sense” – not much over thirty. One’s “common sense” or ability to
be “sensible” in parish administration, we should note, nearly always was a
synonym for the soundness of their charitable ideas. Somerville gave special
thanks, in his parish report, to the “assistance of several valuable agencies at work
in the Parish…” Each had made, he said, “a deep impression on the welfare of
those who live here.” First on his list was “The Charity Organization Society,”
which, he said, “help[ed] the deserving poor on sound lines…”825
At a little above forty, Rev. George Asker was the oldest of the quartet,
but he displayed the same “soundness” of mind. Relief at St. Andrew’s was
“given carefully: very little [was] given in money,” his church-workers met
“weekly” to discuss relief, and “a representative of the C.O.S.” supervised all
proceedings. Yet there was also the same sternness one saw with Longsdon: “A
large proportion of the applicants for relief,” in his view, were “quite unhelpable.”
Asker also charged 2d for each of the 3677 Children’s Dinners given the previous
winter. As with most clergymen, this trifling fee was likely charged to encourage
a sense of responsibility and independence among parents. In a loose-fitting jacket
common to Evangelicals, the tall, thin, sunken-cheeked Asker could not have
struck an attractive figure, but unlike others whose lack of vigour or attractiveness
might draw the tag of “not strong,” it was the method behind the man that
823
Sommerville, B 269: 33; Asker 147-149; Weigall, B 272: 91.
Sommerville, B 269: 35.
825
“St George the Martyr, Southwark,” 11. In theological terms, Sommerville described himself as
a “broad evangelical.” Somerville, B 269: 39.
824
339
impressed the Booth team. Asker was “one of the best of the Evangelicals” “an
essentially good man, genuine, earnest, sympathetic, with no suspicion of
cant…”826
The “attractive” Rev. Weigall’s relief was also “[m]anaged by a
Committee,” upon which sat the church’s district visitors. Generally present was a
COS representative. “Not many tickets given,” it was noted, but Weigall gave
generously to his parish’s respectable needy. Weigall’s interviewer noted three
important aspects of charity at Holy Trinity: “They try for adequacy, and appear
to give liberally in some cases. Total comes to about ₤100 a year. They have four
pensioners.”827
The parish of Cecil de Carteret, Vicar of St. Paul’s, rounded out the four
“COS parishes” to Longsdon’s west. De Carteret, again, was “young, perhaps 35
or so…a good type of the moderate evangelical, working hard at a difficult
parish.”828 As in the case of Longsdon, he had been handicapped by overgenerous predecessors, and so he made sure to remind his interviewer not only of
the material poverty, but also of the moral destitution prevailing in his parish – a
parish only slowly, in his words, “improving.”829 Places like “Tower St. (d.b. on
map). Duke and Joiner Streets (both black on map)” he said, were “as bad as any
as regards poverty.” There were “Plenty of disorderly houses here, and others
scattered about as in the coffee taverns of Westminster Bridge and the Waterloo
Roads,” but the “worst as regards morals” was probably Gray Street.
Despite this, St. Paul’s showed signs of a slow elevation. The vicar
pointed to the fact that Webber St. had been rebuilt with working-class flats and
that there were “others elsewhere” also springing up in the parish. This foretold of
the arrival of more respectable working-class residents to the area.830 De
Carteret’s overall sentiment was one of encouragement and hope. “Things are
certainly improving, and he takes by no means a pessimistic view of the moral
826
Asker, B 269: 147-9.
Weigall, B 272: 91. Weigall’s services were noted as being “High, but not extreme,” with a
“good choir.” (Ibid.)
828
De Carteret, B 269: 185.
829
Ibid., 189-91.
830
Ibid., 185-7.
827
340
character of his people. As signs of improvement, he pointed to the greater
number of marriages; of attendances [250, evenings]; and the considerable
amount of individual response that was secured.” The vicar was even on good
terms with the local Nonconformist ministers of the district, and he congratulated
the Baptist and Primitive Methodist chapels (of Revs Williams and Tolfree Parr)
on their “active systems of visitation.”
Yet again there was a moral dualism in De Carteret’s account. He
symbolized the late century clergyman who, after a tough start, had found his
footing in a poor parish. “On the whole Mr. De Carteret impressed me
favourably,” Aves wrote. “He is not a man of great distinction, but is unassuming
and sincere, and appears in general to work hard on sensible lines, and to direct a
fair number of other people.”831 De Carteret assured Aves “that his relief work
[was] carefully managed: [and forcefully, he added]”
‘life would not be worth living if it were not, in a parish like this.’
Uncertain cases referred to the C.O.S., and ‘in general sympathy with
them”. Works in with the Registration Committee. His own workers are
not allowed to give anything, but report in all cases. There is still, he
thinks, much indiscriminate charity in the district, and a good deal of
bribery; in this last connexion he considers that the workers are the
greatest offenders, and his own, he says, are allowed to give nothing,
without previous report.832
The same combination of hope and hard-heartedness formed the ideal in
poor Bermondsey. Reverends Ainsworth, Bowden and Vyvyan, were grateful for
the Charity Organisation Society’s help. The personality of Ainsworth
demonstrated not only the difficulty clergymen sometimes faced in hardening
their hearts to the “degraded” of the parish, but the instrumentality (as will be
seen in subsequent chapters) of hard-working church-workers in keeping a vicar
(chartably-speaking) on the straight and narrow. “Mr. A[insworth] works with the
C.O.S,” wrote Arthur Baxter:
The ₤30 does not include money spent by the “St Luke Convalescent
Fund” of which there is a Report. Mr. A dwelt on this at length and told
me something of the history of each of the twelve cases helped last year.
831
832
Ibid., 195.
Ibid., 191-3.
341
The work of enquiry into the cases is undertaken by the members of the
Church Council “who are far sharper and harder than I could be.”833
Like Weigall, Ainsworth also added that a man deserving was a man helped
liberally. Although relief amounted to ₤30 a year: “not many cases are touched,”
Ainsworth said, but those which were, were “helped freely.”834
Rev. Vyvyan at the Charterhouse Mission was thirty-seven. Tall, thin,
pale, clean shaven, and fair-haired, he reminded Baxter strongly “of early portraits
of Cardinal Newman” (no doubt his cassock and biretta helped). He had operated
in Tabard Street – the poorest street in Bermondsey – since he was twenty-five.
“Morally and materially” Vyvyan said the parish had changed not at all in ten
years, yet that it had maintained its social-moral level, and that this counted for
something when speaking of the decency of the people. The only way the place
had improved was “owing to the rebuilding and extension of ‘business premises’
like Dewrance’s and Pickford’s:
This has led to some increase of crowding in the neighbouring streets, but
the people are no poorer: the general level is about the same and still one
of extreme poverty: with the exception of a few shopkeepers the people
are mainly of the casual class; costers, brush and mat makers, labourers,
haddock curers, wood choppers, with a good sprinkling of thieves and
prostitutes. There is a large Common Lodging House element in two
houses, one very large (800), the other small: both take a large proportion
of dossers of the lowest class…835
In terms of charitable methods, this High Churchman presented something
of a challenge to the Booth Team. While men like Booth and Baxter were able to
come to definitive conclusions about men’s charitable methods on the basis of a
single interview and acquired parish reports (ludicrously subjective testimonies to
833
Ainsworth, B 275: 123. Ainsworth was probably High Church. His church magazine informed
parishioners, in evocative incarnational language, of “‘the mystery of Thy (Christ’s) Holy
Incarnation.’ Two natures, human and divine, united for the first time in the one Person of Christ
as God, never again to be separated.” Speaking of the importance of Advent (the coming of
Christ), he added: “What is the practical object in inviting you often to God’s House in Advent?
To arouse in ministers and people, in you and us, as members of the Christian brotherhood, a deep
and abiding sense of sin and weakness with the view of stirring up our wills to true repentance and
amendment of life.” Quoted in Ainsworth, B 275: 129.
834
Ibid.
835
Vyvyan, B 275: 73-5.
342
present-day observers, but “science” to the Booth Men) the evidence Vyvyan
presented was awash in contradiction. Vyvyan told Baxter he was committed to
COS procedures, yet he admitted to pangs of sympathy for the poor men and
women luckless before a church or COS relief committee. He clearly engaged the
Booth Men’s minds, for both blue and black pencil marks (signalling different
readers) drew attention to the first sentence of one passage of his interview: “Mr.
V is ‘a strong believer in the C.O.S.’ and works cordially with it, but helps many
cases ‘which a Society must refuse.’ Relief is mainly given away in money, not
tickets, and always by Sisters or Nurse, not by clergy. The greatest care is taken to
help all without distinction of creed.”836
Perhaps for Baxter there was a lack of commitment in these lines, and
what may have seemed over-reliance on women church workers (see Part III) may
have left him unsure that Vyvyan was firmly in control of charitable matters. A
pamphlet describing Charterhouse’s early years, however, provided by Vyvyan
and included with his interview by Baxter, pointed toward more responsible
administration. The latter, entitled “Charterhouse in Southwark. Some Account of
the Charterhouse Mission, 1885-1892,” demonstrated that the Mission had been
refusing charity to the undeserving since its inauguration in 1885. One anecdote
came from the opening day of the Mission’s Dining Bar. Setting up shop in No.
38 Tabard Street, the Mission’s Miss Goold and her workers had attracted much
attention by their many preparatory visits to the building. “Many comments were
made when the furniture arrived, and the inhabitants were gratified with the words
“Women’s Help Society” painted on window, with “Dining Room and Club
Room for Working Women.” Goold remembered the first time the girls “trooped
down into the cellar that had been converted by pink distempered walls and
pictures into a bright-looking Club Room, particularly as on that special evening
flowers were put in every available place.”
A short address was given, explaining the work the Women’s Help
Society hoped to do, the Club was declared open, and the women invited
to the meetings and the girls to the Club-room. We have often wished
since we had that first meeting sketched or photographed; those bonnetless
836
Ibid., 83.
343
women, and hatless, shawlless girls, with fringes combed down to their
eyes, large aprons, and sleeves turned up above the elbow. Two or three
girls were strikingly handsome, with the peculiarly fascinating beauty of
the southern Irish. Every woman, except a few miserable-looking old
ones, had dirty uncared-for blue-lipped babies in their arms. As we looked
at them, we felt we had reached the dregs of the surrounding population.
After tea and flowers were distributed amongst this motley gathering, they
dispersed, and the workers looked at each other with some dismay; the
venture was launched, the house was opened, and who could foresee who
would return, or how many could be helped “onward and upward.”
Next day, the Dining Bar was opened, and notices of prices were put in the
window, the dinners varying from 1d to 2 ½ d. We had of course, rather a
rush; one woman appeared with five children, and asked for a penny
dinner for each. When asked for the money before she was served, she
replied, putting her arms akimbo, ‘Do you call this charity, here’s me and
me children starving, and ye ask us for money! No, thank ye.’ We resisted
this imposition with determination, and amid a volley of terrible abuse and
foul language, this lady and her tribe were got rid of.837
In the end we cannot be sure why Baxter gave a nod of approval to the
Charterhouse Mission and to Rev. Vyvyan. Was it Vyvyan’s long experience in
the area, his immaculate description, morally and economically, of Charterhouse’s
residents? Was it his “strong beliefs” in the COS despite certain minor infractions,
or was it his employment, as Miss Goold’s account suggested, of strong-minded
church-workers? Whatever it was, Baxter concluded briefly: “On the whole I
imagine real care is exercised.”838
Rev. Bowden at St. Paul’s was much less ambivalent when it came to
charity. Bowden demonstrates, indeed, that the discrimination of poor
parishioners often presented little or no moral dilemma to ministers confident in
this new moral science. Bowden’s statement was cold and hard. His written
response to section “J” of the inquiry’s ‘Form A’ read: “j) About ₤30 this last
winter, but it is usually mild. Besides we co-operate with the Charity Organisation
Society and that keeps the number down.” It was rare that Ernest Aves found a
man too rigidly disposed in his charity, but he described Bowden as “clever with a
strong critical bent, lacking in geniality, and, perhaps, in sympathy. On the other
837
838
“Charterhouse in Southwark. Some Account of the Charterhouse Mission, 1885-1892,” 17-18.
Vyvyan, B 275: 83.
344
hand he is quite certain not to indulge in any of the weak philanthropies to which
his kind is prone, and, in so far as he influences people at all, will certainly tend to
stiffen their backs, and not to weaken them.” At all events, here was a man (alike,
he thought, to City parson, Rev. Blomfield Jackson) who had “grit.”839
In the eastern reaches of Poor South London, Rotherhithe’s Martyn
Bardsley led the pack in his adherence to charity control, noting in his annual
report, “We gladly recognise the kind co-operation of the local committee of the
C.O.S.” Bardsley’s references made him untouchable. The Secretary of the local
COS, Harry Toynbee himself, had described Bardsley as “quite the nicest person
to have to deal with” – “and nice,” wrote Ernest Aves, “he proved to be.”
Bardsley’s “niceness,” one should note, in the late Victorian period, was entirely
compatible with relief work the Secretary himself believed was “carefully
managed.” “[C]arrying on a quiet systematic work in a parish part of which is of
exceptional poverty,” Bardsley had been eight years in the district. He was “a man
of about 45; of average height and size; quiet, and very unassuming in manner;
attractive, owing to a transparent simplicity and honesty, rather than to brilliancy
of any kind.”840
Yet it did not take brilliance either to analyse sociologically a parish’s
moral worth, or to carry out the morally-charged church-work of the period. If
there is one thing the reader may take from the foregoing discussion of poor
London’s charity control elite, it should be this. One can see this amateurism
especially in Bardsley’s and Aves’ conjectures as they peered over the coloured
streets of the Booth Maps, the former commenting, how the “greater part of the
poverty” of his parish lay “near the River, to the north of Union Road”; and how
“[m]ost of the other, and better, part” was on “what he called the Slipper Estate.”
Aves and Bardsley spoke the same language: each specialized in the same
fundamentally religious “science.” It could have been either man (though it was
Bardsley) who said:
839
Bowden, B 275: 131-3. Bowden’s doctrinal leanings were never mentioned in his interview,
but by 1902 “very strenuous objections” were being raised against the vicar’s “Ritualistic
innovations,” putting him squarely in the High camp. Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 108.
840
Bardsley, B 279: 79. Bardsley and his curate, Mr. Somerville, described themselves as
“moderate evangelicals.” (87)
345
The bit near the River is reckoned as the worst part of Rotherhithe, and he
thought that parts were probably worse than any part of the dark blue
patch lying to the West, just across the Bermondsey border, and within the
bounds of Mr. Wallace’s parish. But he is doubtful as to whether any part
is really black, as shown in our map: it is a case of drunkenness, and the
accompanying vices and disorders rather than of crime.841
Keen on charitable matters, Bardsley commented on both the practices of
the local Guardians, and on an apparently negligent woman philanthropist
operating nearby. He also hinted at the load the COS removed from clergymen’s
shoulders in the matter of recipient selection, but noted that COS involvement
was also a welcome addition for the proverbial “shareholders” of churches in the
1890s – their donors. This demonstrates that, whether it was a strong-minded
clergyman, a stern church-worker, or an influential agent from the COS, it took
only one strong, leavening influence in parish work to bring soft-hearted or
inexperienced churchmen and women into line with the precepts of charity
control. Speaking of the COS contribution to work at Christchurch, Bardsley
wrote, “It is early, perhaps, to speak of results, but we have every reason to be
thankful for the change [to COS supervision of the work], which removes a heavy
burden from the Clergy and Visitors, and should give confidence to subscribers
that their welcome donations are being laid out to the best advantage.”842
Poor Rotherhithe – the destitute ring of the riverside around the district’s
more prosperous centre – contained another follower of charitable restraint: Rev.
Wallace. However, Wallace was a victim of the Booth Team’s rather subjective
personality analysis. Using the harsh Darwinian rhetoric so popular in this period,
Aves tore Wallace apart in his interview notes:
Mr. Wallace is a poor specimen of his order – a middle-aged derelict in
the clerical world. In appearance, a man of average height, with small
eyes, a moustache, and a puffy complexion. He was one of the most timid
answerer[s] to questions that I have come across, and timidity in this case
indicated some cowardice and a good deal of ignorance. He is also a rather
stupid man, a heavy-weight; there were no signs of intimate knowledge of
his parish, and the page of the magazine giving the various parish fixtures
841
842
Ibid., 79-81.
Bardsley, B 279: 85; “Christ Church, Rotherhithe [printed report for 1898-9],”13.
346
proved to be full of inaccuracies, some of them having been printed month
after month, without care or conscience.843
Wallace was also “flabby and unsatisfactory”844 to Aves, but it is hard to
say how small eyes, stupidity, cowardice, ignorance or even timidity could have
fatally affected one’s (entirely subjective) ability to spot poor or degraded
characters and keep relief out of their hands. As long as one intended to practice
moral discrimination, how could “ignorance” or “intelligence” matter? In any
case, both morally and economically, Wallace seemed, despite Aves’ criticisms,
to know his parish well. St. Crispin’s, he told Aves, contained Cherry Gardens,
“one of very poorest blocks in whole of Bermondsey”: two-thirds of the people
were “dockers, riverside and casual labouring class,” many of them Irish. Rather
prolific here were also “women of the rough factory hand class,” a “good many
wood choppers” and “other such low class workers.” Wallace should have
impressed Aves most when he turned his eyes to the survey maps. He told Aves
that the “dark blue part” of his parish was, in his view, “all much of a muchness.”
Wallace implied that more of the place could be painted this way (“an opinion,”
Aves said, “that a walk through it afterwards bore out”), and he “gave the worst
character to the district for drinking and roughness, saying that for intemperance
and for fighting the women were worse than the men.” “Individuals change a
good deal,” he added, “but the class remains the same.”845
Aves, however, had already marked his man. Wallace’s evening
congregation was a comfortable three hundred and offertories had increased ₤40
since Wallace had arrived six years previously. This manner of church-goer
“liberality” in a poor parish was no small success, especially in view of the fact
that Wallace gave back only half of this amount in relief (well below the
metropolitan average). Nevertheless, to Aves, all this seemed to carry little
weight. Instead he attacked what he saw as a “blot on Wallace’s record” – “his not
infrequent absence from the parish.” Wallace apparently “slept out of the parish
843
Wallace, B 279: 37.
Ibid.
845
Ibid., 37-9.
844
347
about three nights a week,” lately taking a cottage in Blackheath for this purpose.
Aves also saw failure in Wallace’s inability to attract curates to work in his
parish. “This reflects rather hardly on the Low Church curate, but perhaps more
so on Mr. Wallace,” he said. Aves was so consumed by Wallace’s “flabbiness”
that he ignored the vicar’s concerns for his wife’s health in St. Crispin’s. Aves
also unfairly expected that a clergyman could attract curates to a nightmare parish
on the basis of his personality alone. Wallace tried to tell Aves that curates “did
not like his neighbourhood,” and that he “could get no replies” when he
advertised the position from his vicarage. Jokingly, Wallace had even “tried the
experiment of dating his notice from Blackheath.” Trying to lighten the
conversation, he exclaimed to Aves that, “answers came at once!”846 But Aves
was not in a joking mood, and he let his personal dislike of Wallace get in the way
of a more accurate description of Wallace’s charitable “influence” at St. Crispin’s.
Lucky, indeed, is it for the historian that Aves included the short sentence
pertaining to Wallace’s charitable relief, which read: “About ₤20 is given in
charitable relief, Mr. W. claiming that he approved of the C.O.S. and worked with
them.”847
6. Rev. A.H. De Fontaine, Charity Registration,
and Holy Men against the “Dead Hand” of Parochial Charities
The tenth member of South London’s unofficial charity-controlling
“elite,” the Rector of Christ Church, Southwark, was Rev. A.H. De Fontaine.
Sturdy (“in body and mind”) the squarely-built De Fontaine was at the fore of
charity reform in Poor South London. At fifty, De Fontaine was the elder of his
charity-conscious colleagues, but he was a man of “great energy and activity.” De
Fontaine lived and breathed charity control; like his colleagues, it gave him a
sense of purpose and strength. He was “decided” in opinions, even domineering;
Aves reckoned that by the look of his study, De Fontaine was both a “practical
846
847
Ibid., 39, 41.
Ibid., 41.
348
and busy man.” This was something of a compliment coming from Aves. De
Fontaine was “the rector,” Aves wrote, and he “knew it.”848
In De Fontaine’s parish of Christ Church, nine out of ten men were
working-class, and the majority of these were unskilled workers. It was necessary
in places like these, the Rector felt, to speak “strongly about the administration of
relief.” Like a significant number of clergymen in South London, he looked
“carefully” after his church’s charitable matters, and cooperated with the COS in
all relief work. He had his own relief committee, based in the church and meeting
regularly, which determined who in the parish qualified as “suitable cases” for
relief.849 His own disbursements, therefore, were well in hand; it was those of his
neighbours, as well as those of Southwark’s endowed charities, which worried
him.850 Such matters dominated the interview. Aves noted that, “Although Mr. De
Fontaine spoke chiefly of the bad effects of overlapping charitable work, he
recognized also the power that the numerous trust charities had of keeping and
attracting the cases of people who are likely to use them to the parish, and he
clearly had no respect for the way, for instance, in which it was necessary to
administer the Vaughan bequest [one of Southwark’s parochial charities].”851
For De Fontaine, then, there were two problems of charity work in
Southwark. One was the perceived unreliability of his ministerial colleagues. The
other was inherent in what a mid-century reformer, COS founder, and Charity
Commissioner Sir Arthur Hobhouse, called the “dead hand” of parochial
charities.852 The first problem, it seemed, was slowly being met by the district848
De Fontaine, B 269: 117. De Fontaine had the privilege of being one of the two ministers in
Southwark which, in Aves’ view, deserved a second interview. The second man was a local
Salvation Army Captain (Captain Broad) who was particularly enthusiastic about Charles Booth’s
plan for labour colonies (Broad, B 278: 64-91). With a group of Clewer Sisters working out of his
church, De Fontaine was High Church. De Fontaine, B 269: 129.
849
De Fontaine, B 269: 121.
850
The local COS official praised De Fontaine most for the very reason he distrusted his charitable
neighbours: “Mr. De Fontaine was mentioned, and the chief thing that the agent appeared to be
impressed by about him was his dislike of other workers in his own parish.” Agent of the COS
Committee at 100 Borough Road, B 273: 13.
851
Ibid., 137.
852
Lord Arthur Hobhouse was in fact the uncle of Leonard Hobhouse, who we remember as the
moral philosopher and labour colony proponent of Part I. Leonard, according to Stefan Collini
noted the “significance” of the relationship emphasized in Leonard’s words: “Since I was six years
old I had been closely linked to my uncle, and I always looked upon him and my aunt as my
349
wide registration of each church providing charity. The aim was to prevent one’s
own distribution from overlapping with that of other churchmen, and a number of
local church representatives sat on a board at the Borough Road Polytechnic. “Mr.
De Fontaine spoke warmly of the value of the Registration Committee that had
been formed, and which [sat] at the Borough Road Polytechnic, and which it was
intended should act as a clearing-house for all the charitable agencies of the
district.”
He was particularly severe on those who refused to cooperate with the
Committee, commenting on the ‘immense harm’ that resulted from
indiscriminate charity, and of the sensational methods that were apt to be
adopted by those who offended in this way. They libel the neighbourhood,
and they tend to attract the poor, and to perpetuate the very evils they
profess to endeavour to alleviate.853
“They ought to be exposed,” De Fontaine said angrily, “and as a minimum of
obligation ought to be compelled to cooperate with any properly constituted
charity clearing house, and ought to be obliged to publish their accounts.”854
Two other Southwark vicars shared De Fontaine’s concerns, and had
joined him on the Registration Committee. These were the young, hard-working
Cecil de Carteret, his parish across Christ Church’s southern border (at St.
Paul’s), and the “bright and keen,” “straight-forward, and level headed,” W.A.
Corbett of St. Peter’s, directly to De Fontaine’s east.855 Through the combined
working of church and registration committees, cooperation against charitable
overlap appeared an achievable goal in Southwark. De Fontaine pointed proudly
mental parents.” The continuity of the two men’s moral thought is brought out in Leonard’s
“fervent support” for his uncle’s Radical cause, “distinguishing characteristic was the relentlessly
exalted moral tone of their political pronouncements, particularly on foreign affairs.” Collini,
Liberalism and Sociology 53, 54 Collini does not mention that Arthur Hobhouse’s fight against
parochial charities was one of these “Radical” causes. David Owen, confirmed that Hobhouse’s
speeches (published as The Dead Hand “marked him as a radical in matters of charity reform.”
Owen, “The City Parochial Charities: The ‘Dead Hand’ in Late Victorian London,” Journal of
British Studies 1, 2 (1962), 123.
853
De Fontaine, B 269: 121.
854
Ibid., 121-3.
855
De Carteret, B 269: 193; Corbett, B 269: 199, 205.
350
to the way Christchurch’s relief committee acted “mainly as a sort of sieve
through which suitable cases are passed through to the Trustee’s Committee…”856
Anglicans were well represented on the Registration Committee. Although
the Committee and its Honorary Secretary Miss Bell will be discussed further in
Part III, Bell mentioned Southwark Anglicans De Fontaine, Duthy, Corbett,
Vyvyan, and Longsdon as prominent in the delivery of regular relief reports to the
Registration Committee (although the Women’s Settlement representatives were
slightly their superiors in this respect). Apparently rather suddenly, Rev.
Sommerville of St. George the Martyr had stopped sending reports, a strange fact
to Miss Bell in view of the fact that his chief church worker was the COS’ Miss
Busk (See Part III). Unlike COS Committees, moreover, the Southwark
Registration Committee had successfully welcomed Nonconformists into its fold.
Prominent Nonconformists who were also reporting to the Committee included
Rev. Tolefree Parr (the popular Primitive Methodist),857 as well as the local
Unitarians. Miss Bell, at the time of her interview, was still expecting a yearly
report from London City Missionaries James Caine and John Coles, from the
Baptist William Williams, from the working-class missioner J.W. Weston, and
from Miss Martin, who had charge of the Hope Mission. Others did not mind if
lists of recipients were simply brought to them by Registration Committee
workers to compare with their own relief lists, and these included Southwark’s
Roman Catholics and a further London City Missionary, Mr. R. Parker, of the
terribly poor Red Cross Street. Bell also mentioned the great wish of ministers
and church workers in Lambeth to start a similar Committee, and at the top of this
earnest list of Anglicans was none other than the “ordinary mortal” that Aves met
856
De Fontaine, B 269: 121.
Tolefree Parr was congratulated in the published volumes for “displaying great readiness to cooperate with other Christian bodies.” Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 25. One wonders if he
greeted Booth’s mention of his charitable practices with pride: “There seems to be no friction with
the Church of England. Indiscriminate visiting is not undertaken, scope enough being found
among those with whom the various branches of their work bring them into contact. The
knowledge obtained in this way, they hold, helps them to avoid imposition….In what they do
there does not seem to be anything that can be characterized as religious bribery.” (26)
857
351
sweltering in the July heat, that began my discussion last chapter: (COS
enthusiast) Rev. Hornby Steer.858
Also to be tackled, in De Fontaine’s eyes, was the somewhat leakier sieve
of Southwark’s endowed charities. These charities were a throw-back to the
seventeenth century, when they were viewed as the first line of defence against
metropolitan destitution. The Poor Law (1601) had been instituted simultaneously
to supplement endowed charities with state aid in time of need. It was from the
end of the eighteenth century that they began to undergo a kind of
“rationalization.” By two Charitable Trusts Acts (in 1853 and 1860), Charity
Commissioners of England and Wales were appointed to remodel old bequests.
From the mid-1850s the commissioners took “small and miscellaneous charities”
and then drew them into one fund, applying them often to new purposes.859 The
City of London Parochial Authorities Act of 1883 operated under a similar
doctrine – that charities whose objects were found to be “obsolete” could be put to
new, if similar purposes. C.S. Loch, secretary of the COS and author of a 1910
history of charitable administration, entitled, Charity and Social Life, noted how
the Acts of 1853 and 1860 constituted the hallmarks of a long, uphill march to
“rationalization” and “moral” administration – a goal still unachieved by 1900.
Loch explained how, over the course of the nineteenth century, parish endowed
charities
remained in general a disorganized medley of separate trusts, jealously
guarded by incompetent administrators. To give unity to this mass of
units, so long as the principles of charity are understood or ignored, has
proved an almost impossible and certainly an unpopular task. So far as it
has been achieved, it has been accomplished by the piecemeal legislation
of schemes continuously elaborated to meet local prejudices. Active
reform has been resented, and politicians have often accentuated this
resentment.860
858
Miss Bell, B 273: 31-33. Bell listed the Lambeth Registration Committee’s main proponents:
“She knew of the wish of some in Lambeth to form a similar Committee there, and mentioned the
following as being keen about it: Mr. Steer; the Oakeley St. Medical Mission; Mrs. Knowles, of
the New St. Mission; and Mr. Wheeler, of Cottage Place.” (33)
859
Loch, Charity and Social Life 320-325.
860
Ibid.
352
In 1894 a Select Committee was appointed “to inquire whether it was desirable to
take measures to bring the action of the Charity Commission more directly under
the control of Parliament,” but, wrote Aves, little came of it except continued
evidence of “the general ignorance that prevails in regard to the elementary
conditions that govern [charitable administration], the common disregard of these
principles, and the absence of any accepted theory or constructive policy that
should regulate its development and its administration.”861
Harry Toynbee, who had experience on COS committees all up and down
the riverside, treated the South London movement to reform endowed charities
with the same pessimism as his colleague Loch. Toynbee mentioned no
opposition, or even friction with local clergy over the work of the Charity
Commissioners in the region. But their work was nevertheless unsatisfactory to
him. Providing Aves with “particulars about the local Trust Charities,” he said:
“In accordance with a new Scheme those of S. George’s will be mainly devoted to
Nursing and Pensions.” For reasons Toynbee kept to himself, however, “The S.
Saviour’s Scheme he regarded as less satisfactory.”862 In a second interview with
Toynbee, he listed the local parochial charities thus:
Charities:
S. Olave’s and S. John’s: ₤35000 a year; relief; pensions; holidays etc. etc.
Bermondsey: nearly ₤1000 a year; pensions etc.
Rotherhithe: ₤325; pensions of ₤10 and ₤5 a year.
Other additional smaller charities in all the districts.863
Unfairly, but characteristically, Charles Booth’s published volumes
contained the same dismissals. He poured cold water on both the Southwark
clergymen’s effort to work through the local charity registry, and also on their
support of endowed charity reform. The clergy might accept the principle of
861
Ibid., 329-30. In 1904 Loch had noted with alarm the extent of this “problem.” “70, 547
separate charities” distributing sums of one million pounds were at work all over the country,
likely causing “dependence and pauperism.” The most upsetting fact, for Aves, was clearly that
“[t]hese, though chartered or registered, are not inspected or, practically, supervised in any way.”
Loch called for a centralized Charities Board to do just this. C.S. Loch, “A Charities Board,” in
C.S. Loch ed., Methods of Social Advance: Short Studies in Social Practice by various Authors
(London: Macmillan, 1904), 173 n. 1, 175, 176.
862
Toynbee, B 273: 25.
863
Toynbee, B 273: 101.
353
charity organization, Booth thought, but he believed they often did not adopt it in
practice. Booth admitted that “unusual pains have been taken here, not without
success, to prevent the overlapping of charities, by the establishment of an
association for the registration of relief – a kind of clearing-house[.]” He noted the
extraordinary cooperation between Established and Nonconformist churches at
the Borough Road Polytechnic, as well as the collection of the names and
addresses of those Londoners assisted. But Booth’s tone of hope changed here to
pessimism. It was a “plan that is excellent,” Booth wrote, but in the end, “rather
difficult to keep up.”864 Perhaps Booth doubted the further rationalization of the
region’s endowed charities. Perhaps he despaired at the inadequacy of ministers
and clergymen Harry Toynbee had convinced him were unreliable. Together,
these elements were keeping the goal of rationalization, of charity control, out of
reach. In passing, the only other development Booth noted concerning the reform
of “old parochial charities” (which he noted were “of considerable amount”) was
that they “now take principally the form of pensions.”865
However unfounded, Booth’s tone here was one of terrible disappointment
with South London’s ministers. With Booth, as we know, charity activism was a
family obsession. Certain men quite close to him had been involved in the charity
reform movement from mid-century. One was Charles Trevelyan who, like Arthur
Hobhouse, had been a founding COS Councilman, but who more importantly was
Booth’s dinner companion and step-uncle. With his infamous record of charity to
the starving Irish during the potato famine, Trevelyan was among the first (in
1870) to “set off” the movement for reforming the City of London’s parochial
endowments. Mary Booth, as we know, only fed Booth’s charity obsession, and
other members of her family did no less. Booth’s friends were no less involved in
charity reform. Lord Parmoor (Alfred Cripps), lawyer, aristocrat, and Booth’s
dinner guest for his 1883 “conversation about socialism” in which he was
decidedly not converted to the movement, took his zeal for charity reform to the
houses of government. Parmoor (interestingly, a devout High Churchman) felt
864
865
Booth, “Religious Influences” 4: 22.
Ibid., 4: 13.
354
strongly enough about issues of charity to introduce a bill into the House of Lords
in 1914. The latter, indeed, was something of a success for the movement. It
substantially increased the powers of the Charity Commissioners by allowing
them “more leeway in converting dole charities” to what they believed were
“more constructive purposes.”866
In reality, however, Booth’s lack of faith in South London’s clergymen
hid a good deal of interest and activism in the cause to reform endowed charities.
It obscured the fact that many of these clergymen shared his, Harry Toynbee’s,
and Charles Loch’s concerns, if not their pessimism. David Owen has noted the
intriguing collection of “complaints” by individuals and groups that made up a
“broader movement for the reform of charity law” in this period.867 Just how
broad the movement truly was can be seen in the fact that not only the COS, but
the hundreds of London ministers affiliated with it, and many more ministers
besides, felt strongly about the reform of what they felt were obsolete,
indiscriminate and un-modern (or “dole”-giving) charities. If, however, Owen
noted the support of literary men and charity scientists in the COS (in his 1964
work, English Philanthropy: 1660-1960), we should also see – in the last years of
the century – a quiet movement, by religious leaders, to rationalize South
London’s parochial charities.
Rev. Sommerville, the thirty-year-old Rector of St. George the Martyr,
outlined how clergymen were responding to Southwark’s endowed charity
“problem” in his Statement of Accounts for 1898:
During the year the Charity Commissioners have published a draft scheme
for the re-organization of the Parish Charities. The old endowed Charities
amount in all to about ₤1400 a year. They are intended of course for the
whole Civil Parish of St. George’s, which has a population of about
60,000 and which embraces five Ecclesiastical Parishes. At present they
are distributed in doles in a haphazard fashion, and no one can say that
they confer a substantial or lasting benefit upon the recipients. The
Commissioners propose to consolidate the various trusts, set aside ₤300 a
year for Nursing the Sick Poor, and for nursing necessities, devoting the
rest of the Income available to Pensions for the Deserving Aged. The
whole will be under the direction of a new Board, consisting of the Rector
866
867
Ibid., 323, 314-315.
David Owen, English Philanthropy: 1660-1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1964), 321.
355
(ex officio), five Coopted Trustees (two of them, Mr. R.D. Hilton and Mr.
J. Chubb, for life) selected by the Commissioners, and seven
Representative Trustees elected by the Vestry. The scheme will doubtless
be modified in certain particulars, but it is not unlikely that it will become
Law much as it stands at present.868
Anglicans and Nonconformists made local charity news their business in
the Religious Influences interviews. Often they reported to the Booth Men the
transformation of old charities – insultingly known as “dole” charities – into oldage pensions by the Charity Commissioners. Writing in the Christian Social
Union’s periodical, the Economic Review, Rev. L.R. Phelps noted that for several
hundred years, “In almost every parish in England some person has decreed that a
certain number of shillings or half-crowns are to be distributed on his birthday, or
some saint’s day, or some special Sunday.” Christian social thinkers, however,
now were well aware of the dangers of these old bequests, and many wanted them
“rationalized.”
It is now the universal opinion of those best qualified to form one that
such distributions do more harm than good to the recipients; that irregular,
spasmodic bounty of this kind inflicts an injury on their characters far
outweighing any benefit it confers on their bodies. Doles, therefore, are
placed by the unanimous verdict of experts among the charities which do
positive harm.869
Charles Booth had become one of these very “experts,” and so, as we see
above, were men like Rev. Longsdon at St. Michael’s, or Rev. De Carteret at
Christ Church.870 All agreed, like Phelps, that doles in 1900 were “what may be
868
A Booth investigator drew a large “X” beside the plan on the copy of accounts Sommerville
provided him. “St George the Martyr, Southwark,” 10. Somerville was supported in his hopes to
“overhaul Southwark’s charities” by The South London Press: “As the parish was one of the
poorest in London, it was obviously desirable that the income should be applied, with as little
reduction as possible, in the payment of pensions.” “Southwark Charities,” The South London
Press 22 October, 1898, p. 6.
869
L.R. Phelps, “The Use and Abuse of Endowed Charities,” Economic Review (Jan., 1892), 92.
Phelps, according to Robert Humphries, was Oxford’s COS chairman and a Fellow of Oriel
College. Phelps considered that the “natural enemy” of the COS was “the Endowed Charity.”
Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity and the Poor Law 81, 90.
870
In his Economic Review article, Rev. Samuel Barnett, too, acknowledged that “a city’s
demoralization” was often caused by parochial charities (trusts). “The chance gifts of old trusts;
the overlapping of relief from voluntary and poor-law agencies; the sight of successful begging or
356
called ‘questionable kindnesses’” – they were a form of compassion which had to
be brought “into line with modern ideas of fitness.”871
Using the “emblematic verbiage”872 of Darwinism which thinkers on
“social subjects” so commonly draped upon old moral-religious theories (if only
to seem more “scientific”), Phelps said he held strongly that this did not mean
authorities could be “careless of founders’ intentions.” The welding together of
old evangelical and new scientific discourses was symptomatic of his age. It was
the “genus” rather than the “species of the charity,” Phelps wrote, which needed
attention if it was to be made one of the more “healthy variety.” Because doles
stood “condemned at the bar of modern experience,” the funds that provided for
them required transformation into another form of charity. Doles tended “to form
irregular habits,” they “discourage[d] regular work,” and they were typically “too
much or too little: too much, if a man is to be preserved from a state of
dependence; too little if he is to be raised above it.” For religious men like himself
and the ministers of London, Phelps asked, moreover, “what sight is more terrible
than a church crowded on some special day when a dole is distributed?” For this
and many other, largely moral, reasons, Phelps argued that dole moneys should be
turned to fund technical education (ultimately, among the upper working classes),
to fund open spaces in the city, to fund hospital buildings, and perhaps most
strangely, to pay for old-age pensions.873
This was significant, in view of the typically progressive idea historians
have of the pension. But at the time, a number of pensions for a small group of
deserving pensioners was seen as far preferable than indiscriminate doles of cash,
bread or coals. “I may note here, in passing” explained Phelps,
deceit, weaken the very sources of a city’s strength, and drive some citizens to wish the abolition
of all charities.” Barnett, “Christianity and the Charity Organization Society,” 193.
871
Ibid., 93.
872
This is Jose Harris’ phrase. See Harris, “Between civic virtue and Social Darwinism,” in
Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches 80.
873
Ibid., 93-94, 99, 101, 102-103. David Owen confirms Phelps’ remarks when he describes the
Charity Commissioner’s rationalization of the City Parochial Charities, whose former incomes
were to be reformed to fund “education, libraries and museums, open spaces, provident
institutions, convalescent hospitals, and, in general, for the improvement of ‘the physical, social,
and moral condition of the poorer inhabitants of the metropolis’ [by which was probably meant
direct, but selective, relief moneys].” Owen, “City Parochial Charities,” 126. Also see Part III for
women’s involvement in the use of former dole moneys for technical education.
357
That to carry out any system of pensions a considerable amalgamation of
charities will be required. It is a first condition of charitable help that it
should be adequate to its object, and the rise of what Mr. [Alfred]
Marshall so happily calls the “standard of life,” necessitates an equal rise
in the scale of assistance. Hence a large number of doles will be required
to make a very small number of pensions.874
More and more churches at this time were distributing pensions (from
their own funds, and from funds given them by converted parochial charities)
with the knowledge they were (in their minds, “compassionately”) cutting down
on “dole charity” in doing so. One East End vicar, Rev. Chandler, reformed his
local charity by simply ignoring its (to his mind, “obsolescent”) wishes.
Charitable endowments in the parish amounted to “about ₤60 a year,” said
Chandler, “mostly for quite useless and obsolete purposes. As far as possible,”
Baxter wrote,” Chandler disregards these purposes and uses these funds for
Pensions.”875 Another, Rev. Beardall, did not see any contradiction in arguing for
the abolition of out-relief (relief given through the workhouse) while supporting
pensions. “As regards [local administration of] Poor Law,” he said, “not much to
complain of, if you are to have out-door relief at all. Would prefer to have none,
but a pension society to deal with the necessary cases.”876
Of course, many holy men continued to use the old, so-called “dole”
charities, and among these men one can detect disappointment among the Booth
investigators. Arkell shook his head at one London City Missionary in the
Borough area for relieving an old lady of his neighbourhood – a woman already in
receipt of “the Cowper Charity of 10/- a quarter and some bread” – with the
sardonic comment: “So the old lady levies occasional tribute.”877 The same
disappointed reaction likely greeted the statement of one working-class missioner
in Rotherhithe, who was still receiving, for his own distribution, unreformed,
“dole” relief from what were called the Deptford Charities in late February 1900:
Mr. R[eynolds]. also has some tickets sent to him (without application) by
the St. Paul’s (Deptford) Churchwardens. He had received about 50 of
874
Ibid., 101.
Chandler, B 169: 27.
876
Beardall, B 169: 241.
877
Caine, B 270: 135.
875
358
these tickets; they were for ½ cwt of coal value 9d or a quarter of bread
(5d) in the parish. These tickets belong to long series being numbered
consecutively and each set of numbers was over 1100. They bear the name
of D. Hines, Chairman of the Charity Distribution Committee and are
payable at the Vestry Offices, Tanners Hill. Mr. R. has given some to an
old couple, a man who has lost his foot and a widow or two.878
Perhaps because of the concentration of poverty in Inner South London
(from Lambeth to Rotherhithe), the problem of unreformed parochial charity was
more rigorously attended to in this area than in eastern Deptford. Citing recent
reforms, another LCM in the Borough Market district described how the notorious
old bogey of the metropolis – the manipulative, charity-scrounging old woman –
could now only receive parochial charity after her character was properly
(meaning, morally) appraised. The missioner described how, “St. Margaret’s
Court is poor: of 107 families 31 are those of widows.” Many, in the missionary’s
eyes, were greedy old crones with their eyes on St. Saviour’s Charities and also
Barclay’s Pensions. But “reform” had finally come for these poor women.
“Within the last three years the Charity Commissioners have taken these in hand,”
said the missioner. “A number now get 3/6 a week provisionally for 3 years but it
will be permanent if they are well behaved. There are also a number of widows
receiving pensions from Barclay Perkins and Co. These live near as they have to
draw their pensions (6/- a week) at the Brewery on Fridays.”879
To a great extent, to focus too closely on the thinking of Arkell and the
ministers – every man fooling himself into “scientific” certainty that the “poor but
respectable” “Class C” workers were at last being relieved, and the undeserving
excluded – is foolhardy for the historian. The first Borough missionary mentioned
above, while “unscientific” to a Booth investigator, probably harboured feelings
that the woman he discussed might very well be poor-but-respectable, and that
Arkell had simply misjudged her character.
Other ministers pointed out that, quite without the rationalization and
expertise of the Charity Commissioners, it was still possible to use older local
878
879
Reynolds, B 280: 117.
Hitchcock, B 270: 71.
359
machinery – the vestry committee or church committee, the Deptford Charities, or
whatever – in order to discriminate good poor people from bad ones. Like the
COS, after all, the Charity Commissioners were only one more group of
“professionals” morally segregating working people in the metropolis. Vestries,
which a new generation of charity reformers were finding obsolete, were still
supported by many ministers as effective machinery for responsible charity.
Bromley’s Rector, Rev. J. Parry told a (perhaps suspicious) Aves that ₤140 went
through the Bromley Parochial Charities and that the “vestry clerk keeps the
clearing list.” Run by the rector, two churchwardens and other overseers, Parry
affirmed: “The system has been in vogue fro 40 years and works as well as
possible.” Henry Lewis, Rector of Bermondsey, spoke of his “old Church
Charities, which are in the hands of the local Vestry and are managed by a Vestry
Committee on which the Rector has only a vote.” Lewis admitted: “Some of these
are valuable.” Indeed, he added later, “There may be a few who are attracted by
our Charities etc. – but the vast mass of our people are extraordinarily ignorant
about these charities. It is often the fairly well-to-do people, who scramble for
these prizes and get them.”880 As might be expected, the respectable and poor-butrespectable working classes had, in fact, been beating out “Class B” beggars for
charitable “prizes” for some time, and ministerial administrators, for their part,
had, again, for some time, felt justified in choosing the more respectable first. One
more example shows how serious vestries took their charitable responsibilities,
and how COS criticism may have obscured their own efforts to keep charities
“careful.” The South London Press in April 1897 reported that Wandsworth had
been the site of a “charity scandal”:
THE CHARITY SCANDAL
Wandsworth Vestry has received a report from the Millington Charity
Committee, stating that in their opinion the coats are well placed, the
charity consisting of a coat and £4 a year. The last recipient of the coat,
however, was not fully qualified to receive it, and they recommend the
recision of his appointment. A special meeting is to be held to rescind the
appointment and the churchwardens have resolved to overhaul the list of
old men whom they have made recipients of the charity, it being stated
880
Parry, B 175: 63; Rev. Henry Lewis, “Answers to Mr. Charles Booth’s questions in Form A as
far as they relate to the mother Parish (St. Mary Magdalene) of Bermondsey, S.E.,” 35/56.
360
that one of the nominees is at the present time in the workhouse, and it is
asserted comes out quarterly to draw the pension, returning to the house
after he has spent it.881
From one side of Poor South London to the other, ministers affirmed that
the Charity Commissioners had killed off the doles formerly provided by
parochial charities, and replaced them with old-age pensions. United Methodist
Free Church minister, H. Hall, told Arkell of the region’s parochial charities:
Bermondsey has a number of parish charities. These used to be in the
hands of the Church but now the administration has been revolutionized
and the Non-Cons get a share. Clunn’s charity is the chief. A few years
ago its income was ₤15 a year which had [to] be spent in coals and bread.
Now the income is about ₤600 and they are giving pensions of 5/- to 10/- a
week and sending children to Homes etc.882
Canon Rhodes Bristow, Rector of the more central St. Olave’s parish, also
mentioned the great value of both the Trust Charities of St. Olaves’ and St. John’s
parishes, before indicating on his balance sheet that ₤810 went “to weekly and
quarterly pensions.”883 Finally, moving west into Lambeth, one finds the editor of
the South London Press demanding the reform of the Lambeth Charities.
To administer Charities wisely and beneficially is one of the most difficult
tasks that men are called to perform. We do not doubt that it is done as
well in Lambeth as anywhere else; but it is time that these Charities were
overhauled, and with respect to some of them it is urgently necessary. To
this class certainly belongs that which is called the Walcot Charity.
While the charity’s “pious founder” had hoped such moneys might be ‘given and
disposed to and amongst the needy and poor people of the parish,’” the Press
881
“The Charity Scandal,” The South London Press 3 April, 1897, p. 3.
Hall, B 274: 217-219. The South London Press gave a description of the deliberations of the
Bermondsey Governors and Directors in the creation of the “Clunn Charity Scheme.” The
principal recommendation was indeed that “an annual sum of £60 might be set aside for the
creation of four pensions to be held by persons who will inhabit the almshouses, and that such
pensions should be of the value of £15.” It seems that a fierce debate developed over whether the
pensions should go to almshouses or whether they should be provided individually when a needy
person was found. Angry that he had been overruled and that pensions would in fact be granted to
four almshouse residents, a Mr. Glanville of the Board “left the board, apparently in a ‘huff,’
loudly slamming the door behind him.” “The Jubilee Almshouses: Clunn’s Charity Scheme,” The
South London Press Saturday 4 September, 1897, p. 2.
883
Bristow, B 275: 163.
882
361
demanded it goes to those deemed eligible for pensions.884 From the testimony of
one minister in 1899, it appears that the Walcot endowment had been transformed
into educational grants and pensions. Presbyterian Rev. Milne spoke of the
Lambeth Charities as “numerous – Walcot Charity (pensions)”:
A parliamentary return was made on March 10/99 of the Inquiry made by
the Charity Commissioners into the Lambeth Charities. Most are attached
to one or other of the Churches and the total gross income is stated as ₤14
306. Of this ₤3260 goes in Almshouses or Pensions and ₤3610 in
‘Education’ another name for Church schools and ₤1126 is Non-con
endowments.885
All of this was a step to more systematic application of the old endowed
charities of the poorest part of South London. Behind rationalization of the
charities into pensions was an attack on dole charity potentially reaching a far
larger constituency of the needy. Moreover, it hid something else: the complicity
and support of a charity-conscious Christian ministry.886 This paradoxical
“pension” movement seemed even to be rubbing off on church charity work.
Anglican’s like (Hackney Wick’s) Rev. St. Clair Donaldson and Wesleyan’s like
(Bethnal Green’s) Rev. Arthur Gregory each told their investigators they were
giving a large part or most of their charity “in pensions” to a select group of old
people and widows. The latter said tellingly that he was “opposed to doles in any
form and tries to establish small pensions in place of them where needed.”887
884
“The Lambeth Charities,” South London Press 23 October, 1897, p. 4-5.
Milne, B 271:45. Rev. Andrews Reeve, rector of Lambeth, also noted: “The Trust Charities of
Lambeth are important, and most appear to be administered under Charity Commission Schemes.”
B 272: 77.
886
We should not think that the charity reform movement among the clergy was less present in
other poor areas of London. Another minister, the Baptist Rev. John Hillman of Thomas Road,
Hackney, spoke of how “several parochial charities” were “now organized” and that Anglicans
and Nonconformists were cooperating in their distribution. Hillman, B 188: 62. Two clergymen
hinted likewise when they spoke of what were called the Hackney Charities. Rev. Gardiner-Brown
of St. James Clapton said “2/6 doles” from the Hackney charities did “no end of harm,” when he
first took his post. His neighbour, Rev. Cox, of St. Philip’s Dalston, also remarking on the subject,
said that allowances of 2/6 from Hackney charities were “to be taken away this year.” GardinerBrown, B 186: 53; Cox, B 186: 33. South of the river, according to C.P. Larner of the Woolwich
COS, the same reforms had occurred in Woolwich. “The Woolwich Charities have now nearly all
pooled, owing largely to [Rev.] Mr. Escreet’s action, and are now…used as pensions. Mr. L. does
not think that any considerable misuse of the Charities is now possible.” Larner, B 290: 179.
887
Donaldson, B 185: 201; Gregory, B 183: 225. Bow’s Rev. Wentworth-Bennett said of his
charity: “There are 12 pensioners with 1/ a week. Little or no help is given to out of work cases.”
The rector of St. John’s South Hackney likewise said he “worked with the COS in giving pensions
885
362
etc.” Leonard, B 186: 19. A Bethnal Green vicar explained why ministers were making this move:
“It is one of the best forms of help, and it will be felt by all that to expend two shillings a week on
an old couple to enable them to eke out their own resources and save them from the workhouse is
money far better spent than the promiscuous distribution of half crowns to any chance applicants.”
“Report and Statement of Accounts of St. Andrew’s Bethnal Green, 1896-1897,” p. 4 (Eck, B 228:
113).
363
Chapter 7. Church Charity Control Outside the COS
1. Introduction
The church work of many metropolitan ministers existed outside the
control of the Charity Organisation’s London Committees, but this hardly meant
they were opposed to the moral ideals behind the Society’s charity work. Ideals of
charity control, indeed, existed beyond the confines of the COS’ select group of
members and secretaries, and indeed beyond its most public Anglican activists.
The attacks of several of South London’s Anglican Charity elite upon a Boys’
Home administrator – who notably refused to be intimidated or shamed by either
Aves or the clergymen in question – provides a good example of this. The efforts
of Nonconformists affiliated with the COS, and more importantly, the attempts by
the majority of ministers outside the Society’s supervision to keep to their own
charity ideals, also hints at charity control’s hegemonic quality. Finally, a look at
the careful and not-so-careful remainder of Anglican ministers of Inner South
London’s twenty-nine poorest parishes (after the charity elites, nineteen of these
remain) should caution historians against making narratives of “good guys” and
“bad guys” among ministers who, almost without exception, believed in moral
discrimination. This further demonstrates that the COS was only one group of
many deriving professional status from dealing in moral segregation as they
performed their charity work. When W.A. Bailward of the Bethnal Green COS
told the readers of the Economic Review that “It is rare to find any one outside of
charity organization work who really understands it,” he was mistaken.888 In this
chapter, ministers of all kinds, in all denominations, provide us with evidence of
several other groups, beyond the COS’ aegis, who saw themselves as morallyinclined philanthropic “professionals” as well.
888
Bailward, “Upon Things Concerning Civic and Social Work that may be Learnt in Charity
Organization,” 303.
364
2. The Southwark Anglicans vs. J.W.C Fegan
Highlighting the activities and social work of London missioners, as well
as that in the chief denominations of Nonconformity is important to any study of
church charity in the metropolis. Hugh McLeod has pointed out how thousands of
Londoners frequented back-alley missions, and larger establishments like J.W.C
Fegan’s Boy’s Homes and his Home Hall Mission. In most accounts, however,
little is said about them beyond the explosion of mission building after 1850, and
the fact missions offered material help to the poor.889 The problem with this, as
we will see in subsequent chapters, is that our lack of knowledge concerning
smaller missions and their social work leads too often to a benign approach to
these evangelical “underdogs.” And this leads us to hint that missions, because
they were administered by men and women outside the established churches, or
outside the middle classes, were run by social and charitable radicals. As we will
see, and as J.W.C. Fegan’s comments about charity control and “unwanted
women” tell us, notions of moral segregation ran very far down the social
ladder.890
Anglicans regularly attacked Nonconformist missioners who, they felt,
violated the principles of responsible charity. Beyond even doctrinal hostilities,
indeed, it was in the field of charity organization that accusations were most fierce
among the Anglicans. Nonconformist ministers, in Anglican interviews, could
quite suddenly be the butt of wild, violent criticism. Booth entirely agreed with
Anglican claims that missioners were responsible for pauperising London. In his
published volumes he wrote and quoted Rev. Sommerville verbatim on this score.
“It seems hardly to be questioned that the charity dispensed by the missions here
is mischievous in its effects, and again,” Booth wrote, “I will quote from the
rector.”
Against the definitely religious work done by and in these mission rooms I
would not utter a single word. There is room enough in all conscience for
every form of Christian activity in Southwark, but I do raise my emphatic
889
McLeod, Religion and Society 76-77, 72.
Fegan began his life in Christian work, at seventeen, “like nearly all the rest,” as he said, as a
humble ragged-school teacher. Fegan, B 273: 71.
890
365
protest against the wholesale pauperising which follows, unintentionally
no doubt, from many of them. Either as a reward for, or to encourage and
promote attendance at services, doles and gifts in money or kind are
distributed often with a lavish hand with the most utter disregard of all
sound principles of charity. As a result there are in this neighbourhood
many who go from mission room to mission room for what they can pick
up.891
Booth went on to quote Rev. Longsdon on the “right basis of relief”
directly from his interview, and in turn, as we see above, Booth was quoted by the
editor of The South London Press. In this area of London, the Booth archive tells
us, there could be no doubt which missioner was grinding clergymen’s gears.
Rev. Longsdon of St Michael’s, speaking as vice-president of the C.O.S., and
seeing proper relief practices as the only way for the church to truly “do good,”
reserved most of his ire for Missioner and long-time Boys’ Home administrator
J.W.C. Fegan. He blamed the London City Mission, too, for its “bad
philanthropy,” but added that “the district undoubtedly suffers from Fegan and his
propensity for giving free meals.”892 Rev. Asker of St. Andrew’s thought Fegan
was “‘working on the right (i.e. evangelical) lines’ but ‘he poaches from
everybody’ and his appeals and his map, ignoring all the [other Christian work in
the district], ‘are a scandal.’” Fegan, apparently, had “taken” one of Asker’s
Scripture Readers, “offering him a large salary”: worse, he said, the man was
“followed by members of his congregation and meetings.”893 Christ Church’s
Rev. De Fontaine – after his angry comments against non-participants of the
Southwark Registration Committee – launched into an extended tirade against the
relief of certain local Nonconformists. Fegan topped his list of offenders:
It appeared to be chiefly on account of [the] question of relief that, when I
spoke of ‘other agencies’ he said that it was a sore subject, and appeared
to think it was one that it would take some hours to thresh out. He
mentioned the Surrey Chapel, and the Wesleyans, but against neither of
891
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 21. Later in this volume Booth was thankful that South
London’s independent missions had not approached the scale of those in East London – Fegan’s
Boys’ Homes, for example, rather small compared to a giant like Dr. Barnardo’s. Tellingly, Booth
thought South London “fortunate in this neglect,” South London having been spared the “great”
and often careless spending he felt went with larger organizations. Ibid., 88-89.
892
Longsdon, B 269: 73.
893
Asker, B 269: 151.
366
these did he formulate any complaint, saying indeed with regard to the
former that he had none. His bete noirs are the numerous private agencies,
and he especially mentioned the Collingwood St. Mission (Mr. Young)
and Fegan’s Mission. He appeared to feel most strongly about the latter,
with its Medical Mission; its thousand patients; the offers of free
attendance to all and sundry; the offers of tea to those who would come to
the Mothers’ Meeting; the sensational appeals, with the map carefully
omitting various churches etc. just on the borders of a selected area, and
the misleading statement that ‘in the whole of this district there is not a
single place of worship’, always excepting the Mission itself, I suppose.
There is a special reason apparently for this rather bitter feeling about
Fegan, since they have recently started their mission, in addition to the
Boys’ Home, and, insult added to injury, they have rented the old schools
of the parish from a purchaser who but a few months before had bought
them from the parish!894
Likewise, Rev. Corbett, a close neighbour of De Fontaine and Longsdon, at St.
Peter’s, had no love for a man who deliberately avoided his responsibilities on the
Registration Committee:
He mentioned that Fegan refused to have anything to do with it, adding
that he suspected the control of the C.O.S. a Society that he (Fegan)
abhors. He criticised Fegan’s methods, saying that he started much of his
Home Mission work with a great deal of bribery of one kind or another,
and repeating the charge of an offer of tea (dry) at first to those who came
to the Mothers’ Meeting.895
Yet rather suddenly Corbett reversed himself: “He thinks, however, that this sort
of thing was only done at the start and that he is ‘more careful’ now. Many of the
mothers who were attracted were, he thinks, drawn away from other centres, but
he does not appear to have suffered himself.” Conscientiously, Corbett added:
“Those attending his own Meeting get no material advantage except that of good
terms in buying material, which is managed for them: there are no bonuses, and
everything is managed on a thrift basis.”
Corbett’s more careful consideration of the grievance put forward by his
fellow churchmen illustrates the fact that the battle between Established and Free
Churches over charity, like the battle between Booth and the COS, and like the
894
895
De Fontaine, B269: 123-5.
Corbett, B 269: 205.
367
battle between Booth and the COS against the Anglican and Nonconformist
churches, may not have been a battle at all. Historians have a tendency to
categorize men of church and chapel into “right” vs. “left,” or “COS” vs. “liberal
nonconformist” and “Christian Socialist,” in this period, ignoring the insecurities
which caused men to imagine (quite wrongly) that there were lines of division
between them worth fighting over.896
The remarks, in August 1899, of both Fegan, and his accountant,
demonstrate how blatantly Booth investigators gave priority to charitable matters
in what was ostensibly a “Religious Influences” survey. F.D. Holloway, Fegan’s
financial head at both his Boy’s Homes and his Home Hall Mission, took his job
very seriously, and was clearly aware of the level of scrutiny with which members
of the Christian community watched their counterparts in the field of charitable
matters. Before leaving Ernest Aves so that the latter could speak further with
Fegan, Holloway offered his interviewer a unique look into the world of late
Victorian church, chapel, and mission finance:
[Mr. Holloway] took me back to the Home, and into his office. He is a
dapper little man, and appeared to be first and foremost a good accountant.
He has been with Mr. Fegan for about 15 years, and knows the ropes all
through. He seemed perfectly straight; showed me the balance sheets for
several of the trade and other branches of the work that were lying on his
desk, in preparation for the audit. As will be readily understood, the
accounts for the Home and the Mission, make up a complicated whole,
and Mr. H. appeared to take pride in having everything ship-shape. Wrong
descriptions of accounts, as he said, “set my nerves on edge”, and he has
no patience with people who call a cash account a balance sheet. The only
thing they publish is the cash account inserted, but everything is analysed
in the office, and separate accounts show where less or leakage, if any, are
taking place. At the moment he is looking into the cost of the factory girls’
dinners. He denied that dry tea had ever been given away at any of the
mothers’ meetings.897
896
The idea of a wide political spectrum in which ministers situated themselves can be seen in
McLeod, Class and Religion and Jeff Cox, English Churches.
897
Fegan, B 273: 67-69. Harry Toynbee, when asked about Fegan, knew little yet about Fegan but
significantly highlighting the subjective way COS men and women appraised ministers, said “Of
Fegan he knew little, and naturally had a very poor opinion.” Toynbee, B 273: 23. Both Toynbee
and Mackintosh Walker advised that the Booth investigators read the reports of the Central
Committee for more information on Fegan, the latter adding the tidbit that there was a “ticket
competition” between he and Rev. Asker of St. Andrew’s. Ibid.; Mackintosh Walker B 273: 39.
368
Aves’ encounter with a mission accountant shows us squarely what Charles
Booth’s Religious Influences Survey’ was all about: an audit – London-wide – of
Christian charity. Booth, Fegan, the Nonconformists and the Anglicans of London
were all aware of what a religious influences survey, at this time, really meant.
They knew it would be about instilling moral control in poor working people, and
that the most prominent means of doing this was through moral discrimination,
and more practically, through adherence to methods of charity control.
Fegan admitted that he had given the Registration Committee a miss. He
told Aves flatly: “The C.O.S. appears to be always ready to gird at him, but,” –
and here Aves too was having second thoughts about the man – “whether [it was]
because they disapprove of his work, or because they consider that his ways are
devious we do not know.” Aves chose to confront Fegan on the matter, and the
missioner’s defence, significantly, was more personal than ideological:
Later in the conversation I broached the subject of the Registration
Committee, the objects of which he praised, and he even said that,
knowing and liking Miss Lubbock, he had agreed to join. But afterwards
he discovered that the C.O.S. was the power behind Miss Lubbock’s
throne, and he withdrew. It appears that when he was a young man of 23,
young in years and very young in work, the C.O.S. sent a man down, a
Mr. Cardew, to see him. Mr. F. at that time knew little or nothing about
the C.O.S. and, for all he knew they were going to get him or give him a
grant. In any case he received Mr. Cardew with open arms, and told him
and showed him everything. Some years afterwards a friend of his, I think
the editor of the Christian, drew his attention to a report that the C.O.S.
was circulating, and asked him if he had seen it. He had not, and
discovered then for the first time that on Mr. Cardew’s visit an adverse
judgment of his work was being published. He was bitterly aggrieved, and,
until they apologise for what he felt to be very underhand treatment, he
has decided to have nothing to do with the Society. “They can do me no
harm now,” he said, and “I can snap my fingers at them”, but they will
have to apologise in order to get into Mr. F’s good books. This is his
account of the disagreement between him and the Society. It might be well
to get the counterpart of the story.898
The hope of the churchman in this period was that the public might
recognize them to be capable – scientifically and spiritually – of appraising the
long hierarchy of poor men and women around him. It was not the methods of the
898
Ibid., 73-5.
369
C.O.S. or its moral ideals, with which Fegan disagreed (as we see here he
“praised” the “objects” of the Registration Committee). It was rather that it
doubted his efficacy in the moral appraisal of the working people around him.
Whether they were affiliated with the COS or not, dividing poor men and women
on these moral lines was the essence of the work of social improvement at the
time, and it had clearly wounded Fegan for many years that he had been publicly
called a fraud in this respect.
With this in mind Fegan went on to morally defend other services
provided by his mission. In his Medical Mission, he said, they attempted to treat
the “really” poor (by which he meant poor-but-respectable) while discouraging
better-off working people from also attending.899 He was fast winning the hardheaded Aves over. If this 25-year veteran of social work in South London “had
not meant to follow it up well,” Aves wrote (meaning his previous Boys’ Home
work), “Mr. F. would not have taken the new step” (the new Mission and its
auxiliaries), in the first place.900
On the issue of accusations that his Mothers’ Meetings drew mothers from
Southwark’s Churches and Chapels, Fegan waved off his attackers. What of the
“good many complaints of the ways in which his Mission [had] attracted mothers
and others from existing meetings,” asked Aves. Was he not aware that there was
a great deal of “local opposition to his work”? Fegan was blunt. He “professed to
know little” about the complaints of men like De Fontaine and Corbett. He hardly
“trouble[ed] about it much either.” He explained to Aves matter-of-factly: “When
new things are started, no matter what they are there is bound to be some slight
dislocation, but after a time things settle down. They find their level.”901
Fegan’s answers had by now silenced the hysterical anti-bribery rhetoric
put in Aves’ head by the Anglicans. Charitable overlap was as much a concern to
Fegan as to the clergymen, and in the past he had taken great pains both to clear
the name of his mission, and to keep “cadgers” out of it.
899
Ibid., 77. Aves thought this perhaps “naïve,” but in so doing – discounting the strong class
feeling among working people which wrote a class grade upon every institution (religious or not)
in their neighbourhoods – it was Aves who appears the novice. See Part IV.
900
Ibid., 77-79.
901
Ibid., 75.
370
He said that a Miss Tabor, a friend of his who was also a local worker and
the friend of local workers, had written to him expressing regret at the way
in which he was attracting women away from other mothers’ meetings to
his own. He replied that it was impossible to take notice of general
statements, but that if she would send him names he would look into any
alleged cases. She thereupon sent him 24 names, and he sent her a report
on the whole lot. In some cases there had been no membership elsewhere;
in others the tie had been a very loose one, and the general result of his
investigation was such as to make Miss Tabor admit that the complaint
had little or nothing in it. And, continued Mr. F., “although there are sure
to be some who will come to me or to any other man who is starting a new
thing, and this you cannot avoid, it is not these women that we want.
Those who will leave one thing for another just to see what else may be
going, are invariably the worst of the bunch, and you may take it for
granted that we don’t want to fill our benches with the gad-abouts”.902
Fegan gave the impression that he had been too long in the game of
Christian charity to be taken unawares by the first shriek of “sheep-stealing” that
came his way. Other men suffered from such insecurities, in his view, and he
clearly looked down upon them. Fegan, it seems, had achieved enough local
credibility (through the work of his Boys’ Homes) to be relatively free of anxiety
on this score – though his history of settled scores with the COS, the Registration
Committee, and anyone else who accused him of overlap, might say otherwise.
His efforts, in any case, prove that it took a great deal of exertion to keep a
minister’s or missioner’s reputation bullet-proof.
In Aves, certainly, Fegan had a convert: “The numerous complaints that
have reached us, are, looked at from one point of view, so many tributes to Mr.
F’s successes,” Aves wrote, “since people do not take the trouble to complain of
failures. Local jealousy, of a kind, to some extent explains local animosity, and
the man who can risk an additional expenditure of ₤2000 a year is clearly not to
be sniffed at.”903 Charles Booth was not so easily impressed. Somewhat
surprisingly, he provided a cautionary conclusion to the whole affair in his
published volumes. Dangerously, he noted, Fegan’s original undertaking for poor
boys had “led [him] into Evangelistic and general charitable work.” Booth’s
902
903
Ibid., 75-77.
Ibid., p. 77.
371
investigators had found that Fegan’s “incursions” in the area had been “objected
to” by surrounding ministers, his “doings disapproved [of] by those established
before him.” Booth’s last words on the subject were those of a stern schoolmaster,
and one can only wonder what Fegan’s response was to them: “His mission is one
of those whose charities are most bitterly complained of as ill-considered. There
may be some grounds for these complaints, but there is evidently evidence of
care, and it may be hoped that experience will teach its lesson, at any rate before
much mischief is done.”904
Would South London’s established Nonconformist sects get the same
“high marks for capacity and foresight” Fegan earned from Aves and the Booth
Men? To a Congregationalist, a Baptist or a Methodist, judgement and “love,” in
fact, went hand in hand. Historians, moreover, who paint the Nonconformists as
the progressive yin to the Anglican’s reactionary yang have paid insufficient
attention to their giving practices.905 As in the case of Fegan, belying Anglicans’
confrontational usage of the language of charity control, or opposition to
cooperation with the COS, was a relative similarity of charitable practices
between the established and Nonconformist, or Free, churches.
3. Nonconformists and Charity Control:
The Generous Representatives of “Social” Nonconformity?
Among Nonconformist leaders far too much universalism and generosity
has been assumed to have coexisted with what Richard Helmstadter, among
others, has called “major orientations in theology” during this period –
specifically in ministers’ placing more importance on Christ’s life than on his
atoning death.”906 Gerald Parsons notes one Nonconformist who had a social
Christianity more radical than Hugh Price Hughes, and who was also the founder
of the Bermondsey Settlement was the Wesleyan John Scott Lidgett. Helmstadter
adds that after 1908, “he was the leader of the Progressive party in the London
904
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 23.
See Jeff Cox’s English Churches for a rather optimistic view of the liberal Nonconformist
philanthropist.
906
Helmstadter, “Nonconformist Conscience,” in Parsons Religion in Victorian Britain 82-83.
905
372
County Council.” On 7 February 1900, Scott Lidgett was interviewed by Ernest
Aves. Scott Lidgett said he wanted a less “middle class” Christianity. Yet with the
same moral emphasis as his less famous colleagues, he said he wanted “to preach
a broader Christianity which shall touch life at all points.” Despite an ostensible
Christian radicalism, however, Scott Lidgett’s later, exceedingly Boothian,
comments keep him from being claimed as a “leftist” minister by historians.
Lidgett might have been reading the recommendations of the Poverty series back
to Ernest Aves when he emphasized that the Bermondsey Settlement’s charity
was kept “as careful as possible,” and worse, that poor Bermondseyans were
“more apathetic and less responsive [to religion] than in any other part of
London,” due to the “prevailing casual character of the employment in the docks
and on the waterside; and to the large admixture of low Irish blood in the
population.” Helmstadter found Scott Lidgett “strikingly moralistic,” but also
thought that his “humanitarian concern for the poor” was largely “without
practical point.” Historians should see, however, that Lidgett believed he could
abolish “demoralizing and degrading poverty” the practical means of selective
charity.907
If not as radical as Scott Lidgett, of course, Hugh Price Hughes, with John
Clifford (the Baptist) was nevertheless, among Nonconformists, one of the “most
outstanding examples of members of the clerical elite who advocated Christian
Socialist or social gospel ideas.” The editor of the Methodist Times, Hughes was
famous in the period for “calling upon his denomination to embrace the principles
of a ‘social Christianity’ and to advocate social reform.” In his collection of
sermons, entitled Social Christianity (1889) he argued that Christ had come “to
save society as well as individuals.”908 But perhaps not all individuals: discussing
907
Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” in Parsons Religion in Victorian Britain 52;
Helmstadter,, “Nonconformist Conscience,” in Parsons Religion in Victorian Britain 90; Scott
Lidgett, B 283: 17, 19, 21, 15.
908
Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” in Parsons Religion in Victorian Britain 52.
Helmstadter called Hughes “probably the most influential spokesman for the emerging
Nonconformist conscience in the late 1880s,” a man who railed, like the Anglican Christian
Socialist Bishop Westcott, against society’s “tyrannical individualism.” Helmstadter,,
“Nonconformist Conscience,” in Parsons Religion in Victorian Britain 89.
373
charity in his interview, tramps seemed excluded from Hugh Price Hughes’
“saved society”:
As to Charity, they have a definite system of relief. The agents and sisters
have a relief committee which meets weekly and every case that they think
should be relieved is brought before it. Their principle is to follow up
every case and to help it efficiently but they do nothing for tramps. “They
have long ago abandoned us.” What the poor really need is help rather
than money. They don’t know the institutions that exist for their aid and
need direction to ‘some rich charity.’ Work with the C.O.S. and other
bodies and have representatives on their committees. In the Mission
accounts Relief appears under two heads: Pensions, workhouse teas and
special cases costing ₤188 whilst the Social Relief Fund expended ₤93,
including ₤41 disbursed through the sisters.909
The same could be said of Allen Street Congregational’s Rev. Silvester
Horne, who Helmstadter notes stressed the “social conscience of the well-to-do
and powerful,” the “social responsibilities of the state,” and “a warm sympathy
toward the poor and least successful.” When historians write that the “leaders of
late Victorian Nonconformity changed radically their vision of society and social
reform,” throwing off “individualism,” they must pay more attention to what the
men said privately about “sympathy” and “compassion.” A sympathetic man at
this time was “kind” as much for what he withheld from the poor as for what he
gave to them. Argyle heard Horne tell him: “In giving relief they try to co-operate
wherever they can, and always make careful inquiries. The tendency among the
Churches in this district is to act so far as they can, on C.O.S. lines, so as to
prevent overlapping. There used to be a frightful amount of corruption, but there
is a growing spirit of carefulness in distribution now.”910
As denominational leaders went, none among the Baptists was more
prominent than John Clifford. After Charles Spurgeon’s death in 1892, Clifford
was the “most respected and best-known Baptist minister in London” and was
“for a time an active Fabian Socialist.”911 When Ernest Aves visited him 6
January 1899 at his Westbourne Chapel he noted, too, Clifford’s celebrity status
909
Hughes, B 242: 21.
Helmstadter, “Nonconformist Conscience,” in Parsons Religion in Victorian Britain 89; Horne,
B 262: 27.
911
Helmstadter, “Nonconformist Conscience,” in Parsons Religion in Victorian Britain 89.
910
374
in the metropolis. Rev. Dr. Clifford L.L.B., D.D. was “one of the old war-horses
of Nonconformity, with much battle in him still.” He stood “in the first flight of
the Free Churchmen of the country, and in London perhaps only Dr. Parker and
Guinness Rogers are better known than himself. In his own denomination, the
Baptists, he is, I suppose, the most prominent figure.” New York’s Outlook (the
article of which Aves included in his interview) called him a man “interested in
all social questions in London, and perhaps more than any man now before the
public deserv[ing] to be called the Tribune of the People.”912
Clifford was President of the United Free Church Councils, “said to be
representative of some 6,000,000 persons worshipping in this and in other
countries.” Aberdeen’s Evening Express, like Helmstadter above, called him
with the possible exception of Dr. Maclaren of Manchester, the most
outstanding figure in the Baptist denomination since the death of Mr.
Spurgeon. He is one of the best known and most popular speakers on
London platforms, and in the recent County Council election he rendered
splendid service to the Progressives among whom he is regarded as one of
their strongest men. Dr. Clifford enjoys the respect of all men of all
classes and shades of opinion, his strenuous and successful work, his
breezy optimism, and his genuine disinterestedness in making troops of
friends.
“Dr. Clifford is an Evangelical,” the article concluded significantly, “but by no
means a strait-laced one; in fact there are few men with wider outlooks and more
catholic sympathies, and the social side of his work has always been
prominent.”913
Like Helmstadter, Aves noted of the famous Baptist: “…Dr. Clifford
proclaims himself a Socialist. His Socialism is of the Christian type and the whole
of his political and social activity is instinct [sic] with moral fervour and idealism.
‘I come in,’ as he said to me, ‘to try to heighten ideals,’ and thus we find him on
the war path at times of School Board or Municipal elections. But idealist and
stimulating force though he be, he is a political Socialist, and in reply to me direct
question avowed himself as such, and as a member of the Fabian Society.” Aves
912
913
Clifford, B 249: 27.
Quoted in Clifford, B 249: 29.
375
thought Clifford “a powerful and commanding figure, interesting, attractive and
genuine. He is the President of the Christian Social Brotherhood, of which Will
Reason is the Secretary and which corresponds in Nonconformist circles to the
Christian Social Union of the Church of England.”914
“Scientifically,” Aves gave Clifford a quick, almost physiognomic
appraisal, which he passed with flying colours (note his comparison of Clifford’s
personal moral or elevating effect with that of his picture):
The portrait gives a very good idea of Dr. Clifford’s face. The mouth has,
however, a pleasanter expression than is suggested by the print, and in it
the eyes lose their attractiveness. They are good eyes, light and grayish in
tone. The bushy eyebrows and fine brow attract attention. Dr. C. speaks
well and easily, and his manner suggest what the man is – a
straightforward, zealous, ethically-minded minister of the Gospel.
There was a certain larger than life feel (“a certain massiveness”) about Clifford,
that Aves felt he needed to overcome to understand the man truly. In the course of
conversation with him, one suspected “a great simplicity of character,” but Aves
was not yet sure that a “remarkable character” confronted him.915
For the historian who takes too seriously (as I think Helmstadter has) the
rhetoric of Incarnationalism among Nonconformists at this time, Clifford’s words
to Aves in regard to charity bring us down to earth. Deacons or deaconesses
(“every one who is in any position of responsibility”) reported to him on social
work as often as once a week.” Prizing “system” in his social work, like Charles
Booth, Clifford also understood the dangers of careless charity:
Charitable relief does not appear to figure largely in their scheme of
operations, and most of it is done in connexion with the mission. The
Communion Funds go, as usual, to their poor members, and in addition
there are the Domestic Mission Band, and the Bosworth Road Benevolent
Fund. There is close co-operation with the C.O.S. in dealing with difficult
cases, and Dr. C. describes himself as being very much alive to the danger
of pauperizing. He is “constantly speaking of it.” The cases helped are said
to be mostly those of sickness.916
914
Clifford, B 249: 31.
Ibid., 33.
916
Ibid., 43, 47.
915
376
Like Fegan, moreover, he did not take the endless criticism by Anglicans of
Nonconformists’ “careless” charity lying down. Clifford returned fire with the
discreet hint that “S. Mary Magdalene [a church nearby] has a reputation for
pauperizing…”917
4. “Sympathy with Discrimination”:
Charity Control and the Nonconformists of East London
In East London, men in each of the main denominations looked out for the
loafer, and believed themselves careful in their charity. In the case of
Presbyterians and of Unitarians, Charles Booth’s old denomination, the Booth
men almost universally held up the ministers as charity exemplars.918
Complaining of the poverty in his district, Rev. Hester of Hackney noted coldly
that, of the 150 names sent to him by the (Anglican) curate of St. Phillip’s
Church, “not 20 or 25 could be eliminated [as undeserving]” from receipt of the
“Princess’ Dinner Fund” that year. Presbyterians often spoke disappointedly of a
lack of Scotch families in East London (which many felt served as a moral leaven
in poor-but-respectable neighbourhoods).919 In interviews with Unitarians, one
finds men (like Limehouse’s Rev. Toye) hardnosed enough to speculate (with all
seriousness) which local children would “become loafers and tramps” in later life.
Bethnal Green’s Rev. Cadman was “an active member of the COS.” Rev. Fletcher
Williams of the New Gravel Pit Chapel in Hackney was a fitting example of the
new and paradoxical liberalism in ministers of the period. “His aim,” wrote
Baxter, was “‘to foster a theological enlightenment to spread the more liberal
ideas as to religion; to make men realise that the doctrines of the brotherhood of
man are not only the essence of Jesus’ teaching, but are the only source of social
regeneration.’” But Fletcher Williams’ views of theological and social liberalism
917
Ibid., 47. Housing and drinking Clifford said of the poor in the neighbourhood, were “awful”
and there seemed no cause for this “degradation” “save perhaps that it is a laundry area, that is, an
area in which so many of the women are bread winners that the men can more easily loaf and go to
the bad. Thus the wage-earner is not a very satisfactory sort of person…” Ibid., 51.
918
Robert Humphreys, though incorrectly assuming young Anglicans were repelled by the COS,
correctly notes that “[a]ctive support for the COS tended to be from sects such as the
Unitarians[.]” Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity and the Poor Law 90.
919
Hester, B 187: 58, 54; Johnston, B 190: 87.
377
were easily compatible with his view that charity (as a whole) in poor Hackney
“pretty overdone” and “badly administered,” and that the (unreformed?) parochial
charities of Hackney were “especially harmful.” These views fused seamlessly
with his belief, as a member of the local COS committee, that “80 percent of the
applicants were brought to poverty by early marriage or drink” – in short, because
of their own improvidence.920
From Poplar to Bethnal Green, Congregationalists were committed to
“bring workers up,” but not by indulging the poor indiscriminately and
excessively with charity. Senior Deacon Samuel Dean’s annual report for his
church in Bow, Lower Clapton’s Rev. J. Neville and the “manly” Rev. Fisher of
Bethnal Green, each spoke of “loafers,” “loafer classes,” manipulating
“impostors,” “loungers” and people with “no sense of independence,” the latter
adding: “you can’t trust these poor people with money.” Clapton Park
Congregational’s Rev. Harries, Dean and Williams spoke of the dangers of
“overlapping” the latter “mapping out” his poor districts. The Congregationalists’
most telling words came not from a minister, but from a Deacon: Mr. W. George
of Victoria Park Congregational. He felt the COS could be more sensitive with
applicants. They were “too hard” and made “no allowance for sentiment.” George
instanced “a case when they had insisted that a man must sell a clock which
belonged to his father before he could be helped.” His comments on his own
charity, nevertheless, demonstrated how his disagreement with the COS was one
of degrees, not of ideology. George told Baxter: “I know the impostor in a
moment.” “Asked as to his charitable methods Mr. G. said he endeavoured ‘to
combine sympathy with discrimination.’”921
920
Toye, B 172: 24, 29. Rev. Toye ministered to the people of Limehouse Fields. Like Booth he
spoke of two types of men. He spoke of men preferring a “a casual life to the regular. Some of the
men would rather have alternate days work. If he is regular a man has to take a certain amount
home. The irregular man can do as he likes. The men seen standing about in Ben Johnson Rd. are
often ‘extra men’ at the gas works.” (23) Cadman, B 229: 67; Fletcher Williams, B 190: 71, 75.
Apparently Fletcher Williams was more COS than his local committee, having resigned from it
when the committee, injudiciously in his opinion, gave relief in cash to (what it thought was) a
worthy applicant. (71)
921
Daniel, B 171: 15. Daniel described himself as having “quite COS views” but would not sit on
the local committee and be “patronized” by clergymen he did not respect. (18) Dean, B 176: 119;
Neville, B 190: 76-77; Fisher, B 183: 57, 53. Interestingly, Fisher said his “position as to relief
378
Baptists also spoke of overlapping and mapping out their neighbourhoods
as Booth had in his Poverty Series. Rev. Hazzard, temporarily (but
extraordinarily, in terms of his effort) had allied with two other churches to
systematize charitable distribution in a district full of the “lowest casuals.” After
“mapping out” each church’s charitable jurisdictions, each church had referred to
lists of recipients to prevent overlap, relieving residents only from their own
districts (and “and referring residents in other districts to the chapel in that
neighbourhood”). Like the “no money” Anglicans above, Hazzard quipped:
“tickets, never money.” Suspecting overindulgence, another Bow Baptist (and
partner in Rev. Hazzard’s charity scheme), called the work to provide free dinners
to the poor in his neighbourhood “overdone.” Rev. Phillips spoke of his explicit
wish “not to pauperise people,” and Bethnal Green’s Rev. Thomas objected to a
“class of cadgers” who “try to cadge from Christian people, upon whom they
think they have a claim.” There were similar “sympathy-with-discrimination”
quotes from the Baptists. A representative from the large-scale philanthropic
organization the East London Tabernacle stressed not “panic relief” but “wise
relief” so that the “bold,” the “bad” and “the unscrupulous” would not “make a
good thing out if it.” He emphasized that “Christians must keep their heads on
their shoulders but give hearts to the poor.” In what (at the time) would have been
a heartfelt moment for Arkell and Pastor James Clark of the Hope Baptist Chapel
in Bethnal Green, Clark spoke of “much imposition now-a-days,” the importance
not only to have “confidence” in relief cases, but to “steel one’s heart against the
people” in relief work. Most fascinating – in that the minister’s words
demonstrated the difference between the harshest Atonement-centred
individualism and the newer selective distribution and moral segregation
has…changed within recent years. They give less than formerly and he has not made any appeal
for outside help for two years, the families of the women attending the mothers’ meeting are
looked after and beyond this Mr. F. confines his relief almost exclusively to feeding children and
providing cheap meals for adults and assisting a few old Christians.” “You can’t go wrong in
doing this,” affirmed the minister. (51) Harries, B 187: 104; Dean, B 176: 119; and Williams, B
123; George, B 183: 129. There were the usual complaints of Anglican domination of local COS
Committees, but two of ten ministers explicitly allied themselves with the Society, one through the
work of his wife, and another through his churchworkers (“some of our people belong to it”).
Schnadhorst, B 176: 75; Harries, B 187: 104.
379
characteristic of modern Incarnationalist individualism – were the words of an
old-fashioned Calivinist, the Strict Baptist Rev. Lee. Lee said he had no social
agencies, and gave “nothing”: “If the Lord wants to save people,” he began, the
Lord would “bring them” to religion, but Lee would not help the process along.
Hackney’s Rev. Medley was of a newer generation of minister, an “Open Baptist”
who believed the church should be “as open as the Kingdom of God,” and that all
were “members of Christ’s body.” With a powerfully univeralist tone, Medley
said, that in “our fellowship,” “we are all learners, and none are masters or lords.
We seek not uniformity but unity – the unity of faith in Christ and trust in the love
of God to keep us in unity of spirit and bonds of peace.” Medley nevertheless
cooperated (comparing lists of the sick) with the Charity Organization Society.922
Of the East London Wesleyans, Rev. Roe of the Bow Circuit (and COS
Committee member for two years) spent part of his interview complaining of
Anglican and Nonconformist neighbours who “‘give’ or ‘give away’ a good deal”
– meaning a good deal more than they should in charity. Rev. Saunders, another
Bow Wesleyan, spoke of the dangers of improper charity through the illustration
of a man his church relieved. Although the latter was unemployed, this man had
used his relief to have “a fine carousal” (“grapes, oranges, and a big piece of
beef”). Saunders professed to have caught the man in his home red-handed. One
Bethnal Green Wesleyan, Rev. Arthur Gregory, divided his neighbourhood into
“districts” for his deaconesses and had a “Social Work Committee” in his church
“responsible for the general relief.” He said he did not give “doles in any form,”
although he did try to “establish pensions in place of them where needed.” Last,
922
For mapped out districts, see Joynes, B 171: 33, who used the parliamentary register to mapped
out his neighbourhood. Rev. Moxham and his churchworkers felt they could prevent
“overlapping” on their own. Moxham, B 187: 112. Hazzard, B 176: 13-15. Hazzard’s neighbour,
Rev. Hayward also recalled how each church “would refer applicants living out of their district to
the one in whose district he was resident.” Hayward, B 176: 41, 43. Phillips, B 176: 141; Thomas,
B 183: 17-19; Wickes, B 183: 79 Clark, B 183: 147-149; Lee, B 176: 199; Medley. Most Baptists
wished to handle their own charity work, but as we see here, this hardly made them overgenerous.
Two ministers out of thirteen, nevertheless, admitted working with the COS in their interviews.
Joynes, B 171: 34 ((who sent 21/- a year to the C.O.S. to help pay for a man’s pension); Medley B
187: 93 (who spoke of an agreement, “arranged by the C.O.S.” and “include[ing] Anglican and
Dissenting churches,” to keep a “list of sick visitation cases”). Clapton’s Rev. Moxham thought
the COS were not strict enough, and while he noted that the Society had “got most of the ministers
to report to them,” he felt it was not selective enough in its work (only helping those “in temporary
want”). Moxham, B 187: 112.
380
he gave “nothing” to the out of work. Interestingly, however, he criticized the
Bethnal Green COS – not for their “hardness” but for what he called “bad
judgment.” Gregory said he had actively participated in COS work at his former
church in Lewisham and clearly felt his powers of discrimination keener than that
of Bethnal Green’s local officials. Next, the administrator of one of the East
London Wesleyan Missions did not disburse “large sums” in charity work, and he
thought women’s enrolment in sewing meetings would save them from
“pauperism.” Another East End missioner, Rev. John Howard, Baxter thought
“saintly faced” and therefore a danger in charity. Some of the “hopeless” poor one
simply had to help, said Howard: “they get into some difficulty and unless you are
prepared to help what will they think of your Christianity? Their motives no doubt
are very mixed, but you can’t assume that they are wrong.” One wonders if it was
reassuring for Baxter that Howard then spoke of “a good many failures” among
the “really degraded and hopeless poor” – people he had “dropped” from church
help. The Superintendent of the Hackney Circuit (Rev. Nettleton) felt his district
had too many middle, lower middle, and upper-working-class men and women to
need a COS Committee (the local Committee of which he felt was “very hard”).
He did, however, think such a committee “useful” in some areas of London,
adding that “in some places in Lambeth some of the [Wesleyan] clergy worked
through it.” Nevertheless, this minister complained of “begging impostors”:
“Begging impostors: Mr. N[ettleton] thinks they are imposed upon sometimes but
not seriously. Some people look upon ministers as their prey. Told of a woman,
who came to Navarino Road with a story that she had lost her purse and railway
ticket and thus obtained 5/- from Mrs. N. in his absence.” Finally, a Clapton
Wesleyan (J. Willis Britton) impressed on Arkell that in giving dinners to the
poor, his church (Clapton Wesleyan Church) “touched a poor class” – specifically
the “labouring poor,” and “not the slum poor.”923
923
Roe, B 176: 93-95; Sanders, B 176: 209; Gregory, B 183: 221, 225, 227; Rolls, B 184: 7;
Howard, B 184: 33-35. Howard produced a book of members and proudly showed his interviewer
that five of twenty “hopeless” people had been “reclaimed from lives of squalor,” “all trying to
lead upright lives.” (35) Nettleton, B 187: 21; Britton, B 190: 102. Rev. Britton felt that the moral
difference between these two poor groups was that those he relieved “fetched their [free] dinners
and had them at home.” (Ibid.)
381
5. Distrust of the Adult Poor:
Charity Control and the Nonconformists of South London
In inner South London, the area I am calling Poor South London, there
were also a number of Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists preaching and
practicing social work north of the Newington Causeway and Great Dover Street
– two slanting thoroughfares forming an arrow pointing north toward the poor
riverside and away from the neighbourhoods of the upper-working-class. As in
East London, in Poor South London, ideas of charity organization were tools of
the Nonconformist ministers’ trade. In F. Docker of the Pilgrim Father’s Church
Congregational New Kent Road, Baxter seemed surprised to find what he called –
“that ‘rara avis’[:] a Non-Con minister who works with and speaks well of the
C.O.S.”924 A triangle of ministers in Southwark and Bermondsey – Revs
Redshaw, Linington and Cook – were Poor London’s Congregational contingent.
Southwark’s Rev. Redshaw lived among the labouring class district of
(Bainbridge-Bell’s) St. John the Evangelist, catering to a “respectable workingclass” congregation. Despite the want prevailing in the area, Redshaw said his
relief was “small” because, in his mind, there was “not much acute poverty.”925
Belief in “genuine” poverty on the one hand, and self-inflicted immoral poverty,
on the other, made such outrageous statements possible. Rev. Linington, his
chapel in Rev. Hewlett’s parish of St. John’s Horsleydown, also commented that
“nearly all” in his neighbourhood were “regular wage earners and except in a
severe winter there [was] little actual poverty or distress.” Linington “claimed
cooperation with the C.O.S.” and “exchang[ed] relief lists” with his vicar.
According to Baxter, he “spoke generally as one who understood the ways of the
cadger.” “I don’t suppose we have 100 unemployed,” Linington said, “and they
924
Docker, B 274: 9. “[M]uch against his will,” Baxter added, “Mr. D. was obliged to apply for
help for cases to the C.O.S.: now he has the highest opinion of it: and spent fully half an hour in
telling me of cases they had helped on his recommendation: but his people as a whole still hate it.”
Booth noted in his published volumes that it was Docker ultimately begging for funding for the
Pilgrim Father’s Church, which had hitherto been “subsidized by a rich Congregationalist.” The
man died, the subsidy ceased, and the church, by 1902, had closed. Booth, “Religious Influences,”
4: 85.
925
Redshaw, B 270: 61.
382
are only unemployed because they won’t work.”926 The only minister, in fact,
who did admit the presence of poverty – very much present in all three of the
parishes listed here – was “Mr. Cook,” of Collier’s Rents Mission, in Rev.
Somerville’s parish of St. George the Martyr. Moral judgment, however, was not
only compatible but inseparable from this hint of compassion. Cook said the
people had no thrift, would never let on what their earnings were, and would “tell
you anything to get any perquisites.” “Still,” he said “there is a great amount of
poverty, especially where the families are large and this is not uncommon.” The
people of Long Lane were certainly poor: the men were “nearly all of the
labouring class: carmen; waterside and bricklayers’ labourers.” But their problem,
Cook said, (which Arkell noted under the title “Selfish Men!”) was chiefly one of
self-restraint. “Where the families suffer the drunken habits of one or both parents
is the cause.” Redshaw said as much in his interview. It baffled the ministers that
these men would not even attempt their own self-betterment. Cook said he had
worked in many places – the worst slums that Glasgow and Battersea had to offer
– “but has not met such ‘pigheaded, stubborn, selfish men’ elsewhere. They listen
sheepishly while you speak to them and as soon as your back is turned will go and
‘have a drop.’ No moral control.”927 “The principle of their [Cook’s] charitable
relief,” therefore, was “no money.” Widows and the sick might be sent a few
coins, and the sick perhaps provided some milk and eggs (though tradesmen were
instructed to stop delivery after seven days). It pained Rev. Cook, however, to slip
children charity “where the fellow [the father of the household] is boozing”; it
pained him to think that women in his mothers’ meetings might be attending not
only his, but also Charterhouse’s, St. Stephen’s, and the Crosby Row Mission’s
meetings as well. He admitted that his mission covered half the cost of a 3s.9d
excursion for its mothers, but almost thankfully he added: “They don’t get much
here.” I think the important thing for the historian to understand is that such
indulgences did cause ministers to feel emotional pain. In giving, they felt they
were doing wrong. Ministers like Cook also felt the need to correct the careless
926
Linington, B 274: 53-5; 51.
Cook, B 274: 189-191. Redshaw noted with alarm an increase in drink in St. John’s, to which
he largely attributed both vice and crime in his district (Redshaw, B 270: 65).
927
383
ways of past ministers. Like Rev. Longsdon, Cook had taken the charge of a
mission where “tickets were given and somewhat lavishly,” a place “where the
people look for help [because] they have been trained to it.” He had “stopped” the
tickets on his arrival: “He did not believe in so much relief”: he was “trying to
break it off.”928 Holding down the fort at the poorest Congregational mission in
South London, moreover, Cook could give as good as he got when it came to
Anglicans’ accusations of careless charity. Both Rev. Dodge (St. Stephen’s) and
Rev. Vyvyan (Charterhouse Mission) “did a lot,” he said, but only attracted
people to their churches “with the loaves and fishes.”929
South London Baptists, too, conveyed more than a nodding understanding
of charity control. Whether there was any connection between this and the fact
South London was the resting place of the legendary evangelist C.H. Spurgeon, a
man who had “held fast to the auld vision of Hell” and was “none the less popular
for so doing,” it is impossible to tell.930 The fact that Booth could write in his
published volumes, “I have described the work of the Baptists here at some
length, because it seems to me to be the most remarkable and successful religious
development in South London” – and that much of this was “due to the
personality of Spurgeon” and his “form of Christianity” – certainly makes one
wonder.931 Baptists, in any case, were serious about careful charity. In the
southwest corner of Cecil de Carteret’s parish of St. Paul’s Southwark, Rev.
William Williams noted that he collected or had sent to him “about ₤100 for this
work” but never did he “seek to increase the amount.” He felt that “every
‘additional half crown is an additional responsibility.’” The church had “twelve
928
Ibid., 195-197.
Ibid., 201.
930
Englander, “The Word and the World,” in Parsons, Religion in Victorian Britain 30.
931
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 81. Later Booth compared the work of one South London
Congregationalist organization, saying the Hall (Browning Hall) lacked “the full flow of Wesleyan
enthusiasm” and, at the same time, did not “possess the solid character of Baptist work.” Ibid., 87.
Perhaps the only shadow of doubt about Baptist charitable work came in regard to their mission
(Haddon Hall) in Bermondsey New Road. They preached “uncompromisingly the doctrine of
salvation and its reverse,” and attracted “serious minded working people.” It all made, Booth
thought, for another “solid piece of work,” but because an (unnamed) minister had hinted of
“unwise” charity, Booth reversed his otherwise laudatory approach to the Baptists with the words:
“It may be so.” Ibid, 114.
929
384
people receiving ‘almshouse money’ [pensions] 12/- a month.”932 Following
Lambeth Road past St. George Circus and onto Borough Road, Rev. E. Pool
Connor’s Borough Road Baptist Church was only a short walk away from
Williams. “Coming to Borough Road from Hackney,” Pool Connor sounded like
an Anglican (like Rev. Bainbridge-Bell in the last chapter) when he said the South
End was a great deal worse than the East: “he was astounded by the poverty – the
appalling poverty of the district, as shown by the condition of the homes.”
Poverty, however, was not “through want of work”: men’s earnings were
“decent” but their homes were “wretched” anyway. Like Cook (whose Mission
was in the same parish of St. George the Martyr), Williams tried to “discourage
those [in his mothers’ meeting] who come for what they can get.” The latter were
of a “very low class.” The meeting was the church’s “one point of contact with
this class,” and, Williams said, “with this class the motive he fears is ‘loaves and
fishes.’” Like Cook, helping men and women of this class, in any way, caused
pain and anxiety. Pool Connor’s testimony in regard to charitable relief indicated
a man not willing to take such chances. He limited his charity to the sick alone.
The church gave “about ₤25 a year,” “mostly cases of sickness.” “They ‘never
pretend to take the place of the parish’” said the minister. Predictably, to Arkell,
Pool Connor was a “young man with some grit” who would make an impression
on his neighbourhood.933
Lambeth Wesleyan Mission’s J. Surman Cooke was the first Methodist in
the long east-west strip of Poor South London, his operations based in the parish
of St. Mary’s – that of the Rector Andrews Reeve. The Wesleyans at the close of
the century had made an organized effort to move from church to mission work in
poor parts of London. Like their Nonconformist brethren, they had faced
increasingly poor parishes, but unlike them, chose a centralized mission network
of Wesleyan Missions.934 When interviewed Surman Cooke spoke “in the most
932
Williams, B 270: 9.
Pool Connor, B 270: 17-21.
934
Hugh McLeod notes that the Wesleyans based a late century revival “on the Central Mission
movement, launched by Hugh Price Hughes [see above] in 1885. Each mission was led by a single
dominant personality, who would stay long enough to make himself known in the area as a
preacher, and would be supported by ministerial assistants and a team of ‘sisters’ engaged in social
933
385
hopeful way of the work.” “In common with the other Wesleyan Missions the
greatest stress is laid on social work as the only means of getting the people to
religious observance. Mr. C said, almost in the words of Mr. Howard in the East
End, [‘]We must attend to their bodies first: if we don’t what will they think of
our Christianity?’” A lack of funds prevented large disbursements of relief, Cooke
said, and “great caution,” moreover, “had to be exercised owing to the attempts at
imposture” the Chapel faced from devious members of Lambeth’s poor classes.935
The Mission must have, nevertheless, been able to pick out a few deserving souls.
Cooke’s 1898 Report noted that one hundred out-of-work men and women were
provided a Meat Tea on New Year’s Eve; that a Boxing Day “Old People’s Party”
had been given to the aged poor; and that, at their weekly Pleasant Saturday
Evenings for the People, Coffee was served for only a half-penny a cup.936
The Central Hall of the South London Wesleyan Mission (SLWM),
recently completed at a cost of ₤30,000, connected both of these satellites, and
was run by Revs Meakin and Hopkins.937 While many Anglican and
Nonconformist churchmen (as has been seen) picked out numbers of the aged for
pensions and other relief, the object of charity at the Central Hall was
Bermondsey’s poor children. It is not clear why the very old and the very young
so often fell outside the scrutiny of charity control, but among some, they clearly
did.938 Local Bermondsey LCM’s argued that “it was ‘from the young that results
are expected.’” One missionary “forcibly” explained that, “With the adults…it is
work. The first of these missions was placed in Stepney, under the leadership of Peter Thompson,
and though there was never one in Bethnal Green, others followed in Shoreditch, Clerkenwell,
Poplar, Bermondsey and Deptford.” McLeod, Class and Religion 108.
935
Cooke, B 271: 105-109. Booth ignored Surman Cooke’s aims and concerns in charity work,
and repeated only the dangerous sounding quote, “We must attend to the bodies…”
Pessimistically Booth assumed only that hopes for the mission had been “built on the influence of
the Sisters, passing doubtless through the door of relief,” and predicted that these hopes “are likely
to be disappointed.” Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 37.
936
1898: Lambeth Central (South) Mission [Report by J. Surman Cooke], 14.
937
The Central Hall, built on Bermondsey New Road and based in Henry Lewis’ parish of St.
Mary Magdalene, was in its final stages of completion at the time of the Booth interviews.
938
McLeod, too, notes that while relations were, to say the least, “uncomfortable” between
Anglican clergymen and adults they believed were “shameless cadgers,” many “accepted more
eagerly” the task of “assisting in the control of [their] district’s children and adolescents and of
supplementing the meager facilities for the recreation of the population as a whole.” (McLeod,
Class and Religion 113) With the Wesleyans there was clearly an equal tendency to help children
while keeping suspicious adults at arm’s length.
386
‘like driving a nail into rotten wood.’”939 Booth repeated the remarks by a
Southwark schoolmistress in his published volume, noting how the impulse to
help the young had spread well beyond the Wesleyans or the London City
Mission. Ministers of all denominations, and many others, were involved now in:
A great number of movements on foot to benefit the people, especially the
young ones: the Lord Mayor entertaining parties of Southwark children at
the Mansion House; the annual festival at Red Cross Hall, with games and
refreshments; free suppers given by Pearce and Plenty; Christmas-tree
treats arranged; and flowers and boxes of clothes sent to the schools. The
ladies of the [Women’s University] Settlement help the teachers in
collecting the savings of the children and encouraging them to save, and
have appointed nurses to attend to the schools, and see to little hurts and
sores and minor ailments, so as to avoid either their neglect, or resort to
the hospital for trifles and consequent absence from school.
Booth concluded: “It is certainly the case that a great deal is done on all hands for
the children.”940
In the Wesleyan’s case, Rev. Meakin’s focus on child welfare apparently
had personal origins. Aves probed further into the foundations of the minister’s
“social philosophy” for reasons why adults were not the true focus of the
Mission’s work in Bermondsey. Meakin told Aves how his wife and he had no
family, but that they had “adopted the daughter of a poor working-class family of
the neighbourhood, the father of which, a bricklayer by trade, [was] handicapped
by ill-health. The little girl has been with them for some years and he showed me
her photograph, praising her warmly.”
The success of this experiment in adoption colours his social philosophy,
making him feel that there is hope for all the children, if they could only
be ensured proper surroundings and decent upbringing. Thus he believes
that the “only hope for the slums is in the children”, and he says,
moreover, that the statistic of attendance bear this theory out. The
proportion of adults who can be drawn from these poorer parts to religious
services is small.941
939
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 114.
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 51-52.
941
Meakin repeated this sentiment in an essay in Mudie-Smith’s Religious Life of London survey
in 1904. Conversion “of the man at from the bottom,” the man “from the gutter,” were rarities.
These adults had been poisoned, perhaps permanently, by their slum environment. “The practical
and common-sense method, therefore, for the Church in dealing with the slums lies in the
direction of the children.” Referring to his adoption of the ill bricklayers’ child, the great potential
940
387
A lack of trust for adults with cash indulgences, it appears, was compatible
with charity in kind (in this case, free meals) for children. Aves and Baxter both
noted that the amount given by the mission, under other circumstances, would
have been unacceptable. Aves went first: “The charities of the Mission are
considerable, amounting to about ₤350 last year. Giving is said to be almost
entirely on a personal basis, and there is no reason to suppose that anything
approaching C.O.S. methods is adopted.” “On the other hand,” Aves said, “much
of the money probably goes in breakfasts, etc, and in severe winter as many as
4000 meals are given four times a week.”942 Baxter’s ambivalence (later, when he
interviewed Hopkins) was also clear: “Altogether as in the other Wesleyan
Missions a good deal of stir has been made [sic]…and many of them [the
children] who are brought in are no doubt genuine, but as in the East End there is
no doubt a good deal of froth and imposture with it all. There is evidently a great
deal of giving (the total in money for the whole year was ₤329)…” “[B]ut,”
Baxter added “most of it goes in free Breakfasts to children who in the winter are
fed to the number of 25000. ‘In order to spread it’ the strange plan is pursued of
having an entirely fresh batch of children each month.” Hopkins, with an
enthusiasm which impressed Baxter, appeared to say that large scale child care
was worth doing. It seemed to be an especially Wesleyan quality, indeed, to do
things “big”: “It was noticeable that the tone of Mr. H. as of all other Wesleyan
Missioners was extraordinarily sanguine: he was full of pride in past results and
fuller of faith in the future when the large hall is opened. It is his experience that
to appeal to the poor, “you must do things on a big scale” and that is the aim at the
newer building.”943
The Booth Men’s lack of alarm in their interviews with the Wesleyans was
perhaps also a product of Aves’ “character analysis” of Meakin who supervised
most of the social work at the Hall. Meakin was to Aves “one of the robuster type
of slum children had been “proved in one of the happiest episodes of my own domestic life.” Rev.
Henry T. Meakin, “The Children of the Slums: Their Relation to the Churches,” in Mudie-Smith
ed., Religious Life of London 328-329.
942
Meakin, B 274: 135-137, 139.
943
Hopkins, B 274: 95-97.
388
of ministers, impatient of old-fashioned ways that check aggressive vigour, and
hold in experiments. He started life in the service of the Midland Railway, and
had good prospects there.”
But from early days he had been drawn to mission work, and late in life
and in opposition to the advice of many friends, he decided to prepare for
the ministry. The enclosed papers give some further particulars of his
career, and give also portraits of the man. He appears to combine in an
unusual degree business capacity, simplicity of nature, back-bone and
fervour. The bourgeois element is lost in the good-hearted man, and he
leaves the very decided impression of being genuine.944
There is an interesting postscript to the Booth Men’s study of Wesleyan
social care. In his published volumes of 1902/3 it appears that Booth was still
biting his nails over the wisdom of the South London Wesleyan Mission’s
“methods” of dispensing charity “largely in the shape of free meals.” There was
also a wide range of recreative services, from brass bands to lantern slides. “It
may, perhaps, savour too much of ‘success at any price,’” Booth wrote, and he
balanced this with Meakin’s thousand-man working-class congregation, and
Meakin’s plea (quoted again) that “the only hope for the slums” was in its
youngsters. In any case there was little doubt that when Booth concluded (in his
characteristic way), that, “It is very difficult to measure the value of this work
from the religious point of view,” he had the SLWM’s charity work most highly
in mind. Unable either to praise or condemn the mission, Booth concluded by
saying the place did much “to lighten and brighten” poor London’s city life, “even
if the methods employed sometimes tend[ed] to lower the standard of religious
taste.”945
That Booth was rather anxious about the mission’s methods was clear
when he returned to discuss them his later discussion of Bermondsey. His
passages here were symptomatic of the bizarre obsession of social theorists during
this period with careless charity, and showed that the latter’s approach to
children’s charity was still a contested issue. Booth began by mentioning, again,
the success of the mission in drawing large numbers to services, but it seems this
944
945
Meakin, B 274: 135.
“Booth, Religious Influences,” 4: 84.
389
was only a pretext for other business. Soon his analysis became a long-winded
paragraph on the mission’s “twenty-five thousand” children’s breakfasts.946
Rambling awkwardly but worriedly about the possibility the mission used
sensational advertisements for their meal programme, Booth interrupted with the
sentence – “Not that, up till now, any failure or disappointment is admitted.” He
reiterated that the work of the mission could only be described as “one triumphant
progress from victory to victory,” but similarly followed this passage with the
words: “Nor should I venture even to suggest the applicability to it of such a word
as failure if there were less pretension.” Up to this point, Booth seemed not sure
what he wanted to say. But he came roughly and haltingly to his point in his last
convoluted sentence: “The success attained, and, I think, likely to be attained, is
certainly in some ways greater than that of others, but it is subject to other
limitations, and the inflated ideas upon which it is borne along are full of
danger.”947
Incredibly, Booth was willing to spend a further two pages on the subject
of free meals in his Inner South London volume. He mentioned the “25,000”
dinner figure again. Then he pointed out the tens of thousands more that were
distributed by the small, “thickly studded” missions of the district. Listing 12,000
dinners, here, and advertisements for more money or bigger buildings to provide
them in, there, Booth finally got up the guts to say what he had wanted to since
the first time he addressed the subject of the South London Wesleyan Mission
(page 36 of his fourth volume). He hinted that giving dinners indiscriminately
might mean they were giving them to Bermondsey boys and girls who did not
need them. He said that he and his investigators had been present in a Tabard
Street mission where “the majority did not look habitually ill fed.” Among poor
mothers, he said: “Parental pride or motherly instinct, very often does not extend
beyond the youngest children; the others are willingly abandoned to the care of
any kind Christians who choose to step in.” Booth was clearly hinting here that
946
“It is said that, in order to ‘spread the work,’ a fresh batch of children was dealt with each
month; a curious plan, which, if other missions do the same, perhaps provides an agreeable variety
for the children.” Ibid., 4: 110. One senses a mixture of both subtle accusation and mild panic, I
think, behind Booth’s words.
947
Ibid., 4: 110-111.
390
kind Christians with a sense of charitable selectivity and restraint could inspire
more effort by mothers to take care of their children. The mission Booth spoke of
was probably G.H. Breton’s Shaftesbury Mission. Aves personally inspected a
mission dinner here. In a passage that is disconcerting to read, the Booth Man
made special mention of the fact that while “thin cheeked” sickly boys and girls
were being fed by the mission, there were many who, while having shabby dress
and mussed hair, did not have a “starved look.” Aves and Booth saw this as a sign
of poor discrimination on Breton’s part.948 Adopting the same parental tone he
took in the case of J.W.C. Fegan above, Booth tried, not very successfully, to end
his discussion on a note of fairness:
The policy of feeding and taking charge of neglected children demands
very serious attention, and is not to be condemned off-hand. I will only
say now that witnesses who speak strongly against the system are to be
found here among the very missionaries by whom, or with whose cooperation, the work has been done on such an enormous scale.949
6. Careful Men: Anglican Charity Control without COS Membership
If Nonconformists maintained autonomy over charitable matters by
holding aloof from the COS (if not its methods), then a number of clergymen
outside the South London charity-controlling elite adopted similar methods.
Those clergymen who did not lead in a formal sense (by membership in, or
cooperation with, the COS) were followers through adherence to the same
methods of “careful” giving. Despite often powerful personalities, their
unoriginality in this respect is more than apparent as one sweeps up from
Vauxhall Bridge to the Thames Tunnel.
Booth did not give them much credit for their efforts. He condemned the
charity work of every clergyman from Lambeth to Blackfriars Road in his
published volumes, calling them men “who dare not let their right hand know
what the left hand is doing, lest the right hand show the folly of it.” “On the other
hand,” he wrote, there was “no direct bribery; no unhealthy stimulus or
948
949
Ibid., 114-116; Breton, B 278: 43-45.
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4:116.
391
excitement,” and there was “at least much evidence to show that such influence as
is exercised by the Church in this unpromising quarter of London is wholesome
and genuine.”950 As with the Nonconformists, it seems that half of Booth’s
analytical mind did not follow the conclusions of its other half. He constantly
tried to say two things at once (perhaps afraid of libel suits, perhaps owing to his
marked tendency to indecision) and we must wait until his final volume
(discussed in my conclusion) to see his final verdict on the metropolitan churches.
It is the unpublished South London interviews which draw us away from
Booth’s impossible vagueness, and towards a better idea of the average
Anglican’s charitable intentions. There was the angelic-faced, rosy-cheeked,
“jolly” and “smiling” Rev. Denny (St. Peter’s). His relief was not on COS lines,
“but great care [was] exercised”; indeed, he thought, “much more might be spent
with advantage.”951 To the two old hands of Lambeth,952 Revs Bromfield (St.
Mary the Less) and Lee (All Saints), the use of COS representatives and
committees may have simply seemed superfluous. The cadaverous, unshaven and
untidy Bromfield had “no Committee for the administration of relief” but was
“above the average in perceptiveness, in humour, and sympathy,” referred
“unknown people…to the C.O.S,” had “a competent staff” and “discouraged” the
giving of relief from visitors (“Something over ₤100” was given annually). 953
Lee, cantankerous, uncompromising, and describing himself as an “old-fashioned
Tory,” “detested” the COS, but this was probably because he saw them as
meddlers. Lee said he gave “mostly in tickets, and on personal knowledge,” and
his “system,” he attested, worked “excellently.”954 Finally there was Lee’s
neighbour, the ultra-Protestant Rev. Barraclough of St. Thomas’ parish. Although
Barraclough refused to cooperate with either the COS or the local Registration
Committee, he likely differed with his colleagues more on doctrinal, rather than
charitable grounds. High and extreme churchmen surrounded him on all sides
950
Ibid., 30.
Denny, B 272: 9. “In spite of his aggressive churchmanship,” wrote Arthur Baxter, “I liked Mr.
Denny. There is nothing sacerdotal or Jesuitical about him in manner or appearance. He is
essentially a good fellow and tremendously in earnest. He is an Irishman and married.” (13)
952
Each man had had the charge of his parish for thirty-two years.
953
Bromfield, B 272: 107.
954
Lee, B 269: 49.
951
392
(Weigall, Lee, and Bainbridge Bell, all high or ritualist, bordered his parish on the
east, the ritualists of St. Alphege’s on the west). Barraclough might betray his
own insecurities through over-the-top self-promotion in the English Churchman
(in which he veritably shouted in print – “And you, my Ritualistic readers, after
you have studied it carefully, go and talk about Evangelical laziness, if you
dare!”) but his actual charitable expenditure remained small (₤57), and his need
to bribe for attendance was largely eliminated by St. Thomas’ largely lowermiddle-class flock. Disdain for a class deserving no charity was inherent in his
description of his parish: “His people are nearly all unskilled (porters, etc. etc.)
with any number of loafers.”955
Rolling over the border into Southwark, that “excellent specimen of the
rich University man” Rev. Bainbridge Bell (St. John the Evangelist) did his work
“sensibly,” according to Baxter. His Parochial Relief Committee “met regularly
during the year every Monday morning” and he had “the satisfaction of knowing
that many cases of genuine distress have been satisfactorily relieved.” Aid went to
the homes of these genuine cases largely “during times of sickness,” saving them
from the workhouse. Permanent work, moreover, had been provided for a good
number of men, women, boys and girls, the vicar said, which in his view, was
“naturally the most satisfactory form of relief that can be given.”956 Like his
colleagues, Bell demonstrated that a man could be “sensible,” even if he was not
COS. He described his “Relief Committee” (started by himself) as “working very
much on C.O.S. lines but better than the C.O.S. as there are no hard and fast rules
each case being decided on its merits.” Not only was “Mr. B.” a “sensible man,”
according to Baxter (the universal word of approval from the Booth Team), he
955
Barraclough, B 269: 169, 163. Barraclough also benefited from parochial charities now
employed for pensions. Referring to the fifty-seven pounds Barraclough gave in relief, Aves
added: “The following is the small relief amount, but larger sums are given in pensions through
grants made from the local trust charities. From the latter for this purpose they get about ₤75, and
in addition about ₤38 for ‘Medical Aid.’”
956
“Parish of St. John the Evangelist, Waterloo Road, S.E.: Third Annual Report. Easter 1899,”
16-17. The vicar enumerated precisely his disbursements for 1899: “We have given 816 relief
tickets during the year; these are for milk, bread, coal, grocery and meat. We have given 29
surgical aid letters, and 146 letters for various hospitals.” (17)
393
employed visitors “much more cultured and educated men than most, so I imagine
discretion is used.”957
Across the Borough High Road958 into Bermondsey a number of
clergymen likewise were, in the language of the day, not COS, but “COSy.”959
Two men, Revs Hewlett and Lees Bell were feeling beaten by their parish work.
One, at 40, was burning out early; the other, at 65, was simply “getting feeble.”
The former, an over-enthusiastic High Churchman, had taken the ideal of Christlike self-denial too far. From the look of him, Baxter wrote, Hewlett was
“probably wearing himself out with hard work and asceticism.”960 Nevertheless,
the experience of years in both East and South End had left him giving carefully.
Relief at St. John’s Horsleydown amounted to only ₤40 a year (well under
average), mostly to the sick, and only to those who he “knew.” Lees Bell, a
typical Broad Churchman (in that he had the instincts of a COS official, if not the
membership card to match) laid out a detailed plan of charity administration to
Ernest Aves. It was after a long complaint about his lack of means (and his
consequent “passing over” by the Bishop for a parish beyond his dismal charge of
Christ Church) that Lees Bell at last came upon the topic of charity.
All the relief is by tickets. He is critical of the C.O.S. thinking that they
ask too much in the way of help for the cases that they take up, and their
demands for pensions he finds especially onerous. In fact, he does not
believe in pensions through private charity at all. “They are the best things
in the world if you can manage them, but it is a government question”.
Once, he said, “in a fit of weakness I gave two of 1/- a week. Both were
957
Bainbridge-Bell, B 169: 15.
On either side of the road (on the South side of London Bridge) were two clergymen who had
lost interest in parish affairs, one the Rev. Canon Thompson, now obsessed with the aesthetic
intricacies of his church-turned-Cathedral (St. Saviour’s), and the other, Reverend Bristow (St.
Olave’s), whose parish was called a “sinecure” in the published Series owing to the fact that
demolitions and warehouse-building in the area had pushed out all but 350 potential church-goers.
In his interview Thompson nevertheless remarked – “Apart from the old parochial charities which
are considerable, and are now spent only in pensions, not much is spent on Relief, only about 30
pounds a year, and that entirely in kind.” His interviewer noted that “Dr. T [was] not altogether
friendly to the C.O.S. but that he thought them said “an admirable investigating society and had
some necessary work.” Thompson, B 269: 109-11; Bristow, as mentioned above, benefited from
parish charities, now mostly in pensions. Bristow, B 275: 163. Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4:
123.
959
Baxter originally formulated the term in his interview with Mr. T. Thornton, Hon. Sec. of the
Mile End COS. In Baxter’s words, Thornton was “not at all unpleasantly C.O.S.y.” Thornton, B
225: 1. Whitechapel’s Miss Maclean was also dubbed “the strictest of C.O.S.ites.”
960
Hewlett, B 275: 101.
958
394
mistakes. One was to a blind man, of a class that always moves our pity
for we are always apt to say “Ah! poor fellow, what can he do?” “Well,
very often,” said Mr. Bell “he can do you”, and he gave me particulars of
the way in which he had himself been taken in.
In such a way could an ostensibly progressive demand for pensions resolve itself
into the opposite: a demand for more scrutiny of “eligible” pensioners. Lees Bell
was Rural Dean of Southwark and a former guardian, and while not a member of
the COS he took great pains in charitable matters. Lees Bell had meticulously
recorded his yearly charitable expenditure (usually never above ₤65) for each of
the previous fifteen years. “Since my advent in 1875,” he noted, “the following
are the annual am[oun]ts of Charitable relief:
1875___49.10.0
1887___54.3.3
1899___41.5.10
1876___40.5.0
1888___55.12.8
Total=1321.18.9
1877___43.11.7
1889___55.15.0
24/1321.18.9 = 55.2.7 Average
1878___45.4.3
1890___52.0.10
1879___57.7.0
1891___56.10.9
1880___57.10.0
1892___65.15.0
1881___75.9.10
1893___55.6.8
1882___54.19.0
1894___50.0.8
1883___59.3.0
1895___64.15.0
1884___50.19.3
1896___44.17.0
1885___49.5.0
1897___45.3.0
1886___55.16.1
1898___42.3.1
“No other body” in Christ Church parish, wrote the old but determined Dean,
gave “systematic relief.” On such immaculate lines as he was giving it, Lees Bell
was probably right!961
7. The Bad, the Dead and the Misunderstood
Men opposed to the organization of charity, for their parishioners’ sakes,
were rare in 1900. It was something of a dereliction of a churchman’s duty in this
period, so often were churchmen admitting the necessity of welding together
scientific and religious approaches to parish work. When we examine the reasons
churchmen gave for their negligence, their opposition, or their outright rebellion
961
Quoted in Lees Bell, B 279: 149.
395
against the organization of charity, therefore, we must approach them carefully.
Bad charitable administrators largely belonged to three groups: past failures
(sometimes scandalous); men the Booth Team described, irritatedly, as “lacking
strict lines”; and the truly delinquent.
One noticeable feature in the Booth interviews was the recurring comment
that past philanthropic failures had, at long last, been replaced by more
responsible men. Comments to this effect came from Revs Bainbridge-Bell,
Longsdon and de Carteret. Bainbridge-Bell had “succeeded Mr. Jephson, a Broad
churchman, who did not much care whether the people came to church or not. He
found the church almost empty, scarcely any workers paid or voluntary, and the
parish almost unvisited.”962 Longsdon, as noted above, recalled, “I can’t tell you
in what state of neglect I found things,”
I think that Newton, who was here before me, used to get as many, if not
more, to church than I do, but he had methods. For instance, he used to get
tickets by the hundred from the Police Court Mission, and put them in the
prayer books, for the old women to come and find. And when they had
found them, they very often went out.963
Approaching the fantastic was de Carteret’s predecessor at St. Paul’s. The
“previous holder of the living,” he said, a Mr. Evans, “was a drunkard, with a
daughter who was a professional prostitute.”
The Archdeacon of Southwark was Mr. De C’s informant. Naturally,
under these strange auspices the parish had been entirely neglected, and,
although by the offer of loaves of bread there is reason to think that the
church attendances were as numerous as they are now, things generally
were in about as bad a condition as possible.
Fortunately for de Carteret, a previous vicar, “appointed six years ago,” had taken
the brunt of work in what was then viewed as a wholly pauperized parish. Thanks
to him, church-work was far less “trying” than it might have been. As occurred
with a number of ministers in this period, De Carteret related how his brave
predecessor ultimately “broke down” under the strain, “having acted apparently in
the spirit of his name – Mr. Allwork.” The vicar’s respect for Allwork’s sacrifices
962
963
Bainbridge-Bell, B 269: 9.
Longsdon, B 269: 63, 75.
396
was obvious. Until he was “handicapped by poor health,” de Carteret said,
Allwork had done his best “to pull things together” at St. Paul’s.964
Of the unreliable and deliberately delinquent Anglicans, there were six,
and two, respectively – rather small pickings in a region of almost thirty parishes.
The most distinguishing characteristic of the first group was the fact they largely
lacked any definable stance at all on charity. Quiet, old and inoffensive, they
made poor opponents for fire-eaters like Longsdon and De Fontaine. Accusations
from the Booth Men hinted not at scandal, but rather at slackness in charitable
methods. They were never called “generous.” Indeed, typically they were dubbed
simply “not strict” (3), or “unscientific” (1). The worst that they could be called
(as 2 were) was “unprincipled.”
The first, Rotherhithe’s “quiet, reserved, kindly,” Rev. Blakeston spent
“About ₤40 a year…in Relief given in tickets at the Vicarage.” He worked with
the C.O.S. to the extent of sending them his “doubtful cases”, but otherwise failed
to work “on strict lines.” Baxter seemed not to approve of Blakeston’s
“occasional relief supplements to men in his parish in receipt of out-relief by the
poor-law guardians.”965 The same rather baseless disapproval was apparent in
Baxter’s account of Blakeston’s Rotherhithe neighbour, Rev. Selby-Hele. Without
“energy or enthusiasm” but “not idle”, the vicar was 60, tall and thin. He gave ₤60
in relief, a “good deal on free meals to children of which last year 4097 were
given.” Sixty pounds was rather low, but free meals (as with the Wesleyans) were
one of those borderline issues for the Booth Men. “Mr. S’ methods I think are
quite unscientific,” wrote Baxter, but in view of his church savings banks he was
nevertheless to be praised for encouraging thrift in the parish. His visitors, rather
than distributing charity, were collectors for a Collecting Savings Bank which had
accumulated ₤65 over the last twelve months.966 If not a Bardsley or a
Bainbridge-Bell, Selby-Hele was a somewhat active vicar. The parish of Holy
Trinity, moreover, was too cash-strapped to be careless. In 1889, Selby Hele had
“succeeded Vicar who for the last 15 years [since 1874] of his pastorate suffered
964
De Carteret, B 269: 185.
Blakeston, B 279: 125, 129-31.
966
Selby-Hele, B 279: 103, 107.
965
397
from a throat disease which made him inaudible and who only remained on in
order to qualify for a pension of ₤65 a year, which has to be paid out of Mr. S’s
small stipend of ₤180.”967 Again, what had singled these men out as failures
appears, in retrospect, to be the Booth Men’s “professional” straw-splitting.
To these quiet and tired vicars could be added the Rector of Lambeth,
Rev. Andrews Reeve, who was simply overwhelmed by the developments that
had taken place in urban church social work – work reaching the height of its
sophistication in this period. Brought from Cornwall, he had been rector four-anda-half years years, but he reeked of inexperience to Ernest Aves. So “greenly” had
the rector conducted himself in his interview, Aves noted, that allowance had to
be made “for some of the opinions he expressed.”968 Metropolitan church work
simply floored the man. It was all simply too “wondrous” for him to see women
club volunteers or their members working so eagerly at such things as local
sanitary matters. He interrupted his interview with cries of “Wonderful” at
different aspects of parish work and, importantly, he admitted that he had only
had contact with the “decent” men and women of his parish (his “intercourse with
the Ishmaels [the very poor] of his cure” being apparently “smaller”). Andrews
Reeve was a man who believed poor people with a “sense of decency” were a
“constant source of marvel,” and who said things like “The astounding goodness
of bad people impresses me always.”969
Very possibly Andrews Reeve was let nowhere near ground-level charity
work by his church workers (3 curates, a scripture reader, a nurse, a Bible woman,
a deaconess, a certain number of district visitors, several ladies working in the
church’s clubs, 35 Sunday School teachers, and four churchwardens, three of
them appointed by the local vestry). This, at least, was the testimony of the local
967
Ibid., 101.
“His experience of London is thus not a long one,” wrote Aves, “and allowance must be made
on this account for some of the opinions he expressed. Also, he is not of the robust type, and his
mind is to some extent reflected by the extreme gentleness of his voice. He murmurs, and all
utterance is in the minor key. But he is a very human soul, touches of humour flash from time to
time, he is full of sympathy, and of generous appreciation, even wonderment, at the goodness and
the good work of other people.” Andrews Reeve, B 272: 69.
969
Ibid., 81, 83.
968
398
COS official, Rev. Mackintosh Walker.970 Whether or not the workers of St.
Mary’s had indeed taken the reins of relief work in the face of their naïve and
overawed rector, Ernest Aves clearly felt he had enough evidence to indict the
rector with the charge of charitable indiscipline. “Mr. Reeves hardly ranks among
the strict administrators of charity,” he wrote. But this was hardly enough to close
the rector’s case. St. Mary’s parish relief machinery was simply too sophisticated.
A functioning district relief committee (administering about ₤100 a year) was
based at St. Mary’s, to which the rector said he had “invited others to send
representatives.” Despite this, Aves was irked by the rector’s comment that
moneys were occasionally “given away privately, and without reference to the
committee” (“you can only be loyal to a point” he “frankly” and good-naturedly
told Aves). By the close of his interview Aves (who several times expressed a
liking towards the child-like clergyman) failed to conclude one way or another
about relief at St. Mary’s. With vibrant and popular church clubs – and the
presence of local authorities such as “Mr. Turner, a Guardian, and Mr. [F.B.]
Meyer’s Secretary” (who, apparently, was “very helpful”) on his relief committee
– how could he? Andrews Reeve was even on the Committee of Lambeth’s
parochial charities, which, it was noted, were administered under “Charity
Commission Schemes.” Was Andrews a charity rebel? On the basis of his pieeyed testimony, and without that of his churchworkers (some of whom he said he
gave a “free hand” in auxiliary work), it is doubtful.971
One vicar south of Lambeth Bridge was sufficiently experienced in charity
administration to defend the work of his church. Unfairly, his testimony was
dismissed by Arthur Baxter. Rev. Lilly pleaded that his “object” (like everyone
else), was chiefly “to lead [parishioners] on to higher things” (his most faithful
often drawn from auxiliaries such as the church’s clubs). Point blank, he told
970
“One of the curates (Mr. Carrack, formerly a Dissenter) on C.O.S. committee, and also others
from the parish,” said Mackintosh Walker. “Also a parish committee, but Mr. Reeve’s own idea is
‘to give half-crowns’, and Walker does not think that he is over loyal to his own Committee. A
very gentle-hearted man. Much help from Surbiton, and many agencies in the parish, but not many
of them run by the Rector.” Mackintosh Walker, B 273: 41-43.
971
Ibid., 73, 77. Booth could not bring himself to condemn the church, only noting that it was
“ready to and does co-operate with other religious bodies on such questions as social morality,
temperance, and relief of distress.” Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 42-43.
399
Baxter that while he was aware of the incessant charge of bribery against the
Christian churches of South London, that this was “a quite untrue charge in [the]
case” of Emmanuel parish.972 Baxter wrote that Rev. Lilly was a “a dull,
uninteresting, good, conscientious man,” who, on balance, was putting “a lot of
work is put into the parish.” But he damned Lilly with the comment, “Relief is
from ₤100 to ₤120 a year: it is not administered on strict lines.”
As we will see in my conclusion, the Rector of Bermondsey, Rev. Henry
Lewis, had his account slightly altered by Booth for the published volumes.
Lewis’ account of his relief was a mess of contradictory statements. Lewis, for
example, had large attendances in his mothers’ meetings, and this led Baxter to
assume “that the Mothers have come in for even more plums than elsewhere: and
certainly Mr. L. is not likely to discourage indiscriminate almsgiving and
treating.” Placing a large space between sentences for emphasis, Baxter recorded
Lewis’ defiant words of opposition to the Charity Organisation Society: “We are
at war with the C.O.S,” he said. Lewis noted of the Society: “they dislike doles:
now we find doles often most useful: our experience is that a shilling grocery
ticket for a week or two will often tide a family over the bad time.” I will leave to
my conclusion how Booth resolved the rather contradictory evidence –given in
Lewis’ prepared notes on parish work. In these Lewis affirmed that all charity
work was done by careful enquiry, at a Wednesday meeting between clergy and
church workers, and its aim was to “minimize imposition” by the undeserving
poor. 973 Although Booth would resolve the issue by simply ignoring some of the
evidence Lewis presented, “cooking his books” in some respects, there is no way
to resolve such contradictions. Despite Lewis’ windy proclamations of war
against charity control, he was nevertheless on the look-out for a class of the
undeserving.
972
Lilly, B 272: 45, 41, 37, 35.
Lewis, B 275: 61-63; Lewis, “Answers to Mr. Charles Booth’s questions,” 21. Like the East
London Nonconformists, Lewis’ system of visitation was elaborate. Despite having a parish
population of 24,000, the district was “completely mapped out,” so much so that Lewis could say:
“we may not always succeed in entering [parishioners’ houses], but the visiting gives some
information about every house or shop in the parish.” Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 103.
973
400
Rev. Dodge of St. Stephens’ may have been the only man “bad” without
qualification in his charitable work. But he was bad because he was desperate.
Dodge presided over the “large dark blue area lying between Long Lane and
Great Dover Street:” the area Booth had called the most depressingly poor district
to be found in London.974 Between 50 and 60, stout, rather unwieldy and
awkward, “shy and slightly gauche,” Dodge had little in the way of charisma.975
He handed over ₤200 a year, in Baxter’s words, “evidently without any
principle.” It is an interesting fact, as we will see in Part IV, that despite his
generosity, he was a failure among his parishioners. He could not attract sufficient
workers to the church, and those who did come were too often “frightened away”
by parish conditions. He had tried every kind of social agency, and each had
failed, one after the other. Dodge impressed upon Baxter his love for his
parishioners, but he complained how he could not prevent the young men of the
parish from avoiding his church. Even those, he said, who occasionally joined his
service, or attended his clubs, seemed frequently to slip away. It must have been a
real blow that even children of Sunday school age, usually a London clergyman’s
saving grace, would not attend classes at St. Stephen’s. “The numbers given for
the Sunday School are small,” Arthur Baxter wrote, and this “in spite of the fact
that Mr. D. is evidently very lax in his principles of admission…” Dodge made
“apparently no effort to keep out those who attend merely for the treat: to do so he
said ‘would keep out many whom we should be sorry to deprive of a day’s
pleasure.’”976 Dodge’s failure left him grasping at straws in his interview. Perhaps
it had been a “great mistake to bring the church to the people” of the slums, he
thought: perhaps it might be better to build near a “good thoroughfare,” “where
the people can attend without attracting the attention of their neighbours.” It
seemed that some kind of popular taboo was keeping people from the churches,
and – to the end – Dodge had no idea what it was. The reader is left with this
poor, kind man’s remark “that quite an appreciable number of his parishioners
d[id] occasionally go to outside churches and chapels who would not dare to go to
974
Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 105, 102.
Dodge, B 275: 13.
976
Ibid., p. 19-21.
975
401
their parish church.”977 Some in his parish went to other centres of worship; they
simply did not want to go to his.
What the testimony of these six “failures” proves was that opposition to
charity organization was in no sense an organized opposition. Only two
clergymen in Poor South London actually seemed guilty of unashamedly
providing charity without inquiry. Both of them were from Southwark. The first,
Father Goulden, had been for years a legendary priest and a veritable autocrat in
his parish of St. Alphege’s. Goulden asked the leave of neither clergyman nor
COS man in the district, the mission becoming an island unto itself. However,
while his mission’s selfless beginnings – in a reeking coster’s shed, built over a
cess-pool – were laudable to a Victorian audience, his charitable practices were
not. Goulden had become infamous for his charitable excesses – his “reckless
giving and sensationalism,” in Aves’ words, the choicest of gossip.978 His
“influence,” of course, was difficult to trace for the Booth Men. This was because,
by the time of the Booth survey’s South London interviews, Goulden was dead.
It is significant that, though he had been gone three years, St. Alphege’s
curates were nevertheless defensive at the coming of Ernest Aves. They
scrambled on word of the approach of their Booth Man, and by the second week
of July, 1899, they had chosen the slick and self-assured Rev. R. Mackrell to
receive him. Aves knew a set-up when he saw one. Perhaps due to the contrived
feeling surrounding the interview, Mackrell, to Aves, was “not an attractive man.”
He was “tall in stature,” and “large in voice,” but “inclined to unction, selfsufficiency and conceit.” “His position accustoms him to seeing people,” Aves
added, “and I rather suspect that Mr. Hydes, the acting resident curate, passed our
request for an interview on to Mr. Mackrell so that we might be cautiously dealt
with, and the wrong thing not said.” Mackrell provided Aves only old, irrelevant
annual reports for the parish and said he knew “little really of the working of the
977
978
Ibid., p. 19.
Mackrell, B 269: 215.
402
parish itself, his co-operation having been exclusively connected with the
ministrations of the church.”979
Aves nevertheless saw through Mackrell’s smokescreen. Dirt on St.
Alphege’s was already in the possession of the Booth team, Aves and Baxter
having interviewed most of Southwark’s clergymen prior to the July interview.
Three years following the death of Goulden, indeed, two facts dominated the
minds of neighbouring Southwark churchmen (and women) when they turned to
the troubled legacy of St. Alphege’s. The first was the fact that Goulden’s
immediate successor had been a drunk. As we saw earlier, a breakdown or turn to
drink among clergymen overwhelmed by poverty or financial strain was not
unheard of. The question of whether a drinking problem was at the root of the
collapse of a Father Calcutt dominated the opening lines of Aves interview with
Mackrell:
This well known Mission is in a transition time, a new Vicar having been
just appointed, the late one having resigned after two years or so of work.
The founder of the Mission, Father Goulden, with whose name it is
associated, died some three years ago, and it was during his lifetime that
things were in the heyday of activity. His successor had been working for
some eight years at the neighbouring parish of All Hallows, and has
recently resigned. Mr. De Fontaine made it clear that there was a
“personal” cause.
Toynbee [the local Secretary of the COS] said plainly that he was
compelled to resign; but his friend Mr. Mackrell would only say that [he]
broke down under the strain, especially the financial strain, of the Mission.
Toynbee has since told me that the vicar in question, Father Calcutt, was a
very coarsely fibered man in appearance of whom the charge of
intemperance, made to him quite positively by a reliable authority, might
quite well be true, and if so it seems charitable to suppose that a weakness
was increased by the difficulties of a very burdensome position.980
For Aves, this was important information. It is significant that after his
interview with Mackrell, Aves dug up the typed transcript of his De Fontaine
interview. In his spidery scribble, and with spelling errors abounding, he wrote a
kind of postscript to his conversation with the rector. Sympathy or pity prompted
this short passage:
979
980
Ibid., 217.
Mackrell, B 269: 213.
403
Mr. de Fontaine said nothing more definite than what I have written above
[concerning the reasons behind Rev. Calcutt’s resignation]. Mr. Mackrell,
who was seen for St. Alphege’s, admitted nothing more than a breakdown,
through the strain of the work and worry about raising the money
necessary to keep things going. Toynbee said it was a case of debt. It is
probable that Macrell [sic] and Toynbee between them give the facts of
the situation. I have no doubt but that Allcutt had to resign, poor chap.981
Fortunately the Nonconformists in the region were hardly as discreet as
the face-saving Southwark Anglicans. One local missioner said flatly that “The
late vicar (Calcutt) used to drink and had to be sent away, suffering form D.T.’s,
at least the servants say so.” Another London City Missionary gave the same
account of Calcutt. “Of the Vicar of St. Alphege (Rev Calcutt) he gave the same
reason for his resignation as Miss Martin e.g. D.T’s.” Arkell left a large space
before the missionary’s next sentence: “He was always drunk.”982
While Calcutt’s excesses were appalling enough in this exceedingly moral
society, Aves was most interested in whether Goulden’s tradition of
indiscriminate charity had been continued in the parish. Already a number of
clergymen had told the Booth team that Goulden had published sensational
accounts in the London press as a means of drawing church donations. St.
Alphege’s was accused all round of asking too much money to meet its charitable
needs. COS men like Longsdon seemed half-scornful, half-envious in their
comments about the Mission. “Both getting helpers and getting money are great
difficulties with me and I sometimes wonder how people like Harry Wilson and
the people of St. Alphege’s manage it.” “Father Goulden used to raise 3 or 4
thousand a year,” Longsdon said – “Yes he used to be called the ‘Coster’s
Bishop’ and the press used to write it up. We used to laugh.”983 De Fontaine’s
tone was harder. Unmercifully did he allude, when speaking of Goulden, “to the
evils of overlapping” that issued from the perpetrators of charitable excess. St.
Alphege’s was a simple case of bribery and sheep-stealing to the Rector. Whether
it was St. Alphege’s or anyone else, he “was inclined to impute ‘mercenary
981
De Fontaine, B 269: 137.
Miss Martin, B 270: 87; Caine, B 270: 129.
983
Longsdon, B 269: 75.
982
404
motives’ to…those who sent out their sensational appeals.” Here we see the same
betrayal of a local holy man by his colleagues that we saw in the case of Anglican
scandals, or with J.W.C. Fegan above. The ideal of charity control was simply so
important at this time. Rev. Sommerville, for example, alluded to St. Alphege’s
when he described his own flock as “the largest unbribed congregation in the
neighbourhood.” His parish of St. George the Martyr, he told Arthur Baxter, was
“a refuge for the destitute in a district which [was] rapidly being Romanised.” The
“romanisers” in question, however, were not of the Catholic kind: “The church
which Mr. S. had mainly in mind in his references to bribery and Romanisers was
St. Alphege, where relief is given lavishly, and practically only to those who will
attend church or meetings.” Foreshadowing Aves’ visit, Somerville told Baxter to
expect a great deal of guile from authorities at St. Alphege’s. “As I was going Mr.
S. warned me not to believe all we heard from St. Alphege’s. ‘You will be told’
he said “of the wonders that have been effected by ‘the Catholic Faith’ of the
numbers confirmed, the number of communicants and so on: it ‘is all the result of
bribery.’”984
Charles Booth, who had relied on Ernest Aves, who had relied on Rev. De
Fontaine of Christ Church parish, had much more hope for St. Alphege’s in his
published volumes. De Fontaine had told a, probably relieved, Aves how “The
new Vicar, Mr. Tylee, has just been appointed,” and that with him, there seemed
the prospect of more responsible churchwork. “Mr. De Fontaine had seen him the
day before,” wrote Aves, and from his chat with St. Alphege’s new vicar, De
Fontaine concluded three things:
He thinks that [Tylee] has been looking into things carefully, and admitted
that the [more recent] statements that the Mission had begged upon were,
to say the least of it misleading. In the heyday of his time Father Goulden
used to collect ₤6000 a year. He was succeeded after a short interregnum,
by Mr. Allcutt, but the latter resigned after a little time through a “little
difficulty, of a personal kind.”985
984
985
Sommerville, B 269: 27-9.
De Fontaine, B 269: 135-7.
405
It was with Tylee, or Tylor, for his name was not clear from Aves’ reports, both
Aves and De Fontaine expected charitable improvement. Aves passed this hopeful
account on to Booth: “We do not know what the future of this Mission may be,
but Mr. De Fontaine has said that the new man, Mr. Tylor, has been looking into
things very carefully, and that in the future the parish will be very differently
worked. He (Tylor) also criticised the misleading character of the St. Alphege
appeals in the past.”986
The process of how this impressionistic information reached Booth as a
testament of fact is itself symptomatic of the wildly subjective method by which
the Booth Team did its work. Nevertheless Booth spoke of the charity work at St.
Alphege’s under Goulden as a form of philanthropy that had seen its day. “The
story of the work at St. Alphege is a story of the past,” Booth wrote, as if he was
writing the epitaph not only of Goulden, but of irresponsible charity work.
[T]he time of our inquiry (July, 1899) was for it a period of transition.
Changes were impending, but up to that time the work was still carried
forward on the lines of High Church practices, combined with the
sensational appeals and great pretensions with which its name has become
connected. The work has been very futile on the religious side, and on the
social side positively mischievous. Huge sums have been raised by rather
questionable means and spent none too wisely. There is a considerable and
remarkable consensus of opinion that the evil conditions of the
neighbourhood have been accentua