Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-but-Respectable 9780773598607

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1 Charles Booth: The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist
2 The “Religious Influences” Series: What It Was and What Booth Proposed
3 “Ordinary Mortals”: History and Holy Men of London
4 Women and Charity: Love, Feminism, and “Men’s Worlds”
5 The Hard Lines of the Working-Class Hierarchy
6 Discipline and Release: Religion and Drink
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T h e Mo r al Mappi n g of Vi ctor i an an d E dw ar di an Lon don

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The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-but-Respectable

T h o m a s R . C . G i b s o n - B ry d o n

E d i t e d by

Hillary Kaell and Brian Lewis

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4686-8 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4687-5 (paper) 978-0-7735-9860-7 (eP DF ) 978-0-7735-9861-4 (eP UB)

Legal deposit first quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gibson-Brydon, Thomas R. C., 1976–2009, author The moral mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian charity, and the poor-but-respectable / Thomas R.C. GibsonBrydon; edited by Hillary Kaell and Brian Lewis. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4686-8 (cloth). – is bn 978-0-7735-4687-5 (paper). – isbn 978-0-7735-9860-7 (pdf). – is bn 978-0-7735-9861-4 (ep u b ) 1. Booth, Charles, 1840-1916. Life and labour of the people in London.  2. Poor – England – London.  3. Working class – England – London.  4. Charities – England – London.  5. London (England) – Moral conditions.  6. London (England) – Religion.  7. London (England) – Social conditions.  I. Kaell, Hillary, editor  II. Lewis, Brian, 1965-, editor  III. Title. HV 4086.L66G52 2016   305.5’690942109034   C2015-906989-0 C 2015-906990-4

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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In memory of Tom and Laura

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Contents

Preface by Brian Lewis  ix Introduction 3 1  Charles Booth: The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist  18 2  The “Religious Influences” Series: What It Was and What Booth Proposed  37 3  “Ordinary Mortals”: History and Holy Men of London  54 4  Women and Charity: Love, Feminism, and “Men’s Worlds”  86 5  The Hard Lines of the Working-Class Hierarchy  104 6  Discipline and Release: Religion and Drink  139 Conclusion 163 Notes 169 Bibliography 197 Index 217

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Preface

Tom Gibson-Brydon completed his PhD dissertation under my supervision in 2007. He had begun the process of turning it into a book when, in July 2009, he and his partner, Laura Nagy, were tragically killed in an automobile accident while driving back from his hometown of Kelowna, B C , to Montreal. I and his other advisers and examiners – Colin Duncan, Elizabeth Elbourne, Sandra Den Otter, and Torrance Kirby – agreed that his work deserved to be published, both because he had important things to say and also to serve as a lasting memorial to a young scholar of considerable promise and a friend of exceptional warmth and humanity. Tom’s dissertation is an exhaustive and illuminating study of the relatively neglected “Religious Influences” series in the Charles Booth Enquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London archive at the London School of Economics. In combing through the  fascinating and largely untapped interviews of 1,800 London churchmen and women, Tom not only brings to life a whole cast of  characters ­– from “Jesusist” vicars to Peckham Rye preachers to  women drinkers – who have received scant attention in other histories, he also discerns a city­wide audit of charitable giving and philanthropic practices. And he uncovers in the startlingly frank ­testimony not only “social scientists,” Christians, and philanthropists deploying moralistic languages stigmatizing and excluding the despised underclasses, but also members of the working classes themselves who were addicted to moral segregation as they tried to maintain their rank in the poor-but-respectable hierarchy. In critiquing the warm idea of working-class solidarity and community

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x Preface

building portrayed by many leading social and labour historians, Tom argues for a much meaner, bleaker reality in London’s teeming neighbourhoods. The dissertation is 850 pages long and should be consulted by those eager to know more about the riches of this remarkable archive. But publication required something slimmer, and the heroic task of winnowing it down and reorganizing it was largely the achievement of Hillary Kaell, a friend of Tom’s who volunteered for the task and who was supported out of a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHR C ). Much of the rest of the editing, prose-improving, and footnote-correlating was done by myself. Our aim throughout this process was to maintain Tom’s voice as clearly as possible, essentially by selecting one or two of his large number of examples to support each point. We have from time to time rewritten for clarity and toned down some of his more polemical sallies; but we have not attempted to impose our own opinions, and we did not think it appropriate to conduct extra research or add material. We did not, in other words, want to create a Gibson-Brydon / Kaell /Lewis hybrid but to keep the book authentically Tom’s. This is an imperfect compromise: he would undoubtedly have done a better job himself had he had time to do additional work, reflect, and rewrite. But, whatever he thought of our efforts, I know that he would have flashed us one of his characteristic 100-watt smiles. In the acknowledgments for his dissertation, Tom thanked Colleen Parish and the staff of McGill History Department; the staff of the London School of Economics archives; Professors Colin Duncan, Ruth Sandwell, and myself; and his friends Tavis Triance, Sebastian Normandin, David Meren, Jarrett Rudy, Danny Anderson, Martin Forcier, John Jaenicke, Chris Karogiannis, Matt Farnholtz, and Richard and Jane Duncan. In particular he paid moving tribute to Laura (“for her patience, her strength, and her partnership I thank her from the bottom of my heart”), to his mother, Cathay Gibson (she “provided me with an example of compassion and sacrifice that underpins all of my writing”), to his brother, Jeff, to his father, Tom Brydon, and to his late grandfather. To this list I would like to add my warm thanks to Professor Robert Tittler for preparing the index, to James Wallace for typing up a copy of the thesis, and to the staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press for their fortitude and accommodation during the protracted process of revision and preparation

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of the manuscript. Tom’s doctoral studies were supported by a S S H RC fellowship and the book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by SSHR C .

Brian Lewis Department of History and Classical Studies McGill University 1 May 2015

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Introduction

Few men in late Victorian social histories are referred to more consistently than Charles Booth. A Liverpool shipping magnate, philanthropist, and social scientist, he spent a considerable amount of money and more than a decade of his life studying the working class and poor of late Victorian London. Foremost among his publications was The Life and Labour of the People in London, a seventeen-­ volume series painstakingly researched and collated between approximately 1886 and 1903. With pages upon pages of interviews, charts, and colour-coded maps, the project was divided into three distinct sections: poverty, labour and industry, and religious influences. Booth’s inquiry made him something of a celebrity; in his own time, social thinkers regularly referred to him, and today he is worth at least a footnote in most histories of the period.1 Yet often he is treated only as a vehicle for other stories. Few historians know that Booth himself is the story; he provides us with a window onto a religious, class-stratified society grappling with moralized ideas of work and charity. Two opposing conceptions of Charles Booth and his survey predominate in historical scholarship. One group has seen Booth’s investigations as compromised by his moral assumptions. Beginning with John Brown’s articles in the late 1960s and 1970s, this scholarship (principally focused on Booth’s “Poverty” and “Industry” series) interrupted the far more benign assessments of Booth by his wife (in 1918) and Thomas and Margaret Simey (in 1960). Perhaps doubting the empirical value of any study of religion for social history, many historians dismissed Booth’s “Religious Influences” books as a relevant historical source, calling them “useless,” “impressionistic,” and

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“redundant.”2 A newer group, characterized by less critical scholarship – indeed celebrating Booth as a humane, modern social scientist – renewed interest in his Life and Labour survey in the 1980s and 1990s. Although such scholarship does recognize Booth’s “Religious Influences” series, it tends to see it as somehow disconnected from his earlier work on poverty and industries.3 Using the unpublished series notebooks, this book shows that there is a consistent thread throughout Booth’s work. Through the entirety of Booth’s surveys one can detect two elements: first, a commitment to the moral division of working people into respectable and unrespectable classes and, second, an overriding concern for improperly selective charity – much of which was distributed through the metropolitan churches. Indeed, this latter concern is perhaps the most repeated and explicit theme in the Booth archive, reiterated constantly in the unpublished interviews for the “Religious Influences” series.

Moral-Religious Sensibility in the Late-Victorian Period Over Booth’s lifetime (1840–1916) a great shift occurred. Among the men and women of his class, at least, the public discourse moved from one centered on evangelical religion to a more “scientific” outlook. Yet the social science that men like Booth practised was fundamentally rooted in the authoritarian evangelicalism of the past,4 the lynchpin of which was the idea of “character,” the substance of a man that, it was felt, could be preserved through the invigorating pain of work and competition. Character could be endangered and the instinct to work and compete softened when charity was provided indiscriminately to the poor. This belief in moral capitalism and character in 1900, which historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has called “secularized Evangelicalism,” was a mirror image of the evangelicalism promoted by Anglican clerics three-quarters of a century before.5 Was this then evangelicalism, or was it secular “moral” thought? The best we can do is to call it both: a moral-religious sensibility. These ideas were hegemonic in the late Victorian period. The “tendency to carry morality into every sphere of life” was, historian Stefan Collini notes, consistent across the political spectrum after 1870. He has found it “intoned like hallelujahs in the litany of

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Introduction 5

every reforming group of the period,” from the hardiest individualist to the most earnest socialist.6 The ideal of character, and the exclusion of a section of society on moral grounds, was “at the very heart of the hegemonic assumptions of the age.” As one contributor to The Encyclopedia of Social Reform noted in 1897 (the same year Booth began his “Religious Influences” series), “[I]n 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.”7 This fear of working-class moral deterioration, or the weakening of working-class character, was Booth’s obsession as well. Booth believed that the pain of work and self-discipline could constitute a revitalizing experience.8 He saw cycles of economic depression as necessary, and, although he admitted that men did “suffer from these alterations,” he suggested that this was not necessarily negative, writing, “As to character, the effect, especially on wageearners, 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.”9 He felt that this suffering was natural – like winter following summer – and therefore abhorred any proposals for collective charity or welfare that would do away with invigorating stress and anxiety.10 Of course, this concept of competition implied and permitted persistent misery among a section of society. Like many people at the time, including prominent working-class leaders, Booth believed that certain social groups had no chance at socioeconomic wellbeing, and it was therefore better to exclude them from the working world and even consign them to labour colonies, which would 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.”11 Moral-religious ideas of idleness ­– notions of the absolute moral necessity of work – were simply so hegemonic at this time as to have obscured the full horror of this authoritarianism. Booth shrugged at such methods, saying frankly, “[I]t is not a pleasant thing to be improved off the face of the earth.”12

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The “Religious Influences” Series It is within this context that we must situate Booth and his lifelong obsession with the moral and material improvement of working people, which culminated in a city-wide social classification scheme, employing an alphabetical, six-class hierarchy and colour-coded maps of where each class lived. Booth’s great innovation was to show that London’s poor were not uniform: they could be divided into distinct classes based on their appearance, behaviour, and, moreover, their own self-assessment. Of Booth’s six classes of working people, four were “respectable,” and two (classes A and B) were not. The latter, he believed, were “loafers,” socially and morally unfit since they were unable to appreciate the value of work. With all his maps and data, Booth concluded that, in fact, most working people in London were respectable; 30 per cent of Londoners were poor, he wrote, but fully 20 per cent were poor-but-respectable, with only 9 per cent loafer (class B) and a mere 1 per cent actually criminal (class A). Booth had no sympathy for loafers who shirked work and responsibility, but he loved, indeed fetishized, the respectable poor, whom he saw as substantially independent, despising charity, and capable of what he believed to be moral self-control. In his “Poverty” series, he told the world about them, and it was to improve their lives that he conducted his surveys and made his recommendations. He felt that he was serving their needs, and that fact is crucial to understanding the “Religious Influences” series. In the “Poverty” series, Booth identified what he felt was a solution to the problem of rampant poverty: segregate as much as possible the loafer poor from the respectable. He advocated a “principle of action … to interfere by administrative action and penalties at each point at which life falls below a minimum standard, while offering every opportunity for improvement.”13 In the “Labour” series, which tracked the rapidly growing factories of the industrial revolution and its concomitant economic inequality and health concerns, Booth’s rather bland conclusion was to celebrate the moral influence of the great engine of capitalist competition. He recommended continued entrepreneurship by London’s industrial elite, and only limited organization and regulation. In other words, Booth was convinced that a spiritualized capitalism produced a respectable, working-class majority (however poor), and this belief is what underpinned much of the Life and Labour inquiry. The “Religious

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Influences” series (published 1902–03) followed naturally from these conclusions. In its seven volumes, Booth advocated an applied version of the poverty distinctions he had created almost a decade earlier. His team of investigators – Jesse Argyle, George Arkell, Ernest Aves, Arthur Baxter, and George Duckworth – spent six years conducting 1,800 interviews with a wide range of London’s religious leaders. It was Booth’s third citywide study, and his team spent years investigating every single slum of the metropolis. “Every street, court and alley has been visited,” he concluded with satisfaction.14 Religion had long been fundamental to how Booth understood working-class “improvement.” Early on, in 1870, he suggested that, “the only way in which the thoughts and habits of the people in general could be influenced for the better was by means of an organized religious influence.”15 It is still something of a shock for historians painting Booth as a social progressive to find him, in 1897, standing amidst the social wreckage of Blackfriars Road, asking the question, “What role can religion play in these conditions?”16 Yet Booth believed that religion could prompt a steadier, more ­regular lifestyle and decent habits. The religion provided by the churches, Booth wrote, acted as a “restraining power,” a “social pressure of great importance in support of order,” and one that could “raise” people from poverty.17 By the time he began the “Religious Influences” series, however, Booth had become convinced that religious organizations – churches, chapels, missions – were in fact ruining the otherwise positive nature of unadulterated religious influence. Despite the fact that “immense efforts were being made” on the part of religious bodies “to give people uplift,” they were, nevertheless, “not succeeding.”18 The problem, in short, was charity. Booth believed that London’s philanthropists and churches, rather than inculcating the values of self-sufficiency through “scientific” charity, were giving money and foodstuffs indiscriminately to the poor, creating dependence and thus moral ruin. The goal of the “Religious Influences” series was to create a clear set of “scientific” maps and labels that would enable those who distributed charity in the metropolis to see the hierarchy of working people in their visiting districts and thereby distinguish who should receive help and who should not. Moreover, the interviews sought to convey the ideals and methods of charity control. What this meant on the ground was that the various parochial charities were “rationalized” by charity commissioners who ran them or sat on their

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boards. Whereas these charities formerly gave “doles” in bread, coals, or cash to the poor, under the new rationalization (or “scientific”) scheme, these doles were converted to pensions for deserving elderly, or their funds were turned toward things like local technical education.19 Charity “professionals” throughout the metropolis cheered these reforms and Booth’s contemporaries praised his maps and charts as a key tool in the new “science” of giving. As the Morning Post of 26  May 1887 had 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 … [S]uch hard facts as have been collected in this inquiry form the basis for the efforts of both the legislator and the philanthropist.” 20

Bo o th th r o u gh th e H i stor i an ’s Len s Although contemporaries welcomed the “Religious Influences” series as an encouragement to more “responsible” charity, no historian has yet called it what it was: an audit of London church charity. Nor have historians realized the impact of religious thought on Booth’s intellectual formation. Historian Rosemary O’Day argues that this lacuna is due to Booth’s first biographers, Thomas and Margaret Simey, who relied too much on the Booth children, George and Meg. In 1957, the Simeys asked them why their father’s “Poverty” and “Industry” surveys were followed by the (rather enormous) “Religious Influences” volumes. “Was he turning from Positivism to more orthodox views? … Did he sense that Science was not enough?” 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.” Were they right, the Simeys asked, to see a hidden religious sensibility behind the series? The Booth children flatly answered “no.” Their father “probably” had wrestled with religion early in life but they were “convinced” this was not the case at the time of the inquiry, when he was “deeply interested” in his survey’s subject but only “in an impersonal way.” “As a result,” O’Day writes, “the offending sentences implying that the survey was a personal

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Introduction 9

search for a religious creed were removed from the early drafts of the Simeys’ book.”21 Yet even with this insight, O’Day and her coauthor David Englander portray Booth as a secular positivist, with the potential even for socialism.22 As a result of these missteps, historians have portrayed Booth as a humane, sensitive man.23 They have set him up as a counter to the hard-line individualism of the Charity Organisation Society (CO S ). Founded in 1869, the goal of the CO S was to regulate charitable overlap and, by gathering information on the ground, make decisions about who should receive aid and how. In fact, as this book points out, Booth and the C O S officials were in complete agreement ideologically; historians have greatly exaggerated disputes over oldage pensions, for example.24 C OS officials had a profound impact on the research and writing of Booth’s “Religious Influences” series and Arthur Baxter, one of Booth’s closest secretaries and investigators, was himself a former C O S official. This does not mean that historians have completely ignored the “moral” Booth. John Brown, Gareth Stedman Jones, E.P. Hennock, and Michael Cullen have each noted Booth’s moralistic diatribes against certain unrespectable members of the poor. Cullen draws attention to Booth’s preoccupation with the “moral consequences of  poverty,” particularly evident in his “insistent use of the terms ‘respectable’ and ‘disreputable’.”25 The great strength of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Poverty and Compassion (1992) is her emphasis on Booth’s unfailing sympathy for the poor-but-respectable and his frustration when the deserving class C was confused by contemporaries with the loafers and beggars of class B.26 This understanding is a crucial addition to the work of Booth’s most prominent historians, Rosemary O’Day and David Englander. In their 1993 book, they repeatedly describe Booth as “humane” and “sensitive” in his approach to the poor.27 They even see him as a “sympathetic” man with “a larger liberal vision” who “tried not to be judgemental.” 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 misleading.28 Booth was sympathetic only to class C. Like many contemporaries, Booth saw structural factors leading to the poverty of the poor-but-respectable, but in their case alone. A.W. Vincent notes the same inconsistency in “moral” and “environmental” notions of (and solutions to) poverty by the CO S , which reflected

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a wider moralized culture.29 In light of this, it remains important for historians to continue to acknowledge the people that men like Booth excluded from mercy. What Booth’s surveys do tell us is quite a bit about how the poorbut-respectable understood themselves. Although Booth’s wife Mary exaggerated the closeness of her husband’s connection with the working classes, he certainly did identify aspects of social relations shared by his class and theirs.30 In other words, most historians of the social survey go too far in suggesting that Booth could not understand the people he studied because the middle class held views about status and hierarchy that differed substantially from their working-class counterparts.31 For example, Seth Koven has remarked how surveys like Booth’s were innovative but not dialogic. They were innovative in that they “solicited their data directly from the populations being surveyed: workers, inhabitants of a community, city or region, etc.” But they were meant for an “elite readership and excluded those whom [they] surveyed.” Middle-class social scientists like Booth failed to “make the survey the basis for dialogue across class lines” because this would “threaten to empower working-class communities by demystifying [the community] as a form of knowledge.” If working people knew how they were being counted and categorized, they would reject this categorization, and this would ruin the survey as a “tool of [middle-class] policy makers within and outside the state.”32 In the face of this wall of scholarly condemnation of both Booth’s class bias and his survey, there was little chance until O’Day and Englander’s research that his discoveries of working-class life would be taken seriously. In fact, as they show, Booth’s inquiry is a prime example of the innovative aspect of late Victorian surveys – asking working people what they thought. During the “Religious Influences” survey, as we shall see, a great variety of working-class people – religious and nonreligious, ministers, and missioners – provided testimony.

Ch ar i ty Co n tr o l ac r o s s th e M etropol i s This book is made up of six chapters, which introduce different sets of people in charitable London: Booth and his team, clergymen, female charity visitors and professionals, and the working classes and poor themselves. Of course, each of these categories could be broken down further in innumerable ways. What is crucial to note is

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Introduction 11

that, with few exceptions, all of these people concurred with Booth’s understanding that poverty was a moral (rather than structural) condition and that “loafers” ought to be punished. They all, including the working classes, created and perpetuated the hierarchy of the “deserving poor.” In other words, there are no historical good guys or bad guys, as scholars have sometimes portrayed them when comparing Booth to the C OS or feminists to authoritarian ministers. Chapter 1 begins with an overview of Booth’s life and influences. It highlights Booth’s crisis of faith – a key event in his life – and his ideas at the time of his travels in the United States and Italy, showing how he thought of religion as a broad moral influence that could order society. Chapter 2 recontextualizes Booth in his charity-­ conscious context, pointing to the similarity of charitable and religious influences in Booth’s mind. This chapter demonstrates Booth’s powerful moral tendency in his discussions of men and the London market. While chapter 1 gives an overview of the broad evangelical influence in the period, chapter 2 introduces Booth’s specific research and proposals. The third chapter moves beyond Booth to look at ministers and charity professionals, particularly in the Charity Organisation Society. The C O S, and especially the ubiquitous Harry Toynbee, had a significant influence on Booth’s series after 1897. This has caused some historians to paint the C O S and the London clergymen (just as they painted the C O S and Charles Booth) as ideological opponents – a generous new clergy against an outdated, hardnosed society. In fact, this chapter shows that they are best seen as competitors in an intensely subjective field of charity control, each armed with the same ideas about the immoral poor. Rather than take the CO S at their word regarding uncooperative ministers, historians must look for the intent among ministers to “give carefully.” Refocusing in this way allows us to see that – in and out of the CO S – there were myriad ways ministers adhered to the principles of charity control. It allows the historian to properly adjudicate what were seen as charity “failures” in this period. Failures, importantly, were few. On close examination of Anglican testimony, for example, only a single minister could be found truly delinquent among a handful of suspect charity administrators in the area I am calling “Poor South London” – and he had been dead for three years. Failures were in fact usually cases of simple incompetence. Thus the first half of chapter 3 explores the issues and insecurities that ministers faced in their daily lives. Interviews with the London clergy

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revealed an anxious, depressed group of men defeated and disillusioned by what they thought was the secularization of the London working class. 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” ministers (and lower-class ministers as well) they felt themselves engaged in a difficult moral counterattack in a world plagued by class, gender, and sexual disorder.33 Some clergymen were even on the verge of breakdown, and all ministers, moreover, constantly accused each other of misusing church donations. Historians have attempted to pinpoint the ideological prop that gave the London minister the conviction to carry on, arguing that the response was an intensely incarnational theology: a newly generous, welfarist religion and a break from a harsher, evangelical past. But 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 overall historians and contemporaries have overestimated this rhetoric.34 In fact, both Anglicans and Nonconformists spoke the same language as Booth regarding the moral “forces” of capitalism and scientific charity.35 And it was none other than Booth’s work that provided the “science” – by the time of the “Religious Influences” interviews, London’s churchmen and charity workers were already well acquainted with his maps and typology. The fourth chapter elaborates on the agents of London charity control but focuses on women – missioners, trained professionals, socialist feminists, district visitors, and ministers’ wives. When men were tagged “failures” in the field of charity work, they regularly pointed fingers at their female workers, painting them as silly and sentimental “amateurs.” If Booth and his investigators were wrong to blame churchmen for careless charity, however, churchmen were equally wrong in blaming women church workers. These accusations – and the Booth team’s tendency to trust men’s testimony exclusively – have served to obscure the labour of thousands of female district visitors and charity professionals. Worse, it has obscured the motives behind such work. Some historians have discussed women’s work in terms of “love” for the poor, “socialist feminism,” and the creation of a more caring, female social science in opposition to the moral social science of Booth and the London ­minister. In fact, as newer scholarship argues, the Booth archive

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Introduction 13

reveals and the fourth chapter discusses, women mirrored men in the field of charity control but with less historical credit. The fact that churchwomen, professionals, or socialist feminists had contact with the poor did not lead to any conversion from moral to structural notions of poverty, as some historians have suggested. As Margaret Sewell of the Women’s University Settlement told a group of district visitors in 1893, these encounters probably had the opposite effect. She describes how developing relationships with the poor convinced her of the need for moral segregation and careful charity to avoid giving to negligent or wilfully manipulative working people. Like Booth, Sewell believed very strongly in a poorbut-respectable class, a class C, which should be every philanthropist’s focus. The C O S provided a particularly important vehicle for women to prove that they were equally adept at the “science” of moral segregation and within its ranks were some of the brashest critics of men’s charity. During the Booth interviews one woman expressed her deepest wish that she could bring “amateur clergymen” up to the standard of charitable distribution, and many others peered over the Booth maps with Ernest Aves and Arthur Baxter, correcting the men on their moral geography. What chapter 4 points out is that not only did women often believe that their knowledge of the people, and therefore their charitable practices, was superior to that of male ministers and charity administrators, but that it was mainly they who provided the raw data – the classification of each street according to a moral hierarchy – that undergirded Booth’s entire project. The last two chapters examine the subjects of the “Religious Influences” series: the working class and the poor. Booth’s great discovery was that the vast majority of the working people in London saw themselves as either respectable or poor-but-respectable. Historians of the social survey have largely ignored this fact, arguing that Booth’s class bias prevented any groundbreaking discoveries in  working-class culture. Despite urging by contemporaries like Robert Roberts, and by historians like Joanna Bourke, most historians of working people have downplayed the suggestion (originally Booth’s) that the working class was rife with status consciousness in 1900.36 When historians have noted conservatism in the working class, they have seen it as largely static, in contrast to the supposed dynamism of class-consciousness in the face of social and economic oppression. Moreover, when historians

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have suggested more attention should be paid 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 unclear.37 I would like to suggest that the historian’s starting point should be the anxiety of working people: anxiety arising from the threat of absolute poverty and the struggle to survive in the face of starvation and disease or anxiety derived from relative poverty, a new kind of anxiety for a larger than ever group. This latter poverty was, paradoxically, the result of unprecedented wealth. A late-­ century depression made even the wages of the unskilled worth more than usual and wages themselves had undergone an 80 per cent rise since 1850.38 The result was a burst in working-class spending and often extreme anxiety about maintaining social status. 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, targeting their own perceived inferiors within the community. Using Booth’s survey, chapter 5 explores this socially conservative response to inequality. From regular people to the popular South London Press to politicians like Will Crooks, the working classes articulated the very hierarchy that Booth set out to document, wielding a complex discourse about loafers, cadgers, and mumpers in order to assert their own sense of respectability while excluding others. The poor also paid particular attention to the material trappings of respectability. Nowhere was this clearer than in the movement to dress above one’s class. In the upper-working-class districts of South London, churchgoing families strove to blend in with their lowermiddle-class neighbours. In the slums, poor people were 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” sometimes kept their children from attendance at school and church, while at other times, if they let them attend inferior institutions designated

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Introduction 15

for the lower working classes, they nevertheless tried to distinguish their children from others in the neighbourhood, leading to myriad “decent exteriors,” as one board school headmistress put it. This chapter also pays particular attention to the ways that churches offered opportunities for what I call “money participation” – a means to demonstrate publicly working people’s competence with their own money. This included saving and giving. The former was possible due to hundreds of agencies and clubs across the metropolis where poor people could donate a penny at a time for insurance, down payments, or safekeeping. Against cultural Marxists’ old suggestion that class consciousness and solidarity lay behind most saving institutions in this period, Paul Johnson and Trevor Griffiths have argued that competition was the chief characteristic of working peoples’ approach to one another.39 I would add that anxiety over poor respectability played a key role as well, and in this chapter I extend Johnson’s and Griffiths’s discussions to include savings agencies in the London churches. These churches also offered working people a chance to give. In a deliberate and seemingly foolhardy way, working people used their pennies in contributions to building funds, offertories, and gifts to ministers in order to bolster their social status. They also donated to missionary organizations. The British Empire provided an extended hierarchy to the poor-butrespectable working classes, colonized peoples providing a class inferior even to themselves to which they could assert power as the charity-giver, just as churchmen and women did for them. Maintaining these types of material and monetary respectability when the household could at any point be on the brink of major economic collapse was a stressful task, particularly for women. Chapter 6 continues the discussion by examining the self-discipline practised by the poor-but-respectable and the forms of release, where the stress of this hard life could be momentarily forgotten. Selfdiscipline in the late 1890s encompassed a number of behaviours: avoiding public violence, limiting one’s family through the hushed practice of birth control, and, of course, a grim willingness to work at demeaning, monotonous, low-paid labour. Historians have frequently argued that the working class relieved the pressure of these activities through radicalism and unionism. Yet union drives and strikes among the poor-but-respectable happened rarely and, moreover, required more self-discipline, not less. Historians need to look for forms of real release that working people practised all the time,

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acts of psychological and emotional liberation. This chapter identifies some of the most popular forms: social subordination, religious services, and alcohol. The ecstasy and emotional displacement evoked by a salvation-based sermon provided a release in venues such as missions, theatres, and outdoor parks, where the rough and respectable mixed. The widespread use of alcohol – particularly among women – has been subject to a virtual scholarly blackout. Historians like Ellen Ross have portrayed women in this period as the victims of men who drank away wages and caused suffering for the entire family. While she is right, this focus is too narrow.40 Drawing on David Wright and Cathy Chorniawry’s discussions of the era’s “considerable women’s pub culture,” I examine how many women wanted to be and, in fact needed to be, periodically or regularly drunk.41 When Charles Booth spoke, people listened. He traced solid boundaries between respectable and unrespectable working people, which guided government and charitable social policies in the  Edwardian era, with significant repercussions for our own. His moral social science was used to determine who received relief in the metropolis and who was excluded. He articulated ideas about charity control that had near universal commitment among his contemporaries, regardless of gender and class, and his archive is unique in its ability to offer testimony to this fact, with its 147 notebooks containing 1,800 interviews with church and civic representatives. The testimony is extremely candid and honest. “Use me but don’t publish me,” one South London vicar told his investigators, and Booth obliged, fearing libel suits.42 Through exploration of the entire archive, ministers’ intent in charity, and indeed in a wide variety of church social work, is revealed. A major question running throughout this book is “who hierarchized poor London?” With his maps and statistics, Charles Booth categorized a metropolis of men and women in classes from A to H. Churchmen’s interviews and annual reports undergirded Booth’s efforts, providing him with the social and moral composition of the parishes in which they lived and preached. These churchmen, in turn, had their moral geography ready for the Booth men because of the tireless efforts of women visitors of all kinds, from district visitors to deaconesses. These women were the true “ground troops” of the middle-class attempt to morally segregate the London working classes for the purposes of Victorian social science. Their efforts,

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Introduction 17

however, only lead us so far. Ultimately, the question of who hierarchized London has its final answer in the city’s working people. Examining how working people treated and spoke about each other in the Booth notebooks shows us that they themselves were intent on creating and maintaining poor respectability and hierarchical relations on every rung of London society.

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1 Charles Booth: The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist

As an employer in both the leather and shipping industries from the 1860s, Charles Booth had extensive contact with the London and Liverpool working classes. He went on to produce a masterful, ­seventeen-year study of the poverty, industries, and religious belief prevailing in London’s working-class neighbourhoods. Yet, even with this lifelong contact, Booth suggested harsh, even authoritarian, proposals for dealing with London’s poor. Historians present Booth as a successful upper-middle-class businessman, a painstaking social scientist, and a progressive activist.1 Largely ignored is historical evidence that paints Booth as something less than a decisive, self-assured captain of industry. Even more distorting is our picture of Booth as someone who, as a progressive social scientist, “rejected charity as a cure and Christianity as a creed.”2 The story of his crisis of faith in the 1870s, an emotional and psychological collapse that so damaged his health as to almost end his life, is buried. How Booth recovered from this, the lowest point in his life, we cannot understand apart from the support of his wife Mary and her family, the Macaulays, who restored Booth’s moral-religious understanding of the world. This chapter depicts Booth within the context of his family, his religion, and the larger evangelical world around him. Once this is taken into account, the reasons for Booth’s paradoxical kindnesses (to the true working class) and his cruelties (to beggars and loafers) become clear, as does something that has perplexed historians: the reasons that he followed his study of London poverty and industries with a study of religious influences. Booth relied on a moral-­religious sensibility and never ceased to believe that religion might broadly

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The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist 19

influence people morally and materially and was therefore absolutely necessary in Victorian London. Looking at Booth’s own insecurity and his sources of ideological conviction allows us to come to more realistic conclusions about precisely what he sought to accomplish in the Life and Labour survey.

T h e Co n fi de nt B ooth ? Who was Charles Booth? Historians have, for half a century, attempted to reconstruct Booth’s mental make-up. Crucial in our portrait here is the fact that he grew up in a household where religion was central: the family was Unitarian, and his mother was a well-known Norwich preacher. The tradition made his parents “hard workers and straight thinkers” with a “solid foundation of moral principle.”3 All this is evident in the Simeys’ 1960 biography. However, their repeated emphasis on Unitarianism’s “feeling of ­obligation for the less fortunate” and on the family as “yeomen-­ merchants,” “Nonconformist to the backbone,” “leading comfortable, civilized lives,”4 tells us little of substance. In the Simeys’ account the “Unitarian principles” in the Booth house amounted to little more than a selfless social conscience.5 Historian A.H. John gives a fuller picture of the church community that dominated the early lives of Charles Booth and his brother Alfred. Describing their Renshaw Street chapel in Liverpool, he says it “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.”6 In correspondence from the period, John finds the brothers taking “an active share in the affairs of the Renshaw Street Chapel.” Their names appear in its records, and many of their father’s surviving letters are given over to news of its activities. The morality and ethics of the Booths’ Nonconformity were, John stresses, “uncompromising.”7 Historians have begun to broaden our understanding of this generation’s religious mind. Discussing the upbringing of Leonard Hobhouse, England’s first professor of sociology, for example, Stefan Collini notes 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 of

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Hobhouse sheds light on Booth as well. He explains that historians do best not to ignore the early influence of evangelicalism in the lives of Victorian men: “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.”8 Collini’s description of an anxious moral mind stands in contrast to the artificial sense of calm created by the Simeys. “[H]is [early] 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.”9 Besides religious doubt, another factor affected Charles’s boyhood: he “was not considered one of the clever ones” by his parents. His father, his wife Mary later recalled, would commonly “indulge” him, listening to Charles’s “crude” schemes and ideas from his chair.10 Young Charles’s world was filled with a number of significant losses, including the sudden death of both his parents before he was twenty-one. His mother died when he was thirteen. His father’s death was even more severe a blow, occurring in 1860 when he was twenty and away on business. Mary later described how he “loved to talk of him, always had his photograph close at hand in any room he occupied,” and remembered his father’s sympathetic ear during his boyhood. Moreover, in this same period, before Booth met Mary, he suffered the sudden loss of the first woman he loved – she died of consumption while he was staying with her family – and of his brother, Thomas, of fever in 1863. Mary recalled Booth’s intense adoration of this first young love and historians have pointed out how “the death of the brilliant brother whose promise and friendship were woven into Charles’ own life was reality at its sharpest and bitterest.”11 At this time Charles began in business with his older brother Alfred. The Simeys paint Booth as critical of his brother for his lack of work ethic, sloppiness, and so on,12 but focusing on such criticisms is to miss the point that Alfred could handle a crisis and make quick business decisions, whereas Booth very often could not, rather

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The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist 21

impotently preferring his figures, tables, and numbers.13 Thus it was Alfred who took the helm after their father’s death, with Charles remaining largely passive. The older brother set up what was to become the Booth brothers’ leather and steamship companies. A partnership was formed to establish a merchant house dealing in leather goods with an American named Walden whom Alfred had met in the course of business at Rathbone and Company. Alfred and Philip Holt then opened New York offices for their new shipping agency based in Liverpool. And where was Charles in all this? A.H. John puts it this way: “[H]ere 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.”14 Alfred disliked business intensely and saw it as a “self-discipline, which as the years passed grew more irksome.” Though Charles liked it better, he was much less good at it, acknowledging that he lacked foresight, focusing on the minutiae, while Alfred had a “better judgement” that the younger Booth appealed to many times.15 Even by 1880, when Charles Booth had become his firm’s senior partner, he thought himself capable of “making some mess with my hasty tongue and stupid thick head.”16 Nor did Booth look like the confident businessman historians have portrayed. Indeed, his cousin by marriage, Beatrice Potter, described him as more clerical than a captain of industry. He was, she wrote, “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 aquiline nose, with moustache and pointed beard barely hiding a noticeable Adam’s apple, the whole countenance dominated by a finely-moulded brow and large, observant grey eyes. Charles Booth was an attractive but distinctly queer figure of a man.”17 Though he was often sickly and not much good at business, Booth, like many Victorian men of his class, was expected to be, what historian John Tosh has called, a “manly, entrepreneurial type.” The Victorian industrialist, writes Tosh, was expected to have “energy, virility, strength – attributes which equipped a man to place his physical stamp on the world.”18 Although Booth did not possess these qualities in abundance, he certainly grew up with a “profound belief that self-realisation comes from purposeful work, not from the enjoyment of society.”19 Booth worked long hours, many

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days barely pausing even to eat. This work ethic has hitherto been employed by historians to demonstrate Booth’s confidence and success but it rather speaks to his nervousness and insecurity. As he grew into manhood, moreover, Booth never ceased to be burdened by the pressure to be at once a successful businessman and later a competent statistician and social scientist. His anxieties manifested in two major ways: his lifelong habit of collecting facts and wallowing in indecision and his repeated psychological and physical breakdowns.

A n I n s ati abl e A ppe ti te for In for m ati on Booth preferred disaster to strike because, in his view, this “called for renewed activity” which was “always preferable to a state of inaction, however secure.” Yet, even in calmer moments, he was never sure that he had mastered his surroundings and was “constantly subjecting himself to a dispassionate criticism of his own manners and methods.”20 He had an “insatiable” appetite for information, insisting 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.”21 Less generously, one could, along with sociologist W.J.H. Sprott in the 1950s, tag him as little more than a bean counter, a lover of facts for facts’ sake.22 To maintain a modicum of control over the facts before him, Booth collected colossal amounts of information for study, throughout his business career and in his work for the London survey. For his “Poverty” survey, Booth subjected school board visitor interviewees to at least twenty hours of interrogation.23 During his “Industry” series, Booth was so overwhelmed by the swaths of statistics that he “jettisoned” the information “he himself collected” and decided instead to write a purely descriptive account.24 Mary reported that Booth never used all of the mountains of data he collected and all of this leads one to suspect that he required such data, in some respects, more for comfort than for use.25 There was an exhaustive thoroughness that spoke of someone who felt he lacked control over his life and labours, who hoped that among so many “complicated facts” there would be sufficient facts in common to provide unequivocally the “basis of more intelligent action.”26 For most of his life, then, despite long work hours and thoroughness, Charles Booth hardly knew what he believed in. His method of

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The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist 23

accumulating data and his inability to sort through it gives insight into his perpetual indecision in other areas of his life as well, such as his failure to adhere steadily to specific creeds or doctrines. Mary excused him, explaining that his “nature, though enthusiastic, had many needs, many aspirations difficult to satisfy, and not easily confined within the limits of any formal body of doctrine.” For example, although momentarily captivated by positivism, Booth “never took the step of joining the Positivist body,” and ultimately lost interest.27 Later, when he was accused of socialism by contemporaries who disagreed with his pension and penal colonies schemes, she defended him by saying that he would never have joined any one group.28 Mary, quite charitably, chalked this up to an extremely judicious nature: “He held aloof from political party and from any definite religious system, not from any contrariness of nature,” she wrote, “but because he found much to sympathise with in many forms of thought and methods of government.”29 His agreement with a wide range of proposals, from representatives across the political spectrum, to alleviate London’s poverty problems can indeed be seen as his concurrence with the “moral” beliefs shared by such men and women regardless of their political stripe, but, less charitably, he was plagued with the simple inability to make up his mind and come to any one conclusion amidst the mountains of facts he amassed. 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 huge piles of data in the attempt to reduce exaggerations that he felt were rampant in the public mind about the state of poverty in London. While he derived much satisfaction from the thinning down of over-amplified ideas, when it came to dissolving such data into facts or principles or action-based remedies for social problems, very often he shied away. As the Life and Labour investigations proceeded, Booth for the most part demonstrated a determination to avoid either recommendations of remedies for London poverty (for example, public housing, healthcare, or unemployment insurance) or alliance with a political ideology. At the close of his “Industry” series, Booth said he sought to provide “a picture of a way of looking at things, rather than a doctrine or argument.”30 Mary also impressed upon her readers that her husband only wanted to “observe and chronicle the actual, leaving remedies to others.”31

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Br e akdow n an d a Cr i si s of F ai th Booth felt a great pressure to succeed. Today he would certainly be called a workaholic and his relationship with food (what Mary called his “trying abstemiousness”) likely labelled an eating disorder. By the late 1870s, Booth worked from dawn until midnight every day of the week, held private sessions Sunday mornings, and “lived frugally on bread and butter, vegetables and cider.” He became a vegetarian in 1881 and was apparently less and less “robust” as his life continued.32 As he worked on the Life and Labour survey from the mid-1880s 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.”33 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.”34 There was an evangelical asceticism here that has been little understood. At three points at least, during the early 1870s, the early 1890s (following his work campaigning for old-age pensions) and in 1905–08 (interrupting his contribution to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws), Booth suffered “crushing” emotional and psychological collapses.35 The first was probably the most severe as it was a crisis of faith, brought on by a decade of losses and stress. Like many of his generation, Booth abandoned the denominational Christian faith of his parents and went looking for an ideology to fill the spiritual vacuum. He “looked about him for some escape” from the cold and scientific world he had chosen.36 Also, like many contemporaries, by the 1870s he seems to have begun a slow “rapprochement with religion.”37 Crucial in this process was his wife Mary Macaulay, who met Booth in 1868. From the first, Mary struck him as a woman of convictions – someone nothing like himself. In proposing to her, he presented himself as a half-disconsolate, half-frenzied man “desperate for companionship.” Mary, unsurprisingly, told her father to send him away, but Booth “flatly” refused to be dismissed, and, in 1871, she agreed to be his wife. Mary was her husband’s chief support throughout the early 1870s – what she called his “gritty period,”38 his crisis of faith. Beginning in about 1870, he was “often lonely and depressed, exhausted by his long agony of indecision in the face of a moral dilemma with which he was confronted.”39 Booth, at this

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The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist 25

time, could barely eat and “any mental exertion” would bring on the “miseries of his disorder.” He required rest before and after meals. His weight decreased alarmingly, and the family went abroad for him to convalesce in Switzerland. Mary hid his books and periodicals so as not to tempt him into exhaustion.40 For five years, and from London to Switzerland and back, Mary supported her husband, despite his unpleasant moods and the “barrage of criticism” that “threatened the very foundation of her existence.”41 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 père de famille!’ he exclaimed.”42 Having returned to England in 1875, Mary still referred to Booth as an “invalid” who could deal neither with society nor 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 … of his wife.”43 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.”44 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.”45 As the Simeys note, Booth left “no memorandum” giving reasons for his return to emotional and psychological stability in the mid1870s, but at the bottom of it was Mary. Booth spent the period “argufying” with her, thinking aloud about problems of business and, later, in the 1880s, his London Inquiry. Mary’s “talents,” her “phenomenal memory,” her philosophical bent of mind, were at his disposal.46 She read for him. In many ways, she pulled him up, dusted him off, and remade him: “She acted as universal critic and amanuensis, making herself responsible for everything he wrote, whether it concerned his business interests or those of his leisure, correcting and re-writing with the confidence and freedom of one who shared his innermost thoughts.”47 What, however, did Mary tell him in this crucial period? What galvanized Booth, filled him with conviction, actually had a great deal

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to do with Mary’s family. Thanks to his marriage, Booth was now able to hobnob with the cream of England’s “urban intellectual aristocracy.”48 Foremost among these were the Macaulays, part of a class of intellectuals that emerged from the Clapham Sect, of which Mary’s uncle, Thomas Babington Macaulay, was the most distinguished.49 Another of Mary’s uncles and another conversation partner for Booth was the civil servant Charles Trevelyan, one of the founders of the COS.50 At home Mary criticized the women philanthropists of Booth’s Unitarian circles as unsophisticated (perhaps unscientific?) busybodies, “covered by the sense of charity and the fluff of flannel,” who turned charities into “societies for circulating gossip.” Mary became “the source of his vigour” when he turned his attention to the problem of poverty – she was responsible for endless attacks on his “basic assumptions,” and she provided the stimulus that made “revolutionary changes in outlook possible.”51 At dinner parties, still sickly but at last happy, he listened to and was likely deeply influenced by his wife’s Claphamite father, Charles Macaulay, “and in later years was wont to say that his intimacy with his father-in-law had a greater effect on him than any other single influence in his life.”52 Although this chapter is mainly concerned with Booth’s moralreligious influences, it is useful to point out that Booth’s political ideology shifted over the 1860s and ’70s as well. In his youth, Booth had supported the Liberal Party over the question of extending the franchise to the working classes and had campaigned in Liverpool for working-class education, but he tended toward the Tories after the 1860s. In their letters, both Charles and Mary expressed only “unstinting praise” for Conservative leader, Benjamin Disraeli.53 The significant involvement of Booth’s shipping company in Britain’s “informal empire” in South American was consistent with the values of Liberal imperialism, but the virtues of territorial expansion increasingly appealed as well. This too was a position reinforced by Mary: “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 historian Norman-Butler, “followed the same lines,” and in later life she “absolutely detested” Mahatma Gandhi.54

A Wi de r Pe r s pe c ti ve o n th e M or al B ooth Historians have used the word “moral” as a stand in for “religious” on a number of occasions in regard to Booth’s views on poverty, and

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The Making of a Victorian Social Scientist 27

these terms need some unpacking.55 John Brown, E.P. Hennock, and Michael Cullen have each noted Booth’s diatribes against certain members of the poor, above all his repeated use of the terms “respectable” and “disreputable.”56 To understand this language, we must backtrack to popular religious sentiments common in the four decades prior to Booth’s birth. At this time evangelicals were the most vocal and influential moralists in terms of popular culture. Evangelicalism refers to a broad religious tradition based on two theological formulas, Christ’s atonement and his incarnation. This religious outlook 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). In fact, evangelicalism was articulated in harmony with modes of science prevailing at the time. Spokesmen for the evangelical worldview included 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. Historian Boyd Hilton’s important contribution, in his Age of Atonement, has been to demonstrate that these men believed themselves exceedingly “scientific” in their economic views. Hilton suggests, first, that the political economy (or Christian economics) of influential clerical groups like the Clapham Sect informed popular opinion to a great extent. It is these ministers, Hilton suggests, “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.”57 Second, Hilton argues that most of Darwin’s contemporaries regarded his work as a synthesis of religion and science, rather than a break from a backward, “religious” and “unscientific” past. Hilton notes the tendency of historians to “regard evangelism as irrational” and “bitterly antipathetic to the scientific developments of the first half of the nineteenth century.” Rather, evangelicals such as Rev. Thomas Chalmers and Archbishop of Canterbury John Bird Sumner “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.”58 They also carried out scientific investigation in the manner of the nineteenth century. Like Charles Booth fifty years later, professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, William Whewell, “believed that, to deal ‘inductively’ with moral sciences, it was first necessary

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to build up hundreds of examples of human conduct … ‘observing and classifying phenomena, from which [one] deduces consequences that are … in the place of moral laws.’”59 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.60 Such tests were to be left to occur naturally; suffering, especially, was a moral test and one that 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, avoiding at all costs carelessly distributed doles that were only given 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.61 In this moral scheme, “the poor” (as they were called by most contemporaries before 1850) were denied the indulgence of routine charity because it would serve to dull the pain of their lives and thus prevent their salvation.62 This meant that Thomas Chalmers, an Anglican pioneer of parish social work in Britain, allowed only “spontaneous” and irregular charity in his parish of St John’s, Glasgow, firmly believing that this was the only way the poor could be made “virtuous” and thus “happy.”63 Evangelicals like Chalmers and Sumner, it is important to note, still gave a great deal. “What evangelicals insisted on was that each act of charity, besides discriminating between deserving and undeserving recipients … must be heartfelt, ‘spontaneous and individual’ on the part of the giver.”64 Chalmers’s idea, building on Malthus, was that systematized charity was dangerously overindulgent (doles, in the Malthusian sense, causing the poor to “procreate themselves back into all their old misery”).65 The widespread popularity of Evangelical ideas of charity was ultimately to blame for the delay of aid to the starving Irish in the 1845–47 potato famine. Mary’s uncle and Booth’s conversation partner, Sir Charles Trevelyan, a prominent member of the Clapham Sect and assistant secretary at the Treasury, was responsible for administering government relief during this crisis. He was also a man “who regarded ‘dependence on others’ as ‘a moral disease.’” Evangelical hegemony at this time meant that Trevelyan could call

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the famine “the judgment of God on an indolent and unself-reliant people.”66 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.67 Historians have yet to answer satisfactorily where this science of suffering went in the late nineteenth century when Charles Booth wrote his surveys.68 The standard conclusion today is that evangelical, retributive religion mellowed out and lost its cultural currency.69 We must recall here Hilton’s remarks about the widespread popularity of evangelicalism: a third of Anglican clergymen, and the vast majority of lower-class Nonconformist ministers, explicitly identified as evangelical, and, by 1850, one out of every six English lay people thought of themselves as evangelicals.70 Moreover, adds Hilton, “evangelicalism could hardly have had the impact ascribed to it if it had been confined to those who formally acknowledged the label.”71 But evangelicalism and its harsh doctrines about the moral nature of suffering, in Boyd Hilton’s view, could not withstand the assaults of conscience that accompanied the 1845 potato famine and the cholera epidemic of 1849. Indeed, a substantial group of Anglicans argued that no God could sanction such calamities. They questioned not only the fairness of hellfire but the brutality inherent in the “idea that God would inflict excruciating suffering on his son as a vicarious sacrifice for men’s sins.”72 Thus Hilton argues that the ideas in what he calls the “Age of Atonement” (1790s to 1840s) were replaced by 1870 with an “Age of Incarnation,” characterized by a focus on Christ’s life (his generosity, his humanism) rather than the guiltinspiring fact of his death for sinful men. A similar transformation took place in Nonconformist theology during the 1880s and 1890s, according to Richard Helmstadter.73 This theological transition was extraordinarily good for business because God in the Age of Incarnation no longer sanctioned the suffering of middle- and uppermiddle-class bankrupts. In the 1850s, limited liability legislation was passed, which allowed multiple small shareholders and the practical inability of a shareholder to sue a business that went bankrupt. It was this very legislation, in fact, that enabled the Booth brothers to buy their first ships.74

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What, then, do we make of surviving evangelicalism in the average middle-class, lower-middle-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 the “Religious Influences” series) who, in complaining of the evangelical theology preached by workingclass London City Missionaries, said, “[The missionary] says lots of things about Hell fire which I don’t agree with, but he goes everywhere, and sees everybody … and besides the people like to hear about Hell fire.”75 The fact is that neither working- nor middle-class attitudes about charity changed in substance even when theology shifted from atonement-centred to incarnational. Boyd Hilton himself admits that incarnational enthusiasts were as hostile to “indiscriminate charity” as Thomas Chalmers had been forty years before.76 It was the language that changed: Victorians referred to “character” rather than sin and redemption, they described “morality” rather than religion.77 Moral-religious hegemony was galvanized and reinvigorated in the great psychological and emotional crisis that confronted the generation born in the mid-nineteenth century: the encounter of average Britons with social Darwinism.78 This philosophy, which filtered Darwin through sociologist Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest,” reached its heyday in the 1870s. It 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 invention (one might say, resurrection), in the thought of intellectuals like Huxley, Toynbee, Green, Marshall, and Hobhouse, of a more lukewarm, moral kind of evolution, in which a self-disciplining morality underpinning new concepts of social cooperation, obligation, altruism, and character could continue to accompany social evolution.79 For evangelical thought, therefore, damage from the fallout of social Darwinism was localized. The Genesis narrative, after the 1860s, may have been too problematic to accept any longer as a matter of fact. And newly “scientific” social Darwinist Britons may have wanted to distance their new morality – entailing the spiritual progress of society through the discipline of ever-increasing capitalist competition – from “old-time religion,” meaning the spiritual preservation of society through God-given punishments. But old

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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 broadly demanded “work” (“service,” “sacrifice”) and otherwise “decent” living from all members of society.

T h e R e l i gi o u s B ooth : L e tte r s f r o m A m er i ca an d Italy Charles Booth was certainly affected by these larger theological and intellectual trends. The way he felt about organized religion in society – twenty years before gathering data for his London survey – is perhaps best illuminated in a number of letters he wrote to Mary from the late 1870s. In her biography, Mary hinted that these letters contained aspects about her husband “too personal” and “too private” to be revealed in 1918. However, she hoped that “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.”80 In fact, in his letters Booth demonstrates less the secrets of a “Captain of Industry” than those of a man engaged in the reformation of his own religiosity. This is evident in two overlapping ways. First, Booth’s religious sensibility manifested itself as an appreciation for simple piety and ritual, regardless of denomination, and, second, his letters show his effort to find an appropriate kind of religion, one that would produce a good society and an honest, moral people. The year 1878 found Booth on a business trip in America. In his letters, he describes to Mary what he felt were the most important and appropriate practices of religion. Twenty miles outside Boston, Booth visited the small town of Peabody, one of the early Puritan settlements, probably in order to discuss purchases of leather by local boot and shoe factories.81 Here he was disappointed that the popular religion did not meet his expectations, complaining about the home life he encountered. “This is not a religious household,” Booth wrote, clearly perturbed, “and I was absolutely almost shocked at no blessing being asked before tea.” While they might be “good Christian folk” and 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 felt that “piety does not pervade the atmosphere.”82

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Such spiritual inadequacies did not stop him from attending a nearby Congregationalist Church and remarking, equally critically, about both the religion and preaching methods. “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 then laid out to Mary why what he saw practised 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.”83 In mid-summer 1880, Booth again found himself on business in the US. His trip took a detour when he chose to visit Ocean Grove, a Methodist retreat on the New Jersey shore (which he called “a religious watering place”). His memoirist, Mary, wrote that the experience he “preferred” was religion that involved an “effort to bring pleasure to the aid of godliness, like the lively music to revival hymns.” 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.”84 Until Peckham Rye’s 10,000, he would not hear of a larger one. After his experiences at Ocean Grove, Booth fumbled towards an idea (in one letter to Mary) that had probably occupied his mind for more than 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. Writing from Ocean Grove, he told Mary how he had attended an adult Sunday school class: “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

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– a strenuous effort after a certain ideal of life sustained by prayer and glorified by praise.”85 But Booth’s momentary approval turned suddenly to irritated dissatisfaction. As much as he might praise this form of religious learning, there was still something, in his view, insufficient about it. It was too small in scope, 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 selfsatisfaction, 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.”86 Already, in 1880, we can see Booth thinking about how an appropriately practised religion could best remedy the “problems of self” – what he would later describe 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 next, “and I don’t know that I have said what I mean, or perhaps I don’t know what I mean.”87 When Booth returned from these trips in 1882 he was, according to Beatrice Webb’s recollection, a man with a “stronger clearer reason” and seemingly without “any vice or even weakness in him.” This was probably to exaggerate Booth’s confidence, but something had nevertheless caused a change of attitude which made him seem 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.”88 Although we do not know precisely what caused this remarkable change, it was around this time that Booth likely threw off the last vestiges of his (already tentative) belief in positivism and 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.”89 Booth likely found strength in a highly personal form of Christian belief – unorthodox but present nonetheless. He continued to question how religion ought to function socially, as is probably best evidenced in his letters from Teano and Riardo, small Italian villages where he

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spent time in 1893 to recover from illness and exhaustion.90 At Teano, he described the “three large churches, of which the largest, the Duomo, is very beautiful among beautiful churches.” He said he stood in the gathering dark listening to “the whole evening service.” Tempted when he saw the village women going into the church, Booth told Mary that he went in also and “the whole thing was perfect as an act of simple congregational devotion and I did not know the Church of Rome could do it – but it seems to do everything.” He listed Bible classes and Sunday schools (as he would in the “Religious Influences” interviews) as among the churches’ educational auxiliaries.91 He continued to attend masses and participate in processions, a funeral, and the religious life of the towns. “My shoe maker, meeting me coming out [of the church], said ‘You were there, and yet did not understand a word.’” Obstinately, Booth corrected him. “I had understood something,” he said in his letter to Mary, “and so I told him.”92 What impressed Booth most was how “in Church or out of Church, the hold on the people is certainly extraordinary.”93 This is  not solely, as some historians have noted, evidence of Booth’s “detached” ability to describe religious rites and customs. It was rather a sign of what Booth found most important in religion. Where once Methodism’s confidence in the face of nineteenth-century secularism had impressed him in the late 1870s, by the early 1890s Booth was focused on the all-encompassing nature of a truly religious society, as the Italian villages seemed to be. Charles Booth, whom 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.”94 There was another aspect of Booth’s religious mindset inextricably attached to his praise for the pious. As he observed the Italian villages, thoughts of the “submerged tenth” – the loafing, beggar class at the bottom of society – entered his mind. Although it came

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as a passing thought, Booth remarked to Mary that the people of Teano seemed “most respectable,”95 and he later portrayed Riardo as a paradise of religion-inspired regularity. “No one has ever begged from me, no one has ever tried to sell me anything or in any way make money out of me,” he wrote Mary. It seems Booth was convinced that begging was completely foreign in this church community – even to the poorest of villagers. “I say no one has ever begged,” he 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.”96 This sensibility infused the workingclass villagers as well. Booth recalled 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.97 The people of Riardo were infused, Booth seems to have thought, with a sense of decency and self-sacrifice borne of their religious ways. 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 selfdiscipline, self-reliance, and character. To beg, to deliberately avoid work, meant one might already be incapable of regular work because of moral carelessness. 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 “fear of the ‘moral [and religious] destruction of the next generation.’”98 Instead of recasting Booth as a redoubtable “Captain of Industry,” a new focus on his early life and anxieties causes his personality to take a complex but more human shape. He emerges as a gravely serious, yet highly indecisive, noncommittal personality. His own life and labours were a strange combination of indecision and conviction, commitment and withdrawal. He refused to align himself with any doctrine of belief but, at crucial moments, fell back on a moral, almost religious sensibility.

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In terms of psychological crises and intellectual turning points, nothing equalled Booth’s crisis of faith in the 1870s. Emotionally, Booth had been through hell and back in the 1860s and early 1870s. He had left behind the Unitarian faith of his boyhood but then floundered as he suffered through the deaths of those closest to him and contended with Victorian ideals regarding middle-class men that did not fit his own temperament. Fortunately for his career, he had an able, elder brother in Alfred. Fortunately for his sanity, he had a strikingly intelligent nursemaid in Mary. 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. Englander and O’Day, for example, have insisted that several evening conversations in 1882 and 1883 “affected” or “sensitized” Booth sufficiently to consider a socialist point of view. Such evidence clearly pales in comparison to Booth’s ten years of emotional turmoil – a physically debilitating, emotionally crushing experience. This crisis was resolved with the help of Mary and her family, who pulled him back to moral-religious certainty. Thus he began his study of poverty intellectually refreshed by the Macaulays, standardbearers of Victorian morality. In this, the history of Charles Booth appears not unlike that of evangelicalism broadly, which struck the rocks of Darwinian doubt in the 1860s but survived, galvanized into a ubiquitous moralism. Led by members of the Clapham Sect, including Mary’s family, this moral-religious sensibility meant a cruelly uncompromising stance on charity to the deserving and undeserving poor that, in the case of Mary’s uncle, Charles Trevelyan, truly knew no limits.

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2 The “Religious Influences” Series: What It Was and What Booth Proposed

In March 1897 – only a month after he finished the “Industry” series – Booth began to request the cooperation of religious leaders all over the metropolis. He asked them to contribute to the undertaking of a new series, one that would be the finale of the Life and Labour project. Over the next six years Booth and his team collected 1,800 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 1902–03. This new study energized Booth and “the speed with which he set to work reveals the enthusiasm with which he regarded the subject of his new inquiry.”1 This spirit contrasted sharply with the aimless approach he had taken in previous series, always hoping for some revelation from the data and never finding one. The “Religious Influences” series is the only study where Booth is listed as sole author, and, indeed, his authorial voice changed substantially.2 He approached the material with “a frankness of speech [he] seldom extended before or since.”3 As the previous chapter made clear, by 1870 Booth had concluded that organized religion was the only way that average people could be influenced for the better. That he wrestled with this question was clear in the “Poverty” series, as he studied the working people of Blackfriars Road, whom he described in characteristically moralreligious 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 – that impressed Booth most. “The moral question,” he wrote, “lies on the bottom. On it rests the economic;

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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.”4 In the “Religious Influences” series Booth sought to lay out moral categories that could classify poor Londoners in order to answer one major question: why, despite “immense efforts” by ministers and religious bodies across the metropolis to give the people “uplift,” were they not succeeding in creating a perfectly moral and thus economically sound society?5 Fundamentally, Booth believed that the answer lay with charity – how it was distributed and who got it – and thus his “Religious Influences” series was at base a survey of the charitable practices in turn-of-the-century London. The subject of charity and charitable disbursement had long interested Booth. He had maintained a hatred for charity since his early days working for working-class emancipation movements in the 1860s, ridiculing what he called “the patronizing philanthropy of Lady Christian Consolation and the Reverend Ebeneezer Fanatic”6 – charity that came from unselective sentimental women and proselytizing clergymen bribing the poor to fill pews.7 While the last chapter described the evangelicalism that pervaded the culture of middle-class London, this chapter outlines some of the actual research and proposals that Booth made in his “Religious Influences” series. It situates Booth in the context of the charity-conscious culture of the period, showing how intertwined were “religious” and “charitable” influences in his mind and how, in this sense, he was very much in agreement with the Charity Organisation Society and socialist reformers in the period. The chapter ends with a discussion of the personalities and methods of the “Booth men,” the group that served as the interviewers for the series.

Cl as s i fi c ati o n an d th e Inven ti on o f th e Po o r- bu t- R espectabl e In Booth’s moral world, competition was spiritualized to such a degree that he had no sympathy for the lazy and unproductive classes who, he believed, refused to participate in the capitalist market’s “great game.” This idea of competition implied and permitted persistent misery among a section of society. Moreover, in addition, Booth vigorously demanded further consequences for the immoral

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and unproductive. His was a religious, and indeed, evangelical sensibility because, in addition to accepting inequalities, Booth observed a moral division between the decent working classes and the disreputable working classes: one class deserved respectability and citizenship for its moral self-discipline and the other deserved swift retribution for its refusal to seek redemption. Thus 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 human nature.”8 Also inadequate is O’Day and Englander’s suggestion that Booth’s belief lay somewhere between positivism and the softer political economy of American economist, F.A. Walker.9 Rather, Booth believed that the pain of self-discipline and privation could revitalize a man’s character.10 In his “Industry” series he spoke of the “invigorating stress” of sudden adversity, unemployment, and poverty.11 In a decidedly Spencerian moment, he 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.”12 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. A.H. John notes that the Booth brothers eagerly took advantage of new limited liability legislation to get the funds necessary for the shipping company’s creation (the “value of the ships was divided into sixtyfour parts” and “the money was found within a month”).13 Booth also very commonly benefited either from market monopolies or agreeable compromises with his “competitors” in the leather and shipping industries, so as to avoid costly price wars.14 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.15 We know now that this was (and continues to be) patently wrong. Social epidemiologists have, in the past two decades, demonstrated the direct and

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deadly biological effects that these anxieties pose to people of all classes – very far from the belief of Booth and his contemporaries that they might “stimulate” and “guide” the capacities of men.16 None of this was substantially different from earlier evangelical conceptions. Booth’s innovation, writes Gertrude Himmelfarb, was “the delineation of classes of the poor – the creation of a new typology, as it were, of poverty.”17 Booth’s typology of poverty also broke with influential evangelical social theorists because he argued that some – in fact the majority – of the working class were respectable. By contrast, in On Political Economy, in Connexion with the Moral State and Moral Prospects of Society (1832), Chalmers saw no possibility that “the general peasantry” might live by the same rules as their betters. A generation later, Booth noted that more working people than ever were not only status conscious but as independent-minded, moral, and 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-butrespectable, and respectable. With a third Reform Act in 1884/5 and an 80 per cent rise in real wages,18 Booth’s study revealed something of which Chalmers would never have 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 swaths of reform-minded British society in finally determining how many people in English society were members of what he called “the ‘deserving’ poor, the ‘labouring’ 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 it 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.19 Booth’s researches took him all over London, and they led him to conclude that nearly 70 per cent of the London working classes were in varying stages of “comfort.” Just over 30 per cent were in poverty.20 Yet of this 30 per cent, only 10 per cent were unrespectably poor. Twenty per cent of poor London should more accurately be

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described as poor-but-respectable.21 Thus Booth characterized fully 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 criminal class making up less than 1  per cent of the population. Class B was just under a tenth of London’s population. This class attempted to work as little as possible and was usually poorly dressed. Classes C through F were increasingly well dressed but 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 that might move, respectably speaking, toward more decent standards and that each class contained many “grades of social rank.”22 Booth did not just study numbers: he seemed to lose himself happily in London’s poorer neighbourhoods. As he put it, he found a “vigour,” a “drama,” and a “brightness” in a world he knew was full of “poverty,” “toil,” “murder,” and “drunkenness.” He said he slept better in the houses of the poor-but-respectable than he did even in quiet Grace Dieu, his Leicestershire country house.23 “I don’t know whether you take beer?” a working-class husband would ask his humble lodger and Booth would accept. Booth was comfortable roughing it in houses bereft of middle-class comforts. He was complimentary of working people’s “pleasant, simple, healthy” lives.24 As the Simeys have noted, there was even a touch of envy in Booth’s accounts for the way the poor approached daily hardship. There was a “silent want” that the “respectable poor” simply “endured.”25 Early on in life, describing a poor Liverpool warehouseman in his company, Booth’s strange envy was clear: “They are so uncomplaining, so simple, and so dignified about their sorrows.”26 It was as a result of his in-house experiences with the poor-but-respectable, Booth wrote, that they “became, and still are, my friends.”27 Booth’s romanticization of the poor may disturb readers today. For example, he related how a warehouseman told him, “We have trouble at home, sir, the boy died last night – it’s the fourth boy we’ve lost and the girl is ailing now – there is nothing much to do, sir, and I thought you’d perhaps allow me half a day to bury him.”

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Booth remarked immediately, “What a fuss we [the middle and upper classes] make about our losses by contrast – the house of mourning – the drawn-down blinds – the funeral – the subdued voices and the subdued footsteps of the undertakers wearing gloves.”28 Booth’s great personal enjoyment of poor-but-respectable working-class life led him to conclude that, though “their lives are an unending struggle and lack of comfort … I do not know that they lack happiness.”29 Throughout his inquiries, Booth’s sympathy, and even envy, was reserved only for the poor-but-respectable classes. The loss of a child among those labelled class A or class B was simply the fault of immoral parents. What is crucial to understand, however, is that the lower classes, although they might not have agreed that there was anything to envy in their status, most certainly would have understood and applauded Booth’s moral hierarchization. Booth’s inquiry was symptomatic of a larger, morally and religiously inclined culture, and some historians have long recognized working-class cooperation in sustaining it.30 They have moved beyond class analyses that saw the social survey in this period as a middle-class construction, an instrument of top-down power, and therefore not “dialogical.”31 But when historians have suggested that Booth intentionally created a “poverty line” for the progressive good, this is to misread him.32 Gertrude 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 this notion was received in and outside Great Britain.33 Tellingly, lower-brow newspapers like the Daily News and magazines like Century referred to Booth’s project as outlining a “line of plenty” or “line of comfort,” emphasizing not the extent of poor London but rather the size of the more respectable working public. Most striking in this vein were the observations of the St James Gazette (20 May 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.’”34 More than anything else Booth wrote his series in order to stop what he called “the saddest form of poverty, the gradual impoverishment of respectability, silently sinking into want.”35 The great strength of Himmelfarb’s work is her emphasis on Booth’s unfailing sympathy for the poor-but-respectable. She stresses how frustrating it was for Booth that class C was so often confused with the loafers

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and beggars of class B. She drives home to the reader that class C, for Booth, was morally better than B. He admired C terribly because its members had achieved (as Himmelfarb notes he once told a meeting of the C OS), an “acceptable level of decent independent life” against all odds.36 Booth created his hierarchy of working people because he wanted to highlight the sacrifices of class C who braved the “invigorating stress” of competition. By contrast, class B willingly, almost animally, avoided the pain of sober self-discipline, shirking the selfsacrifice of poor respectability. Members of class B liked drink. They worked only when starvation forced them to. They found a regular lifestyle uncomfortable, and they avoided extended labour. Class B was a “leisure class” – and a class defining itself by its relaxation, its leisure, was to Booth beneath contempt.37 With a great deal of support from a grateful late Victorian public, Booth set out to devise a rod (to use an evangelical term) with which to punish the immoral classes.

T h e S e gr e gati o n o f Poor f rom Poor In suggesting that the immoral poor be segregated and punished, Booth was only following what had become a regular exercise for writers, thinkers, and activists in the reforming classes in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.38 For instance, Edwardian “welfare” legislation, such as the Pension, National Insurance, and Labour Exchanges Acts, was designed “to separate the deserving and undeserving labourers as impersonally as possible, with a minimum of inquiry.” Historian Pat Thane has remarked upon the means-tested basis on which pensions were granted and on the Pension Act’s “respectability test,” which excluded all but a miserable minority of “very poor, very old” workers from its meagre fiveshilling benefit. Almost two thirds of those insured by the National Insurance Act were in fact regularly paid workmen. One of the act’s architects (Hubert Llewellyn Smith, an associate of Booth and 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.” Simultaneously, as historian V.A.C. Gatrell writes, there was a crackdown on “misfits, inebriates, mental defectives and paupers,” meaning that crime in

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Edwardian England became more closely regulated than it had been in the previous century or would be in the interwar period.39 When Booth set himself up as the defender of the “silent poor” of class C, it was one of those rare moments in his life when he had a real proposal in mind: he recommended that class B be consigned to penal detention, or in the parlance of the day, a “labour colony.” They had, Booth felt, 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.”40 Like Booth, most prominent social thinkers, whether they inclined “left” (collectivist) or “right” (individualist) in this period, demanded retribution for this brand of immoral behaviour. The idealist Alfred Marshall, prominent clergymen like Samuel Barnett, the economist Arthur Pigou, socialists and Labour Party leaders like Will Crooks and George Lansbury; Fabians like Sidney Ball, Annie Besant, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb; New Liberals such as J.A. Hobson and William Beveridge; C.S. Loch and the C O S ; and the Poor Law Unions Association all demanded hard consequences for refusing to submit to the pain of character-building work.41 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.42 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,” as it would “successfully impress the precept that if a man will not work neither shall he eat.”43 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 language of disease permeated the conversation. As Booth put it, those “who stoop low enough to ask charitable aid rarely stand the test of work … 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.”44 Booth was able, without hesitation, to condemn, at one go,

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seven-and-a-half per cent of the workforce – 317,000 people in London alone. A class this repulsive, this dangerous, he felt, was “incapable of improvement.”45 Booth believed that, if it could be surgically removed from society, it should be. 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.”46 Where the presence of classes A and B was thought of as diseaselike, that of the middle classes was seen to be a boon. By the late 1890s, the belief in the elevating powers of middle-class contact had spread all through the metropolitan reforming classes. As the medical officer of Poplar and Bromley’s Board of Works told Jesse Argyle, “if some of the educated and refined people of the west would come and live in the east it would be a considerable benefit in elevating the tone of the people.”47 One must emphasize here that the problem reformers wanted to  address was felt to be limited to emotional, psychological, and behavioural difficulties. Structural causes of poverty were not considered, and, as such, middle-class reformers felt that their mere presence and the civilized example they set would be enough to effect change. For example, through gifts of flowers Rev. Henry Lewis’s intention was to soften “the hard lines of care and want” that he saw on the faces of poor girls in his factory club. Reports describe the “flock” of girls eagerly crowding around Lewis’s ladyworker to receive their bouquets. Church workers in this quaint vignette open their baskets and distribute their contents – “flowers! all fresh and dewy; fragrant pinks and roses, pansies and forget-­ me-nots.” The women resound with “My ain’t they lovely!” Yet perhaps inevitably, the account is spoiled by one woman who refuses the flowers on the basis she has nowhere to put them in her oneroom tenement whose bed she shares in shifts with four other women in what South Londoners referred to at the time as the “Box and Cox” arrangement.48 J.G. Curry, former missioner at the Charterhouse Mission in Bermondsey, likewise put his faith in increased contact between poor boys and university undergraduates. Together missioner and volunteer brought about “happy and personal contact between the bright side of life and the shadowed, between the buoyant gladness of the young men who from time to time will visit the Missions and the

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opaque dull lives of countless toilers.” Undergraduates, Curry said, had an opportunity at Charterhouse both to measure “the chasm that divides the extremes of English society into two alien worlds” and to “bridge” it “with simple kindness.” The superficiality of this solution is again evident when, during one of the undergraduate’s visits to the mission, a child tells how he was abandoned by his mother one day while he was out looking for work. He never saw her again and subsequently lived on his own in the slums, except for the odd nights that the Charterhouse boys’ club was open.49 It is a disturbing but fascinating aspect of middle-class culture at this time that charity professionals who worked closely with the poor, such as Boys’ House missioner J.W.C. Fegan, could believe that personal influence might take away traumas suffered by “a boy who had been thrown out of a first floor window in a court in St Giles by his Father, a drunken Irish bricklayer; another with a fearful polypus through his father smashing his nose with a hammer; another crippled for life through being struck with a poker; others scarred all over their heads, and with teeth knocked out by blows from their mothers.” These were boys who had all sought refuge in Fegan’s Southwark Boys’ Home.50 Emotional rehabilitation was negligible without a welfarist, redistributive, material component – something beyond the late Victorian moral imagination. Redistributive reform was a long way away, and so churchmen and settlement workers were buffeted by tragic scenes they could not understand and by an emotional as well as material problem of poverty they could not remedy.

T h e R o l e o f Ch ar i ty an d th e Ch ar i ty O r gan i z ati o n Soci ety Every major debate in which Booth was involved, from his classification of the working classes in his “Poverty” inquiry, to his campaign for old-age pensions, to his work on the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, revolved around how certain sections of the poor should be provided charity while others should not. The careful classification scheme of classes A–F was, in large part, an evaluation system for who should receive charity. Thus labour colonies were meant not only to “discipline” class B but “to check charitable gifts” wastefully provided to them.51 On the other hand, if one gave a penny to class D families, Booth believed, one was giving to families who kept

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up respectable appearances and who had a “make-the-most-ofeverything” kind of thrift.52 Once charity is put in its rightful place as central to Booth’s outlook, we see that his supposed epic clash with traditionalists in the Charity Organization Society was, in fact, simply a debate over outcomes and did not represent a fundamentally different way of understanding charity. Booth’s clashes with Octavia Hill and Charles Loch of the C OS, and with the “socialists” Sidney and Beatrice Webb, have been exaggerated by historians as a clash between traditional C OS views and socialist ones. Really, they boiled down to how best to distinguish and relieve the “good” poor from the surrounding “bad” poor. This interpretation of the series categorically places Booth among advocates for charity control, among societies practising what they thought was “scientific charity” – like the CO S . This, however, is to head into rough waters, historiographically speaking, because most Booth historians have arrived at precisely the opposite conclusion. Englander and O’Day make too much of Booth’s alleged awakening to socialist ideas, and they therefore ignore his (far better documented) hopes for responsible charitable practices.53 They insist that “Booth did not share [the C OS] conviction that the poor were entirely responsible for their own lot,”54 but it was not clear that either the man or the society were so cut-and-dried in their individualism. It was hardly the case that Booth believed in some form of poor relief while the C OS limited itself to moralized advice. Both Booth and the C OS agreed that only the poor-but-respectable deserved charity (just as they agreed the loafer deserved labour colonies). One presumes that the more than £26,000 the society spent in relief (in 1887 alone) went to precisely those of the poor its officials thought were part of this respectable group.55 As we will see, moreover, Booth and his team, during the course of the “Religious Influences” interviews, proved themselves as hard as any CO S official in their interrogation of churchmen on their charitable methods. Moreover, Booth was probably connected directly with the CO S – as Mary insisted in 1918.56 The much-acclaimed Booth-C O S “break” over pensions, usually portrayed as a pro-pension Booth against an anti-pension society, appears much less dramatic when it is noted that the CO S not only advocated but even distributed pensions for the “deserving.” While, officially, the C OS’s central office was distributing no more than 1,100 pensions in 1895, Charles Loch Mowat later admitted that

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“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 which 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 (1895–96) as being more than 18,000.57 Booth’s own advocacy of universal old-age pensions also requires some context. It was akin 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 help their sense of thrift.58 Similarly, the epic struggle between Booth and the Webbs dissolves blandly into the former arguing for “strict administration” of outrelief and the latter arguing for more “drastic action” – through a multi-labour-colony plan – to segregate once and for all the undeserving loafers.59 No one was proposing welfare socialism, which attempts to aid every man and woman whether they are working or not. In the 1870s and again in the 1890s, the CO S 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.”60 From 1889, prominent personalities began to emerge such as H.V. Toynbee, H.L. Woollcombe, and Miss Sewell. By 1897 there were twenty-two in this elite, ten of them women, who established a charity control “standard” in each district to which they were sent and organized church representatives as best they could.61 The closeness with which charity control was related, in Booth’s mind, to “religious influences” – disciplining and civilizing the recipient – is evident in how many of these paid secretaries were interviewed by the Booth team.62 Harry V. Toynbee (the brother of Arnold Toynbee, after whom Toynbee Hall was named) was interviewed three times. How Booth linked religion and charity of the CO S variety is particularly evident in his little-noticed relationship to Arthur Baxter, one of the interviewers for the series.63 While the other interviewers were veterans from the previous series, Baxter was brought in especially for Booth’s audit of the churches. Baxter was CO S -trained, which explains why he was given charge of most of the interviews with Anglican clergymen; although the CO S was private, it was

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associated most strongly with the Anglican churches. These churches, on average, had the most resources to spend on charity and most were C O S affiliated.

T h e Bo o th Me n an d T h ei r M eth od For the task of almost two thousand London interviews, Booth required investigators who understood his moral framework and who were themselves specialists in the “science” of charity control.64 The contributions of Arthur Baxter, Ernest Aves, George Arkell, George Duckworth, and Jesse Argyle were crucial in the making of the “Religious Influences” series. Although Rosemary O’Day has stressed the “independence of mind of all the secretaries,” in fact the colossal research task went smoothly precisely because the Booth team was in ideological agreement.65 No one challenged 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 CO S point of view). They were, in every sense, “Booth’s men.”66 A graduate of University College London, with a day job as a barrister, Arthur Lionel Baxter (b.1860) only interviewed for the final series, beginning in 1897. This did not stop him from quickly gaining an important place on the team. Baxter blossomed into a fullblown editor of the series – and everything besides. He logged hours with Mary Booth, looking over the 1902–03 drafts, put time in with Jesse Argyle on the final edition proofs, and apparently even provided an abstract of the survey’s seventeen volumes.67 Historian Hugh McLeod calls Baxter (along with Aves and Duckworth) a “nominal Anglican” and “evidently an agnostic,” though Baxter’s connections with an Anglican church in Notting Hill complicate this somewhat.68 Certainly, Baxter became the unofficial interviewer of London Anglicans. As mentioned, Baxter had been a CO S official about a decade before his work with Booth. While interviewing the clergy in the East Battersea notebooks, Baxter wrote, “I was 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.”69 Baxter knew or knew of many of the CO S officials long before he interviewed them, and, importantly, as one of their own, Baxter did not require the help of former C O S superiors to gauge the character

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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 interviews for the series have been hailed by historians as “models of the genre.”70 Ernest Aves (1857–1917), educated at Cambridge, began his investigative career during his years of residency at Toynbee Hall, an Anglican-affiliated university settlement in London’s East End.71 He, like Baxter, was “religiously minded.”72 Mrs Henrietta Barnett (wife of Canon Samuel Barnett) remembered Aves as a kind of sage. She called him “the ‘Pater,’ so wise, deep-voiced, judicial, so steadfastly dutiful and strong in his slowness, so wholly loveable and generally so tiresomely right.”73 Aves likely met Booth at Toynbee Hall around the time Booth’s original coloured street map was displayed there.74 With the opening of research for the “Industry” series, Aves became a coeditor and a prized deputy on the  Life and Labour project, becoming Booth’s “most intimate colleague.”75 There was a very sentimental correspondence existing between the two men that ­demonstrates well the affection and dependence they felt for each other.76 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.”77 Like Booth, Aves was a committed social statistician and zealous in his collection of facts: his interviews were by far the most lengthy of the team. He was also a jack-of-all-trades. Aves interviewed almost anyone for the series and his E.A. signature is ubiquitous in the Anglican, Nonconformist, Roman Catholic, and Local Government notebooks, as well as (that grab-bag of respondents) the Miscellaneous notebooks. Yet what did Aves believe? It seems clear that he was a union supporter. He encouraged “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.” He also held governmental positions as a special commissioner on wage boards in the Edwardian period and as chairman of the British and Irish trade boards in 1913. Indeed, as the Simeys have written, Aves was committed to “social action.”78 He was also, however, firmly in favour of charity control – something entirely compatible in this period with union rights.

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A sample from Aves’s interviews gives a sense of what the Booth men looked for in an ideal clergyman in this period. When he met Rev. Canon Palmer, Rector of St Mary Newington, Kennington Park, on 23 January 1900, Aves was heartily impressed. Palmer consigned 90 per cent of the men in the local lodging house to Booth’s loafer class – or “cadgers,” as he called them – and he accused neighbouring parishes of making the situation worse by giving out charity indiscriminately after Sunday mass. In order to combat the poor who grovelled for charity at church, Palmer kept a close eye on St Mary’s relief efforts. Not trusting his (likely, women) visitors to the task, Palmer only permitted clergy to give relief. Aves was impressed with such systematic supervision of charity work, and, without actually having seen Palmer’s parish workers at work, he wrote, “There is every reason to think that what is given, is given well.” He also expressed his great liking of Palmer as a person, and in his description we see the ideal of a vigorous Victorian man: “[Palmer] combine[s] 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 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.”79 The Booth team was rounded off by three more members. The first, George Arkell, became an experienced social investigator in Booth’s initial poverty surveys and from early on he played a “crucial” role in data management. In his research, Arkell worked closely with Octavia Hill on the subject of block dwellings (a discussion in the “Poverty” series).80 And, later, he created intricate maps detailing the pubs and clubs of the metropolis. In the “Religious Influences” series he also seems to have been the unofficial “Nonconformist” specialist, perhaps because he himself attended – at least occasionally – Northcote Baptist Church in Western Battersea.81 George Herbert Duckworth (1868–1934) spent ten years at Eton and Cambridge and then married the daughter of an earl (Lady Margaret Herbert). He began research on the “Industry” series and, perhaps unlike the rest of the Booth team, was a bit of a dandy. “He was a man of distinguished presence, exceptionally companionable, a delightful talker and a connoisseur of good living.”82 He was also an Anglican and, like Argyle and Aves, frequented Toynbee Hall.83

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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 or anecdote. Like the other Booth men, he believed strongly in moral segregation and was particularly attuned to the “scientific” method of observing the physical attributes of people and places in order to assign them moral value. 84 For example, one interviewee, Father Whelahan, defended the character of the Irish tenants in one of the poorest parishes in Deptford, St Nicholas: “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: G H D].”85 Lastly, the Cockney Jesse Argyle served longest with the Booth project. Like Arkell, he was adept at separating data into smaller, workable subjects, a skill his fellow investigators surely appreciated. Originally a clerk in the Booth Steamship Company, he had been a secretary and social investigator since the mid-1880s. Mary said that, like Booth, Argyle had a “great zeal” to help the working classes and did “great work in connection with various movements of the time among the artisan class.”86 Argyle was involved with workingclass education, organized the Adelphi Terrace offices, took part in the original Tower Hamlets investigations, and studied poverty in Walthamstow and West and North London as well as silk manufacture and London’s drawing power for provincial labour (a paper he presented in Toynbee Hall).87 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. Argyle’s interviews in the “Religious Influences” series were most often with authorities in local government. A sample from his interviews again introduces subjects that most preoccupied the Booth men: whether small or large numbers of people should be helped (small, said the Booth men), whether charity should be private or public (private, said the Booth men), and whether the taint of moral poverty was necessarily passed down generationally. Argyle’s May 1897 interview with S.A. Lewis, clerk of the Stepney Guardians, raises a number of these issues. Argyle describes Lewis’s dilemma regarding free dinners distributed through the Princess of Wales Fund: “His Board and he himself think the affair injudicious, and

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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.”88 Argyle is clearly sympathetic with the aim of the Stepney Guardians to keep charity small, local, and private. He was also concerned with heredity, something that comes out in his interview with another clerk, Fred Butler of the Poplar Guardians. Butler assured him 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.”89 These were the men and the ideas that Booth unleashed on church, chapel, and mission staff across the metropolis. Booth and his men saw improvement in the London working classes who, they believed, had become – spiritually speaking – middle class. However much the poor 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. As he and his team knew, however, religious influence could produce the morally disciplined and, at the same time, discipline what L.T. Hobhouse called the “morally uncontrolled.” Christianity was ostensibly a religion of self-sacrifice and ministers were expected to instil a spirit of thrift in working people, even if this caused them pain. Booth and his men 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.

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3 “Ordinary Mortals”: History and Holy Men of London

Ernest Aves arrived at Rev. W.H. Hornby Steer’s Anglican church of St Phillip’s in Lambeth on a hot July day in 1899. In his notes, Aves paints a vivid portrait of a vicar immersed in the dirt and sweat of South London church work: On arrival I found Mr Steer just finishing a Baptism Service … 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 … 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 … 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.1 Let us trap Rev. Steer in this historical moment as simply a man, “an ordinary mortal sweltering, like everybody else on that hot July afternoon.” This allows us, as with Charles Booth, to start afresh in

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our analysis of what precisely made Steer, and his Nonconformist and Roman Catholic colleagues, tick. 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. As these historians have pointed out, after 1850, beginning with the Anglican Church and followed by other denominations by late-­ century, Christian ministers adopted a new, generous, social, and philanthropic approach to their urban parish work, “providing food or clothing, or other kinds of material help” to the poor.2 As Jeffrey Cox notes, in 1859 Charles Kemble’s influential Suggestive Hints on Parochial Machinery informed Anglican clergy that their primary objective should be the diffusion of “Christian influence through all classes” through a battery of church auxiliaries responsible for poor relief, thrift, temperance (or Bands of Hope), medical services, education, clubs, recreation, and entertainment.3 “Both Christian compassion and Christian universalism,” continues Cox, combined “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.”4 Historians nearly all give positive assessments of church auxiliary activity. Despite having studied the Booth archive, their optimism about the humanitarianism behind auxiliary activity doggedly persists. Moreover, most scholars add that Booth and his team were sceptical of this new method, creating a binary where “good” ministers encounter “bad” Booth men. This chapter offers a more realistic portrayal of the clergy who were, after all, simply late Victorian men engaged in a profession requiring training in practical social work, of which they had none.5 What is crucial is that the clergy and the Booth men, as this chapter shows, thought very much alike about charity issues. But both agreed that certain members of the profession were defective. Booth and his men recorded the lives of clergy who, unlike the young Rev. Steer, simply could not cope with their work among the urban and very poor people of London. They buckled in the face of the physical rigours Christian social workers were required to overcome and fell short of Booth’s expectations. Ministers’ fairly constant round of indignities fell into two main areas, each of which mingled with the other: anxieties regarding a

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popular lack of respect and the (generally shocking) social experience of poor urban London; and anxieties revolving around a loss of faith in the moralizing power of the church. Both of these anxieties were coupled with the ever-present worry about raising funds, which Rev. Steer mentions in his interview with Aves. This chapter examines the lives of ministers and explores the insecurities they faced, asking where, finally, they were able to find a source of conviction. The second half of the chapter looks at disagreements between the C OS and London ministers, who were accused of not being “sensible” in their charitable practice. It argues that, in fact, disputes rarely occurred because of divergent ideology, as historians have supposed, but because of competition for authority and resources in the world of London charity control.

Pas to r al F ai l u r e s : T h e E l der ly, th e In fi r m Not infrequently, Christian ministers in charge of a parish or neighbourhood were too old or sick to fulfil the practical duties of urban social work. The Booth men did not mince words, calling elderly curates “cadaverous,” “elderly failure[s],” and “poor creature[s],” lacking the vigour so prized in a man like Rev. Steer.6 At St George’s parish in Blackheath, for example, Ernest Aves dismissed the elderly Henry Kendall: there were never more than thirty adults at the church’s services and Aves could get little 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.”7 Predictably, the Booth men were most concerned that age might be accompanied by a softening of the instinct to administer charity carefully. Arthur Baxter alluded to as much, when he interviewed Congregational minister Rev. J. Ellis: “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.”8 Other times the Booth men had mercy on elderly ministers. Even the hard-nosed Aves felt pathos for the plight of Rev. G. Barnes of St Barnabas, Bethnal Green, an elderly man physically and financially exhausted: “When he came he had 3000 [pounds] 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

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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.” In this instance, Aves 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.” Moreover, knowing that Barnes’s words would reach his editor-in-chief, Charles Booth, Aves allowed him to make a 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: “I hope Mr Booth will tell the Bishop of London to portion off in some decent way the old incumbents.”9 The Booth men also encountered men debilitated by illness, ­mental and physical. Some ministers, 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.”10 Other ministers soldiered on in spite of bodily ailments. In Victoria Park Wesleyan, Rev. Arthur E. Gregory, a forty-year-old with “bright eyes,” was “evidently a keen active and cultured man” in Arkell’s opinion. Nevertheless, church work had worn him down: “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. 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.”11 Bermondsey vicar Rev. J. Ainsworth had just recovered from influenza, which, striking him at 62, 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.”12 Near constant parish visiting-work undoubtedly weakened immune systems. From the bottom of the Christian hierarchy (Nonconformist

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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 territories, which could often amount to ten or twenty thousand people. Weak immune systems were more liable to succumb to whatever plagues were going round working-class neighbourhoods at the time, diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever. Salvation Army officers were particularly involved in their communities and often looked thin and sickly in their interviews. A Hackney Wick captain named Miss Smith described how she had only recently visited a lodger at her sergeant-major’s house who had scarlet fever and that, the day before, 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.”13 Surrounded by poor people who were always sick, it was difficult enough for ministers to bear the ever-present threat of illness and possible death, but often others’ lives were at stake, particularly family members. Christian workers questioned their convictions when family members (some of them brought into slum areas) died of 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, halfdeaf, and portly London City missionary of Greenwich, John Saberton, had lived seventy-five years as a missioner 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.”14

A n x i e ti e s o f S o c i al Au th or i ty, Mas c u l i n i ty, and Cl ass Leaving college, or following their conversion and commitment to some form of Christian ministry, these men believed they had a

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sacred calling. Yet often they were faced with their own impotence in spreading gospels, elevating communities, and raising characters. As Richard Dellamora suggests, the masculinity of these men had been violently thrown into question at almost precisely the moment the Booth team reached their doors. In the late-1890s, men in London faced the liberation of a female elite, working-class emancipation, and homosexual scandal.15 Most ministers of Christian religion – because of who they were and what they represented – were engaged in a counterattack against what was perceived as 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 Christians and as men.16 And they were not the only ones in this counterattack. Lower-middle and workingclass ministers asserted their competence and equality with these “gentlemen” – preaching with the same frequency a masculine, even combative gospel of improvement. This masculinity crisis was made worse when distinguished, selfimportant ministers were subjected daily to the vulgarities of working-class life. In the case of one Lambeth Baptist, this meant listening to workmen – too hung over to attend services on Sunday – provide 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 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.”17 Other times their working-class parishioners wanted little to do with them at all. A Greenwich vicar told of a working-class woman who told him, at the doorstep, “‘to go to Hell’” while he made his neighbourhood rounds. A London City missionary described how occasionally he was rebuffed with “‘Don’t want to see you to-day, Governor.’” The emaciated Captain Fowler, stationed in Hackney, 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 … 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 … They get more insults

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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. “With the exception of visitation, he welcomes his work. It is hard when the people show that they do not want to receive you.”18 Perhaps the worst insult to gentlemanly independence was class invasion of their profession from the lower classes themselves. Of the Anglican clergy, Rosemary O’Day has written that “three quarters of all ordinands in the late nineteenth century were graduates” of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Rev. Anthony C. Deane (a popular writer of Christian literature in this period), in an article titled, “The Falling-Off in the Quantity and Quality of the Clergy,” tracked the number of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in the overall clerical population as falling from 62 per cent in 1894 to 57.9 per cent four years later. “In former times,” Deane wrote, “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,” he concluded, “an ill-educated and lower-middle class clergy will be an uninfluential clergy.”19 This meant that men were vying to be ministerial gentleman who were not from the middle and upper classes, and this was noticed both by metropolitan ministers and the Booth men. Among Nonconformists there were fewer Oxbridge, higher-class clergy, and therefore there was more defensiveness in regard to the subject of lower-class ministers and their impact on the profession. 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.”

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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.” At this point spilled out the minister’s own class skeletons: “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.’” Baxter perceptively noted MacGregor’s own emphasis on ministerial authority and his separation from the working-class laity in spite of, or perhaps because of, his own humble roots.20 Middle-class notions of status consciousness in a time of moral as well as financial chaos (with sexual and gender norms in flux) made ministers ostracise any religious man with an immoral past. Aves’s interview with a Salvation Army man, Mr Topham, offers a good example. They met at a Salvation Army “Elevator” (essentially a paper-sorting workshop for the unemployed) where Topham was deputy. Aves characterized him as “a choice-looking 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 this time Aves’s character typing 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: “[H]e 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 want his people to know where he is. In confidence, he told me his name – Topham.” Topham knew his social position was marred by his moral crimes, and that it would be so indefinitely among Army officers and indeed among all middle-class ministers in South London. Only outwardly was he “one of them.” Men like Topham could never really be “saved” or “come clean,” at least in middle-class, Christian circles.

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Importantly, as was hinted here (“he at one time … ruled a rougher set of men”), these men reproduced the class snobbery from which they suffered and trained it on those they felt were “below” them. In a rather pathetic but poignant episode at the end of the interview, Topham showed that he knew that Aves might very well join in this middle-class ostracism: “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.”21 Most clergymen steered clear of moral improprieties (or kept them secret) but nearly all toiled endlessly to maintain the financial independence of their churches. Money problems could bring ruin and ostracism upon ministers and from their own colleagues they continuously expected charges of “begging” and misuse of donations. The elderly Rev. Lee of Lambeth, for example, when asked where he procured his funds for poor relief, responded quickly, “Most of 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. “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 for ostracism. Rev. Adamson of St Paul’s, Old Ford, Bow was singled out both by local clergymen, the C OS, 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, “[Other clergy] 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 ever-reliable C OS. In what now seems a spectacularly vague appraisal, Mr Eveleigh of the C O S told him, “Rev. W. Adamson, St Paul’s, has a standing quarrel with all his brother clergy … He is a great beggar

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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.”22

C la ss Cu l tu r e S h o c k: D r i n k i n g, Sex, an d Vi ol en ce The entry of mainly middle-class ministers into working-class neighbourhoods could often result in culture shock, particularly related to public displays of drunkenness, sex, and violence. The simple quantity of alcohol consumed by working men and (more shockingly) working women was jarring for many clergymen. One London City missionary (L C M), in his 1897–98 Mission Report, straightforwardly put his worst cases under the title “S O M E CAS E S – 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 prayed with him and pointed him to the glorious Cross … His wife neglected him, while she went about drinking with her friends … 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.’”23 A second L C M, in East Dulwich, poured out his heart to Duckworth, fearing for children “born drunk”: “Women when bad are worse than men and can be seen on any Monday in the public houses … ‘Then look at the children sipping.’ He wd 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. ‘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.’”24 A third borough L C M 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.” One Anglican emphasized “the barrier to religious observances that was created by the late hours

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habitually kept on Saturday night. The whole place is all agog at midnight, and just as still and sleepy the next morning.” Another minister in Bethnal Green emphasized his own impotence in the face of loud pubs nearby: “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.”25 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 it is perhaps not surprising that such men succumbed. Like their working-class parishioners, it was often drink that relieved their anxiety. Usually all the proof we have of such indiscretions 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.”26 One interview provides a better idea of what it was like for the minister who fell out of line. Rev. C.S. Coldwill of Christ Church parish on the Isle of Dogs had taken to drinking and had then been rusticated by the clerical authorities for seven years. He had returned, however, and his reception from both 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.” He came away from the interview thinking the man “distinctly infamous,” “shifty and unreliable.” Probably the only reason his church showed any signs of life, Baxter wrote, was because Coldwill had “returned married to a vigorous wife who very largely runs the parish.”27 By a fortunate turn of events for the historian, Baxter then narrated an encounter with a local curate named Free. He told Baxter how the clergy had isolated Coldwill, and had tried to turn Free, a newcomer in 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 felt he had paid his debts. “[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

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story.” The snobbish lack of sympathy of ministers in this example is striking. Free explained to Baxter, “He [Coldwill] certainly has made a mistake in coming back to the parish for it is impossible to live down the past … 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.”28 Another shock to middle-class sensibilities, and if not that then at least an indignity to men of religion, 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.”29 There were the very common “early” or “forced” marriages, as one Anglican noted: “Forced marriages are almost universal, and are thought nothing of. The respectable people … 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.”30 There was also the spectre of incest, a subject mentioned fairly frequently among 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. L CM 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.”31 As common as the complaint of early marriages were ministers’ frequent hand wringing about 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

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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.”32 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 directly outside the walls of their churches. One Greenwich L C M 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, attacked as sites of the sex trade, were often simply dark places in  which the working-class 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 that had a “very evil reputation,” and added, “you cannot cross it at night ‘without stumbling over the couples.’”33 In interviews with the Booth men, ministers often confessed to being 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 (ill and “unable to shake off the effects of an attack of influenza”) “mentioned the 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.”34 Surrounded by what appeared to be 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. In desperately poor East and South London neighbourhoods 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, trading punches or worse. Negotiating one’s way as a Christian

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minister among men and women much more physical with each other than they were in middle-class suburbs (at least in public) could be terrifying. One Bethnal Green vicar said that, during the raucous uproar of a New Year’s Eve service (when poor people commonly packed churches) “the poorer class” flocked in “from the public houses.” While the 700 seated (and the “500 or 600” standing in the aisles) were “generally respectful and well behaved,” the vicar said, “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 failed 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 that as a Nonconformist he was safer from anticlerical violence. “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.’”35 A rather different concern, yet one still related to sexual excess, pitted Anglican Low Church ministers and Nonconformists against their High Church colleagues. Specifically, some middle-class ministers worried that morally suspect, unmanly High Church practices were affecting the already fragile popularity of the church. Rev. Grundy told his interviewer that his Low, Lambeth church “met a want” in the district because of “its thoroughgoing evangelicalism”; it kept local Anglican residents, he thought, “from lapsing to non-conformity those who want a simple service and plain gospel teaching” (Low Churchmen always had to be on the lookout for Nonconformist sheep-stealers). 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.”36 A Hackney Unitarian, Rev. Fletcher Williams, concluded that only “effeminate” men were drawn to high ritual – a statement refuted by the many High Churchmen (such as Hoxton’s Father Jay) who celebrated manliness and virility. Nevertheless, as Rev. Williams explained, “Most of the churches in Hackney are high, and … 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.”37 This worry about the feminization of the churches was related to what Aves called the “usual complaint” “of indifference.” In other

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words, ministers constantly worried that attendance was down. Historian Gerald Parsons has noted the coexistence 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 self-conscious: “Victorian churchmen and women sensed that they were involved simultaneously in both crisis and opportunity. [They] were the opposite sides of the same phenomenon: the vitality and commitment of urban mission was the obverse of anxiety and fear at urban irreligion and its presumed social consequences.” Parsons suggests that Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Anglo-Catholic revivalism in the late nineteenth century was anxious men’s “reassertion of theological conservatism” in the face of feelings of loss of control.38 Indeed, all across London by 1900, insecure ministers, fearing indifference from parishioners, tried to deal with it by making desperate attempts to assert popular religion. In Poplar, Arthur Baxter described a Protestant revivalist who, at his Cubitt Town Tent Mission, distributed (imperfectly worded and ungrammatical) copies of the “Protestant Banner,” a pamphlet that called on all true Protestants to rally to the “principles for which the Protestant Reformers died.” Baxter was also told of the “Ritualistic Church” in this part of East London where the curate had “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.”39 By causing extraordinary emotional agony and relying on hellfire Christianity, some clergy hoped to draw attendees and interest.

T h e Bo o th Me n ’s Wor r i es abou t I n c ar n ati o n al T h eol ogy There has been some debate among historians about what these shifts related to class and gender meant for theology. At the time Booth conducted his surveys, London clergymen of all denominations espoused a type of universalism, a new language of human fellowship based in Christ’s incarnation. 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 – Stanton proclaimed a brotherhood and love between himself and those before him. “God has given me the love of my fellow men,” Stanton said, and the men burst into applause. “Amor vincit

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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 credal and social difficulties and differences to unite all men together. It is a blood and a heart that make men one.”40 The worry, for the Booth men, was that men like Stanton in their zeal for a “new love” would lose their sense of proportion. Charles Booth had consistently argued that London philanthropists should at all costs avoid indiscriminately giving charity 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. He could not be sure, as the “Religious Influences” interviews began, whether clergymen had tempered their incarnational theology with a “scientific” understanding (that is, moral division) of working people and an equally “scientific” application of careful charity. In some cases ministers showed little sign of adhering to Booth’s methods, conforming to the popular stereotype of the inefficient clergyman. Certain men baffled the Booth investigators as sentimental dupes or unrealistic fundamentalists. On a Saturday in April 1900, for example, Arthur Baxter walked into St Luke’s Church in Bermondsey and met the vicar, Hugh Chapman. Baxter spent the next three days with Chapman as a guest at the vicarage. He studied Chapman’s philanthropic activities and he interviewed his curates. Chapman was certainly a High Churchman, one of the proponents of a “new love” and a “living Christ,” but what this meant in practical, charitable terms was not clear.41 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, Chapman said, “I believe you’ll go back and make a note, ‘Here I met a hybrid. I can’t place him. Amusing chap.’”42 Chapman was correct; Baxter was having a difficulty with his assessment. The vicar was “immaculate in his dress: very neat and dapper, with the whitest cuffs and expensive gold and diamond links.” Baxter described his 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

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“gentleman” had become an increasingly contested term, Baxter noted that, “Even in Peckham he always dresses for dinner so that he ‘may not forget the gentleman.’”43 Baxter’s description of the vicar’s study takes us to the eclectic scene of their conversations. “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 was engraved the single word “Others,” always reminding Chapman of the importance of Christian self-sacrifice.44 Baxter wanted to know, in a practical sense, what this heavy dose of Jesus amounted to. Chapman told him that he wanted to be 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.” 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.’”45 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.”46 Baxter, however, was not through. 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:

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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 altar rails, meditated on the Epistle for about 20 minutes. 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.”47 Finally, during lunch, Baxter pinned his high-flying vicar down. Unfortunately it confirmed 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. And then: “I do it with a sort of splosh, I’m built like that,” said Chapman, clearly without 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 administration of relief has been taken from his hands, and centred 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

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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.48 Chapman’s brotherly religion served as a powerful impetus to his church work but his methods of charity were, felt Baxter, clearly dangerous. It is rather interesting in this case that the vicar’s careless methods had caused his curates (one of whom, named Waldron, Baxter noted, “freely” dropped his aitches) to wrest control of relief from him. It was perhaps because of the presence of more “sensiblyminded” 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.”49

Scie n ti fi c H o ly Me n an d Booth ’s Gi f t to Lon don Although Rev. Chapman stoked the Booth men’s fear of irresponsible charity, his actions should have put them at ease. After all, it was an age when people were easily categorized and even a proponent of “Jesusism” like Rev. Chapman applied moral types. Over lunch, Baxter was told by Rev. Chapman and his working-class curate, Mr 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.”50 Despite Chapman’s new love for incarnationalism, in other words, he showed great facility in wielding typologies of moral hierarchy. 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. This was part of a larger trend stemming from Darwinian science and biblical criticism. To cope with these new intellectual trends, ministers turned, paradoxically, to science itself.51 By the 1890s, steps were taken to accommodate evolutionary science in a wide range of orthodoxies – from

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the Evangelical, Low Church, to the Anglo-Catholic, to the particularly science-friendly Broad Church schools.52 The way that evolution was integrated was by merging it with morality and then using this combination to explain a number of new sciences – social science and economics, for example. 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, “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.”53 Nonconformists were in agreement with Anglicans like Talbot. “Almost all [Nonconformist] ministers,” according to historian Richard Helmstadter, “accepted the validity of using the latest and most scientific techniques of historical and literary analysis in order to better understand the Bible.”54 What this meant for ministers in their parishes was that they turned to what they called “practical” or “applied” Christianity. Interviewed by Ernest Aves in early January 1899, the famous London Baptist Dr John Clifford explained, “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, whom he described as “a zealous, optimistic Christian Socialist.”55 Whether ministers called it applied Christianity, practical Christianity, or Christian socialism and whether they were CO S affiliated or not, they overwhelmingly agreed on the need to differentiate the moral from the immoral in any given community. The question was: how to be trained in this new method? Rosemary O’Day and Alan Haig point out that there was no systematic training or body of expertise upon which ministers could draw until after the First World War. Although ministers bewailed this rather embarrassing flaw in their training, “handbooks and guides for ministers were singularly contentless” and universities and theological colleges lacked strong courses in pastoral theology.56 Indeed, practical courses at university focused on theology, preaching, and learning to defend oneself against secularist and Darwinist critics. There was no help with the “science” of parochial work.

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Booth’s series not only provided an invaluable training tool but it gave “practical Christianity” the stamp of science. Praise for his work was immediate and Life and Labour and then “Religious Influences” were highly recommended reading.57 The Simeys reproduced a thank-you note from prominent clergyman Canon Samuel Barnett, who wrote to Booth after having received a complimentary copy of “Religious Influences”: “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.”58 Direct praise for Booth also came from the Christian ministry’s “left,” the Nonconformist Social Gospellers. As one Hammersmith Congregationalist, Mr Adams, affirmed in his interview with Argyle, “social Christianity” was easily compatible with Charles Booth’s moral-religious science. “Mr Adams,” wrote Argyle, “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 … 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 six sermons upon it, which were afterwards published in a religious magazine.”59 Indeed, not only did Nonconformists preach on issues related to Booth’s survey, they often owned full sets of his work. The most famous member of the Nonconformist “left” interviewed by the Booth team, the Wesleyan Hugh Price Hughes, declared himself very willing to help in the investigations, as “he knew and had got all Mr Booth’s books.”60 It was not just prominent church leaders who referred to Booth’s method. 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

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Booth surveys, their familiarity with Booth’s maps and volumes, and praised Life and Labour. This tells us two crucial things: clergymen in London felt that Booth had established himself as an authority in the realm of sociology, and the project of hierarchizing workingclass London made scientific sense. Of course, one should not paint too uniform a picture of the London minister. 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. 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.” 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.61 More often, however, London’s holy men praised the project and some had been involved in the survey nearly as long as Booth, having been consulted for the “Poverty” and “Industry” surveys a decade before. L C M Charles Wheeler, it was noted, “Has 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.’”62 These precious quotes remind us that Booth’s idea of an urban working-class 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 since the mid-century parochial revival. Clergy were exacting about how they wanted their parishes portrayed. Many began their interviews with the Booth team by a perusal of the poverty maps and it was with their help that the maps underwent revisions right up until the publication of the “Religious

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Influences” series. 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 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.”63 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. Churchmen then used these designations in their appeals for money. “The population,” reads the 1898 “Report and Annual Statement of Accounts” at the parish of St  George the Martyr, Southwark, “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.”64 Ministers were also proficient, like Booth, in distinguishing who was a “loafer,” a category granted scientific credence since at least 1889.65 In the Bow and Bromley interviews, for example, 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.”66 Ministers from a variety of denominations sometimes suggested drastic solutions. In an interview with Camberwell Ragged School missioner John Kirk, it was recorded, “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.’”67 Father Newton, whose church was in the epicenter of Southwark poverty on Red Cross Street, had a more practical solution: “for the young loafer,” he declared, “there is nothing for it but discipline and the Army.”68 The one exception to this strict evaluation was with the very old or young, who were given charity regardless. It is not clear why this was the case. With children at least, it became common to assert that “it was ‘from the young that results are expected’”69 and Booth noted how ministers of all denominations, and many others, were involved in helping children: “A great number of movements on foot to benefit the people, especially the young ones: the Lord Mayor

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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 … 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 … absence from school.”70 Though adults could not be trusted with cash indulgences, it appears, this type of charity (such as free meals) was allowable for children. Describing a Wesleyan Methodist mission, Aves wrote, “Giving is said to be almost entirely on a personal basis, and there is no reason to suppose that anything approaching CO S methods is adopted.” “On the other hand,” Aves said, “much of the money probably goes in [children’s] breakfasts, etc, and in severe winter as many as 4000 meals are given four times a week.”71 Describing the same mission, Baxter’s ambivalence was clear: “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 … but,” he 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.”72 That Booth men were willing to give the Wesleyans any benefit of the doubt at all was partly to do with Aves’s “character analysis” of the minister in charge, Mr Meakin, who, he felt, was “one of the robuster type of ministers.”73 Fundamentally, though, the Wesleyans were dealing with children and this made all the difference in the assessment. In the 1902–03 volumes 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” for children, deciding that “the majority [of recipients] did not look habitually ill fed.” Among poor mothers, he continued, “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 Christians who showed charitable restraint could inspire more effort by mothers to care for their own children. In the end, however, even Booth seemed unwilling to completely condemn efforts to help the youngest poor. He again quoted Meakin’s plea that “the only hope for the

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slums” was in its children and finally concluded ambivalently that the mission did much “to lighten and brighten” poor London’s city life, “even if the methods employed sometimes tend to lower the standard of religious taste.”74 Although the Booth men had a positive impression of Meakin’s character, they generally condemned as ineffective the ministers who did not apply Boothian charity discrimination. These ministers did not oppose Booth’s surveys for the sake of their parishioners (like Rev. H.P. Denison above, who refused to participate in the survey) but because they were simply floundering. In South London, for example, the Booth men found six unreliable and two deliberately delinquent Anglican ministers – rather small pickings in a region of almost thirty parishes. The most distinguishing characteristic of these “unscientific” ministers, however, was that they largely lacked any definable stance at all. Quiet, often aging, and inoffensive, they made poor opponents. A man such as the Rector of Lambeth, Rev. Andrews Reeve, 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 in from Cornwall, he had been rector four-and-a-half years, but he reeked of inexperience to 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.”75 Metropolitan church work and the legion of women volunteers simply floored him. He interrupted his interview with cries of “Wonderful” and concluded with unhelpful explanations like “the astounding goodness of bad people impresses me always.”76 But was Reeve a charity rebel? Hardly. His relief committee included local authorities such as “Mr Turner, a Guardian, and Mr [F.B.] Meyer’s Secretary” (who, apparently, was “very helpful”). He was even on the committee of Lambeth’s parochial charities, which were administered under the Charity Commission Schemes. Reeve simply had no idea what was going on in his parish but had a small army of church workers – to some of whom he gave a “free hand” in auxiliary work – who took care of the details.77 A second example comes from Rev. Dodge of St Stephens, who may have been the only man “bad” without qualification. But he was bad because he was desperate. Dodge presided over the most depressingly poor district in London.78 Between 50 and 60 years old, stout, “shy and slightly gauche,” he had little in the way of

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charisma.79 He handed over £200 a year, in Baxter’s words, “evidently without any principle,” and yet he could not seem to attract people to his church for services, Sunday school, or auxiliaries. Nor did Dodge have enough church workers, since so many were “frightened away” by parish conditions. He had tried every kind of social agency, and each had failed.80 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 but Dodge had no idea what it was. The reader is left with this poor man’s remark “that quite an appreciable number of his parishioners do occasionally go to outside churches and chapels who would not dare to go to their parish church.”81 His parishioners went to other centres of worship; they simply did not want to go to his.

T h e CO S an d Bo o th ’s Cr i ti qu e o f th e L o n do n M i n i ster s What is evident is that opposition to charity organization was in no sense organized: it was generally borne of the failures of specific ministers, unable to cope with their parishes. Why then did the CO S – and, by extension, Charles Booth – criticize so many ministers for their inability to work along “strict lines” and be “scientific”? Indeed, despite the outpouring of support for charity control in the interviews, one of the startling things about the published “Religious Influences” series is Booth’s uncompromising criticism of charity methods. This is particularly evident in the fourth volume of the series: Inner South London. In the unpublished interviews, ministers repeatedly underlined the painstaking care they took with charity, but, in the published version, Booth instead inserted his often ambivalent, sometimes very critical assessments. Booth even blamed churchmen for the low nature of their neighbourhoods, arguing that their careless relief methods dragged the district down. There are over ten references to “unwise” or “mischievous” uses of charity before the volume’s thirtieth page. Regarding the improvement of the moral “character” of the people, sniffed Booth, the results were “hardly commensurate with the efforts made.”

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This battle was not, as much as it may seem on the surface, an ideological one. This is clear from the testimony of the ministers above and in the unpublished interviews. Rather, it was a battle for control of the new field of scientific charity that emerged in the 1890s. Too often historians have taken at face value the battles between Established and Free Churches over charity, or between Booth and the C O S, or between Booth and the CO S against the ministers. Historians have a tendency to categorize men of church and chapel into “right” vs “left,” or “C OS ” vs “liberal nonconformist” and “Christian socialist,” ignoring the competition that caused men to imagine that there were definite lines of division between them.82 Booth believed that the men who knew the most about this new science were “professional charity scientists,” meaning CO S officials. It did not hurt that Mary Booth’s uncle, Sir Charles Trevelyan, was one of the original founders of the C O S . Booth and his investigators relied strongly on C OS testimony in each area of London they entered, though the society was often in competition with the very ministers the Booth men sought to evaluate. Indeed, Trevelyan’s 1870 comment (published as late as 1887 in the London CO S ’s annual report) laid out how the C O S expected the world of church work to function: “every clergyman and minister, and every congregation must be content to work in subordination to a general committee of direction,” he stated, although “the religious difficulty” (a clergyman’s Christian kindness) would be a particular “impediment” to this goal.83 What the C O S wanted, specifically, was direct cooperation on the part of churches by introducing a CO S representative on their relief committees. Less formally, churches could also work with the society through consultation with a CO S representative. Problems cropped up when ministers chose not to ally. Anglican clergy outside the “charity elite” in the area from Lambeth to Blackfriars Road, for example, avoided the CO S , as did Nonconformist ministers who did not want to work under this predominantly Anglican body.84 Indeed, Anglicans routinely launched verbal attacks on the neighbouring Nonconformist churches and missions, the latter commonly accused of being pauperisers.85 Other times, both sides simply seemed clueless about the other, with CO S officials complaining that the Nonconformist ministers were “friendly” but would not join or, if they did, they never went to meetings.86 Even ministers who were unwilling to work with the CO S , for a variety of reasons, were nevertheless mindful of the dangers of

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indiscriminate charity. In these cases, ministers pointed out that, quite without the rationalization and expertise of the Charity Commissioners, it was still possible to use older local machinery – vestry committees, church committees, philanthropic organizations – in order to discriminate good poor people from bad ones. 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 that, “The system has been in vogue for 40 years and works as well as possible.”87 One representative case illustrates how a particular minister might run afoul of the C OS and thus of Charles Booth. J.W.C. Fegan, a Nonconformist missioner and longtime Boys’ Home administrator, was accused by the vice-president of the CO S of a “propensity for giving free meals.”88 A neighbouring CO S affiliate, Rev. Asker of St Andrew’s, thought that Fegan “‘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 by offering him a large salary, and, worse, the defector was “followed by members of his congregation and meetings.”89 Likewise, Rev. Corbett at St Peter’s complained that Fegan 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 CO 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.”90 Later, Corbett downplayed this accusation somewhat, saying that he did  not believe these bribes of tea continued in Fegan’s church. Conscientiously, he 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.” In August 1899, the Booth team finally came to investigate, interviewing Fegan himself and his accountant, F.D. Holloway. Holloway, the financial head at both Fegan’s Boys’ Homes and his Home Hall Mission, took his job very seriously and was clearly aware of the scrutiny with which members of the Christian community watched their counterparts in charitable matters. Holloway offered Aves a

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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 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’… 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.”91 Later in the interview, Fegan admitted his annoyance with the Registration Committee. He told Aves flatly, “The CO S appears to be always ready to gird at him, but,” – and here Aves was having second thoughts about the man – “whether 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 personal rather 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 CO 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 … drew his attention to a report that the C OS 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

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of the disagreement between him and the Society. It might be well to get the counterpart of the story.92 It was not the methods of the C O S or its ideals with which Fegan disagreed (as we see here he “praised” the “objects” of the Registration Committee). It was rather that C OS officials doubted his efficacy in the moral appraisal of the working people around him and had humiliated him publicly on that account. In the interview, Fegan went on to 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 betteroff working people from also attending. He was fast winning over the hardheaded Aves.93 Regarding the accusations that his Mothers’ Meetings drew mothers from other parishes by offering bribes of tea, Fegan waved off his attackers. Fegan “professed to know little” about the complaints of ministers like Corbett. He hardly “troubles 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.” Fegan’s answers had by now silenced the accusations put in Aves’s head by the Anglicans. Fegan declared that charitable overlap was a sincere concern, and in the past he had taken great pains both to clear the name of his mission and to keep “cadgers” out of it: “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.”94 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.”95 Charles Booth was not so easily impressed. Somewhat surprisingly, he provided a

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cautionary conclusion to the whole affair in his published volumes. He noted that Fegan’s original undertaking for poor boys had “led [him] into Evangelistic and general charitable work” and that his “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 was Fegan’s response when he read 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.”96 The Charity Organisation Society was not a lone voice crying out for charity control in South London. It was one voice among many – clergymen’s, ministers’, missioners’, and local government officials’ – each competing in a hopelessly subjective game of moral segregation. When clergy did not cooperate with the CO S , they often had good reasons. Many times nothing they did was sufficient to meet C OS officials’ expectations and there was the recurring criticism that the C OS’s procedures took too long: inquiries could be handled better by those in direct contact with the poor.97 Clergymen also complained that C O S officials were often tactless towards residents with whom, morally speaking, they were not adequately familiar. Rev. Eck, the young curate-in-charge at St Andrew’s Bethnal Green, told Duckworth, “He works in closely with the CO S [and] is convinced that their system is not only right, but the only one. ‘Where they fail is in the overzealousness of some of their workers, eg you will find they have given unnecessary offence by enquiring of a most respectable couple whether they have been properly married or not.’”98 Importantly, however, these were methodological, not ideological objections. While historians have painted ministers as benevolent Christians who juxtaposed incarnational beliefs against CO S individualism, in reality ministers at this time were often just tired of being called amateurs by C O S men who could not possibly know the moral map of their parishes as well as they did. Indicative is an article in the South London Press covering a CO S conference held to promote cooperation with the St Olave’s Guardians.99 The conference was a flop and it must have been a cathartic moment for Christian philanthropists across the metropolis to read about it in the papers. When C OS official, Harry Toynbee, stood in front of the

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crowd and complained about the methods of non-CO S charity organizations, the guardians answered him “vigorously, Mr M’Carthy [a guardian] pointing out that only widows, the sick, and the aged had out-relief.” If loafers were not receiving relief, the guardians wondered, what was Toynbee complaining about, and what business did he have in telling them how to do their job? Most embarrassingly for Toynbee, the chair of the conference, Augustus Shand, gave him a dressing down: “Mr Shand said he was much disappointed. Mr Toynbee had taught them nothing. If the Charity Organization Society could give information to prevent fraud and extravagance, well, the guardians and the relieving officers were always glad of information.”100 Toynbee had no new information or technique to offer the guardians, just as he and his society had little to offer a group of holy men keen to separate the loafer from the poor-but-respectable. In this, somewhat ironically, the Booth survey was crucial. It gave ministers the tools they needed to separate poor from poor and apply scientific methods. Not only were ministers of all kinds familiar with it, they owned copies of its volumes, reproduced its maps and felt its researches of “practical use” in social work.

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4 Women and Charity: Love, Feminism, and “Men’s Worlds”

No church could function properly without women’s labour. Rosemary O’Day has noted the paradox of women in Victorian religion: “On the one hand, women were denied the major orders in both the Catholic and the Anglican churches and leading positions in Methodist, Congregationalist and Baptist denominations. On the other hand,” because of their attendance at church and because of their critical role in church social auxiliary work, they were the “mainstay of Victorian religion.”1 Of 500,000 women involved in voluntary work for the churches of England and Wales, several hundred thousand were in the unpaid employment of the Church of England, and between fifty and seventy thousand were district visitors between 1890 and 1910. Contemporary observers estimated that “at least” two or three women worked in every parish.2 In terms of church personnel, women often outnumbered the clergy of a given church three or five or ten to one. Charles Booth, at the time of the “Religious Influences” interviews, found sometimes twenty or thirty female visitors at work in a single parish, and yet only one in ten interviews in the series are with women.3 Early histories of women’s role in church work tended to be hampered by the assumption that women philanthropists, filled with “Christian love,” practised a more “feminine” philanthropy or social science than male clergy, reproducing Victorian notions of a woman’s natural, even superior ability to “love” the poor.4 In fact, as a rich seam of more recent scholarship makes clear, the subversive potential of female social science has been overrated.5 Although many “independent” women in this era helped to erode male privilege, appropriate new professions for themselves, and make men

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nervous and defensive by entering the public sphere, they were fundamentally as conservative-minded as the men they challenged. A language of “women’s love” may have served to differentiate them as new public figures but did not signal a break with prevailing moral discrimination. In reality, there was an extraordinary degree of cooperation between men and women charity workers across the metropolis. They sat on the same relief committees and women assisted and even supervised men in the day-to-day running of missions. The Women’s University Settlement (WUS), where many female charity workers were trained, and the settlement houses that they set up across the city, were closely tied to the C OS and the ideals of charity registration and control.6 Female church workers, as historian Sean Gill points out, understood that “[d]irect giving of assistance” was a “problematic” practice and that it “required careful monitoring, since it was thought likely to foster what it is now fashionable to call a culture of dependence.”7 Why was this cooperation between men and women charity workers obscured? Principally because male philanthropists and social scientists in Booth’s period kept women from our view.8 Using the Booth men’s unpublished interviews with female workers, this chapter outlines just what women workers were doing in London in the 1890s. It argues that, like clergymen in the period, middle-class and upper-middle-class lady workers were often filled with deep insecurities that affected how they classified the poor they encountered. As mentioned above, by late century women did most “systematic” or “house-to-house” visitation, a practice that has been treated rather innocuously by historians. But it was not simply a house-to-house checkup or a distribution of religious tracts. It was the registering of working people in terms of their “decency,” their place in a workingclass social hierarchy and, by extension, their moral eligibility for charitable aid. In other words, women did not just assent to men’s systems; they played a key role in the social classification of working-class neighbourhoods – a classification that made relief possible in the first place and upon which Charles Booth had built his reputation as a social scientist. Women’s great (largely unheralded) gift to men was a thousand parish hierarchies, each of them constantly amended to take account of immigration, impoverishment, and building improvements. Their work was a persistent hierarchization and rehierarchization of parish communities.

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Wo m e n i n Bo o th’s Lon don : Wo r ke r s , V i s i to r s , an d Tr ai n er s Because it was principally women workers who gathered the data that made clergy appear properly “scientific” in their charity, they were in great demand. Often clerical annual reports served as recruiting advertisements. One sees in Rev. Sommerville’s parish “Report and Statement of Accounts” the typical request of churchmen at this time. He asks “ladies of leisure” to please “consent to come and work here [as you] would receive a hearty welcome, and in time would find the work blessed and profitable. It is hard to overrate,” he added, “the importance of systematic district visiting.”9 The archive shows us that women in philanthropic work were typically separated into four types during this period. There was the missioner, the “trained” church worker, the untrained church worker, and the minister’s wife. Rosemary O’Day tells us that while paid workers figured prominently in the life of the late Victorian churches, “their importance was far outweighed by that of the myriad unpaid, voluntary helpers – the district visitors, the Sunday School teachers, the organizers of clubs and charities.”10 Women missioners, unpaid district visitors, and others came in for a great deal of abuse from the Booth investigators. Such women were stereotyped as incompetent amateurs, and their testimony was clearly seen as less valuable. The minister’s wife was also given little credit for professionalism, as she was a jack-of-all-trades in visiting and social auxiliary work, but respected as an emotional bulwark for her flagging husband. Yet these women’s commitment to the ideal of charity control was no less fervent than their professional superiors’ and the idea that poverty had moral causes was common sense to them. In interviews, they often surprised the Booth men with their “scientific” knowledge of neighbourhoods surrounding the church or chapel. Despite the Booth team’s picture of unprofessional lady visitors, a significant minority were, in fact, C O S trained, and some of these, to be fair, were afforded much professional esteem by the Booth men and perhaps met men’s harsh standards for professionalism. The rise in trained visitors is not surprising since institutions like the Women’s University Settlement were increasingly teaching charity organization. This training certainly had a class bias, since women had to have sufficient money for tuition. Those who could not afford it “sought informal training through the various church missions.”11

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In South London, Anglican deaconesses were trained by women like Mrs Isabella Gilmore who, by the time of the “Religious Influences” interviews, had been head of the Rochester Diocesan Deaconess Institution for fifteen years.12 Gilmore, and other professionals like her, believed firmly in the necessity of proper training and derided the untrained visitors: “In speaking of the work of the Deaconesses Mrs G. pointed out how much more thorough it is than that of the voluntary workers: she believes that so called District Visiting seldom amounts to much more than Magazine distribution, and that very few parishes are really visited in any effective sense: and as illustration she told me of a woman who said to her one day ‘Why don’t you come and see me, Deaconness?’ ‘But you’ve got your District Visitor.’ ‘No I haven’t: she only leaves a Magazine.’ In contradistinction to this the Deaconesses really have the most thorough knowledge of the people in their district.”13 In her 1900 report to the Bishop of Rochester, Gilmore stressed that, “the day is passed when people think no training is required for work amongst the poor, and I find on all sides a desire to know more about it.”14 Yet, like the clergy, women professionals mainly made do with on-the-job training; beyond religious training and trooping around slum parishes, their courses were rather contentless. From Gilmore’s report, we see that a deaconess’s two-year training consisted of three ten-week terms in theology so that she could “teach Church doctrine” and “answer the atheist and agnostic.”15 Practical training appeared to be nothing more than partnered urban visiting with “some one who has actual experience in visitation … showing and helping” the student to “know the poor” and speak with them.16 How, then, did middle-class women manage to tell poor from poor? In Battersea, a Baptist named Sister Kathleen worked closely with the C O S to try to determine who was deserving of charity. In  one instance, one of Battersea Park Baptist Tabernacle’s “old Mothers” had a stroke or similar attack and was “now lying at death’s door.” “The old man had nothing in the house and was not able to go to work,” wrote Sister Kathleen. “Mrs H. sent 1/- and I was able to take 2/6 from our Mission.” There was also help from Arthur Baxter’s much respected old C O S chief: “Mr Woollcombe of the C OS has kindly sent 6/- on Wednesday and 6/- today (Saturday) thus proving to the old couple (both Christians) that ‘He never forsakes.’”17 But Kathleen turned a harder heart toward another family being investigated by the C O S. “The CO S case is one I have had for

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3 months,” the Sister wrote, “a very mysterious one too: the place always clean and tidy but children seem starved, and the woman always crying and telling me they could not get food.” Kathleen continued, “I felt there was something in the background. We helped by giving Quaker Oats and milk for the children, and then went to the C OS to help [determine] if it was all straight, they having more time to investigate. I myself suspected sly drinking on the woman[’]s part and the C OS have found out from her relations that it is so. She drinks the children[’]s food money. We (the mission) are not helping any more. I am trying to get the man and woman to our meetings, but have only been successful once.”18 For a visitor like Sister Kathleen, working in the district meant actual visits but also collaborating closely with the CO S members and listening to a lot of gossip, asking friends and relations to find out whether everything “was straight.” If not, as in the case above, the visitor would inform the family that they would receive no more help – except from the Lord – and it was hoped they would attend mission meetings in order to bring about a change in behaviour. Historians have stressed the “freedom” that charity work provided women. While it is true that “Neither teaching, nor nursing, nor even mission work permitted women so much spatial freedom”19 – in fact all of these professions gave charity of a sort. Teachers gave free boots and dinners for children, nurses gave free treatments and medicines, and missioners gave everything from cash to coal to maternity bags. In doing charity work all embraced a freedom manifesting itself in two kinds of power: charity work allowed women to walk freely about the city, and, at the same time, it empowered them to examine poor people and exercise judgment about whether to provide or withhold care.

Yo u r s I s L ovi n g Wor k: Br e akdow n an d Col l apse Edward Talbot, the Christian Socialist and Bishop of Southwark, addressed the women workers of his new cathedral. He impressed on them the importance of love in church work. The diocese, he said, “was an instrument of this love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” “Yours is loving work,” he continued, “that is my thought for you: loving work in your purpose and meaning, but more deeply because the love of Christ is working itself out through you … you are ‘companions of the charity of Jesus.’”20 Talbot went on to offer

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practical suggestions. He made clear immediately, for example, that the work was going to be very tiring, but that, because Christ was with each of them, His love would “constraineth” them when hope “flagged” or patience “hardened.” When visiting poor homes, Talbot emphasized, love could never become routine or mechanical. A visitor to poor homes should avoid driving and ruling people – “lording it over God’s people” – “for their good.”21 These instructions were extremely difficult, of course, to put into practice. Bishop Talbot must have known that it would be impossible for his lady visitors to always shrug off fatigue, to keep smiling in slums, and to escape crushing monotony in their work. Church visiting work was frustrating. The visitors encountered streets and houses filled with undernourished poor people with all the usual accoutrements of status anxiety, short tempers, and a constant wish for a quick, alcohol-fuelled release. Women’s philanthropic work in a very poor city, as the bishop explained, would be the challenge of their lifetimes. Their job would be hard, “plodding” work, often lacking “freshness, and force and warmth,” but they were required, nevertheless, to put a “living power” in their work – a “love for men and women and children, and for their souls.”22 Few historians focus on either the psychological strain of church work or the class-biased leanings of church workers or how both these factors affected visiting and relief work. Women were subject to the same collapses as men in the face of East and South London poverty. Martha Vicinus has discussed how “even the most confident and farsighted [female slum workers] lost their way, feeling that they and their project had no future.”23 District workers, like Lady Bowen in one of the most “depressing” of central South London parishes, could suffer serious breakdowns. The vicar of St Stephen’s gave a heartrending account of her despair, which was published (minus Lady Bowen’s name) in the series: “Of one worker in particular Mr D. told me – Lady Bowen – who after she had been at the work some months, came into his room one day, sank her head on the table and burst into tears: she could bear it no longer she said: the condition of the people, their callousness, the sights in the houses and streets had completely unnerved her, and she must give up the work. This was an extreme experience, but the people are at too low a level for the average lady visitor.”24 The difficulty was exacerbated by the sheer amount of social work women did for the churches of London. According to Alan Bartlett, “lady workers did the brunt of the everyday visiting, ran the clubs

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and societies for girls and women, helped in the Sunday Schools and above all supervised relief.”25 Talbot’s speech – where women tread wearily through London, thinking, “loving work changes our very selves: for love is of God” – might be juxtaposed with the words of a longtime Boys’ and Girls’ Home of Industry administrator. Miss Annie Macpherson explained to the Booth men that her work “was entirely religious.” Her Home prided itself on religious services, Sunday schools, mothers meetings, and the assisted emigration of 6,400 boys over forty years to Canada. Arkell listed the home as “undoubtedly a centre of much Christian activity” and the list of operations for the Home was concluded with the words: “The above work carried on Trusting Jesus.” Yet the same Annie Macpherson, upon returning from a trip to Canada, had allegedly shouted at her poor charges, “You deceitful old bitches, I know what you’ve been doing while I’ve been away: you’ve been going to Father Jay, so losing the chance not only of the relief I should give you in this life, but at the same time imperiling your immortal souls.” This was the franker side of the veteran religious philanthropist who was thrown into a rage that the women in her mothers’ meeting might be ministered to by anyone but herself.26

Be h i n d Me n ’s Wor l ds: T h e S to r i e s o f Wo men O bscu red Gender historians are correct to see women occupying a great deal of public space in the late nineteenth century. However, like historians of women’s philanthropy before them, they are apt to see labour in the churches as too rigidly divided. Jane Lewis and Frank Prochaska both note how “tasks of men and women were clearly differentiated”: “men controlled finances and committees in the world of nineteenth century charity” while “women raised funds through bazaars and visited the poor.”27 Women and men occupied different offices in the church, assigned by a male ecclesiastical hierarchy who believed women were a subordinate sex. But, by the 1890s, differentiation of female “benevolent action” from male “scientific” charity had no basis in reality. Women studied charitable sciences and employed them in their social work just as much as men. Men, by late century, were starting to notice this fact, and they did not like it. According to historians Dorice Williams Elliott and N.N. Feltes, the pious female philanthropist and the male

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professional began to seem so alike that men began calling women charity workers “nonprofessionals” and amateurs. In Elliott’s words, “If male professionals’ vocation looked so much like women philanthropists’,” then “male professionals needed another way to distinguish themselves in order to consolidate their monopoly over the social sphere.”28 By painting women as amateurs, men made a lastditch attempt to differentiate themselves but it was a losing battle. By the 1890s, women had muscled their way into formerly male positions of relief administration. Women not only sat on relief committees but also, in certain cases, exerted a noticeable control over their proceedings. Vastly outnumbering men in visiting work, they could provide detailed ground-level accounts. The history of women charity workers should emphasize their class snobbery and their vulnerability. In the world of metropolitan church social work, pious women were without a vote or a secure role in the public sphere. They struggled for social and professional legitimacy, making a place for themselves at a time when religious middle-class men – social scientists and clergy – experienced a threat to masculine authority, a crisis of faith, and a merging of new science with old religious thought. Thus, in some ways like their male counterparts, women’s most significant characteristic at this time was their insecurity and their attempt to secure power. Indeed, Martha Vicinus argues that the chief benefit of settlement work for women was power. It was “a stepping stone to local politics,” where women had “successfully carved out an area of expertise that gained them respect and a voice in social legislation … [Women] found scope for their talents, satisfaction for their ambitions, friendship among equals, and a cause greater than themselves.”29 Seth Koven is even more blunt: “Well-to-do women,” he writes, “like their male counterparts, were deeply attracted to the sights and sounds of metropolitan poverty and found in slumming a means to expand their social authority over the poor.” He quotes suffragist Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, who commented in 1898 in a private letter on “the irony that ‘women’s position of slavery’ led so many to seek ‘rather power to coerce others than to free themselves.’”30 In the Booth archive, there are a number of women who successfully carved out a place for themselves as experts. Ernest Aves’s account of the proceedings of Christ Church parish’s relief committee, for example, gives us insight into the world of a nameless sister. The committee was the great pride of the famous charity enforcer,

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Rev. De Fontaine. Aves, in fact, missed the relief committee’s meeting but, rather than wait a week to attend the next one, chose to rely on the second-hand account of the district’s new CO S secretary, Harry Toynbee. It was “by chance,” Aves said, that he “[heard] about it [the committee proceedings] afterwards from H. Toynbee, with whom [he] had an appointment the next day.”31 Of course, it was not by chance that Aves chose to accept Toynbee’s testimony as fact. As we saw in the last chapter, unlike churchmen, and certainly unlike churchwomen, the testimony of a C O S official was, in Aves’s eyes, the testimony of an expert, even if Toynbee had only attended the relief meeting for the first time the day before.“32 Toynbee described the meeting as “a very funny affair.” There seemed to him to be “very little care shown in the treatment of cases that came up,” and the problem, as was often the case, was in the form of a woman. De Fontaine, his curate, and two sisters were present at the committee table, but “the point that impressed Toynbee most was the influence of the leading sister.” Aves broke in with his usual character description: “I had a glimpse of her at the Church, tall, handsome, distinguished, hardening, conventual.”33 Toynbee found the sister brazen: she embarrassed her superiors (De Fontaine and his curate) and treated Toynbee almost as if he was not there! Dismayed, Toynbee told Aves how “De Fontaine seemed … to have resigned in her favour, and her suggestions, milk in this case, coal in that etc. [were] to be acted upon very much as a matter of course.” “There were signs too,” Toynbee noted, “that she did not attach much importance to the Registration Committee, and the Rector had to say in mild protest, while they were discussing some case, that although it was known to her, she did not know whether it was being helped from some other centre or not. Finally, when Toynbee mentioned some case that he was hoping the Trustees would help, she said, that ‘that’ case would get nothing, as though she had the power to settle the action of the Trustees, as well as of the Church committee. And it is quite possible that she has, for she attends it.”34 One gets the impression that Toynbee and Aves were floored by the sister’s behaviour. Aves never even bothered to name her. None of the men dared admit that her knowledge of the parish’s sociomoral conditions might be superior to theirs or that her parish visiting was equally important for the administration of charities in the district. Did most men at this time react this way to assertive women, by dismissing their ability and even their presence in such activities?

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If so, this might explain the minimal attention historians pay to women’s involvement in church charity organization. For her pains, Christ Church’s sister was either disparaged or silenced by Aves and Booth in the published series. Ironically, our history of the loving woman philanthropist of 1900 may have its origins in such exchanges as that between two male experts on poverty and charity, Ernest Aves and Harry Toynbee. In conversation, the two men agreed that a minister “especially when fortified by the proselytizing ardour of a Clewer Sister,” would almost inevitably engage in careless relief work.35 Booth, in his published volumes, made this patent untruth fact. Indeed, he probably critically misled later historians when, in his published volumes, he traced the “reckless giving of charity” to sisters who were “invariably beyond control in this matter.”36 One interesting fact, however, was that De Fontaine remained silent throughout the committee meeting. We see something resembling respect in the vicar’s reticence. In front of a member of the CO S (Toynbee) the usually rabid De Fontaine was clearly ceding a great deal of authority to his Sister: bowing to her “influence,” “resigning” in her favour, protesting only “mildly.” Perhaps in this strong-willed sister, De Fontaine had met his match. Perhaps she was good at her job, and the rector knew it. Some lady charity workers asserted their own professionalism by preemptively critiquing clergy and male philanthropists, whom they accused of being silly and sentimental. In East London there were a number of women in the C OS and this credential saved them from the tag of the “woman amateur.” Jane Burrell, the first CO S woman interviewed for the survey, spoke with authority, declaring that she  was trying to reverse the trend of “pauperisation” begun by “St Mary Abbott’s, Kensington,” a rich church that had “sent a lot of money down.” Disdainfully, but thankfully, she noted that the Kensington vicar responsible was now “drawing in his oars, and is running his relief on structured lines, though he still gives too many dinners” in her view.37 In Hackney, Miss Davis dismissed as a group the clerical membership of her committee (calling the men “weak”) and criticized the local Hackney Benevolent Society for giving pensions without “real enquiry.”38 And in Southwark, Miss Busk of St George the Martyr showed considerable anxiety in trying to prove her worth to the visiting Booth men. Busk was the chief visitor, a vestry member, and a member of the CO S . It is perhaps for this

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reason that Baxter took her testimony word for word. Described as “a lady of means who has lived in the parish for 6 ½ years,” Busk was a late Victorian social scientist’s ideal.39 As Baxter unfurled the Booth maps, Busk joined the minister, Rev. Sommerville, telling Baxter that she knew “more about Southwark than anyone else.” All three scanned the Inner South London map and “It was agreed that so far as there was any change since our map it was in the direction of greater poverty.” Yet Busk (like Charles Booth) did not want to  paint a sensational or exaggerated picture: “Miss Busk thinks ­however that the two neighbouring parishes of St Alphege, and St Stephen are both poorer than St George’s.”40 Busk was likely accustomed to the scrutiny regularly trained on female philanthropic workers. In her interview, she seemed apprehensive about the performance of her still fairly inexperienced rector (Sommerville had only been there since 1898). Busk knew that any errors would very likely be traced to a woman administrator before they were pinned on the “pleasant, genial man of vigour and common sense” for whom she worked. Knowing the gendered realities of parish work in the 1890s, therefore, Busk decided to take Baxter aside. “It should be noted,” Baxter wrote, “that Miss Busk during an interval while Mr S. was out of the Vestry, warned me that the [Parish] Report, so far as it describes the parish, is mainly based on Dr Waldo’s Reports [the local Medical Officer of Health] which Miss B. considers exaggerated and unduly sensational. Miss B. indeed regretted altogether the publication of a Report and though she evidently works cordially with Mr S. clearly looked back with regret to the days of Mr Gage Gardiner [the former rector].”41 It may be difficult to grasp the kind of stress this constant practice of church public relations must have caused lady charity professionals during this period, but it was likely very real. Careless charity (or reports of “sensationalized” poverty) on the part of a church constituted a serious local scandal. Baxter, in any case, never saw a hint of weakness in Busk, and this was probably owing to the fact he was somewhat bowled over by her visiting work: “The visitation so far as it goes is very thorough and through visitation the church evidently has an intimate knowledge of a large number of parishioners, particulars as to whom are entered up in huge folios of which I was shown there. Miss Busk calculated in 1897 that the church had this intimate knowledge of about 1100 families, representing about 5000 people.”42

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“I have no doubt we could have access to these books if wished at any time,” Baxter covetously wrote in parentheses. Busk was leaving him breathless. Systematic supervision of the parish was accom­ panied by expert relief administration. “Relief,” it was said, was “entirely in the hands of Miss Busk, who is a member of the CO S .” She worked parish relief “in C O S lines, but ‘less strictly.’” Only Busk, the clergy, and the church’s paid staff, it was added, were allowed to physically distribute relief. Ladies doing voluntary work in the parish were probably not trusted by Busk with charity, and these were only allowed to distribute magazines. Moreover, Busk directed the work of the parish nurses as well, whom she proudly counted as the “most useful and the most influential” of church agencies.43 Busk also informed Baxter of the recent reform of Southwark’s endowed charities – the great passion of the region’s charity elite. Busk herself, it turned out, had had a hand in determining which candidates received its pensions. Like any clergyman keen for charity control, moreover, Busk kept a close eye on the personnel of neighbouring charitable centres. Mr Meyer’s people, she said, were “active” and “always ramping around.” The “Non-Cons” and the Salvation Army were “quite ineffective,” though the latter’s officers were “excellent people.” The Roman Catholic priests could not get their people to Mass, but were nevertheless “first rate men,” looking after their people well. Sommerville, in his parish report, was full of praise for Busk’s work: “Many a humble family to-day in the Parish,” he wrote, “has to thank her for keeping the home together when the breadwinner was laid aside through illness, or out of work through no fault of his own.” Baxter drew attention to both points. He pencilled two large Xs on the pages of Sommerville’s report: one beside the rector’s acknowledgement of the CO S , the other beside his tribute to Miss Busk.44 Although Miss Busk seems to have avoided it, women like her could be caught in a double bind since seeming too confident and professional could put their femininity in doubt. For example, Aves interviewed Miss Postill, the interim missioner at Camden and Chislehurst mission (until a man could be found to replace her). Postill was a strong woman, willing to cooperate with the nearby rector but refusing “to be dictated to” by the (newly appointed) clergyman. Aves, also feeling insecure with Postill’s assertiveness, remarked that she “had a sort of face (not unpleasant but showing a latent angularity)” that indicated the power to say sharp things and

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hold her own. He concluded that Postill’s “nature is not an unsympathetic one, but her tone was a little professional.” What had hardened this woman so? Aves put it down to the rigours of rescue and mission work. “Her duties,” he said, “have been such, as to try the virtuous reserve of any human soul.”45 In reality, Aves was resorting to powerful and widespread stereotypes that women in charity work were “hard, mannish, and unfeminine.” Women not only had to watch their charity closely to avoid tags of gender-based incompetence, they had to regulate their mannerisms to convince men they had not lost their femininity.46 Unlike C O S-trained workers like Busk and Postill, district visitors on the whole were a particularly abused group by metropolitan charity experts and professionals.47 Women like Busk relegated them to handing out magazines. Ministers accused them of being beyond the control of their male superiors and Booth men like Ernest Aves looked attentively for examples of “irresponsible” female visitors. An excellent example surfaced in the Dulwich interviews and Aves recorded every moment of the episode, in sympathy with Rev. Rae of Emmanuel Church in West Dulwich: As I went into Mr R.’s study he was talking to a Lady of a certain age dressed in black satin and bonnet: evidently a district lady visitor. This was their conversation. V ic a r : No I cant [sic]. The Chapel must really manage to look after its own people. La dy: But she’s such a respectable women and so poor. I am sure she wd come to Church if you gave her some coal tickets. She says she is really Church and wd just as soon go to Church as Chapel, only Chapel people were kind to her before. I said I wd tell you and almost promised to bring her a coal and grocery ticket. I do hope you will be able to give me one. V ic a r : Gives tickets. P.S. … The Lady was one of those awful women who wont [sic] go and looking as tho’ she was prepared to stay there the whole day if necessary, until she had her way.48 Not only could lady visitors be portrayed as pushy and aggressive, they were also seen to be fundamentally incapable of understanding

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the working class’s moral hierarchies so were commonly duped and “dealt out doles.”49 In a paper read before an audience of district visitors and Sisters of St John’s Westminster, Margaret Sewell (warden of the Women’s University Settlement in Southwark) declared, “most of us know that the accepted opinion is that no special qualifications or knowledge are required for District Visiting; a little spare time and a kind heart are considered qualifications enough.”50 So “sentimental” and undisciplined was the “ordinary district visitor,” Sewell continued that she often could not “bear to see people in such misery” and so left “a sixpenny grocery ticket and an order for a half cwt. of coals.” Sewell demanded, therefore (like Booth demanded of ministers and like leading ministers demanded of their colleagues), that district visitors “study their subject more” or risk demoralizing the poor.51 The major problem, Sewell said, was that untrained district visitors did not bother to distinguish “the best of  the poor” from the “drunkard,” the “idle careless mother,” the “wasteful and careless housewife,” and, generally, “people of bad character.” In Sewell’s words, this was a simple test of the visitor’s “skill.”52 In the parishes, trained deaconesses, like Miss Florence Glossop of St Peter’s Battersea, also criticised district visitors. Glossop was a graduate of the Deaconess Institution for the Diocese of Rochester where she had paid 21/- per week during her training in “church history and dogma, nursing and district visiting.”53 She became a deaconess in 1892 and now had thirty visitors working under her, half of whom were working-class women.54 Her testimony provided perhaps the best summary of how professional women church workers viewed relief work in 1900. She distanced herself from “careless” colleagues (male and female), and she reiterated her commitment to hard lines: “She works with the COS: is on their committee: she began by thinking them hard and often helped when they refused. She still does on occasions but she very seldom does it without regretting it. The more she knows the people the more she is convinced on the necessity of making enquiries. She finds that enquiries are only resented when no help follows: as a rule those who resist enquiries are those who are undeserving. ‘If people could realise the harm done to character and to religion by indiscriminate giving.’ She instanced west end Ladies and young clergymen as the worst offenders.”55 Visitors were only rarely allowed to speak for themselves. South Hackney’s Miss Parnell, “a lady not over 30,” was “one of the District

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Visitors attached to Hackney parish church.” Patronizingly, Baxter called her interview “most unproductive,” but granted an important fact: “She visits only in Orchard Place, out of Clarence St, and this little bit she knows really well. It is coloured purple on our map. Here there are 22 houses each with four rooms.” Tenants coming into her street were a “less respectable lot than those whose place they take,” Parnell noted. Questioned on relief, she told Baxter plainly, “The Visitors in this parish are not allowed to give relief on their own initiative, but Miss Parnell is often asked for relief, and is always glad to be relieved of the responsibility of deciding, and to be able to say that she must report the case to the relief committee.”56 Parnell, like Morris, was again careful not to lay too much claim to professionalism, but by noting her parish visiting rules she prevented Baxter from placing her among the ranks of irrational, “sentimental” district visitors (however weak-kneed she admitted herself to be).57

D r u n ke n an d D egr aded: A l c o h o l as th e Ch i e f Cau se of Pover ty In her speech above, Margaret Sewell went on to describe how district visitors trained at the WUS began to understand the poor in a series of stages. At first, good-hearted women would want to relieve all distress and never blamed the poor themselves, but, soon enough, upon further examination, they found that “great distress exists where there is no apparent reason for it. Then we cannot help contrasting the very flourishing appearance of the public house with the surrounding squalor, and a very little observation shews us that a great deal of money goes there which ought not to go.” The poor, then, were negligent and irresponsible but also devious and manipulating. Sewell continued, “and more careful observation still teaches us that the very people who find their way to it [the pub] are the ones who ask us for a ticket and say they cannot get enough to eat. Strange things happen too sometimes; by some accident we discover that Mrs Smith, who says she has no friends, and is so anxious for help of any sort, belongs to two, or even three Mothers’ Meetings, attends one Church herself and sends her children to the Sunday School of another, and has ‘pickings’ from all sides.” Why would the poor act like this? Sewell had a few answers: “difficulties of heredity, deficient education, of daily circumstances, of which we know little or nothing.” Sewell’s mention of “heredity”

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demonstrates the popularity of social Darwinism, and her understanding of “daily circumstances” does point to a structuralist understanding of poverty. And yet, she finished by telling her audience that the only thing a district visitor could do is judge the “character” of the poor. Only through this careful, moral judgement could lady visitors make sure that the money did not go to “the drunkard, our clothes to the children of the idle careless mother, our tickets to the wasteful and thriftless housewife[.] We do not see, but they [the poor-but-respectable] do, how often the money goes to the public house, how swiftly the clothes find their way to the pawn-shop, or how the tickets are taken by the publican for beer.” Sewell demanded that district visitors not bow to their own (unthinking and unscientific) “sentimentality” and offend the poorbut-respectable working class further with their blundering kindnesses. Importantly, she felt that there was “more than enough to do” in attending to “the difficulties of the sober and steady, arising from illness, accident and other unpreventable misfortune,” and in this separation of poor from poor she mirrored Charles Booth.58 What Sewell suggested in her evaluation is that the closer a woman ventured into the daily lives of the poor, the more she felt justified in her moral convictions that they were thriftless and irresponsible, manipulating charity that should have gone to the poor-butrespectable, silent-but-suffering class C. What this shows is that women’s increasing intimacy with the domestic lives of the poor did not have to lead to a structural understanding of poverty. It may have even – and one thinks here of Angus Calder’s work on poor evacuees to the affluent countryside during the Second World War59 – have reinforced notions that many among the poor were a rather revolting race apart. Miss Barclay, twenty-six-year veteran missioner, spoke to the Booth men of moral improvement in her district. She believed that, “both from the religious and the social point of view” there had been a “great improvement in the district since she first knew it.” Not only were “meetings and the churches better attended but the people [were] more civilised.” Unlike their counterparts in the 1870s there was today “less rowdiness, less gossiping at the door,” and working people maintained “a higher standard in dress.” Barclay attributed this to the work of the various religious agencies in the area. Such work had failed for some, Barclay admitted, but only because of the individual’s own moral iniquities or because of the

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counterproductive, careless social work of certain, in this case probably Roman Catholic, religious workers. The district’s unrespectable working classes, according to Barclay, were a rather large number of Roman Catholics near the parish of Christchurch, and it was they who constituted “the most drunken and degraded element in the population.”60 Despite demonstrating a complex moral understanding of local poverty, at least as intricate as many ministers interviewed, Barclay was still judged a failure by the Booth men. Arthur Baxter’s dislike of Barclay was obvious from the beginning. He described her as ­middle-aged, possibly a member of South London’s famous brewing company, and, sadly, a philanthropic amateur: “she is not a person of any strength of character or personal attractiveness. She is indeed a weak type of the ‘lady bountiful,’ her deliberate policy being to buy the people.”61 In fact, Baxter later made clear that Barclay actually had very little money at her disposal. Nor did she think alms would help the poor. Instead, she pinpointed drink “as the chief cause of the poverty of the district.” Barclay felt that this led to much violence, and she wanted these crimes punished with a great deal more severity.62 At this point came the closest thing to an apology one might hear from Arthur Baxter. Barclay was not the amateur in charitable matters he had initially painted her: “I have noticed that Miss B. probably gives a good deal in the district but in her 26 years experience she has learnt something of the dangers of imposition and for some years she has endeavoured to obtain some guarantee of the genuineness of applicants by applying a work test: the chief form that the work has taken has been the making of mats at a low rate of pay. The result of this test has been that applicants for relief have largely fallen off in numbers.”63 Baxter was willing to give the woman credit for perceptiveness. Through years of “on the job” training, Barclay had clearly gained an acceptable understanding of the moral science of this work. Importantly, however, nearly three decades of work among the poor had not given her insight into the structural causes of poverty. If Baxter was right, Barclay’s experience had taught her only to watch out for loafers and charity-mongers, to press for more law and order in a desperately poor community, and, most important, to cite drink as the chief cause of poverty. Despite gendered notions of female philanthropy, middle-class women charity workers were hardly “silly” or “sentimental.”

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Churchmen’s testimony in this respect was probably more a sign of their own insecurities than proof that female church workers were unable to spot the “scrounger.” The vast majority of female charity workers, like the WUS, the C O S, and Booth and his men, believed that charitable work had hit a turning point, and the time had come for all social workers in the city to “know” the poor. Knowing the poor meant having the tools to practice strict charity control, where only the deserving benefited. One by one, case by case, until numbers reached thousands and hundreds of thousands, until maps like Booth’s recorded millions, the goal of social work was the accumulation of morally charged information about what “character” of people lived in any one place. This was the cutting edge of social science – to endlessly troll the streets judging good and bad poor, determining who should receive relief. This is what women charity professionals and volunteers, more than anyone, provided for Booth and his men. These women did not see themselves as acting against the interests of the poor – far from it. As WUS director Margaret Sewell said in her speech, it was actually “cruel, from a moral point of view,” to “encourage dependence and helplessness” through charity to those of poor character. Without the moral will to struggle in competition against others, men and women would remain poor, corrupt, and, likely, drunkards. Though it bore no comparison to his own life, Booth was, of course, fascinated by the brutal arena of competition, speaking of mystical “forces” through which men distinguished themselves from their moral inferiors. He would have been in complete agreement with Sewell as she concluded her homily to the lady charity workers: “Not till you make men self-reliant, intelligent, and fond of struggle, fonder of struggle than of mere help – not till then have you relieved poverty. If you could give every poor man in this town of ours a house, a wardrobe and a balance in a bank to-­ morrow, do you think there would not be poor men and rich men here among us still? There must be, as long as there are some men with a spirit of independence, the light of intelligence and the love of struggle; and other men who have none of these things which make the only true riches of a manly man.”64

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5 The Hard Lines of the Working-Class Hierarchy

For many middle-class professionals, Inner South London, socially speaking, had dropped as far as it could go. Nurses, ministers, and the South London Press all declared that the area was characterized by “the most depressing dead level of poverty.”1 Others described the area as filled with “rough” classes that, declared a doctor practising in Bow and Bromley, consisted of the “poorest of the poor [that] are most dependent. Have not much self respect … [but are] living hand to mouth.”2 Moreover, middle- and upper-class professionals were not alone in their (often contemptuous) overgeneralization of the poorer working classes. In East and South London, working people themselves also had unflattering names for those who, because of loss of employment or other tragedies, were forced to move into poorer neighbourhoods. East Londoners in poor-butrespectable Poplar, for example, referred to the residents of poorer districts such as Canning Town as people having “gone over the bridge.” “To describe a family as gone ‘over the bridge,’” said one resident, “implies descent.”3 In reality, however, there was no such thing as a neighbourhood whose poverty had reached a “dead level.” As historian Anna Davin has aptly put it in her study of London childhood, “Almost no-one saw themselves as not respectable.”4 Jennifer Davis’s work suggests the presence of myriad poor-but-respectable classes that hid, during this time, behind the obfuscating tag of rough. “A wide discrepancy” existed, Davis argues, between the public’s “image of the casual poor in London” and the reality of a working poor who “held attitudes and behaved in ways characteristic of the respectable working class.” In other words, although working- and middle-class majorities may

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have been convinced that the casual poor were immoral, even the poorest would have included themselves as part of the respectable strata had their opinions been asked.5 Once we have understood this fact, it is possible to put into perspective families like the one Jesse Argyle met on a tour of the poor Southwark slum of Red Cross Street in June 1898. Walking up a courtyard with a mission pastor, he looked at the flowers in the window: “It is one of several which have an effective window show of geraniums, fuchsias, creepers and other plants – bearing evidence of some taste and much care. He talked with the man (evidently a coster) and his wife, a fair stoutish, respectable looking woman, of 40 odd, who was introduced as one of the regular attendants at the mothers meeting etc. at the mission. A sharp shower coming on, we took shelter in a small front room, which was very clean and crowded with furniture, whilst prints and portraits – some in quite gorgeous frames – covered the walls.”6 This respectability – the behaviour, idea, and material expressions that went with it – are what Charles Booth, if problematically, attempted to tell us about the late Victorian working class. His realization that a strain of “poor respectability” ran through workingclass culture remains his greatest contribution to working-class history today. The question that arises now speaks to one of the central themes of this book: who hierarchized South London? If Booth and the ministers made the maps and women provided the data, it becomes clear that they based it on a hierarchy originally created by working people themselves. This world was very different from Asa Briggs’s original and influential suggestion that British society shifted from an eighteenth-century hierarchy to a nineteenthcentury, progressive-minded, class system.7 It rather bears more resemblance to Michel Foucault’s picture of people who gained citizenship by wielding the power to exclude those deemed less competent and moral.8 Historians have often had trouble coming to terms with this aspect of working-class life. They long saw the Booth survey as either a form of social control – a middle-class construction to reify categories of poverty – or a document best ignored since it obscured the Marxist historian’s truth of cozy, communal, working-class social relations. In line with more recent scholarship, this chapter seeks to challenge these interpretations, arguing that “poor respectability” was in fact the heart and soul of working-class life. Its widespread

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nature in working-class culture demonstrates to historians that working-class social relations ran on hierarchical, not class lines, and Booth’s survey gives scholars a good idea of how hierarchical relations worked.

T h e Pr ac ti c e o f Wo r ki ng- Cl ass Pover ty In 1971, in The Classic Slum, Robert Roberts asked for more histories in which working people’s conservative and hierarchical social relations were highlighted, instead of a more pleasant picture of togetherness and community. Labour and working-class history of the period largely failed in this task. It made the labour movement and its unions the organized manifestation of the working-class community’s progressive hopes.9 Conservative sections of the working class, when treated, were seen as abnormal.10 Fortunately, histories in the 1980s and 1990s went through the “turn against social class,” which produced more accurate depictions of the late Victorian working class.11 Essays by Ross McKibbin and Gareth Stedman Jones, for example, hinted at a divided working-class community in 1900 and one substantially without progressive aims.12 But their narrative collage failed to provide any sort of model for how conservative social relations worked. Most helpful for the discussion here is Joanna Bourke’s WorkingClass Cultures in Britain (1993). Studying 250 autobiographies in the period up to 1930, Bourke noticed a narrative trend in her texts: after writers described the communal nature of their working-class communities, they ended by describing the conflicts that ripped these same societies apart. Expertly, but politely, in the face of the scholarly mainstream, Bourke suggested that “romantic use of the phrase [‘working-class community’] has been fostered in working-class autobiographies and oral histories, where social relations are often recalled through a golden haze: conflict is forgotten in favour of doors that were always open.”13 Bourke further observes that “close proximity to neighbours [did] not necessarily promote a sense of identification between the individual and the group.”14 Working people certainly established what Ellen Ross has called “sharing networks,” but these operated in emergencies only, and in this way, as much as possible, families maintained a much-valued privacy and separateness from their neighbours.15 These conclusions remained surprising to the historical mainstream. Walter Arnstein called

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Bourke “significantly revisionist” and accused her of “profound scepticism” for presenting working-class families that “were noted as much for conflict as for neighbourliness.”16 James Obelkevich called Bourke’s dissection of the myth of community “skilful,” but stated that she “is perhaps overinsistent on ‘power’ and ‘conflict.’”17 Bourke’s findings are easier to understand if it is assumed that poverty did not make people nicer or bring them closer together. They make more sense if we assume that poverty made people meaner, pettier, frustrated, anxious, and suspicious of those around them. David Vincent tells us how interminably busy were the poor, describing poverty as a “practice” rather than anything so static as a “condition.” The fewer resources one had, the more thought and energy were required.18 Vincent’s busy poor were also an anxious poor, and this fact had very negative effects on working-class relations. Perhaps counter-intuitively, anxiety was caused because the 1890s were, in fact, a time of unprecedented plenty. Working people at the time were unique in Britain’s history because, on the one hand, they continued to experience the absolute poverty and infectious diseases common to the nineteenth century, and on the other, they experienced new “penny luxuries.” Thanks to an 80 per cent wage increase since 1850, the poor could now buy more food, clothing, and newspapers, gamble more, afford holidays, and attend the theatre and sports events.19 Moreover, this rise in wages took place within a period of falling prices, meaning that even the poorest in Britain found that their wages were worth more. Prices fell, according to Eric Hobsbawm, “because [of] an entire new world of cheap, imported foodstuffs … [For example,] meat consumption per head went up by almost a third, but the proportion of imported meat they ate trebled.”20 This meant, to varying degrees, that although working people still experienced shortages of food and material necessities, they were less anxious about such basic things. Instead, they began to suffer more from a kind of stress caused by status consciousness.21 What is needed here is the insight of social epidemiologists such as Richard Wilkinson, who traces how, in increasingly affluent twentieth-century societies, stress over material scarcity is “accompanied by the effects of psychological and social stress”22 – the anxieties surrounding maintaining respectability and status. Wilkinson’s work tells historians that respectability was – psychologically and physically – a negative addition to working-class life. As he writes,

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an anxious, status-conscious working class felt respectability take its toll on their minds and bodies, experienced “the psychological stress of feeling stigmatized and looked down on or feeling angry and ashamed at being devalued” – not in single instances, but day after day – and it is now clear that this was very harmful to workingpeople’s health.23 Stress, of course, is difficult to trace in history, where it remains hidden behind the diseases it caused or exacerbated. Recent studies have proven, however, that “experiencing prolonged stress downregulates our bodies’ immune systems,” and “it makes us more vulnerable to whatever infections we may be exposed to.”24 Population studies made over the 1980s and 1990s have decisively measured the health damage (typically arteriosclerosis leading to heart disease) caused by high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. In addition, stress is closely intertwined with a range of problems: depression, anxiety, hopelessness, hostility, isolation, insecurity, and a sense of lacking control – not to mention the pressures that lead people to dependency on prescribed or recreational drugs (including tobacco and alcohol).25 According to Wilkinson, there can be no doubt that stress in unequal societies has a biological effect. In short – and as British newspapers like the Guardian have repeatedly noted in recent years – inequality kills.26

Mr Bo o th ’s S u r ve y s and th e Str u ggl e fo r R e s pe c ta bi l i ty The working classes of late Victorian Britain formed part of a dynamic class hierarchy. Contemporaries like Robert Roberts, according to historian David Cannadine, saw working people as they really were. Discussing Roberts’s recollections of life in early twentieth-century Salford, Cannadine points to “the range and richness of his vocabulary as he described the ‘social ladder’ or ‘social pyramid’ in terms of ranks and orders, gradations and degrees, layers and strata, classes and caste.” Cannadine notes that while Roberts spoke sometimes in terms of a two-class society (“rich vs poor”) and other times in terms of a three-class model (“upper classes, bourgeoisie, and manual workers”), one brand of class language trumped all: “[Roberts’s] overriding impression was of a complex, finely graded hierarchy, in which people were deeply sensitive to the smallest nuances of status. They did not think in terms of collective

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identities locked in bitter, permanent, inevitable struggle, and their battles with employers were more for survival than part of a great class war against capital. ‘The problem of the “proletariat,” they felt, had little to do with them.’ In envisaging British society as he did, there seems little doubt that Roberts was a better guide than Marx.”27 “As a child before the first world war,” wrote Roberts, “I hardly knew a weekend free from the sight of brawling adults and interfamily dispute.” Roberts wanted people to remember “how deeply many manual workers and their wives were possessed with ideas about class” and how “with some, involvement reached almost an obsession.”28 Roberts’s book shows how status consciousness produced an anxious, irritable, working-class society. It was a truth of working-class life even children of this class understood: that there was always a “bottom dog” in the community lower than you.29 Booth admired this competitiveness and class anxiety immensely, assuming that it was a good, healthy, wholesome thing. He very nearly fetishized working-class life and the perpetual fear of crisis that infected the poor as the most superior manifestation of respectable self-discipline. His respect for those who understood the great ladder of social hierarchy led him to give working people their say. In the Booth interviews, workingmen were called upon to survey the maps of pinks and purples and blues. At Rotherhithe’s Abbey Street Baptist Church, the minister called on three men – one was a vestryman, one worked at the wharves, and one was a lower-middle-class tradesman – to give their opinions. “They were agreed that the streets by Paradise Street and near London Street were the worst parts of the district. The dark blue patch by Cherry Gardens Street is not so poor as either of the foregoing now and the D[ark]B[lue] patch by Albion Street has improved.”30 These men, like upper-­ middle-class clergymen, were conversant with Booth’s classification scheme. They objected only to those areas that they felt were improperly coloured; they wanted to get it right. Booth’s surveys often allowed working-class people the opportunity to explain their situation and make a plea for respectability. As early as the 1880s, for example, Booth empathetically describes a woman living at 92 Eldon Street who was “a little ashamed” of her brother-in-law’s position on the working-class social ladder as an out-of-work painter. Booth made sure to mention details – important to working people but little discussed by historians – that “Mrs

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Pierce was born better to do than what she has come to be” and that she had been ostracized by her own family.31 Repeatedly, in Life and Labour of the People in London, Booth cautioned readers to be aware of such details, though they may not always be evident at first glance. For example, when describing the residents of the poor South End, Booth wrote, “There is decent and comfortable life to be found also in these little streets, and though the scenes encountered may at first almost exclude all thoughts except those of horror and pity, a true judgment must consider both good and bad.”32 Booth noted a powerful tension lying beneath the surface of pub and parlour frivolities so often in evidence in working people’s homes. Mrs Pierce’s son had lost his job as a cabinet maker, “and his young wife fretted herself into an illness about it, being anxious minded and unable to face living in a poorer way than to which she had been accustomed, contrasting her position with that of some of her friends who had been lately married.”33 To “fret oneself into illness” would hardly have been unusual among families so close to a socially constructed “respectability line.” The testimony of Mr E.M. Falkner of East Dulwich is an excellent window onto the poor-but-respectable classes.34 Interviewed by George Arkell on 12 November 1900, Falkner was described as “a stout cheery old man of 60 or 70. Plentiful grey hair and thick grey mustache. A painter by trade he is now in business as a jobbing builder and has a shop here used for the business. He suffers from bronchitis and probably the business is mainly in the hands of his son. He was born near the Elephant and Castle.” Falkner’s interview shows how the struggle for respectability could have dissatisfying, even painful, results. In the late 1850s, he moved to West Norwood and then further to East Dulwich a decade later, where he built houses to let.35 He was among the speculative builders discussed by Gareth Stedman Jones who “overestimated the cheapness, extent, and efficiency of … new transport facilities,” and who, since the 1870s, built houses “designed to attract the lower middle class and respectable working-class outflow from the more central districts.”36 Falkner, like other builders, had not gauged correctly, and, for many years, the houses he built remained empty or fetched only low rents.37 He was able to hang on to the properties, however, and it finally paid off: a steady trickle of families to upper-working-class districts such as East Dulwich caused housing prices to boom by the mid-1890s. The result for working-class house investors like Falkner

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was that they finally stood to make not only money but to accrue social capital out of long-awaited working-class emigration. “The house next door to Mr F. in Hindman Road,” explained Arkell, “was offered for £145 but could not be sold. It is now worth £230.” “Prices began to jump up about 5 years ago,” Falkner told his interviewer, “and rents have almost doubled in that time. Houses in Landells Road which let for 7/- a week now fetch 13/-.”38 Falkner was a typical landlord in such districts: a working person who saw an opportunity for small investments. In 1881, a middleclass East End medical officer sniffed that these were “people who have saved a little money; people who have been in trade; they are not a nice class of person as a whole.”39 Indeed, Falkner describes enduring social discrimination from former class equals (and perhaps from superiors like the MO). He then turns this language around to repeatedly affirm his own class claims, often in the form of subordinative statements about people he thought to be socially and morally beneath him. In his interview with Arkell, Falkner described the working-class hierarchy from the top down. He started with his superiors – specifically, men who had risen with him during the Dulwich housing boom and who subsequently had climbed above him on the local social ladder. Immediately apparent, Arkell noted, was Falkner’s class anxiety. “Now some people have gone up in the social scale – succeeded in business and stand aloof from those like Mr F. whom they do not think have done so well.” Falkner was clearly hurt by his former peers, who avoided him because they believed he had failed. “I never know if they don’t know me,” Falkner added, rather pathetically.40 Having situated the scornful men above him, Falkner now subordinated a number below his station. No better example could we find of Theodor Adorno’s Radfahrer-Reaktion – the bicyclist reaction – which he had seen most starkly in the Nazi scapegoating of the Jews during the Holocaust: “in authoritarian social structures with strong ranking systems, people bow to their superiors (as if leaning forward on a bicycle) while kicking down on subordinates. The tendency is for societies with bigger inequalities to show more discrimination against vulnerable groups, whether women or religious or ethnic minorities.”41 First, as in many working-class biographies, Falkner compared a past “golden age” of East Dulwich to the poorer, increasingly immoral social relations he felt prevailed in the

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present. “In the early days the place was like a country village,” Falkner claimed: “The people came together more and knew each other. There was also an absence of public houses and pawnshops.”42 Falkner then described the advent of a new working class that he himself snubbed. “People are not poorer now than they were,” Falkner began: “Poverty now is through drunken habits and improvidence. They are not prepared for a hard winter. A few weeks out of work would bring them round asking if there was anything to be given away.”43 Falkner elevated himself above these working classes by unselfconsciously relating himself to the idealized workman of the past, epitomized by his father: “Mr F. contrasted the condition of the workmen now with that of 40 years ago the result being very unfavourable to the present day worker. In his father[’]s day wages were 24/- a week and 27/- in a ‘good’ shop. Days were much longer … Workmen always saved something, lived on good plain food and generally had a good Sunday suit. His father had a good black suit which was carefully brushed and put away and lasted many years. ‘He never gave less than a guinea for his hat.’”44 Falkner also supported official control programs in urban and open spaces in East Dulwich, praising the local authorities who “have got rid of the rough element” through demolition programmes that wiped out poorer neighbourhoods, as well as other policies to clear the poorer people from Peckham Rye. “Darrell Road was very rough but is better now,” he said. “Henslowe Road had a bad moral repute but has been cleared. Generally the district has improved although they have lost some of the richer people, who have gone to Streatham etc.”45 Finally, in a few barbed comments, Falkner distinguished the upper working classes from the lower, rougher rungs of the workingclass hierarchy on the basis of leisure and thrift. Arkell carefully noted what the grizzled builder had to say about shifts in the working-class community in South London: “People from Bermondsey and elsewhere come on Bank Holidays. At Easter the people go to the Rye. They have not saved enough for an excursion; at Whitsuntide they go to the seaside. Crowd is always greater at Easter than Whitsuntide. Mr F. did not appear to know much about the local government and similar questions. Most of his spare time has been devoted to Mission work. Nearly all the men are in Friendly Societies – exception ‘the drunkard.’”46

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Falkner and men like him were not interested in politics or class-consciousness; they were interested in comfort and a “decent” place in the working-class hierarchy. In their efforts to migrate to more respectable working-class neighbourhoods, indeed, the great aim of working people was not to come closer together but to get as far away from the poorer set as possible. As Falkner described and Booth confirmed in his published volumes, there was “a continual exodus of the more prosperous in both the middle and working classes” out of Inner South London.47 Evidence of working people’s moves to the South give much more weight to claims by historians of respectability that “respectable working men,” in Brian Harrison’s words, “kept a wary eye open for the subtle gradations of status which existed between houses even in the same street, let alone in different streets or in different parts of town.”48 For these men and women, the Booth archive tells us, the South was something of a promised land.49 One must look closely to find these working-class families. When churchmen referred to the exodus of the “better” classes from their waterfront parishes, they often leave the impression that these were the middle classes alone. In fact, the exodus included working families bound for more respectable working-class parishes. It was not a move to perfect prosperity but rather a trek to a world in-between, a world Booth called pink South London, where working people were “poor but comfortable.”50 This change in status was obvious to the ministers and missioners who worked there. Typical are three Salvation Army ensigns (two from Nunhead and one from Peckham) who called their people “decent working class” and “decent working people” who “if they have only one room when they come,” soon managed to “get two or even three.”51 Status, for working people, was inseparable from privacy, which was perhaps the greatest prize in pink South London. In Rev. Walsh’s St Anne’s parish of “lydies,” engineers, tanners, and clerks, the people were “friendly, but unapproachable, and Mr W. described how at the house of one of his best workers he had been that morning kept on the doorstep.” “That is characteristic of the class and of their attitude,” said Walsh.52 Rev. A. Holland (of pink and purple St Agnes’s, Kennington Road) said that the most attractive attribute about his parish of small clerks, professionals, and artisans was that they were “of a class who ‘keep to themselves and are

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proud of doing so.’” Holland vigilantly kept church visitors from their doors and remarked, “Any suspicion of spying would be fatal to our influence.”53 At least two ministers in Peckham dealt with the phenomenon of poor respectability by announcing in church exactly which streets they would visit and when. Aves saw the soundness of this method, commenting, “Thus all the members living thereabouts know that [the minister] will turn up. It seems a good idea, and doubtless saves much worry, sudden donning of tidy gowns and cleaning up of untidy rooms, etc.”54 Besides the worry about being presentable, respectable working classes also sought to keep secret the fact that they had taken on lodgers to pay the rent. “Practically every house is visited,” said Rev. E.H. Bell of the relatively comfortable workingclass area All Souls’ Grosvenor Park (Walworth), “but there is the usual great difficulty as to seeing lodgers, due partly to jealousy but much more to the wish that it should not be known that lodgers are taken on.”55 Moving, like Falkner’s building investments, was a gamble in respectability, and, even with measures such as taking on lodgers, some working-class families were unable to survive. According to Stedman Jones, many were “forced to return [to the inner city] because of the inconveniences of suburban life and travel.” Families’ budgets were simply too small to endure the financial obstacles of suburban life, such as the lack of women’s work and the absence of cheap markets. Food costs were a particular trial. Stedman Jones quotes the testimony of a painter – a John Kirkham, who had moved out to Battersea: “If I do not have my dinner at home, I go to a cookshop, and I cannot get a dinner there under 10d. or 1s. to do me any good, but the wife would get it for us all at that amount or adding a little to it.” Worse still, if the gamble did not pay off, families could find themselves stranded, since overcrowding on the riverside often did not permit their immediate return to the old neighbourhoods. One Bermondsey minister said he had “people living in New Cross who [had] been waiting 2 years to get back into the neighbourhood.”56 These moves to more respectable areas caused communities and even families to break apart. Occupational solidarity, for example, did not keep pottery workers together in Lambeth. Those who were of the kiln burning set – rougher in class – lived apart from the potters, who were better paid and thus chose to move further away. In

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the case of families, the young car men and factory hands of St Olave’s Bermondsey offer a good example of the choices made for respectability. Regarding their grandparents, they “kept the old [people] until they tired of it and went and got married. Then the old folk go to the workhouse. The young do not settle down in the neighbourhood but go east towards Southwark Park [in Rotherhithe].”57

P u bl i c Pl ac e s an d th e “ C l oth i n g D i f fi cu l ty” Since the 1850s, there had been a migration of thousands of working-class families to what Charles Booth called the pink areas of London. When they got there, they found working-class neighbours above and below them in the class hierarchy. Like Falkner, they joined friendly societies, ostracized the drunkard, and applauded city ordinances that drove poorer people out of the streets. They also joined churches, where local class hierarchies were maintained and promoted; deacons were appointed from the upper-working or middle classes. Lower status or newly arrived families hoped for their turn to climb the rungs of respectability. Yet ministers spoke of stability, not friction among members. All were aware of subtle gradations in class and respectability: lower classes understood the benefit of associating with their superiors and ceded them power in the church; higher classes sought some way to move yet higher in order to better themselves even more.58 There is an enormous contrast between this reality and E.P. Thompson’s belief, in his landmark The Making of the English Working Class, that working people “injected” into their chapels, churches, and missions their own “values of mutual aid, neighbourliness and solidarity.”59 In fact, Thompson’s central idea that ­working-class values had anything to do with class solidarity now seems somewhat fantastic. Respectable parishes, as well as impoverished ones, in actuality, were sites of intense exclusivity. Whether of the richer or poorer classes, all would have agreed with one working-class missioner who told Booth’s men that claiming respectability meant the exclusion of unrespectable classes: “We don’t have any rag tag and bobtail.”60 Even within one church, morning and evening services were often divided on class lines. John Wilkins had a “large number of working people” connected with his Congregational Church in Camberwell – “packers, warehousemen etc. living in the neighbouring violet

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streets; a few gas stokers.” Yet the congregation was divided into two groups. Wilkins said that “socially the better part of the congregation” typically came to the morning services, while a second group “from the Fort Road district of much poorer Bermondsey,” numbering many more than the morning congregation (about 400), came to evening services.61 Arkell pointed out that this was generally how worship worked in South London: “the conditions are much the same as in neighbouring churches – a small attendance, chiefly members in the morning and a larger and poorer congregation in the evening.”62 An East London Wesleyan sister in a working-class neighbourhood mentioned how “Society Classes” were segregated according to class: “one on Tuesday afternoons for women who are so poor and ill-clad that they could not possibly meet with any comfort to themselves and their sisters in better circumstances who meet on Thursday afternoons.”63 This sort of hierarchy is even evident among children and it offers a window onto the anxious class judgements of workingclass parents. In the Booth archive, headmasters and clergy tell of parents “who think themselves a little respectable [and] prefer to pay a small fee [rather] than send their children to the [free] Board Schools.”64 Once children arrived at school, they were also agents in perpetuating fine gradations of hierarchy. Kennington’s Rev. Steer described how the fee-paying “artisan” children “will not mix with those of the free Schools either in the Sunday Schools or anywhere else, in fact they appear to be a most exclusive set.” “Confidently any member of our class, if called upon, could have pointed a finger at the bottom dog provided of course he was in attendance,” is how Robert Roberts remembered his Salford slum. He then describes an “illegitimate son of a prostitute, [who] socially and economically … hit rockbottom.”65 When the Booth men asked Rev. Aylett of Camberwell Green Congregational Church about his Sunday schools, he told a similar story: “The ages are between 4 to 16. Children sort themselves: poor sit next poor, well dressed next well dressed: the gutter children don’t come: only occasionally a child has to be spoken to for being dirty: the bulk are well dressed, nicely behaved children: some stay away if they have not sufficient good clothes: a few of the parents are Church members.”66 In all of these places – churches, schools, and streets – clothing was an important class marker. It is how poor were separated from very poor, how working-class girls or children knew whom to sit

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beside or exclude altogether. Almost every class of working person in late-century London tried to assert respectable status through a veritable movement to dress “above” their class. This movement was fundamentally about aspiration as much as it was about accumulation. Higher wages and cheaper prices in the 1890s meant the time was right for poorer people to make a stab at respectability. From the beginning of the “Religious Influences” series interviews, the Booth team made working-class clothing inspection a priority. Churchmen saw a distinct class-crossing trend among working-class people. Isle of Dogs vicar D.G. Cowan noted that among his flock of “entirely working people” “the women generally [were] very dressy, and now with the prevalence of large flowery hats and crinoline dyes the church ‘looks rather like the flower beds in Park Lane.’” In St Peter’s Limehouse, Rev. P. Alpe said bluntly, “Going to church is entirely a matter of clothes.” In Bow, Rev. Sweetnam remarked that “only the well dressed and respectable” in his working-class parish attended church, while very poor people, not quite up to standard, attended poor mission halls.67 In fact, the working-class movement to dress above one’s station made precise social measurement of churchgoers rather difficult. More than once working-class men and women fooled the Booth team. Aves, who was quite an expert in spotting class “character” by 1900, recorded one such episode. As a sharp-eyed investigator, Aves kept close notes of his stroll around Peckham and Nunhead: “From S. Antholin’s I went round to the Cheltenham Mission, and arrived just as the people were beginning to come out, so I watched them from the roadway and counted. There were some 130 or 140, and at first they gave me much the same impression that the congregation at S. Antholin’s had done, ‘lower middle’.” In fact, it turned out that these were working-class people, who had managed to dress a rung above their station.68 Many ministers at the time referred to the “clothes difficulty.” Rev. J.A. Richards, minister at St Bartholomew’s, a parish of poor railwaymen and warehousemen, described the situation to Booth’s men: “[Richards] was convinced however that the clothes difficulty kept some religious people from church: people wont go to church unless they are ‘smartly’ dressed: even one of the sidesmen, a genuinely religious man, has not been to church for some weeks, through lack of a sufficiently smart pair of trousers: and Mr R. instanced a man who had said ‘I’ll come to church when I’ve got fit

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clothes to go in’: on Mr R. expostulating the reply was ‘Oh! One must have some self-respect.’”69 Clothing-conscious working people tried desperately to avoid the shame of being pronounced badly clothed and, therefore, a short step from morally bad. Ministers often encouraged the link between dress and morality since they themselves believed that it was the civilizing influence of the church and district visitors that encouraged the poor to dress better. Bromley’s Rev. Vere Barly explained, “Nothing is so civilising as religious convictions.” “Nothing,” he added, “is more wonderful than to see the gradual change in a lad who has really been brought under the religious influence: the first effect is on his clothes: without any suggestion he leans off loud ties, bell trousers etc., and gradually his whole nature alters.”70 Some ministers also mentioned the thin margin upon which the well-dressed poor lived. In purple South London, Rev. Clatworthy admitted that “if anything went wrong” – sickness, accident, or job loss – his tidily dressed families “would be on their beam ends.”71 In other words, these families had nothing saved up and no reserve.72 For adults and young adults in poor South London (Lambeth, Southwark, and Rotherhithe), looking respectable required substantial amounts of time and effort. Most of the smart looking poorbut-respectable only looked that way on Sunday or holidays. Poor children, however, were expected to look presentable six days a week – for school and for church. This meant constant preparation of children for the public eye. A surprising number of families were able to accomplish this, and this fact was borne out by the testimony of veteran schoolmaster, Feargus O’Conner Slingo, headmaster of Lant Street Board School. With twenty-four years of teaching experience in Southwark, Slingo could compare two generations of students: “Mr S. frequently has now in the school the children of parents who have been there, and says he cannot call to mind a single instance in which they are not better, cleaner, and more civilised than their parents were: the school in fact has told on the home, and when the father came almost in rags the son will come with a collar.”73 Those who could not clothe their children well and send them to better schools or churches typically had two choices: send their children to schools for the less respectable or temporarily keep them at  home until fortunes returned. The pastor of Jamaica Road Congregational Church described the rigid separation between poor and less poor. His church welcomed three hundred respectable

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working-class Sunday scholars, all of them “decently dressed, while [t]he poor children” went “to St Stephen the Yeoman Ragged School and St Crispin’s Mission.”74 Many parents, however, opted to hide their shame indoors and “would on no account,” according to Robert Roberts, “allow their children to go out on Sunday in their weekday wear. No matter how fine the weather, they were kept cooped up all day in the kitchen or bedroom so that face might be maintained before the neighbours.”75 In poor Bethnal Green, a Baptist missioner spoke of this as a specifically poor-but-respectable kind of pride: “People have gone to his school and expressed surprise at the manner in which the children are dressed – yet he knows the parents and the homes and people would be surprised to see the poor homes from which these children come: ‘It is the pride of the mothers.’”76 Poor working mothers often dressed their children better than they did themselves when in public, in the hopes that family respectability would be reflected in the dress of the child. When, therefore, Arkell noted that the poor children attending North Lambeth Medical Mission were “better clad” than their dowdily dressed mothers, we should see this as no accident. “All are poor, judging by their dress,” he said. “Women dressed in rusty black dresses and other dowdy garments; children rather better clad than their parents but unmistakeably poor.”77 Mothers also accomplished outward appearance of respectability by privileging certain garments over others. One headmistress in St Mark’s Walworth noted that, “apart from boots [the poor children] are usually decently clad, but usually it is only the outward show which is decent, their underclothing is nonexistent or wretched and ragged, if on a wet day boots are taken off the stockings usually scarcely exist under the boot.”78 The Booth archive tells us that poor women used church auxiliary agencies, typically clothing clubs, to help them acquire good clothes in small instalments. Paul Johnson notes how extensively “paymentby-instalment” was used, “especially by the poorest families, for the purchase of clothes, boots, coal, and durable goods.” In 1985, he could write how the “use of clothing clubs … is still very extensive among poor families in Britain living on supplementary benefits, because they lack the means of accumulating privately the capital sum large enough for cash purposes.”79 In 1900, church clothing clubs provided, without restrictive rules, an opportunity to take part in an unofficial system of hire purchase.

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One means by which some mothers turned pennies into respectability was to make their smart clothes themselves. Hackney missioner F.E. Tozer said of his sewing class, “The material used in the sewing class is bought by the mission and paid for by the girls [mixed poor and very poor] by instalments. Each girl decides what garment she requires and is instructed how to make it. When she has paid for the material she may take it away.” Perhaps pleased with working women’s show of industry, church officials provided incentives in clothing clubs, sometimes allowing women to obtain fabric at a better cost than market rate. This production of clothing could be helpful but also detrimental for some women. One missioner explained how very hard this system was on widows with school-aged children: “They work away at trousers, shirts and juvenile shirts and hardly gain a living. ‘It’s enough to make you cry sometimes.’”80 Although middle-class clergy and women charity workers portrayed the lower classes as civilized through their encounter with religion, in reality working women had their own goals – respectable-looking family members and homes – and they felt that the churches could, maybe, help them succeed. We can see this reflected in how a missioner named Mrs Goold told of religion-inspired “improvement,” a story typical in the Booth archive. “The women [who come to our meetings] show more improvement than the girls,” she said: “They have suffered more, and know more of the bitterness and burden of life. They are, also, more subdued. Many of them have been confirmed and are regular communicants. Some were unbaptized when we first knew them, and some unmarried. We can say, too, that the majority are more sober, that their homes are cleaner, their attire more neat; they no longer wander about the streets bonnetless, or come to church with only shawls over their heads; they buy a great deal of material at the Monday’s meeting, and have made innumerable garments and now purchase sheets, pillow-cases, and table-cloths, all of which were unknown luxuries five years ago. Besides, they make nice little outfits for their babies, instead of borrowing or begging for them as they used to do.”81 Goold told of “one woman [who] said, not long ago, ‘I could not bear my life at all, but for the peace I have been taught to find at the Mission.’”82 That “peace,” it should be specified, was at least in part the peace of feeling adequately respectable in the face of the scrutiny of the working-class community. As we can see, it was hard won – achieved in the face of an overbearing middle-class churchwoman

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and of such overwhelming poverty that the act of making one’s own dress was just another chore in an endless round of chores. Poor respectability had its limits, however. Robert Roberts describes how, if one had acquired an immoral, unrespectable name, even the best clothes and furniture were of no use: “I recall one street walker, ten years after ceasing her trade, blamelessly married, with a ‘clean doorstep and a beautiful house of furniture’, who was still cold-shouldered by her neighbours. Drunk one day, she could stand it no longer and burst in a passion through her doorway, half pleadingly, half enraged. ‘It’s not what I was!’ she screamed again and again, ‘it’s what I am now – a decent, clean-living woman.’ This, over a knot of startled children playing in the street, to rows of closed condemnatory doors. The moralists found it hard to forgive and they never forgot.”83 As we shall see in descriptions of working people’s approaches to charity and dependence, the poor-butrespectable community had no mercy for such people.

“ Mu m pe r s ,” “ Cadger s,” an d th e Ch ar i ty - S c r o un ger Stereotype A frequent site of social exclusion was in poor-but-respectable people’s approach to charity. In a time when almost everyone in the poor-but-respectable community needed charity or relief from the workhouse at some point in their lives, it is ironic that the most common form of abuse was to accuse one of receiving undeserved charity epitomized in the terms “mumper” and “cadger.” This language could potentially be employed by anyone, no matter how low their social status, because they could always appeal to the myth that their character somehow placed them above doles and free meals. Because churches were often the vehicles of charity, many working people refused to be associated too closely lest they be tagged a “scrounger” by their peers. One Unitarian minister interviewed in Hampstead, Dr Hereford Brooke, believed that workingmen stayed away from church partly because “with the sturdier working class, [they] say, ‘We don’t want to be mixed up with that crowd [at church]. They only go for what they can get.’”84 A nearby district visitor also remarked that “none but the strongest natures” could face “the chaff to which the religious and church goers are subjected”: “Miss Parish knew of a most respectable old woman in Clarence Terrace who resorted to all sorts of subterfuges to conceal from her neighbours

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that she was going to church; she would start a great deal too early, or walk in the opposite direction.”85 Working-class antipathy to charity was very pleasing for middleclass workers, even if falling attendances were not. To emphasize the respectability of their charges, mission workers often referred to refusals, where charity was offered and rebuffed. Miss Price, who ran a coffee house for factory girls in Poplar, admitted that the young women might be a hard-living and gregarious set, “and yet,” she added, “these girls never beg.” What was more, she added, they “would die at their post rather than receive parish relief.” Even in the case of the famous 1888 Bow matchgirls’ strike, the women involved impressed upon the public, in an interview with the East London Observer, that, “‘Poor as we are … we ain’t come to cadging yet.’”86 The idea that money might go to undeserving hands was weekly news in South London. People read about it repeatedly in the South London Press. Guardians’ minutes were reported verbatim in every issue and the news was very commonly about doles given wrongly to ne’er-do-wells who could not handle their money responsibly. Stories of loafers could also serve as entertainment for workingclass Press readers, such as in an 1898 tale called “The Loafer’s Ride.” The plot whisks a “lazy, good-for-nothing” Englishman to Rhodesia (“How he got from his home in Hampshire to Buluwayo nobody ever knew”). Trusted by no one there, he either slept in the veldt or “roamed from canteen to canteen” in search of drink. In Rhodesia no one calls him by his real name (James Stanton); knowing his type, they only call him “Loafer.” At this point in the story, danger looms for the white settlers: “The Matabele were restless, and it was even whispered that in the outlying districts some white men had been savagely butchered in cold blood and their bones left to bleach on the veld … the niggers grew more and more insolent and daring, the Buluwayans suddenly awakened to the full seriousness of their position.” When a search party is organized to rescue passengers of a carriage stranded in the veldt, the Loafer, figuring he will not survive in British-run Buluwayo, offers to join the party on its dangerous mission. Fearing he will sell it for brandy, however, no one will lend the Loafer a rifle except a cowardly Jewish man. The Loafer, the author seems to say, is still a white Englishman, and is therefore superior to certain people despite his immoral nature and he is portrayed as more courageous than the Jew. He “snatches” the gun from this

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“elderly little man of a Hebraic cast of figure … looking as if he were afraid of the rifle in his hand.” When battle comes to the search party, the Loafer fails to join immediately with his white brethren in rifle fire upon the African warriors (“niggers”). Yet ultimately he distinguishes himself by aiming at “a powerfully built, six-footed induna – carrying a rifle” and, in a single shot, strikes the African leader “in the middle of the forehead,” thus proving that even the most superior African is inferior to the lowest on the British social scale. By sheer force of numbers, the warriors overwhelm the Buluwayans and the Loafer is ordered to save a woman from the carriage. The Loafer is on the point of vindicating himself and saving this damsel in distress, when the Matabele (even at that moment turning to flee) throw their last assegai spears. The Loafer dies gruesomely: “An assegai struck the Loafer full between the shoulders, where it remained embedded in his flesh.” Yet Bulawayo is saved. Because of his “heroic ride,” the Buluwayans “forget [the Loafer’s] dissolute habits.” Redemption, for the Loafer, comes with death.87 The South London Press served as a kind of turn-of-the-century Jerry Springer Show, lampooning and humiliating the many losers of a society with 30 per cent of its working people under the poverty line. This constant media attention to the loafer stereotype, in an urban atmosphere of stark inequality, served as grim but extremely popular entertainment, while at the same time heightening readers’ anxiety that at some point they, too, might be ridiculed as one of the incompetent “outcasts” of London.

Wi l l Cr o o ks an d th e L a bou r Col ony Pl an Historians often prefer a more sympathetic picture of working ­people. Alistair Reid writes how “the fundamental moral ideal of [working-class] Christianity” from 1870 to 1900 was that of “caring for others and sharing one’s resources with them.” By 1900, he claims, it became “clearly impossible” for plebeian radicals “to accept the assumptions of economic and social individualism.”88 In fact, as the previous section made clear, the poor did not adhere to a “poor bloke” brand of class sympathy. Rather than face the fact that respectable pretensions could only do so much in the face of economic scarcity, working people accused each other of taking money undeservedly. One Friday night, for example, two Southwark

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sisters, Rose and Miriam, attended a nearby mission’s “poor children’s supper” and received “two thick slices of bread with jam.” Their father made sure they never did it again, beating them both severely for receiving free meals at a mission he believed was below his family’s station.89 The punishment suffered by these girls is indicative of the poor-but-respectable culture of anxious self-discipline and social subordination. Subordination and punishment reached an institutional level in the politics of Poplar’s Will Crooks, a working-class celebrity, guardian, and London County councillor.90 From a family of Congregationalists, he was the embodiment of “decent” working-class culture, and working-class men voted for and admired him. In his interview with George Duckworth, Crooks described how he was elected to the same Board of Guardians that took him as a boy into the workhouse after an accident left his father disabled. Now an elected member of the London County Council, Crooks preached the doctrine “help yourself” and “self-reliance.” Crooks was, according to G.K. Chesterton, the only Labour member “who symbolises, or who ever remotely suggests the real labouring men of London.” Most of all, wrote Chesterton, he is “of the Walworth Road” (which, on the Booth maps, was pink and blue with occasional dark blue spots).91 His “socialism” was a kind of moral ethics most working people would have understood at the time. A local Wesleyan reported that in Poplar there was “really a modified socialism reflecting the influence of Wm. Crooks who is the leading spirit here and holds meetings outside the dock gates on Sundays. One good thing about it is a strong opposition to drink and gambling.”92 In his interview with George Duckworth, Crooks spoke of an improved working class in Poplar. He praised residents for demonstrating the grit to maintain poor-but-respectable standards. Crooks described the “infinite” improvement in recent years, as evidenced by the fact that even in the “lowest streets” all had clean blinds. He  had known the time “when they were only taken down at Christmas.”93 Crooks emphasized that relief was limited to “deserving paupers” and those displaying “good character.” Aged people would be provided relief if they had been careful and had put away money for rent (he had a soft spot for them and wanted them to live decently) but he “never relieves cases of want of work.” Uncleanliness was “punished by the House.” Applicants were always examined and a medical officer inspected sick cases. Relief, when granted, was

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for “two weeks during which time the case was watched carefully and reported on by the Relieving Officer.” “No relief [was] given without strict investigation.”94 Crooks sounded precisely like many clergy when he criticized his peers’ methods of relief. About other guardians, “Hears they are wasteful in Bow and give it away and waste money.” And, like London’s ministers, he knew and approved of Charles Booth’s scientific survey. He assured Duckworth he was “glad to give any further information or any help in his power. Had just got Life and Labour volume IX but not yet read it.”95 Historians of working people will perhaps question whether Crooks’s answers were “put on” – made for the consumption of Booth and the wider public. Yet Crooks’s own biographer concurred and his speeches from the period focus his views in the same direction. In 1905, speaking to the National Liberal Club, Crooks proudly recalled his involvement in the 1893–94 Unemployed Committee of Poplar clergymen and workingmen: “One vicar urged a very awful case of appalling poverty, such an appalling case as it had never been his misfortune to come across before: a poor man who had been out of work for a long time, a poor woman slaving away at needlework with several children. ‘What’s his name?’ a poor ex-stoker asked, and when he had the answer, they said: ‘Oh, put him under the table, he’s a wrong ’un.’ What does that prove? It proves that the working-class are quite capable of finding out who are the tryers and who are not. That vicar had three cases described as ‘wrong ’uns,’ and we had the intense satisfaction of knowing whether a man or woman really needed help … There was discipline, and we never plead except for honest work and honest labour under proper organisation and discipline.”96 Like many workingmen at this time, Crooks expressed the great wish that the ruling class would appreciate the particular expertise that working people brought to the moral discrimination of members of their own class. At a dinner for all the new Free Church members of parliament in 1906, Crooks told a story to illustrate the point. Most significant was his understanding that he was a brother to the poor, a class comrade, while at the same time upholding hard moral hierarchies within his rhetoric of progressive social reform: I had one gentleman visit me after going down into a slum, and he said: “It is a wicked and barbarous thing living in this district. There is a family starving down there.” “Are you sure?” “They

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told me.” “Very well, I will go and see.” I went. “How are you getting on?” “All right.” “Old man at work?” “Oh, doin’ a bit.” “Getting on pretty comfortable?” “Yes; mustn’t grumble.” “You had a parson down here just now, hadn’t you? … you spun him a pretty good cuffer, didn’t you?” “Yes, and he did take it in.” “But,” I said, “he has been up and told me about it.” “Yes? He was not so soft, after all, was he?” Now, why should they have tried that on you and not on me? Why, because they feel I am a brother, and they have got a doubt about you. You have got to wear that doubt off, and you have got to make the humblest of our brothers and sisters understand that there is someone in the world who does care for them, there is someone who is going to fight through that Parliamentary machine by which we have to abolish sweating, slumdom, over-crowding, rack-renting, and we have got to promote industry in such a way that every honest worker may find useful work to do.97 Like Booth, Crooks advocated the removal of very poor men to labour camps or “colonies,” and he acted on it. Collaborating with the working-class socialist George Lansbury, Crooks leased the Laindon Labour Colony not far from Poplar, in Essex, in 1903.98 He was outspoken in parliament on the issue and “reminded Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman’s Government, in the early days of the first Session, that at the General Election they had talked about the need for colonising England. Here, he told the House, was a chance to give effect to the promise.” “Whatever may be said to the contrary,” Crooks said, “the town wastrel takes more kindly to the land than to anything else … but then it is well known that I favour farm colonies for training him.”99 Crooks, it appears, wanted a nationwide policy of labour colonies, directed by a centralized Ministry of Labour, which would subsume the duties of the Labour Department and the Board of Trade. On application from local authorities, the ministry would grant funding for public works in times of distress. Most importantly, Crooks wanted labour colonies for two kinds of men: the loafer poor and the respectable poor, who were worthy of training. “I want to see the Government responsible for three separate kinds of labour colonies,” said Crooks: “First I want a farm colony for the habitual ablebodied pauper. He needs to have his muscles hardened and to be trained to work. The tasks set such a man in the workhouse are

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wasteful, and do him no good … The second class of farm colony would be for habitual tramps. These men need to be kept entirely separate from able-bodied paupers. The third class would be voluntary colonies, to which unemployed men could be sent and trained in market gardening and farming.100 Reports on the Laindon colony measured its success in explicitly moral terms. G. Herbert Lough, clerk to the Poplar Guardians, said there were favourable “moral and physical” conditions at Laindon to “enable” men to become “self-supporting.”101 The goal was for the 130 men, engaged largely in road building, to realize the moral importance of work. In his 1905 National Liberal Club address, Crooks described how the unemployed acquired a kind of behavioural syndrome of work-shyness after about three months out of work. He said that if a man was asked about his prospects right after losing his job, he would reply, “I think I shall be getting something soon; good morning.” But if asked the same question three months later, the answer would be quite different and he would say, “‘No, and not likely to! Members of Parliament and County Councillors, what’s the good of the lot of you?’ See him a few weeks later and ask him if he has heard of anything: ‘No and I don’t want to!’ The nation has lost the only value it ever had in that man; he has lost his manhood, and you see him at last with slackened muscle, until, little by little, he becomes quite indifferent to anything.” Crooks was disheartened by the loss of the man’s cheerful spirit and incentive, which he believed was a kind of pauper syndrome, a metaphysical, semi-spiritual disease. Words of contempt now described the man: he “slouches about,” he is “one of the Unemployables,” he is “worthless,” a “wastrel,” a “sharper” (professional beggar), and a “tramp.”102 Crooks explained that labour colonies were precisely for men in this condition, “without discipline.” Unemployment had, in Crooks’s mind, stripped them of what made them good people, and through hard agricultural labour, they could be made good again: “I have seen them work. I have seen the twenty-five men whom we took away to Laindon Farm who were just of the idle wastrel class – doing nothing, caring for no one, and not intending to do anything. Well, we took them to Laindon Farm Colony, and they got hungry in the fresh air; then we got them something to eat and put them out to use a spade. Well, I tell you that in less than six months these men would come and say to me: ‘Feel my muscle, Mr Crooks. What do you think of that?’ This

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shows that it only wants proper discipline and kindness to help these men really to work.”103 Three points are important in concluding this discussion of Crooks and labour colonies. First, note how the colony men so easily took up their roles as men reclaimed and reborn (“Feel my muscle, Mr Crooks”). These men knew their place in the class hierarchy and behaved as they thought their class (very poor) ought to in order to achieve some manner of poor respectability. It is also important to be reminded – despite historians’ attempts to distinguish Lansbury’s socialism from Booth’s middle-class authoritarian paternalism – that George Lansbury fought very hard to keep his and Crooks’s Laindon Colony alive before it closed in 1905.104 Last, and perhaps most important, the labour colony project was broadly popular. According to Rachel Vorspan, Crooks was hardly a lone voice in the working class: “Organized labour and the working-class press … supported the recommendation to incarcerate habitual tramps and paupers in labour settlements.”105 In February 1909, for example, working-class readers could browse Lloyd’s Weekly News and read how “Workshy and vagrants will be treated as on the morally criminal level until they can prove by long trial in disciplinary colonies that they are able and desirous of rising above it … [They] will not find the world by any means so desirable a place in which to follow their strange devices as the Poor Law has permitted it to become in the past. There will be a certain element of ferocity in pursuit of the bad citizen.”106 This makes ministers and the Booth men, with their harsh words, seem more like spokesmen for poor-but-respectable claims than bourgeois evangelists asserting middle-class social control. In advocating such policies, London’s working people were exercising their own claims to respectability, an act that required a simultaneous exercise of exclusion.107

M on e y Par ti c i pati o n an d C h u rch goi n g Lon don To appeal to poor-but-respectable citizens, the churches had to understand their culture, focused as it was on the myriad degrees of poor-but-respectable actions and dress and on hurtful gossip about which was a cadging or loafing family and which was not. At root, the “real business” of poor-but-respectable lives was “earning enough to pay the bills and having a little bit extra left over.”108

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Successful church organizations allowed poor-but-respectable people to do with their money what they had already done with their neighbourhoods, their appearance, and their conduct. Giving and receiving money was, and is, one of the most powerful means by which one can bid for both a political and a public identity. It is arguably the very foundation of status among working people. Through their social auxiliaries – and until commercial enterprise offered more attractive places to use money publicly and welfare reforms removed the need – the churches provided people with services for which flexible payments might be made, thus staking a solid claim to a respectable place in the working-class community. The problem clearly rests in how we interpret evidence of workingclass spending, or what I call “money participation,” a kind of collective individualism. A few scholars, Paul Johnson foremost among them, have viewed working-class spending as evidence of competition and status consciousness among working families,109 in contrast to those historians who saw cooperative societies, friendly societies, insurance, saving, or borrowing as expressions of working people’s class consciousness.110 My analysis concurs with Johnson’s. The cross-class efforts of many ministers and working people to construct a Christian community in the metropolis proves that most working people were focused on status consciousness not class-consciousness. Money participation, in its various forms, allowed poor respectables to become part of a wider church hierarchy: as worthy recipients of charity, as liberal donors to the church, as donors to poorer and inferior imperial subjects, and as new, competent church workers. But it was also a striking moment of social exclusion – the exclusion of a loafer class both churchmen and working people had fought together to keep from the doors of poor-but-­respectable churches. Although C O S pessimists like Helen Bosanquet argued that working people had no foresight beyond the week, Johnson has shown that it was actually quite the opposite. In fact, “almost everyone indulged in some club saving and some credit purchasing that extended beyond [the household’s] weekly cycle.”111 As a Poor Law guardian in Mile End explained, over the course of the year the poor put savings into provident and loan societies, to be drawn out at Christmas – savings that were “well spent as a rule – clothes, furniture etc.”112 Unlike retail or insurance companies that required regular payments and often demanded significant sums, the appeal of these clubs was that a clergyman could do nothing in response to

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those who missed payments. This, and the toleration of small deposits by working families wishing to invest their pennies, suited the poor-but-respectable household economy perfectly. Every South London church and chapel provided a fund for saving money – whether it was until the end of the year, until sickness hit the household, or until an accident befell someone at work. In Lambeth alone, according to historian Jeffrey Cox, churches offered twenty-five savings or penny banks and twenty-one boot, coal, blanket, or clothing clubs.113 These clubs offered flexible financing of all kinds of purchases – everything from vacations to trousers – and they granted working-class investors social superiority at the same time. Every member of a family who paid something won both self-respect and a wholesome feeling of superiority over the poorer of the neighbourhood who could not. In every working-class district of London holy men presented themselves as the proud handlers of working people’s money. A Hackney Wick L C M spoke of a thirty-one-year-old penny bank that in its time had amassed nearly 20,000 depositors and more than £7,000. In equally poor Stamford Street, Southwark, a Unitarian spoke of a penny bank that had begun in 1886 with a little over £8 taken from one hundred depositors. By the late 1890s it had nearly £700 and more than 1,000 depositors – depositors who, in one year, had invested more than 21,000 separate amounts. This Unitarian spoke of “heavy draws before Bank and Christmas Holidays,” and he believed “it is mostly spent very usefully – in clothes and other necessaries.”114 Increased thrift among the poor appears to have been a new development for ministers. One finds the surprised testimony of Rev. J. Ainsworth of St Luke’s parish, Bermondsey, who, after a painstaking investigation, found that contributions to church clubs and banks came even from the poorest areas. There were six blocks of slum courts that occupied the northeast corner of Ainsworth’s parish that, in the vicar’s view, had “all got much worse in ten years.” Each street was home to a rough, rowdy, gambling people who “work all the week and have a spree on Saturday and Sunday.” Having said this, it was nevertheless working-class thrift that dominated the vicar’s mind. Ainsworth “spent a very long time on the thrift agencies in connection with the parish,” his investigator noted, ultimately earning himself the tag of “longwinded” for the effort. What Ainsworth wanted to explain, however, was that in terms of thrift, “even in

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the  poorest streets there [had] been a ‘distinct improvement.’”115 Ainsworth described how he had launched an inquiry into the saving and spending habits of his people, and he was astonished at what he found. With the Booth investigator, he went “carefully through the books of the collecting bank and the Penny Bank pointing out the names of the people in the slums, and often telling me something of their history.”116 Beyond savings banks, there were also insurance agencies of all kinds operating out of the churches. Church agencies, once again, were more accessible and affordable than the major friendly societies. Rev. Tolefree Parr of Surrey Chapel, Southwark, explained, “the income of the people is so small and so uncertain that beyond the ‘slate,’ ‘medical,’ and ‘goose’ club they cannot make much provision for a ‘rainy day.’”117 Surrey Chapel, therefore, asked for whatever contributions poor-but-respectable families could provide. “The Men’s Slate Club meets a real need,” Parr explained: “There are few skilled artizans in our neighbourhood, and the unskilled labourers, for the most part, are not members of Orders or Sick Benefit Clubs. By the payment of 7d a week, the members of our Slate Club are entitled to Medical attendance … Needless to say such provision for a ‘rainy day’ has proved a God-send to many. Last December after all sick payments had been made, the Men shared out £1 5s. each. There are over 100 men now in the club.”118 Of equal help to Southwark’s poor women was the Chapel’s Women’s Medical Club. “For one penny per week,” the 150 women of the Chapel Mothers’ Meeting were “entitled to the service of a highly skilled lady doctor, from the Blackfriars Women’s and Children’s Dispensary and,” it was noted, “are thereby saved from the demoralizing practice which is so common of applying to the parish in every illness.” Parr believed that the Women’s Medical Club was “a great bulwark against pauperism.” It was a contingency plan for an inevitable emergency that might keep poor people from losing what little social status they had – sustaining their “independence,” as Parr said, “at times when resort to the Guardians seems inevitable.”119 People at all levels in poor London had learned the lessons of thrift – and the social and material reasons for it. This was well illustrated by a group of undergraduates who visited the Charterhouse Mission in the mid-1880s. One of the university men stopped to converse with a Bermondsey working boy. “What do you do, Smith?”

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the young man asked. “I helps the man what sells fish at the corner, Sir.” “What are your wages?” “He gives me grub, and sometimes 6d. or 8d. a day.” “I hope you save some, in case you’re out of work,” the undergraduate replied. The boy’s answer was matter-of-fact, his remarks “cogent and practical.” He affirmed that he “had deposited 5d. last and 2d. this week with Mr Curry [the missioner] and saw prospect of a further transaction next week.” This flexible but consistent effort would continue for the rest of many working-class lives. The boy’s “determined answer” to the cautions of the young man should remind us of the careful planning in these tiny expenditures. He replied, simply, “Why, teacher, I never spends to waste.”120 The other side of the saving coin was giving, which the respectable poor did in large amounts and there are repeated mentions of working-class “liberality” in the Booth notebooks. Minister Kaye Dunn “mentioned that some time back a gold chain was given him” by the congregation – demonstrating both commitment to the church and status affirmation on the part of churchgoers. The poor families in Spitalfields also rewarded their long-time L C M W.B. Murray with an “American organ” in 1887 and “£20 when he completed his 25th year on the district.”121 These acts of liberality were more than simply gifts to prized ministers; they included donations to a wide variety of church funds. Defending what he knew was a status-­ conscious community, Rev. Vyvyan at Charterhouse Mission in central South London said he was “always explaining that so far from ‘getting’ there is much more ‘giving’ for the churchgoers, who alone contribute anything to the Mission Funds.”122 Similar remarks came to the Booth team from all over London. “I have never asked them for sixpence since the work commenced, but they contribute willingly from their poverty,” said Congregationalist Rev. Caine in Lambeth: “The Temperance Society and the Band of Hope, strong and vigorous organisations, raise their own funds, and contribute handsomely to the general cost of the Mission besides; a Missionary Committee collects £25 a year for Foreign Missions, and in a score of ways, direct and indirect, our people squeeze out of their poverty very generous financial aid … [including] a proper system of weekly subscriptions, which has been warmly taken up by the members and will probably realise over a £100 a year.”123 Working families had a keen interest in buildings and budgets, and Bermondsey’s Rev. T.E. Howe spoke of how congregations dug deeper into their pockets when it was learned that their minister was

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drawing a low salary. Howe was a Baptist minister who lived in a  borderland parish between blue and pink South London (St Bartholomew’s, South Bermondsey). Howe “spoke very warmly of his people; the self denial they exercised to maintain the chapel – we have to raise at least £5 a week for expenses and have no outside assistance.”124 Rotherhithe Presbyterian, Rev. T.G. Murray, when asked how he would pay for the enlargement of his chapel, remarked that this would involve an outlay of £3,000. “Out of this, such is the feeling of his people, he expects that £1000 will be raised by them.” His people were artisan and labouring class largely, and, as Murray said, “They are very keen about things.”125 Perhaps most illuminating was the popularity of the Roman Catholic Church, which drew far more regular attendances than any other church in the metropolis. Catholic parishes were committed to the notion of working people as givers rather than receivers, and they refused to be tagged as charity churches. Booth remarked on this phenomenon, noting that the Catholic poor were a “class apart, being as a rule devout and willing to contribute something towards the support of their schools and the maintenance of their religion.” Hugh McLeod, in his Class and Religion in the Victorian City, pays little attention to this fact, preferring to explain the enormous numbers of Catholic faithful largely in terms of the charisma (or tyranny) of individual priests. Steven Fielding, in his own work on the Irish Catholics in England, focuses more on the schools as a focal point for Catholic and nationalist identity than poor respectability.126 Yet for Irish working people at the bottom of the working-class hierarchy, it may have been very important to churchgoers that their claim to respectability was promoted by their holy men. Indeed, in comparison with Anglican and Nonconformist churches – always decrying the lack of men – the success of the Roman Catholics (who had no such problem) may have been very much to do with their approach to donations and charity. “The fear of ridicule scarcely operates as a motive with R.C.’s,” explained Lambeth’s Father Brown: “the charge of going for what they can get is so palpably untrue that it doesn’t touch our people: everybody knows that so far  from giving we go round and collect money even from the poorest.”127 All across South London, few could doubt the Roman Catholics’ overwhelming success in getting hundreds (even over a thousand) to church on Sundays, and the stereotype of a bribing, proselytizing

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church usually failed to stick. The Ark Mission’s William Joyner, in poor Paradise Street, admitted flatly to Arkell that churches and chapels might give too much charity “but the R.C’s do not. ‘They never do – they get money from the people.’”128 To this was added a rather systematic attempt, on the part of priests, to encourage donations. Father Newton noted that, despite the fact the churches were free, “the people of the parish help a good deal.” Men in the district, indeed, took it upon themselves to collect for the church. The parish was “divided into six districts,” Newton said, “and a body of working men collect weekly ‘For the support of the Schools’ – going to Catholic homes, and not simply to parents who have children in attendance. Last year 110 pounds was collected in this way.” Aves was impressed and found this fact worthy of note.129 A related facet of giving was directed at the “heathen” in the British colonies. Just as inequality encouraged social subordinative relations between the working classes at home, inequality and imperialism encouraged working people to participate in the subordination of nonwhite people abroad. As Hugh McLeod writes, the immoral, degraded ways of colonized people featured prominently in the missionary accounts heard in London churches, which portrayed missionaries as a force for good among benighted, lesser, subject peoples.130 Historian Jonathan Schneer notes that London was the “nexus of imperialism,” but living in such a hub “did not teach that decent treatment was a right, or that rights had anything to do with the way one was treated. Out went the soldiers; in came the fruits of imperialism. The strong survived, the weak went to the wall or submitted to their conquerors, sent them tokens of their submission, accepted their rule, judgement and charity.”131 In terms of charity specifically, the empire probably offered a place for working people to involve themselves as charity providers, distributing their own small donations abroad to inferior-but-deserving classes, just as West Enders had to them. It was an act of money participation, once again, granting them some measure of respectability while displacing tensions through the subordination of another (racialized) people. One cannot forget also the exotic allure that Empire offered when it was repeatedly recreated to entertain poor-but-respectable churchgoers. Parish newsletters requested funds and prayers for missions abroad, calls that were often accompanied by lengthy descriptions of far-off people and places. Rev. A.H. Langridge, for example, wrote

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to the people of St Peter’s Vauxhall about his adventures in India on the frontier of Tibet. He told stories of the Gurkha “hillmen who fought for us so splendidly in the Afridi Campaign,” and of journeying through the “impenetrable jungle … over mountains, and down through valleys, and winding round the edge of precipices, and here and there through forests where huge trees are laden with gorgeous flowers, and all kinds of strange, bright-coloured birds fly to and fro, and monkeys leap from the branches and try their best to frighten your horse.” This exotic account offered an Empire that working people could participate in, if vicariously. When referring to  dangerous terrain, Langridge spoke parishioners’ names. “Mr George’s ’bus, or Mr Fred Ayliffe’s van, would have a very bad time of it going from Naini Tal to Almora,” he wrote. Langridge also played to a new consumer identity that a fortunate few at St Peter’s (with bicycles of their own) may have achieved and to which all congregants would have aspired. “The heat is so great, and the way so tiring, that you cannot get more than about fifteen miles in a day. I wonder what the S[t] P[eter’s] V[auxhall] Bicycle Club would think of that – over mountains, and down through valleys.”132 Susan Thorne, in her work on London’s Congregational missions, has noted how “most people [sent] their children to Sunday school with pennies for the missionary collection.”133 A full 15 per cent of the London Missionary Society income was collected through the efforts of thousands of Sunday school children.134 Thorne notes how the ministers’ hope was that working people might be taught charity. “The virtues of sacrifice and service were considered essential to training the children of the poor,” ministers believed, one of them arguing “you cannot implant the principle of ‘giving’ too early.” In the mind of the child who had just dropped his penny in the missionary box, “others’ wants and woes have been thought of … there has been a looking beyond personal comfort and pleasure; an upward lift has been given to that child’s character.”135 Of course, mission donations may have been a means to regard one’s colonial brethren with compassion. But they were much more than this. Such donations provided a way to oppose oneself, as a white, poor-but-respectable working-class child against a nonwhite “heathen” class far below his or her social station. Providing charity to the less fortunate, and choosing a poorer-but-deserving case thousands of miles away, ministers, churchwomen, and working-class leaders were all dedicated to this hierarchy-forming activity within

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the poor-but-respectable parishes of East and South London. Through the vehicle of Empire the poorest and youngest, and their parents who gave them their pennies, could take part in it too.

C r o s s - Cl as s Co o pe r ati o n an d Wor ki n g- Cl ass Ch u r c h Wo r ker s One of the most effective means of welcoming poor-but-respectable people to a wider Christian community was in churches’ increasing employment of them as church workers. In addition to positions as Sunday school teachers, working people were taken on as district visitors and, alongside many (middle-class) women workers, sat on church relief committees as well. Some ministers realized that status-conscious working people – symbolized by leaders such as Will Crooks – were extremely competent in the detection of charity scroungers and should be put to use. Church work, particularly in the charity field, jibed well with working people’s tendency toward moral segregation, and we see many eager participants.136 Like churchmen and women, working people gained power and social status as representatives of church relief systems. Although many working people were clearly eager to be involved, churchmen continued to be insecure about sharing parish responsibilities both with women and with workers. A regular refrain by East End ministers, for example, was to discuss how one employed working-class Sunday schoolteachers and then to complain about them. Bow’s Rev. Sweetnam mentioned that he had “a large sprinkling of working men from the parish; the latter are not always ­satisfactory teachers.” Fortunately Sweetnam’s words were said in private and could not be taken to heart by his new teachers, including the once “radical” Bow matchgirls, eight of whom were confirmed at St Mark’s Church in 1897.137 Rev. J. Wentworth Bennett at St Gabriel’s in Bromley said the same: “The teachers belong to the working class. They are kept as much as possible to question and answer: they don’t teach well, but won’t come to teachers classes.”138 Rev. Hawkins of Hackney, a little more positively, noted that, “all his teachers are parishioners, and their teaching is only fair; but they are very keen and take great interest in the work.”139 It may have been difficult for ministers to admit that they employed working-class district visitors. Often workers were only referred to briefly and simply as much appreciated “helpers.” Rev. Leonard of St

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John’s Hackney spoke “very highly of the earnestness and devotion of these helpers and more particularly of a number of them who are young women of the poorer working class – work girls etc.”140 Southwark’s Rev. Asker, likewise, did not think his parish was “capable of supplying visitors” (a frequent stab at working-class competence in this respect) but admitted that it supplied “about 50  voluntary workers of all sorts, all working men and many of them very poor, a sweep, a dustman, a cross road sweeper etc: ‘the earnestness of those who do come out’ said Mr A. ‘is very remarkable.’”141 Both in East and South London, however, some ministers’ minds were changing. They began to welcome working people as competent ground troops into their charity-conscious church hierarchies. What clergymen noticed was that working people were uncommonly strict managers of charity. Working people were invited to participate in charitable matters themselves, both as district visitors and relief committee members like Will Crooks. The much-respected Rev. Escreet of Woolwich (who believed that “Mr Booth’s books are the next most important thing for a clergyman after the Bible”142) was among a number of churchmen who testified that working men and women were beginning to compete with women of the middle class for the position of district visitor. Arthur Baxter noted that, “Mr E. lays much stress on visitation … All his visitors are of [the] working class, and he much prefers that it should be so: ‘of course’ he said ‘if you consider it the duty of visitors to distribute shillings, and to patronise[,] ours would be no good,’ but for collecting, for reporting to the clergy, and eventually as spiritual agents owing to their greater sympathy with and understanding of those whom they visit, working women are he thinks much better than ladies.”143 As some ministers began to appreciate workers’ competence and strictness in money matters and moral segregation, it was perhaps inevitable that they invited working people onto church relief committees. Just as Will Crooks had added his “class expertise” to the task of rooting out “wasters” at All Saints, Poplar, committees were forming in South London to tap the moral knowledge of parishioners. Christ Church parish in Rotherhithe is a good example. Run by Rev. Bardsley, it was recognized by neighbouring clergy as the “strongest church in the neighbourhood.” Christ Church had what Aves approvingly called “a genuine [relief] committee” that cooperated with the C O S and key to its success was that it embraced

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members from up and down the hierarchy of the Rotherhithe community.144 “We went through the names of the Parish relief Committee and it is thus composed: a working-man; the Missionwoman; the wife of a lighterman; the wife of the Superintendent of the Baths; a man in the Customs; the Nurse; a fruit-salesman, who is also churchwarden; the wife of the last; a coffee vendor, who goes round with basket and stall along ‘The Wall’; a working foreman; a lighterman; the scripture-reader; the niece of the lighterman, and Mrs Bardsley. In addition, there are the Vicar, Curate, and a Mr Sutton, the Sec.”145 In his yearly address of June 1899, Bardsley wrote to his parishioners that it had been eight years since his first report: “The same earnest paid staff is with us – the same active Wardens, with interest manifested in all things connected with Christ Church – the same persevering Sunday School Superintendents, and, to a large extent, the same body of other workers. A few have been welcomed as ­fellow-helpers.” He hid much working-class participation from view (the “other workers”) but, using the language of love, he spoke of a community operating as one, middle-class and poor-but-respectable people working side by side: “The past year has been a specially happy one … growing congregations and growing schools, growing offertories and increased communicants, are great encouragements, especially when we believe, as we do, that there is along with these things that growth which is alone of real and lasting value – the growth of love and loyalty to the Lord and Master Jesus Christ.”146

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6 Discipline and Release: Religion and Drink

Poor respectability in South London was a combination of self-discipline and release, often through violence and drunkenness. Ministers and Booth investigators constantly remarked upon this development, not quite knowing whether to call it “improvement” or unrespectable poverty, when both elements seemed prominent. After all, poorbut-respectable behaviour was what reformers desired: it meant civilization, decency, character, salvation, and redemption. Largely because they did not understand the hardship it caused poor-butrespectable people, it was what middle-class improvers most wanted for them. Charles Booth praised it, even fetishized it. Civilization and improvement, however, involved a network of self-disciplinary practices that caused powerful anxiety, and this in turn led to repeated moments where psychological release was not only necessary but also inevitable. In any poor community, then as much as now, the cycle of self-discipline and release continues relentlessly. Nevertheless, scholars today, like reformers in the past, do not often see the link between these inseparable phenomena. In this chapter, following social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, a range of forms of behavioural self-discipline will be examined, along with two major forms of release. In London, self-discipline among the poor could be found in increasingly nonviolent behaviour, cleaner language, the use of birth control, and, as we saw in the last chapter, hiding poverty behind a veneer of respectability. Release, it is important to note, only rarely took the form of industrial disputes or other public protests. Events like the 1888 strike at Bryant and May’s matchmaking company were few and far between and the benefits were negligible in the face of government and industry’s

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disproportionate power. Instead, this chapter looks at everyday releases, namely certain types of church practices – worship and entertainment – and drinking alcohol. The latter was particularly popular among women heading poor-but-respectable households. These forms of release should be twinned with another, which was explored in the previous chapter: the isolation and subordination of those beneath oneself, especially those dependent on charity.

S e l f - D i s c i p l i n e: V i o l e n c e , R e pr o du c t i on , an d Wor k That famous 1888 matchgirls’ strike offers a good example of selfdiscipline, if we read it somewhat differently than historians have done thus far. Many prominent labour and women’s historians continue to argue that the most obvious method of displacement was working-class radicalism. In her City of Dreadful Delight, Judith Walkowitz describes the emergence of a radical workingwoman – a woman who is a gender radical and, by way of this, a proponent of social justice, too.1 Thus Walkowitz suggests that the matchgirls’ “demonstration of mass solidarity set off a new pattern of unionization, whose effects, historians of labor have argued, extended well beyond the boundaries of the East End.”2 A decade after the strike, however, Arthur Baxter set about interviewing women who were close to “the girls” after the affair died down. Miss Nash was superintendent of the Clifden House Institute and Restaurant for Working Girls, an institution she described as “an outcome of the strike.” Three to four hundred girls attended the institute by May 1897 when Baxter arrived: 1,200 ate there, fifty girls relaxed in its clubroom every night, and twelve lived in its adjoining lodging house. In stark contrast to the Walkowitz account, the picture in 1897 was exceedingly “civilized”: “The girls were a terribly rough lot and decent people scarcely dared to go down the street where they were coming out of work. Now, this is all altered. The girls have become tractable, decent and quiet in their dress and behaviour; their relations with the firm are excellent; and the firm recognises the influence of the girls who attend the institute.”3 It is clear that the matchgirls should be characterized less by “class consciousness,” as historians have done, and more according to their assertion of class hierarchy. Within years of the strikes, eighty had signed temperance pledges, many others attended singing, drilling,

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and needlework classes, and institute volunteers could speak “in high terms of praise of the good conduct and excellent behaviour of the girls” on holiday excursions and tea parties. Walkowitz’s most effective historical contribution, therefore, is not to demonstrate working-class radicalism but rather to emphasize the prominence of a “gender scare” in the 1880s and 1890s. Women’s voices seemed louder in the metropolis than before and thus matchgirls, in a fairly minor industrial strike, came to sensational prominence in the London newspapers. All this was unsettling for men and even created a dangerous backlash for women in public. But gender scares and gender radicalism do not equate to a fight for social justice. The matchgirls, like other poor and working-class Londoners, were in fact most interested in exercising self-discipline in order to assert their own respectability. It is perhaps most instructive to see the late Victorian “gender scare” as similar in its lack of impact to the “class scare” manifested in the 1889 Dock Strike. In both cases, at a working-class level, working people frightened the devil out of the London middle classes with murmurs of “revolution” on the one hand and the “new woman” on the other, and in both cases the new unskilled man and the new unskilled woman turned out to be poor-butrespectable and strikingly well behaved, their ostensible “threat” vastly overblown. Clergymen often hoped to take credit for working people’s “good conduct and excellent behaviour,” particularly if, like the matchgirls, this was seen to be a major improvement. A Wesleyan missioner in East London described how this elevation worked: “a family living in some court or alley having been under the influence of the mission, in a short time moves into a more decent street or buildings, and continuing to attend the various meetings at the Tabernacle, hears from others what they have done, and the advantages to be had from living a little way out – so soon as they are able, they in turn move to Forest Gate or Upton Park. In this way he believes they lost quite 100 of their people last year.”4 Booth also believed in the power of religion to civilize, commenting that, “in the district in which these popular forms of religion flourish there is a tendency, almost unknown elsewhere, for the purple streets to become pink instead of the opposite.”5 Working people also believed that men and women, no matter how poor, could become self-made and respectable, and this could happen due to Christian association. For example, Mr Murray, a working-class

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missioner in Peckham, told the story of Mr Tanner, who started the Gasworkers Mission in Culmore Road. Mr Murray spoke reverently, telling the Booth team how Tanner had been a drunken navvy of humble station until his conversion to Christianity when (as the story typically went) “almost immediately” he and his wife saw a change of material circumstances.6 Despite this ubiquitous discourse, working-class “improvements” were not the mystical result of Christian worship and association. They resulted from serious efforts on the part of all members of poor families – men, women, and children – across East and South London. Self-discipline took a number of forms. First, the Booth team gathered many reports about how violence and foul language had diminished in recent decades. Headmasters noted how parents had become less violent towards board school teachers. Mr Bain’s Webber Row Board School, for example, was in one of the poorest streets in South London. Comparing parents and children in 1882 and 1900, Bain said that parents now were “Much more friendly to the teachers.” “The hostility, insolence, violence, and the threats, common in 1882, now hardly ever occur. (No personal case for the last three years).” Had parental violence toward children similarly declined? Not quite, said Bain, although there was certainly “Less violent ill-treatment (as shown by bruises and wounds).”7 In twenty years, moreover, Bain noticed subtle changes in the behaviour of poor children: “Much more docile; insubordination, then endemic, now almost unknown (when it occurs it is very likely to be the fruit of the teacher). Cheerful and eager now; then, often sullen and morose. No street calling after teachers, or stoning. Relations with teachers generally friendly; often affectionate.”8 Mile End’s J. Winkworth, with eighteen years’ experience, even noticed “a general tendency [among pupils] … to dwell on the gospel of getting on, being successful from the material point of view.”9 According to Southwark’s Mr Hitchcock, people were also keeping their speech more respectable, at least when they were sober. His mission was close to Borough Market so the poor market porters were always within earshot. “A great change has taken place in the market,” Hitchcock said. “At one time the language was very bad; swearing is stopped now.”10 Bursts of obscenity, nevertheless, had far from disappeared in the streets of Southwark. Schoolmaster Mr Bain wrote that “Obscene language” in St Paul’s and Christchurch parishes was “Common, both in the street and in the home.” No longer,

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however, was it so in his school. “[D]isagreeable” words, mainly “the f’” were “often used by the boys,” but now they made an effort to stay “out of [their headmaster’s] hearing” when they did so.11 The poor-but-respectable were also expected to suppress their feelings, particularly when it came to complaining about poverty or their station. As one East London Baptist remarked, “Christian men never have to be relieved. They keep their distress to themselves.”12 In this, too, Booth and other middle-class observers were astounded that on the whole, these very poor residents presented themselves as “wonderfully cheerful and contented.” A visitor remarked, “One good old lady asked me up into her room, which was very dark, with walls discoloured by the smoke of years, with a cheerless outlook … And in that room, she told me, she had lived for thirty-five years, and brought up a large family, and she had not, on the whole, spent an unhappy life.”13 These were almost precisely Charles Booth’s words – that on the whole, poverty did not prevent happiness. An equally difficult and potentially life-threatening brand of selfdiscipline was reproductive: the use of contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs or self-inflicted accidents to limit the size of working-class families. This was largely women’s territory. Just as the workingwoman sought to keep the rages of violent husbands private, just as she dressed her children and cautioned them not to fight or swear, and just as she kept uncleanable rooms tidy, she had to worry about getting pregnant. Thanks to contemporary observers like Richard Hoggart, historians know that by the 1950s working wives were “responsible for contraceptive practice,” largely because of husbands’ “shyness” or conservatism. In 1900 as in 1950, women, often with far fewer resources at their disposal than their 1950s’ counterparts, took steps to employ what they called “preventive checks.”14 Indeed, pastors noted that poor-but-respectable families in 1900 seemed to have one or two children each instead of four or five, as it would have been in “the old days.”15 Likely these checks meant diaphragms, pessaries, or abortifacients. Upper-working-class families, when they used them, employed the former, while the poorest women “very largely” practiced abortion. Diaphragms “were certainly employed in the 1890s and 1900s” notes Ellen Ross, and a 1946 study found that fifteen per cent of women married before 1910 admitted to using birth control. Among the unskilled this proportion dropped to four per cent. Ross also states that, “local abortionists were busy.”16 Abortion, of course,

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was not safe in 1900. Whether it was a “5s. box of capsules,” a forced fall, or a medical procedure, it could be lethal. Women’s anxiety over the unavoidable dangers of birth control, therefore, must be added to our rather long list of stress-causing practices. One does not want to portray women – however material necessity demanded they be responsible for such matters – as exceptionally eager to employ birth control. They were afflicted just as much by moral taboos as men. The East Dulwich vicar, Rev. Jennings, noted significantly that there was “nothing like the number of illegitimate children there used to be.” Jennings “feared” that “this may be because girls have become more cunning in prevention. He thought there was still ‘a great deal of illegitimacy: it is in the air.’” “But,” he added, “sentiment is against it. They [working people] are not well pleased with a girl who has a child before marriage: they are not well pleased with a girl who goes ‘big’ to church.”17 Although illegitimacy was condemned on moral grounds, preventing pregnancy in families had much to do with the maintenance of social status. Women were caught between pastors (and neighbours) who called birth control “unnatural, inhuman and immoral”18 and those, like Rev. Corbett of riverside St Peter’s, who declared, “it always seemed to him that the worst sort of family generally had the largest number of children.”19 Too many children, of course, meant that poor families would be living beyond their means and Ellen Ross notes that in this period “conception was still vaguely ‘blamed’ on women.”20 Angus McLaren’s quotation of one Leeds woman in 1916 adequately sums up the mindset of women forced to periodically take their lives in their hands and prevent more hungry mouths to feed and bodies to clothe. “A ‘Mrs B.’ of Leeds confessed that her last pregnancy almost drove her to suicide: ‘I did not do so but I did something almost as bad and which almost cost me my life, leaving me very weak. We are now living apart, because I would rather lose my husband than live thro’ that again.’”21 Finally, the most emblematic form of poor-but-respectable selfdiscipline was work. Poor-but-respectable women, despite ministers decrying the destruction of the working-class family, commonly performed “double duty,” working at home and in some form of paid employment. “Much female adult labour. Majority of married women work away from home,” wrote Webber Row’s headmaster, Mr Bain.22 Borough headmistress, Miss Newland, said likewise of her students’ parents, most of the latter “unskilled labourers” and

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poorer people of “the coster class”: “The occupation of the parents is very varied, there being no special industry in this part of the District. It is not an uncommon practice for both parents to go to work, but I have traced very disastrous consequences to the children through this, as it has in some instances given opportunity for their acquiring confirmed habits of truancy.”23 In St George’s parish, Camberwell, Rev. Appleton, head of the Trinity College Mission, was more respectful of the hard work done by working mothers. Appleton thought that “as a rule mothers of families are harder worked than their husbands or than their daughters ‘in business’, and this is to say a good deal.” At home, a woman was “housekeeper, nurse, cook, parlour-maid, housemaid, laundry-maid all in one.”24 Housework was gruelling. In Southwark, Nurse Ward described how the hard labour at home put housewives at the top of her list for frequency of injury. “The very large number of housewives nursed is very striking,” Ward said, “164 out of a total of 739 patients”; “they are generally the most hard-worked and indispensable people in the community, and their presence in the home is often so essential that they can hardly go to the hospital until it is absolutely necessary, by which time they have endured more suffering and made themselves much more ill, than would have been the case had they received proper attention at an earlier stage of their malady.”25 Back in Camberwell, Rev. Appleton described how younger women and daughters worked eight to eight in the offices of the City; others filed into Camberwell’s “three large Factories of Aerated Waters, notably of Kops Ale, [the] Pickle Factory, etc.”; and yet more slaved away in the many laundries of the region (“several of them of considerable size”).26 Laundry work, a particularly gruelling yet common form of labour for women across London, provides us with a sense of the gritty, enervating horror of women’s work. Historian Patricia Malcolmson gives a sense of what it was like: “Out of the steam comes mother’s face – pinkish-purple, sweating, her black hair putting forth lank wisps that hung over her forehead and cling to the nape of her neck. The hairpins in her hair rust in the damp and steam. ‘Christ!’ she gasps, and wipes the sweat from her face, and for a few moments rests her hands on the side of the washtub – hands unnaturally crinkled and bleached from the stinging soda water. ‘Wash, wash, wash; it’s like washing your guts away.’”27 Elizabeth Roberts quotes another woman from the period,

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who again suggested that work wore women away till there was nothing left. “The women, they worked and worked. They had their babies and worked like idiots. They died, they were old at forty.”28 Poor-but-respectable women withstood double-duty, backbreaking labour, and constant injury on the (paid or unpaid) job, yet they took the most conspicuous part in the myriad forms of self-discipline required of poor respectability in the working-class community. Women attempted to control violence, coarse language, and visible displays of poverty. Women, therefore, were the principal agents repressing and concealing from the public the anger and frustration arising out of absolute and relative poverty. Households were increasingly attempting to stifle their squabbles, refraining as much as they could from violence to keep a respectable face, while ministers and missionaries exclaimed over their “success” in civilizing and improving the populace. It cannot be impressed enough how extraordinary a historical phenomenon it was that a people still so miserably poor could push so hard to repress the tense rage that poverty inspires.

R e l i gi o n am o n g th e Ver y Poor : Mi s s i o n s , T h eatres, an d O pe n - A i r Meeti n gs The much-publicized but little understood “outcast” (or at least poorly clothed) London still went to church: sex workers and former sex workers, people with a criminal background, people whose poverty and underemployment had plunged them into destitution or even homelessness – those who had been ostracized by middle-class authorities and isolated by the working classes. In view of this ostracism, it would be easy to conclude, as does Gareth Stedman Jones, that working people swore off churchgoing by 1900: “The consequence of association between church and charity was that religion became a symbol of servile status. Church attendance signified abject poverty and the loss of self-respect.”29 Yet more recent research has pointed out that one fifth of the working classes attended a religious institution in 1900.30 The fact is that, for the very poorest, religion was paradoxically both a form of self-discipline and a release. Ernest Aves reported on a sermon preached by an Irishman to a crowd of poor Londoners. His tone, according to Aves, was “fierce” – six-feet-two of fiery Protestantism. He railed against the poor

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people who came “Sunday after Sunday” but did not respond, or did not respond appropriately, to the Christian message. “The fact is, and he brought it out with a great shout … ‘You don’t want Christ’, and he repeated the terrible indictment ‘You don’t want Christ’. ‘But’, he added in a threatening undertone, ‘But you need Him; you need Him’ … the furious energy, and the terrible voice that made my ears ache drove me away.”31 To many historians the act of “wanting Christ” is explained away as an exercise with profound and inexplicable elements. But “wanting Christ,” conversion, moralization, “improvement,” selfbetterment – all of these things amounted to an aspiration to achieve respected and respectable social status. Very much like the angry, violent, and public social exclusion we saw in accounts like Robert Roberts’s Classic Slum, outdoor evangelical meetings provided an opportunity to claim respectability while displacing tension and hardship through Christian worship. It was one means among many of letting off steam – an emotional exhalation inseparable from the self-discipline required of poor-but-respectable aspirations.32 The problem remained, however, that the poorest Londoners could not go to respectable churches due to the “clothes difficulty.” Where, then, did they access preachers like the Irishman? They met spiritual needs by attending religious institutions that both legitimized their (very respectable) claim to religiosity while excusing them from the typical restraints of smart dress. These institutions included the mission, the theatre, and the open-air meeting. There were probably more than 1,000 one hundred- and 200-member mission congregations scattered across the metropolis. Tens of thousands of very poor Londoners attended them. An article in the English Churchman explained how essential missions were to people who did not meet their community’s expectations as regards clothing. “There was not a large congregation,” the writer said of his visit to Barraclough’s mission, “but that was not the fault of the Vicar and his helpers. Most of the people in the parish are so badly attired that they would be ashamed to be seen in church, so they go to the mission-room services instead.”33 Missions met a need among the very poor because they allowed them, if for a moment, some recognition of a decency typically denied them. The Booth men and London’s ministers used terms like “the lowest of the low” to describe these poor worshippers, and according to Robert Roberts, working people called them “low

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class” or “no class.” Nevertheless they adhered to poor-respectability in their own way. This is what Mr Tomkins, an L CM presiding over the Townly Street Mission in St Mark’s Walworth, meant when he talked about the eighty or so poor women who filled his little hall: “Sunday evening service when the hall is fairly full. Mainly poor women, who try to make themselves bright.”34 Sometimes ministers had to make an effort to remind parishioners of a church’s mission status, and its therefore freer expectations as regards clothing. Rev. Dondaldson of poor Hackney Wick told Baxter, “None will come to an ordinary service unless well clothed,” “but if a mission service is announced and appeal issued asking people to come just as they are the church is filled to overflowing.”35 Another alternative for poor-but-clothing-conscious men and women was the large and, importantly, dark theatre. These theatre meetings have been referred to recently by historians as stimulating the “nostalgic power of hymns,” facilitating “powerful emotional responses,” and demonstrating the vitality of a positive and communal religion in poor London communities.36 In 1899, D.J. Rounsefell, minister of the Waterloo Road Bible Christian Church, told George Arkell that the Victoria Hall (the “Old Vic”) was “hired from October to May for special services.” Rounsefell said that in this way they captured the poor in numbers well beyond anything typically seen in church or chapel. The poor’s knowledge of Christian hymnody, moreover, is a striking rebuttal to the usual remark by many ministers that the poor were “indifferent” to religion: “They commenced the evening service with about 600 and closed with nearly 2400. Mostly lantern services. Excepting about 300 of his own people, the audiences were non-church-goers. Mr R. noticed that the people knew and sang the popular hymns from Sacred Songs and Solos (Sankey’s collection).” Then, aided by limelight slides, Rounsefell preached a sermon that ranged from current events (such as the Dreyfus Affair in France) to moral exhortations to avoid drink and “sow the seeds of good living.” This supposedly immoral class behaved itself civilly, respectably, and religiously: “it was wonderful to see how they sobered down, as workers, drawn from their own ranks and speaking in their own dialect, moved amongst them and after a good deal of singing, Mr Hallett obtained a hearing for a short temperance talk, and Mr Rounsefell was listened to in almost perfect stillness as he pleaded for an immediate surrender to Christ. At the close a number of the audience rose to their feet to express

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their determination to lead a new life in the New Year and 79 total abstinence pledges were taken.”37 This went against all expectations of the middle-class public. Why was it that “by eleven o’clock there was a congregation of some 1200 of the poor non-churchgoing class” assembled in the theatre? When typical church attendances never averaged more than several hundred, why did the theatre draw a phenomenal attendance of “beshawled women, young costers with countless buttons, and inebriates”? None of this should be surprising to historians. Theatres simply provided the poorest of Southwark an opportunity to exercise a respectable claim of their own. The fact that the theatre was dark was crucially important since, no matter how good the singing or rousing the sermon, the poor would not enter if their clothes could be seen and judged by their peers. Rounsefell explained to Arkell that he “also noticed” that “a number of people did not come in until the Hall was darkened for the lantern. The singing was also more hearty when the gas was down. People did not like to be seen singing but joined heartily in the obscurity of the darkened room.”38 East and west of the Old Vic along riverside South London were more examples of this alternative form of religious worship. Numbers at Lambeth Road’s Wesleyan Chapel had dwindled below two hundred by the late 1890s, and the decision had been made to renovate the chapel and abolish pew rents for Lambeth’s poorer Christians. But pew rents were not the problem; it was the status consciousness of the working poor that was keeping all but the outwardly respectable away. This was borne out when it was decided that, while the chapel was being renovated, services would be held in a nearby theatre. These proved a startling success. As the Wesleyans’ annual report noted, “We began by shutting [the old Chapel] up, and rallied all our forces for a campaign in the Canterbury Theatre. From a thousand to seventeen hundred people gathered to hear the Gospel, and the first-fruits of Lambeth Mission were found seeking the Lord in the ante-room of this popular Music Hall.”39 Again, services in a music hall had brought three and four times the usual attendance of a church or chapel because its darkness protected poorly clad and self-conscious people from scrutiny. ­ Likely as a result, ministers attempted to construct churches to look like t­ heatres and music halls. Alan Bartlett and Hugh McLeod have noted how Wesleyans all over poorer London, Primitive ­Methodists and Free Methodists in South London, and one might

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add nondenominational halls like Thomas Richardson’s Rotherhithe Free Church, started to build churches that were, in Richardson’s words, “all very big, and deliberately unecclesiastical. They looked more like a theatre or music-hall and the style of worship bore similarities as well. String and brass bands flanked the preacher. The singing was enthusiastic.”40 Evangelists also noticed how streets and commons remained very viable, from the point of view of poor people, as arenas of Christian worship, and, unlike places of indoor worship – churches, missions, theatres – there were regularly a good number of men at these events.41 Open-air meetings have not been given sufficient attention by historians. Even S.C. Williams’s study refers to them only as a sign of South London’s “popular and communal religion.”42 From early on in the “Religious Influences” interviews, ministers noticed how effortlessly people participated in these meetings. “At their Open Air Meetings,” it was said of one preacher, “he always gets workers to sing the old hymns. Finds that these reach the people’s hearts. Has seen the people visibly moved – by such hymns as ‘rock of ages.’”43 Bethnal Green vicar Rev. Clemens particularly noticed “a drifting congregation” of “men who will go inside no building but will lean against a fence and smoke as they listen.”44 A.A. Goodbody, the working-class honourable secretary of the Artizan Mile End Road Young Men’s Christian Association (started because of the class bigotry of the more snobbish YMCA of the district), described how five meetings were held in the evenings in Victoria Park, lasting from seven to ten o’clock. “Keep up until 10,” said Goodbody, “Best time after dark, when people can stand without being seen.”45 Outdoors in the Peckham Rye area many ministers preached on stages and soapboxes, oftentimes simultaneously. Speakers from the secularist, Christian, and even the atheist camps competed for attention, often showering each other with taunts and insults. Ministers of orthodox denominations described it thus: “On a Sunday the Rye from the Tabernacle to the Bandstand is a black mass of people … On coming out of evening service it is hard to force your way through them back to Nunhead Lane,”46 or “There [is] Religious pandemonium in the Rye on Sundays round the Reformers Tree. Bands preaching, praying and audiences overlapping one another.”47 Precise numbers for Rye audiences can only be guessed at. When reporters from the South London Observer and the Camberwell and

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Peckham Times went exploring in late October 1895, they believed that each meeting on the Rye attracted “on an average, some 400 or 500.”48 Six years later, in July 1901, Aves noted how “On and about the Rye I counted some 7 or 8 meetings all, except two small ones near the band-stand, for Christian propaganda. The exceptions were discussing horse-racing and the South African War. One of the meetings was being held outside the Baptist Tabernacle.”49 Aves, ever the careful social scientist, watched the East Dulwich Wesleyan Band meeting and tried to calculate numbers. He stood among the crowd, watching the show: “They had a man with a cornet (who led proceedings) and a harmonium. There was a good choir, and, when I was there towards the close, a fair congregation of about 150.”50 When it was over, Aves noted that, “People were leaving the Rye in large numbers.” In earlier notes he remarked, “The map will show that when the band crowd scatters that a proportion of whatever number of thousands may have been listening to the music which makes its way north … and I have no doubt that for a quarter of an hour or more on every fine Sunday evening the roadway is really packed, making it difficult to get along.”51 On this particular evening, Aves strode over to “the enclosure and found a member of the Band Committee” in order to get precise figures for his report: He told me that the chairs in the enclosure numbered 1500, and that on fine evenings they were generally all taken. Asked as to the size of the crowd taken as a whole he put it 20,000, but, on pressing the point, it did not appear to be a careful estimate had ever been made. I told him that I had put it at 10,000 on the Sunday before, and he said that “for some reason” not so many as usual had been present. Not quite all the chairs had been filled, “but I think there were more than 10,000 people here.” He turned for an opinion to a fellow committee-man, but it was clear that, although they both thought that as a general answer 20,000 was a justifiable figure to mention, nobody really knows what the size of the crowd is. One thing was interesting, namely their statement that the maximum is reached by about the third Sunday of the season. “We always notice it.” “If I want to see a crowd” I was invited to go next Thursday, when they have a Children’s Fete. The enclosure is handed over to 1500 children, and the parents and others flock outside.52

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The figure of ten to twenty thousand people is certainly sufficient for any argument that the Rye was a popular arena for outdoor worship. But what made it so? Fundamentally, the Rye combined rough and respectable religion and style, appealing to a broad audience. It offered a release – emotional and sometimes physical – and entertainment for the poorest classes. But it was also a way for the poorest to access respectable worship. Indeed, all manner of preachers came to the Rye. Orthodox ministers were present, and they admitted to Booth’s team that it was a better place to preach than their own churches, whatever their views of “real” or “false” religion, because thousands gathered there weekly. Also present were unorthodox ministries like the Salvation Army, as well as unorthodox preaching celebrities who appealed to the poor South Londoner by combining rough and respectable religious styles. The orthodox ministers who were interviewed by the Booth team often complained about the raucousness but also admitted that men in particular showed much more interest in outdoor services than in indoor ones and that many working-class flocks expected their minister to make the extra effort to preach outdoors.53 A Unitarian minister, Rev. Knight, admitted that, “On the whole there is a balance of good done by the open air work on the Rye. More are led to the Gospel than away from it from what they hear.” But, he had to “confess with sorrow,” finding Jesus on the Rye did not draw people to his church. Clearly frustrated, he added, “We fail to touch the working classes at the Tabernacle.”54 Another Unitarian minister, Rev. Carter, also preached outdoors and found that men on the Rye responded not to sect but to equal doses of lively entertainment and commonsense Bible-preaching. The audience had very specific expectations of a preacher: “He found there and still finds on Peckham Rye that you must have a band to bring the crowd. Once the crowd is there you can speak to them. No use telling the audience what the great lights of Unitarianism have said and felt with regard to their religion: but take the Bible, prove your position from the text: listeners say ‘Oh if it’s the Bible that he’s using and explaining then he can’t be far wrong.’”55 Among more unorthodox ministries on the Rye, one of the most popular was the Salvation Army and its splinter sects, likely because they specialized in attracting a poor but status-conscious audience.56 Women typically outnumbered men at church yet the Salvation Army drew a high number of men, inspiring a strong sense of

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commitment among poorer working people, largely through respectable religious ostentation like brass bands and smart uniforms. In 1901, Aves was at the Rye and he noted how, “on Goose Green, at the Lordship Lane end, the Salvation Army had taken up their position. The band numerous; the uniforms the smartest that I have ever seen in any corps; but the audience practically nil.” Yet for these men, the lack of audience on this occasion seemed irrelevant. “They marched off soon after I joined them,” Aves noted, “and, apart from their own people (there were a few Sisters and a few soldiers not members of the band) I don’t think that a single person joined in.”57 Next door, a splinter group, the Norwich Citadel Band, was more fortunate in its numbers, and they made a better impression on Aves. Although it had less in the way of outward ostentation (no uniforms) than the Salvation Army, its earnest adoption of the pomp and ceremony of respectable religion was clear: “They had a banner, but no uniforms … Some of the members had very good faces; others looked poor creatures. Most were young men. While I was there they began to play and sing and I left them doing so, with about 100 people standing by. They had, of course, a much better ‘pitch’ than the SA but certainly gave the impression, although they made less show, of having more life, perhaps even more sincerity.”58 The sheer number of open air meetings carried out by the Salvationists of this area was perhaps a sign of the demand for outdoor preaching. On the Rye, meetings were organized not only on Sundays but also during the week. “On Sunday five open air meetings are held on the Rye in the afternoon,” bragged Nunhead’s Ensign Wills. “Also on three evenings a week in Rye Lane and other places.”59 The Salvationists’ “saturation” approach to meetings was accompanied by what appears to have been very effective organization. Mr Cook of the Norwich Citadel Band, among the most respected Army men on the Rye, described the schedule: “On Monday the young men and sisters have a meeting alternately. Tuesday a fellowship meeting or special engagement. Wednesday – Band Practice – Thursday open air meeting – Friday – Bible Reading for young people and Saturday [three] open air meeting[s].” Sunday was “the busy day.” They held meetings all year round, no matter the season, though, unsurprisingly, attendances by working people (in this period embracing new forms of leisure) “Fall off a little at holiday times.”60 Because of the nature of his organization, and because the bread and butter of the Norwich Citadel Band’s services were

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open air meetings, Cook gave a very different assessment of working-class religiosity. Even among “the rough fellows … the religious condition of the people Mr C. thinks is better than it was. You get them to listen and respect you. The Band is treated with great respect. As an instance, he said … Some two people began to make a disturbance, when the rough fellows around were on them in a moment. ‘Clear out and don’t upset the meeting.’ They went.”61 Although saturation, strong organization, fellowship, and meeting the “clothes difficulty” all help account for the Salvationists’ success, it is still not clear precisely why they were able to draw tremendous crowds. Accounts of celebrity preachers on the Rye give us more clues. The place was loud, language could be coarse, and this disorder, because it was mixed with the respectable religion, perhaps encouraged a wide variety of classes to go outdoors for worship. A group calling itself the “Holy Hooligans,” for example, was profiled in the South London Press in October 1898: For nearly three hours there were scenes of disorder on Peckham Rye on Sunday. The Working Men’s Christian Union first put in an appearance, and from a break their speakers addressed the large crowds which had assembled in anticipation of a disturbance. At half-past 3 the Secularists opened their meeting, and almost immediately what was little short of a riot began. A band of about 50 young men of the Christian party bearing in derision of the term Hooligan previously applied to them, the letter ‘H’ in the lapel of their coats, hooted and groaned and made determined, organized rushes with the object of capturing the platform. In this, however, they were defeated by the Secularists who, although fewer in number, were older and heavier men … In the course of individual affrays, one Secularist nearly throttled an opponent. The constable took names and addresses of several of the speakers.62 Letters to the editor were not kind to this “new species of Hooligan,” as one letter put it. All the “tub-thumpers” of the Rye had the same text, he wrote, which was: “Friend, if thou canst not see eye to eye with me, thou art a fool – a most pernicious fool.” Another writer said he heard all manner of language used by the more brash of the Christian speakers: “The following is what I took down in my notebook a few Saturdays ago: ‘Pig,’ ‘dirty-swines,’

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‘filthy liars,’ ‘cowardly curs,’ ‘murderers,’ ‘mad dogs,’ ‘scoundrels,’ ‘brainless idiots,’ and ‘dirty beast.’” The man, clearly one of the secularists, added, “That is what they (the Christian lecturers) called us in one night, and then they talk about ‘polluting the minds of little children,’ and about their moral creed.”63 The celebrity preachers also used similar language. One of the most popular in this period was a man named Humphreys who ran a second-hand bookshop in Paternoster Row. Humphreys had a “loud harsh voice,” and moreover, gave “rough coarse answers.”64 In Humphreys’s evangelical work (as well as the efforts of the young Holy Hooligans) one sees the Rye’s appeal: religion for the workingmen of a variety of classes, served up roughly, without ­compromise or sensitivity. Working-class preachers knew this: that, whatever a family’s spiritual condition, the process of economic “betterment” on a small, fixed wage was nothing short of painful. Humphreys, therefore, lashed out at his audience, knowing they could take it and that it would even provide a welcome release compared to the anxiety-inducing churches and chapels. Rev. Carter remarked how Humphreys had the “loudest voice and uses the coarsest language,” having recently heard an exchange between the evangelist and his audience. “Go home you stinking swine and clean your styes,” Humphreys had bellowed out. In response a member of his audience “remonstrated saying that he had heard pretty strong language used under the cloak of religion but thought that ‘stinking swine’ was just a little over the mark.” Humphreys, however, was not cowed. “[His] answer was, ‘I suit my language to my hearers’ and the repartee was greeted with shouts of laughter.” Carter ended his account with the simple remark, “His audience are men.”65 The newspaper accounts tell us something more: a wide range of classes congregated together on the Rye: “At the corner of the shrubbery on Peckham Rye opposite Scylla Road [the home of clerks and artisans attending Rev. Knight’s Baptist Church],” the reporters wrote, “we noticed last Sunday evening a compact crowd of persons of all sorts and conditions.”66 The more respectable likely felt secure in their own claim to watch the different meetings in rougher company, while the poor-but-respectable faithful, for their part, could blend into the Rye’s rough but righteous atmosphere. Reporting back about the speakers on hand, the newspapermen wrote approvingly that there was no “trace of the lugubrious and unnatural tone so repulsive, and unhappily so common in religious open

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air meetings.”67 In fact, it was likely the very unbridled, forceful-yettheatrical tone of the open-air meeting that made it both attractive and accessible to all classes. Despite the roughness or coarseness or “disorder” of many classes at once assembling and sometimes arguing over religious dogma, as well as engaging in the sometimes raucous experience of a conversionist evangelical meeting, what strikes one most is not the disorder but the decorum present among listeners. While infrequently a scuffle erupted, men and women on the Rye, in large part, behaved respectably, calmly, and quietly. “Now, to speak the truth,” wrote the reporters in surprise, the behaviour of the audience “was exemplary and except for an occasional yell from some belated Yahoo on the verge of the crowd, we might have been in Church as far as decorum went.”68 As was noted regarding theatre services, middleclass observers continuously and favourably remarked upon the poor’s demeanour. If, on the Rye, middle-class observers expected class disorder and  rowdyism common to an uncivilized working class, they also expected sexual disorder among them. Again, they were disappointed. This seems to have been a serious question for Ernest Aves. He wanted to be sure the rougher working class were not using the Rye for sex. The “more serious question,” he said, was “the real character of the Rye in the growing darkness.” He feared especially that with darkness these open spaces might become “just a big spooning ground, dangerous spooning often, I doubt not.” Ultimately, however, Aves could not find what he was looking for. It did concern him that there were “too many people moving about, often roughish boys” and that this might present a moral danger. But he reconsidered this also. The band had collected “thousands of respectable onlookers,” which in Aves’s view was sufficient to protect “the place from becoming … a place of evil resort.” Last, there was no “professionalism” (meaning prostitution) on the Rye in Aves’s view, based on the simple fact that he had not been “accosted.”69

A n x i e ty an d R el ease: S u i c i de an d th e D r u n ken Wo m an Pr o bl em Religion provided one type of release but there were other more drastic and dangerous forms. At its most dramatic, this could mean

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suicide. In 1898, a South End minister described a poor woman’s suicide and the reaction of the working-class onlookers: One Saturday night in September we saw a woeful sight from one of our South London bridges. On the landing-stage below, and in a pool of water made by dripping garments, was a propped-up human figure, with long streaming white hair and deathly face. Policemen were bending over it, and trying to bring back the fast-departing life. It was a case of suicide – an aged woman had committed the crime of self-destruction. Poverty and misery seemed to have been the cause. The monster City had been too much for her, and so after long struggling the poor aged victim of the City sought refuge in its river. It was a sight which ought to have struck every bystander with awe. But what was most significant – what explained how suicides are made – was the cynical laughter of many of the men and women who were looking on. Few were appalled by the tragedy. Most of those present found in it something for witticisms and smiles, as though the cruel pressure which had sent that woman to the river could never come upon their lives.70 In this account, the working-class onlookers seem quite monstrous and unfeeling. Yet the cynical laughter and jokes were symptomatic of working people’s insecurity. Their own respectability was so fragile that it caused them to turn against others less able to cope or less fortunate than them, reproducing the subordinative social relations prevailing in this period. Perhaps it was also an indication of the common nature of suicides among the poor. In the Booth interviews, a minister recalled how Chambord Street was “known as ‘Suicide’ street. 6 or 7 suicides in 6 years”; a Deptford vicar made the grisly but frank observation, “Suicide has been frequent lately”; and the South London Press featured regular accounts of suicides in the late 1890s.71 We get a sense of how women, especially, might resort to taking their own lives through the story of Annie Daniels, a thirty-two-­ year-old single mother. The blunt (front-page) headline reads, “A CAMBERWELL TRAGEDY: MOTHER AND CHILD IN THE CANAL: A MISERABLE LIFE ENDS MISERABLY.” Thomas Hudson, a man who once lived in Daniels’s home, gave evidence. Asked if Daniels had any children, Hudson said she had a nine-year-old son in

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Manchester and also that she had abandoned her second child. “When she lived in Landor-road, Stockwell,” said Hudson, “she gave birth to a child in the street, and came home without it. Her landlady called in the police, and she (Daniels) was charged.” Sarah Roadnight, who also once lodged with Daniels, added, “She had remarked that she could not have much more of it … She used to stay out late at night, and has tried to get men into the house.” “She told me it was a miserable life she was leading,” said Roadnight, “and that she should throw herself in the canal.” The coroner asked if she was fond of her child. “Yes, she always had it with her.” A juror blurted out, “The deceased drank heavily.” Police constable Sweeney testified that both bodies were found in the canal forty-eight hours after their deaths. Sweeney said that, “nothing was  found in [Daniels’s] possession excepting a portion of an old rent-book.”72 Any woman in South London could potentially end up leading a life like this in a world of extreme inequality. Stories of suicides, like the old woman and Annie Daniels, only confirmed what everyone knew: if one lived, one did not live long. Most poor people, however, opted for a different method of release, as mentioned in the Daniels case: regular alcohol consumption. There is a great deal of evidence that South London women were hard, regular drinkers. “Drink,” said Tolefree Parr in his 1899 report, “is their one solace. Their neighbours drink. They themselves were trained from childhood to drink, and, alas, in many of them there is still a hereditary craving for it.”73 Getting drunk at home or at the pub offered an emotional and psychological release from the perpetual self-repression of daily life. When people were drunk, they laid bare the tensions and strong resentments between neighbours. In the pub and in the street, this often meant a fairly rapid degeneration into violent conflict. What is most striking is the frequency with which Booth’s interviewees mention violence among women in particular. In riverside South London, it seemed to come in repeated bursts. Rev. De Carteret of St Paul’s Southwark said he came across a row “nearly every day, generally among the women.” In South London neighbourhoods, poor women – then and now the poorest of the poor – were never hesitant to drop their gloves. Over in Bermondsey similar stories came from the poor streets around the Charterhouse Mission. “Down the street as the Missioner passed one day he was called in because a poor woman was being ‘knocked to pieces.’ She was lying in the narrow passage

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insensible, and bathed in blood, the result of a fight with another woman in the same house. The injuries were not serious, as a matter of fact, but it looked ugly at first sight.”74 These bursts of fury were understandable. The closest of connections should be drawn between the various attempted forms of selfdisciplinary “improvement” and the drinking done by the poor. People dealt with the anxiety of absolute and relative poverty every day, and they knew that their days were probably shortly numbered. Worrying constantly about their children’s “decent exterior,” avoiding spousal violence (“The so-called married live together for life,” said a disillusioned headmaster in Bethnal Green: “Poverty haunts them – drink is a curse – and the woman gets frequently beaten”75), and crippled by the double-load of housework and, say, trouser- or matchbox-making, women grew old prematurely. Stress caused degenerative biological effects: “When a person deals with stress,” writes Richard Wilkinson, explaining anxiety’s health effects, it “goes into a sort of fight or flight response”: “You mobilize energy for muscular activity; you are very alert. But at the same time all sorts of bodily maintenance processes which don’t matter in a short emergency are put on hold or get fewer resources. So things like tissue maintenance and repair, digestion, growth, reproductive functions. But if the stress goes on for weeks or months or years then you start getting the health consequences. Immunity too, if  the stress goes on for more than about an hour, immunity is down regulated.”76 An assumption of religious improvers, repeated by some historians today, is that religion was the only remedy for drunk women. “The majority of converts are total-abstainers, and teetotalism and religion go hand in hand,” argued an evangelist called James Caine: “Conversion is the only effective cure for drunkenness.”77 In fact, because conversion was one among many means by which working people struck a respectable pose, and because this was a very stressful thing to do so close to the poverty line, one might suggest the opposite: that drunkenness was in fact the only effective relief from conversion. But for ministers it was baffling to see what seemed like  a contradiction: church respectability and drinking. Clapton Congregationalist Rev. Alfred Beale reported, “Drink amongst the women is increasing. They have fits of it. Cannot understand how they do. They will come to a meeting and join the singing and then go straight across to the publichouses.”78 Salvation, self-discipline,

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poor respectability: all these amounted to the same constant, healthdamaging suppression of anxiety, and a regular release had to be found one way or another. The fact that this was a necessary concomitant to the “improvement” of working families was difficult for contemporaries to swallow. Often, they chose to paint poor women as angels of sacrifice, incapable of indulgence. A classic account comes from Rev. Appleton of Trinity College Mission, St George’s parish, Camberwell, who, in an essay he included in his annual report for 1898, described the working mother as Christ-like. Discussing the visitation of working mothers at home, Appleton wrote, “Happily, a mother can generally be seen at home. Not that she is often free for more than five minutes talk. I suppose if you, gentle reader, had to be mother and all her servants in one, to cook and set out the meals, do the washing up, dress and feed the children, wash the clothes, wage the fierce and losing war against London dirt, provide a dinner at one for a daughter, at two for a husband, at three for a son, take little Harry to school and go with an umbrella for him at four o’clock, carry on the perpetual campaign against the astute tradesmen, and often, alas! with resources sadly diminished by the [husband frequenting the] public-house, you would not always welcome effusively a visitor who came to ‘keep you up to the mark.’”79 Historians, following contemporary accounts, have often depicted respectability and drinking as separate. If this were the case for men’s drinking, it certainly followed that they were unable to truly recognize women’s drinking sprees. As David Wright and Cathy Chorniawry write, historians’ biases made them believe “that excessive drinking was overwhelmingly a male activity, something which men did and women endured.”80 Women’s historians have increasingly explored the topic in recent decades, but too often their discussion of drinking women clashed with the overbearing trope of self-sacrifice.81 In Ellen Ross’s Love and Toil (1993), for example, the ever-present threat of male violence crowds out a more in-depth discussion of women’s alcoholic indulgences. She concludes that, “poor wives mostly tended toward temperance positions.”82 The Booth archive extends this discussion and broadens our focus. It shows ample evidence of women drinking in private, at home, and also, as Wright and Chorniawry have pointed out, in a thriving pub culture, where some of these establishments were even reserved for their exclusive use.83 As a Hackney relieving officer told Baxter,

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“‘The George’ in Glyn Road is the vilest [public] house in London: it is known largely as ‘The Cowshed,’ and is always full of women. The police shut their ears, and won’t see what is going on.”84 In fact, some of the most convincing evidence of women drinking was that the market was ready for them.85 “By improving the appearance of the [public] houses both inside and out … the brewers have greatly added to the temptation, and have made it much easier for respectable people to go into them.”86 Small pubs had become large ones, with multiple doors for entry, and with multiple “compartments” inside to accommodate all classes of the hierarchical working-class community.87 As James Caine explained, “Facilities for women drinkers have lately been added to many public-houses. What were once small beershops have been rebuilt, and have become fine hostels with ‘private’ bars for the accommodation of female and sly drinkers. These ‘private’ compartments tempt a better class of customers … Drinking amongst women is alarmingly on the increase.”88 Churchmen and Board School teachers from all over London saw evidence of women drinking, and most of them thought it on the rise. The press was also aware of this trend. In April 1897, under the headline “T H E D R U N K E N W O M E N P R O B L E M ,” the South London Press reported that the local Poor Law guardians had “issued instructions that all drunken persons applying for admission were to be given into custody.” The socialist Mrs Despard, a member of the board, chastised the on-duty officer for ignoring this instruction one night and turning one intoxicated woman into the cold. A clergyman on the board, Rev. W. Hobbs, retorted angrily that no officer or guardian should “be bound to coddle and nurse drunken women. (Hear, hear).”89 Of course, respectable poor women were not generally running around drunk in the winter. Rather, as an L C M in Camberwell told Aves, “the drinking among women has undoubtedly increased, and a good deal of this goes on in the home, children being generally sent for the liquor.” This explains how a woman could keep a clean house and children, work full-time, keep her family fed, and still have a binge on Mondays – and this was more and more affordable in an economy of falling prices and constant beer prices.90 It was often difficult, of course, to hide the smell of alcohol. At Mr Bain’s Webber Row Board School, for example, although he reported that parents took increasing interest in their children’s performance at school, nevertheless, “Most parents who come up to the school in

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the afternoon for one purpose or another, generally women, smell of beer.” In St George’s in the East, J. Mellows, headmaster of Highway Board School, complained that “drinking among the women is very great” and also mentioned how “even quite respectable mothers when they come to see Mr M. in the morning always smell of drink.”91 Importantly, Bain noted this “as proving the prevalence of the habit of drinking, but expressed no opinion as to whether it was harmful or not.” After all, he said, “They have hardly ever drunk to excess when they come up.”92 Like Bain, many teachers and churchmen commented on the parallel existence of hard drinking and decent living. H. Cook, president of the Nunhead Christian Band, also hinted at a respectable drinking population when he said, “As a whole the people are decent working people, who have to work hard, drink being their greatest curse.”93 What all these observers were seeing was the paradox of improvement: women who doggedly turned extra pennies into respectability but whose status anxieties drove them, at the same time, to spend two, or four, or six of those pennies at the pub on Monday to keep such anxieties from overwhelming them. When churchmen, teachers, and investigators caught these mothers drinking, some of the women were undoubtedly sheepish and others protested their innocence. Yet others were defiant, unashamed of their weekly release. They seemed to dare anyone to judge them for walking into a pub. As we have seen, it was only “as a result of drink” that women were found swearing aloud in Long Lane.94 Women kept their tongues respectable until a few beers reminded them they did not have to. Eighteen-year Old Kent Road veteran Mr Hulls was full of vitriol for the drinking “home muddlers,” recalling how one woman replied to his accusation that she spent her charity money on beer. “[I] noticed her slip a can under her apron … ‘what have you got there?’, pointing to the swelling under her apron, ‘a tumour?’ ‘No, it’s a can-cer (sir)’ was the reply.”95 Hulls was left angry and puzzled about whether the woman had indeed meant to make such a cheeky play on words.

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Conclusion

Each group that has appeared in this book – social scientists, clergymen, churchwomen, and working people – defined itself through extreme insecurity, often as a result of experiences in poor, urban environments. Men and women’s insecurity was, in fact, an engine of historical change. Charles Booth was insecure because of personal fragility and a crisis of religious faith; clergymen because of a crisis of masculinity and of professionalism; churchwomen (and so-called “secular” social workers) because of professional and gender subordination; and working people most of all because of the special difficulty that came from struggling with both absolute poverty and the anxieties of what I call poor respectability. These crises of faith, professionalism, or respectability resulted in each group’s adherence to a fortifying ideology. Specifically, people across London resorted to a combination of “science” and “religion” in order to perpetuate moral segregation, which manifested itself as a popular discourse in everything from strikes to social welfare. Regardless of gender and class, almost everyone in London attempted to hierarchize the working classes. Charles Booth divided them into four respectable and two unrespectable classes. Ministers reported the class composition of their parishes in meetings with Booth’s men, often using Life and Labour to help them in their task. Thousands of women painstakingly put together the moral maps upon which the Booth men relied, only to be conveniently forgotten by male contemporaries and by history. Finally, working people themselves provided the real moral maps of their communities because they lived there and because – instead of believing in any sort of uniform working

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class – most of them insisted that there existed local, morally defined, and complex hierarchies. In terms of social welfare, each group was committed to charity control and to the welfare of what Booth called his “client” in the Life and Labour survey, the poor-but-respectable class C. This also meant the purposeful neglect or even incarceration of those in the “loafer” classes A and B who were unable to practice self-discipline. Churchmen and churchwomen, whether or not they associated with the C OS, believed in a Christianity that welcomed men and women to a wider brotherhood and sisterhood, while excluding those perceived to be shirking the moral duty of self-control. Most extraordinary was working people’s adherence to the same notions of self-discipline. Few working people saw themselves as anything less than poor-but-respectable – though they were willing to point fingers at neighbours who they felt were beyond the pale. Overarchingly, they were a powerfully aspirational community, committed to economic and behavioural self-discipline despite the financial and emotional cost. Working-class leaders and newspapers, moreover, supported Booth’s labour colony, and most working people approved of some kind of punishment for slackers, loafers, and cadgers. This was a natural result of late Victorian inequality, which brought anxiety and status tension to such a peak among working people that they displaced their frustrations through drink and through the social subordination of their less fortunate neighbours. The foundation of this overwhelming commitment to moral segregation was nineteenth-century Christian evangelicalism. Well after its peak, even after the advent of evolutionary thought in the 1860s, it was believed that a measure of pain, through work and self-­ sacrifice, made for the best men and women. This had been called salvation in the early nineteenth century; it was called character in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: but it arose from the same evangelical ideological strain. Those shirking this pain, it was agreed, were loafers and deserved not simply abandonment to the market but some form of punishment. As is now clear, this is a narrative of continuity rather than change. In the changes of this period, such as scientific incarnationalism and the rise of women philanthropic professionals, we find the continued hegemony of moral ideas. In the respectable public’s attempts to ameliorate the condition of poor people in an unequal society, we find a broader and broader commitment to behavioural

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modification of the immoral and, in fact, to authoritarianism. In view of this moral hegemony in late Victorian and Edwardian society, the historian must think twice before separating historical actors into right and left. He or she must examine the impact of inequality among average people and the effect it had on their expectations of change. This requires the historian to know precisely what the experience of poverty was really like – what it felt like. Social epidemiologists have taken, I argue, an important and hopefully influential position of leadership for all scholars in arguing that poverty makes one anxious and mean, and it can make one look for means of drugrelated escape: tobacco, alcohol, or narcotics. To continue to argue that the middle classes need only witness poverty to understand its structural nature, or that to experience poverty creates communality in the working-class community, is to get inequality all wrong, all over again. Middle-class people need never commit to social action, however obscene poverty and suffering becomes, and the twentieth century showed us that they have largely only surrendered to wealth redistribution in moments of global military or economic emergency. A middle-class philanthropy with moral underpinnings, consistently refusing help to some of the community and committing always to helping the “deserving,” is a  self-perpetuating discourse, never truly solving the problem of inequality. Working people, likewise, need never abandon the continual cycle of self-discipline and release that accompanies poor respectability. The great Marxist hope that these people will one day grow tired of inequality misses the point. These people, in their millions, when they become fed up and frustrated from constant devaluation in every avenue of working-class life, typically attack a weaker group they can subordinate on class, gender, racial, or sexual terms, or they drink as much as they can, and then are ready for another week, or month, or year, of the same conditions. It is appropriate that this project neared its completion in 2009. That year signified the only time in recent memory in which antiloafer (now anti-scrounger) rhetoric was refuted by the popular media in Britain. The press did so as a way to attack corrupt politicians. The very Labour and Conservative politicians who had railed against a negligible number of disabled Britons, immigrants, and asylum-seekers failing to “play by the rules” and get into paid work were shown to be padding expense accounts charged to the

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government on everything from meals to second homes. Revelations of the tax loopholes allowed to corporate citizens and British companies also received treatment, though in less strident tones. If only temporarily, such stories saw some within the media interrupt a long line of popular acquiescence to the wholly fictional notion that great numbers of the poor rejected respectability and status. New Labour’s prime minister, Tony Blair, had questioned whether this might have something to do with inherent moral degeneracy, perhaps inherited from poor parents – the old theory of a “cycle of disadvantage” upon which politicians have drawn since Edwardian times.1 It is not just politicians that mobilize this rhetoric, of course. In April 2009, in response to Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling’s plan to raise taxation to the 50 per cent mark for the highest earners, the much-loved actor, Sir Michael Caine, employed a brutal language seemingly out of step with his own difficult class upbringing: “The Government has taken tax up to 50 per cent, and if it goes to 51 I will be back in America. We’ve got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits, and I’m 76, getting up at 6 am to go to work to keep them. Let’s get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it up.” The Daily Telegraph’s response to Caine’s anger was in line with what it thought its readers would find appropriate: “Hear, hear. If Sir Michael didn’t have one already, I would say: give that man a knighthood … [I]t is the intervention of [this movie] star … that should remind us what is really at stake here.” The paper ridiculed the government’s “suicide proposals” to “level down, or iron out inequalities, rather than raise up.” It praised Caine as a man who knew “all about raising himself up” – a man “born in Rotherhithe, south-east London, the son of a charlady and a fish market porter.” “Everything Sir Michael has made, he has made by his hard work,” the paper said. It pleaded with the Labour government not to abandon the “aspirational poor” by ruining their pursuit of wealth with state benefits and high taxes – by “making a fetish of equality.”2 Why such rhetoric, even after it has been proven to have no basis in fact, can be dusted off, rearticulated, and brandished by politicians, the press, and the public, is an important question. One commentator in the Guardian pointed to the real issue behind the repeated articulation of “layabout” hatred: the support of the poor themselves for a popular attack on – themselves. “It is curious,” wrote Alexander Chancellor, “that Sir Michael … feels so pitiless

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towards the unemployed, for he spent much of his own deprived youth looking desperately for work.” It was a strange and curious thing that Caine could feel “that today’s job seekers are feckless and lacking in discipline” when his own experience ostensibly should have converted him to a sympathetic understanding of the structural causes of poverty. “I have nothing against Caine,” wrote Chancellor, “In fact, I have always liked him as an actor. But it is a curious fact that those who have triumphed over adversity and succeeded against the odds are often much less sympathetic towards the underprivileged than those who were born fortunate. Perhaps they think that anybody with any gumption would be able to succeed as well as they did. Perhaps they hate to admit to the part that luck (or in Caine’s case, charm) may have played in their success.”3 The history of Charles Booth and his Life and Labour survey provides important lessons for a generation once again fumbling with the twin problems of popular acquiescence to the welfare bum stereotype and, more specifically, the reaction of the poor themselves to inequality.

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Notes

introduction

 1 Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain, 65.   2 Pickering, “Abraham Hume (1814–1884),” 33–4; Chadwick, The Victorian Church, vol. 2, 234; McKibbin, “Social Class and Social Investigation in Edwardian England,” 176. All are quoted in O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 161–2.   3 O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 162, 197–8; O’Day, “Interviews and Investigations,” in Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 148–9.  4 Hilton, The Age of Atonement.  5 Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 248.  6 Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 49–50.   7 Ibid., 49n126.   8 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 135.   9 Mary Booth, Charles Booth: A Memoir, 97–8. 10 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 30; Booth, The Life and Labour of the People of London, “Industry,” 5: 295–382. 11 Excerpt from an 1895 speech for the Select Committee on Distress from Want of Employment, quoted in Harris, Unemployment and Politics, 48. 12 Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform, 67; Booth’s Second Paper to the Royal Statistical Society in 1888, reproduced in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 96. 13 Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 159. 14 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 1: 7. 15 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 47.

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 14. Booth, “Religious Influences,” 1: 52, 190. Quoted in O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 163. Owen, “The City Parochial Charities,” 126. Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 92. O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 163–4. Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 15. Brydon, “Poor, Unskilled and Unemployed,” 41–70; Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform, 65; Cullen, “Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey,” 159. 24 For the society’s campaign against indiscriminate charity, see Loch, Charity and Social Life; Mowat, The Charity Organization Society; Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 185–206; Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity and the Poor Law. On pensions, Englander and O’Day, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry and Retrieved Riches are particularly conspicuous for their attempts to distance Booth from the Society. 25 Cullen, “Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey,” 159; Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies, 1889–1905,” 349–60; Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 285; Hennock, “Poverty and Social Theory in England,” 67–91. 26 Charity Organization Review (1889), 398, quoted in Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 128–9. 27 O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 9, 51, 156. 28 Ibid., 142, 156–7, 196; Englander, “Comparisons and Contrasts,” in Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 132. 29 Vincent, “The Poor Law Reports of 1909,” 84–5. 30 Mary Booth, Charles Booth: A Memoir, 35, 176. 31 Meacham, A Life Apart, 7; Pfautz, ed., Charles Booth On the City, 88, 146; Winch, Economics and Policy, 48; Yeo, “Mayhew as a Social Investigator,” 107­–8; Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty, 313. In the 1980s, O’Day’s article, “Interviews and Investigations,” was the only article to hint that Booth’s class bias did not preclude a greater understanding of working-class culture. 32 Koven, “The Dangers of Castle Building,” 370. 33 Gerald Parsons, “Emotion and Piety”; Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly,” 181–210; Dellamora, Masculine Desire. 34 Ramsey, From Gore to Temple; Jones, Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914; Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770–1970;

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Notes to pages 12–19

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Hilton, Age of Atonement; Walsh, “Incarnation and the Christian Socialist Conscience,” 366–70; McLeod, Religion and Society in England. 35 Nonconformist ministers have suffered from the same “binarization” by historians – the same hasty segregation of historical constituents into “right” and “left.” See Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society; Englander, “The Word and the World”; Helmstadter, “The Nonconformist Conscience”; Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” 140–4. 36 Roberts, The Classic Slum; Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, ch. 5. 37 For historians suggesting a static conservatism among working people: Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1914”; McKibbin, “Why was there no Marxism in Britain in Great Britain?” For histories of respectability: Joyce, Work, Society and Politics; Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, ch. 4; Johnson, Saving and Spending; Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society; Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 201; Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 38 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 162; Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850–1945, 48. 39 Williams, Culture and Society, 313; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 456–69; Hobsbawm et al. The Forward March of Labour Halted, 8, 10; Johnson, Saving and Spending; Griffiths, The Lancashire Working Classes. 40 Ross, “Survival Networks,” 4–27. 41 Wright and Chorniawry, “Women and Drink in Edwardian England,” 128. 42 Rev. Lee, vicar of All Saints’ Lambeth. London School of Economics, Charles Booth Archive, “Religious Influences,” Lee, B269: 43. chapter one

  1   2   3   4   5   6

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Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 7–8. Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 13. Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 10, 13–14, 17. Ibid., 14–15, 17. Ibid., 29. L.P. Jacks, The Confessions of an Octogenarian (1942), 138, quoted in John, A Liverpool Merchant House, 20.

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Notes to pages 19–23

  7 Ibid., 20–1.  8 Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 52, 52n6. Collini cites Robert E. Lane, Political Thinking and Consciousness: the Private Life of the Political Mind (Chicago: Markham, 1969), esp. 211–15 for one account of the “relation between personality and political opinion.”   9 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 17–20. 10 Booth, Charles Booth, 5. 11 John, Liverpool Merchant House, 27; Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 33. 12 Ibid., 22–3. For the same quotations, employed towards a rather ­opposing argument, see John, Liverpool Merchant House, 31. 13 However Alfred was not an exemplary “Captain of Industry” either; he wanted to be an artist but could not make a living at it and so turned to business, though he found it distasteful his whole life. John, Liverpool Merchant House, 40. 14 Ibid., 25–6. 15 Ibid., 30–1 16 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 58. 17 Webb, My Apprenticeship, 188. 18 Tosh, “Gentlemanly Politeness,” 460. 19 Tosh, “Gentlemanly Politeness,” 457, 462; Booth, Charles Booth, 93; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 30. 20 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 23­–4. 21 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 22–3. 22 Sprott, “Sociology in Britain: Preoccupations.” 23 Bales, “Charles Booth’s Survey,” 88. 24 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 131. 25 Bales, “Charles Booth’s Survey,” 69. 26 Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 77–8. 27 Booth, Charles Booth, 8­–9. The Simeys write that, “In 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. 28 Booth, Charles Booth, 9, 26. 29 Ibid., 26. 30 Booth, “Industry,” 5: 337, quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 136.

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31 Booth, Charles Booth, 135. 32 Eating meat of some kind in Cassino, Italy, twelve years later, Booth was ill for two or three days. Ibid., 81. 33 Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 145. 34 John, Liverpool Merchant House, 6, 10, 13, 69; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 57, 61, 61n1, 99. 35 Ibid., 174–5; John, Liverpool Merchant House, 40. 36 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 48. 37 Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 52, 241–3. 38 Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 59. 39 Ibid., 49. 40 Booth, Charles Booth, 10–11; Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 44. 41 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 49. 42 Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 45. 43 Booth, Charles Booth, 12. 44 Quoted in O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 145. 45 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 50–1; Booth, Charles Booth, 11. 46 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 50, 52–4. 47 Ibid., 54. 48 Ibid., 45; Annan, “The Intellectual Aristocracy.” 49 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 39. 50 Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 14. 51 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 39. 52 Booth, Charles Booth, 9; John, Liverpool Merchant House, 40. 53 Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 50. 54 Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 106, 152. 55 See Kidd, “Outcast Manchester,” 49; Hart, “Religion and Social Control.” 56 Cullen, “Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey”; Hennock, “Poverty and Social Theory.” 57 Hilton, The Age of Atonement, 6. 58 Ibid., 22–3. 59 Whewell to Richard Jones (professor of political economy, London and Haileybury), 25 February 1831, quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement, 51. 60 Ibid., 8. 61 T. Chalmers, “Introductory essay,” Tracts by the Rev. Thomas Scott (Glasgow, 1826), xxii–xxiii, quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement, 19.

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Notes to pages 28–33

62 Ibid., 81–5, 100–14; Harris, Unemployment and Politics, 103. 63 [Chalmers], “Political Economy of the Bible,” North British Review 2 (1844–45): 30, 49 and Chalmers, On the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God, quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement, 84, 84n41; Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” 43. 64 Hilton, Age of Atonement, 101. Quotation from Chalmers, On Political Economy. 65 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. 66 Hilton, Age of Atonement, 109, 113; Hart, “Sir Charles Trevelyan,” 99. 67 Hilton, Age of Atonement, 114. 68 Englander, “The Word and the World,” 23. 69 Rowell, Hell and the Victorians; McLeod, Religion and Society, 183–4; Cox, English Churches; McLeod, Class and Religion, ch. 8; Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” 59. 70 Hilton, Age of Atonement, 27–9. 71 Hilton, Age of Atonement, 26; Bradley, The Call to Seriousness, 52; Brilioth, The Anglican Revival, 29–44; Young, Victorian England, 1. 72 Hilton, Age of Atonement, 281. 73 Helmstadter, “The Nonconformist Conscience,” 135–72. 74 Saville, “Sleeping Partnerships and Limited Liability, 1850–1856”; Jeffrys, Business Organization in Great Britain, 19–53. 75 Jephson, B276: 27–9. 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,” 30. 76 Hilton, Age of Atonement, 273–90, 331, 334–5. 77 Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 49–50. 78 For a discussion of the popularization of and “moral” reaction to Spencerian thought, see Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, esp. ch. 5 of part 3. 79 Ibid., 158. See also Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, ch. 4. 80 Booth, Charles Booth, 38. 81 Booth, Charles Booth, 54; John, Liverpool Merchant House, 26. 82 Booth, Charles Booth, 54–5. 83 Ibid., 56. 84 Ibid., 60–2. 85 Ibid., 63. 86 Ibid.

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Notes to pages 33–9

175

87 Ibid. 88 Webb, My Apprenticeship, 190–1. 89 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth, 60. 90 Booth, Charles Booth, 64–5. 91 Ibid., 70–1. 92 Ibid., 78. 93 Ibid., 87. This was penned more than a week later, in the village of Riardo. 94 Ibid., 80. 95 Ibid., 73. 96 Ibid., 88. 97 Booth, Charles Booth, 87–8. 98 Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 28, 31, quoting from an 1883 series of exposé articles in Wohl, “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” 203. c h a p t e r t wo

  1 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 138.   2 O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 11–12; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 145.   3 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 147.   4 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 8–9; “Poverty,” 1: 193.   5 Quoted in O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 163.   6 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 37. Norman-Butler names the former “Lady Christina Compassion.” Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 35.   7 Mary likely encouraged her husband in this view. See Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 104; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 39. For more on the Clapham Sect’s and the early nineteenth-century evangelical approach to charity generally, see Hilton, Age of Atonement, ch. 3.   8 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 29–30.   9 Before committing to their positivist picture of Booth, the two authors admit that Booth’s “views are, in fact, difficult to characterize.” Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 144–6. 10 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 135; “Industry,” 5: 336. 11 Booth, “Industry,” 5: 73–5, 256–7; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 208–9; Englander and O’Day, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 151. 12 Ibid., 151.

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Notes to pages 39–42

13 John, Liverpool Merchant House, 35, 40. 14 Ibid., 47. See also Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 34. 15 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 264–5. 16 Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality, 12–13. 17 Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 122. 18 Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men, 48. 19 Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 122. 20 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 per cent. Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 116. 21 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 80 per cent of working Londoners (4 in 5) were not in poverty, when they should have said that 90 per cent of them, according to Booth’s statistics, were both ­respectable (70 per cent) and poor but respectable (20 per cent). Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 161. 22 Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 61. 23 Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 103–4. 24 Booth, Charles Booth, 118–19. 25 Charles Booth, “The Inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets (School Board Division), their Condition and Occupations,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1887): 329. Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 106. 26 Ibid., 40. 27 Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 156, 158. 28 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 40. 29 Ibid., 105–6. 30 See, for example, Gray, The Labour Aristocracy; T.R. Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism; Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, ch. 4; Joyce, Work, Society and Politics; Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society; Griffiths, Lancashire Working Classes; Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, ch. 3; Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman; Vernon, Politics and the People. 31 Koven, “The Dangers of Castle Building,” 370. 32 The Simeys got the ball rolling in 1960 with statements that he “invented the concept of the poverty line,” and that this was his “most

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Notes to pages 33–45

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striking single contribution to the social sciences.” Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 88. 33 Himmelfarb provides a long list of reviews from London to San Francisco. Poverty and Compassion, 104–5, 160–4. 34 Ibid., 104, 163, 413n13. 35 Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 151. 36 Charity Organization Review (1889), 398. Quoted in Himmelfarb, 128–9. 37 Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 131. 38 Brydon, “Poor, Unskilled and Unemployed.” 39 Thane, “Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–1914,” 54; Thane, “The Working Class and State ‘Welfare’ in Britain, 1880– 1914,” 896; Jones, “The 1908 Old Age Pensions Act”; Harris, Unemployment and Politics, 312–13, 349, 352–3; Deacon, In Search of the Scrounger, 12; Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the Poor Law,” 69; Gatrell, “Crime, Authority and the Policeman State,” 308–9. For a ­discussion of similar “moral” discrimination in late Victorian and Edwardian housing policy, see Brydon, “Poor, unskilled and unemployed,” 71–108. 40 Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 167. 41 See Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 86; Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 126, 289; S.A. and H. Barnett, Towards Social Reform (1909), 49, quoted by Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies,” 353; Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the Poor Law,” 76, 78, 80; Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, 242; W.H. Beveridge, “The Problem of the Unemployed,” Sociological Papers 3 (1906), quoted in Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 335; Beveridge and Maynard, “The Unemployed: Lessons from the Mansion House Fund.” 42 Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 126. 43 “Lambeth Not ‘A Loafer’s Paradise,’” South London Press (4 September 1896), 2; “The Poor-Law Paradise,” South London Press (18 September 1897), 4. 44 Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 147, 149–50. 45 Ibid., 1: 38, 44, 50, 163, 176. 46 Collini, “Sociology and Idealism,” 45. 47 Alexander, B 181: 63–5. And see Stedman Jones, Outcast London, esp. ch. 13; Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion; Koven, Slumming, esp. ch. 5. 48 Lewis, “A Third Despatch from the Church Militant,” 15–16.

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49 “Charterhouse in Southwark. Some Account of the Charterhouse Mission. 1885–1892,” 8, 29. 50 Fegan, “A Plea for our Street Arabs,” 7–8. 51 Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 37–9, 149–55, 167–9; Booth “Conditions and Occupations of the People in East London,” 297–8, quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 194. 52 Booth, “Poverty,” 1: 50–1. 53 Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 12–13. 54 Ibid., 25. And see Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 110. 55 Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society, 87. 56 Booth, Charles Booth, 13–15; cf. Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 15. 57 Mowat, The Charity Organization Society, 99–100. 58 See Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 176. 59 Booth, Poor Law Reform (1910), 65–6, 79, quoted by Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 176; “Religious Influences,” 1: 108; 7: 303, 311; Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations, 174–5; Majority Report of the Poor Law Commission (534 ff.), quoted by Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 175; Searle, Quest for National Efficiency, 242; Webb and Webb, English Poor Law Policy, 306–7; McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles. 60 Mowat, Charity Organization Society, 108. 61 Ibid., 109. 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 C OS Committees commonly to tighten the reigns of charity control in each district. Ibid., 102–5. 62 In chronological order: Eveleigh (still in Bow): 8 May 1897, B178: 1–17; Miss Bannatyne (acting head of the Women’s University Settlement while Miss Sewell was away ill): 22 December 1899, B273: 158–75; H.L. Woollcombe (still in Battersea), 22 April 1900, B296: 1–21; C.P. Lamer (now in Woolwich), 17 October 1900, B 290: 154– 81. And see the interview with C.H. Grinling (16 October 1900, B 290: 106–53) who had retired from the C OS but was treated as if he were a bona fide COS representative for Woolwich. 63 See John, A Liverpool Merchant House, 72–3, 76, 111. 64 O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 27. 65 Ibid., 176, 186; Retrieved Riches, 27. 66 See O’Day, Mr Booth’s Inquiry, 182. 67 Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 31; O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 181, 185.

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Notes to pages 49–55

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68 Allen Edwards, B272: 63; McLeod, “Working-class Religion,” 271; Roberts, B261: 17. 69 Tapper, B 282: 13. For another example see Woolcombe, B296: 1–3. 70 Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 31. 71 Aves was a resident at the Hall from 1887 to 1897 and served as its sub-warden from 1890 to 1897. O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 105n5. 72 Englander, “Booth’s Jews,” 291. 73 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 419. 74 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 101n1, 124. 75 Ibid., 124. 76 See O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 178. 77 Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 29. 78 Ibid., 29-30; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 125n2; O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 105n5. 79 Palmer, B276: 193, 197–9, 203, 205. 80 Englander and O’Day, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 13, 66, 169; Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 28–9; Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 160–1. 81 Felmingham, B 295: 73–5. See also McLeod, “Working-Class Religion,” 271. 82 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. 83 Englander, “Booth’s Jews,” 291. 84 Crooks, B 173: 53. 85 Whelahan, B289: 55–7 (21 September 1900). 86 Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 67; O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 93–6; Booth, Charles Booth, 20. 87 Tozer, B190: 15. On the education campaign, see Argyle’s paper at Toynbee Hall, “On the Limits of Municipal Enterprise,” delivered in April 1898, 13n44. 88 Lewis, B181: 67–9. 89 Butler, B181: 127. chapter three

 1 Steer, B 272: 129–31.  2 McLeod, Religion and Society, 143–4.   3 Quoted in Cox, The English Churches, 50.  4 Cox, The English Churches, 89.

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Notes to pages 55–65

  5 O’Day, “Men from the Ministry.”   6 Englander, “The Word and the World,” 34; Woods, B 215: 79. One South London minister, Rev. Leary of St Philip’s, was described as bent with age, “becoming decrepit,” and rather beyond work. Leary, B281: 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, B222: 79. Rev. Loveridge of Bethnal Green was “an old man of about 70 getting rather toothless and deaf and blind in one eye.” Loveridge, B228: 155.  7 Kendall, B287: 87, 93, 95.  8 Ellis, B195: 113. Baptist missioner Edward Smith in Bethnal Green spoke of the elderly Rev. Loveridge as “a dear old gentleman but with more heart than head, whom cadgers of all kinds marked out as their prey.” Smith, B229: 189.  9 Barnes, B182: 159–61, 171–3. 10 Wallace, B182: 49. 11 Gregory, B183: 209. 12 Ainsworth, B275: 111. 13 Captain (Miss) Smith, B190: 41. 14 Rounsefell, B270: 39; Saberton, B286: 225. 15 Dellamora, Masculine Desire, esp. ch. 10. 16 Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman; Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit. 17 Williams, B270: 13. 18 Hills, B 287: 107; Conners, B270: 189; Captain Fowler, B190: 51–2. 19 O’Day, “Men from the Ministry,” 264–5, 267-70; Deane, “The Falling-Off in Quantity and Quality of the Clergy,” 1024, 1029–30. 20 MacGregor, B 262: 131–5. 21 “Notes of visit to the Salvation Army Elevator and Elevator Home in Bermondsey,” B283: 131–5. 22 Lee, B 269: 49; Sadler Phillips, B264: 51; Adamson, B 175: 147; Schnadhorst, B176: 75; Eveleigh, B 178: 7. 23 Friar St Mission Hall, Annual Report For the Year ending 1897–8, 11–12. 24 Saberton, B 286: 221–3. 25 Conners, B270: 189; Weigall, B272: 83; Fawcett, B228: 151; Newton, B 270: 169. 26 MacGregor, B 262: 121. 27 Coldwill, B 169: 185–7, 193. 28 Ibid., 193–7. 29 Donaldson, B185: 209.

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Notes to pages 65–74

181

30 Hills, B287: 111. 31 Caine, B270: 123–5. 32 Asker, B269: 153–5. 33 Matthews, B286: 93; Hawkins, B286: 51. 34 Hodson, B284: 155, 157. See also the testimony of Christ Church, Greenwich’s G.H. Reaney: Reaney, B287: 47–9. 35 Lennard, B186: 7; Captain (Miss) Smith, B190: 44; Sanders, B 176: 209–11. 36 Grundy, B272: 169. 37 Fletcher Williams, B 190: 73; McLeod, Religion and Society, 155. 38 Parsons, “Emotion and piety,” 214. 39 Chorley, B 177: 3–4. 40 Russell, Arthur Stanton, 267–8. 41 Chapman, B281: 133–5. 42 Ibid., 97. 43 Ibid., 97, 99. 44 Ibid., 99–101. 45 Ibid., 103. 46 Ibid., 101, 103. 47 Ibid., 103–5, 123–5. 48 Ibid., 113–15. 49 Ibid., 107. 50 Ibid., 107–9. 51 Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 5–6; Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 49–50; Parsons, “Reform, Revival and Realignment,” 40. 52 Ibid., 43–7. 53 Talbot, “Moral Threads in Social Webs,” 153, 164. 54 Helmstadter, “The Nonconformist Conscience,” 86. 55 Clifford, B249: 55, 57. 56 O’Day, “Clerical Renaissance,” 203–4; Deane, “The Falling-Off in the Clergy,” 1029; Haig, The Victorian Clergy. See also Russell, The Clerical Profession, 1–49, 253–7; Heeney, A Different Type of Gentleman, 1–10, 13, 94–5. 57 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. 58 Quoted in Simey and Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist, 155. See also Barnett, “Christianity and the Charity Organization Society,” 189–94. 59 Adams, B268: 17, 19.

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Notes to pages 74–81

60 Hughes, B242: 1. On Hughes see Parsons, “Social Control to Social Gospel,” 52. 61 Denison, B261: 173. 62 Wheeler, B270: 175; Bainbridge-Bell, B269: 7. See also Lilly, B272: 35. 63 Donaldson, B185: 181. 64 St George the Martyr, Southwark, “Report and Statement of Accounts,” 5. 65 Harris, “Between Civic Virtue and Social Darwinism.” 66 Barly, B175: 229. 67 Kirk, B282: 35–43. 68 Newton, B270: 173. 69 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 114. 70 Ibid., 4: 51–2. 71 Meakin, B274: 135–7, 139. 72 Hopkins, B274: 95–7. 73 Meakin, B274: 135. 74 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 84. 75 Andrews Reeve, B 272: 69. 76 Ibid., 81, 83. 77 Ibid., 73, 77; Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 42–3. Meyer was a Southwark evangelist. 78 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 102, 105. 79 Dodge, B275: 13. 80 Ibid., 19–21. 81 Ibid., 19. 82 McLeod, Class and Religion; Cox, English Churches; Helmstadter, “Nonconformist Conscience,” 82–3. 83 Quoted by Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity and the Poor Law, 91. 84 Such cooperation was not, however, unheard of. See Docker, B274: 9. F. Docker was of the Pilgrim Father’s Church Congregational, New Kent Road. 85 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 21. C OS (and Booth) assessments of Catholic charity tended to be positive, depending on the priest. Toynbee, B 273: 101; Agent of the CO S Committee at 100 Borough Road, B 273: 13; Mackintosh Walker, B273: 43. 86 Martley, B173: 17; Eveleigh, B178: 15. 87 Parry, B175: 63. 88 Longsdon, B269: 73. 89 Asker, B269: 151.

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Notes to pages 81–5

183

 90 Corbett, B269: 205.  91 Fegan, B 273: 67–9. And see Toynbee, B 273: 23; Mackintosh Walker B 273: 39.  92 Fegan, B273: 73–5.   93 Ibid., 77–9.   94 Ibid., 75–7.   95 Ibid., 77.   96 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 23.   97 Complaints in the interviews include: Nicholson, B 229: 83; Sister Maud, B173: 209; Dr Stephenson, B183: 189; Woolley, B228: 177.  98 Eck, B228: 93–5.   99 “C.O.S. and Guardians: An Abortive Conference,” The South London Press (17 December 1898), 3. 100 Ibid. chapter four

   1 O’Day, “Women in Victorian Religion,” 340.   2 The Official Year-book of the Church of England (1889, 1917); Boyd Carpenter in Burdett-Coutts, ed., Women’s Mission: A Series of Congress Papers on the Philanthropic Work of Women by Eminent Writers (London, 1893), 415, quoted in Heeney, Women’s Movement, 217.    3 Rev. Cowan of St John’s parish on the Isle of Dogs had thirty-five ­district visitors. Cowan, B169: 81.    4 For takes on and critiques of this interpretation, see Bartlett, “The Church in Bermondsey,” 133–78; O’Day, “Women in Victorian Religion,” 351–2; Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 15; Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare, 48; Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, 226, 228; Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 198; Heeney, The Women’s Movement, 1; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 55; Hollis, Ladies Elect, 13.    5 See, for example, Mumm, Stolen Daughters; Dixon, Divine Feminine.   6 Vicinus, Independent Women, 218; Koven, Slumming, 347n37.   7 Gill, Women in the Church of England, 135.    8 Heeney, “The Beginnings of Church Feminism,” 260.    9 “St George the Martyr, Southwark. Report and Statement of Accounts,” 11–12.   10 O’Day, “Women in Victorian Religion.”

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Notes to pages 88–96

11 Vicinus, Independent Women, 227. 12 Isabella Gilmore (1847–1923), sister to artist and utopian socialist William Morris, served “as a nursing sister at Guy’s Hospital in 1886 when Bishop Thorold approached her to initiate and direct a deaconess programme in his diocese of Rochester.” Ibid., 172–3. 13 Mrs Gilmore, B296: 71–3. 14 “The Rochester Diocesan Deaconess Institution” (Report, January 1900), 2. 15 Ibid., 6. The subjects of lectures (four a week) for the first (January to March) and second (May to July) terms for 1900 were listed as Dogmatics, Prayer Book, Holy Scripture, and Church History. All were taught by Anglican clergymen (see p8). 16 Ibid., 6; Prelinger, “The Female Diaconate in the Anglican Church,” 171, 173; Frierson, The Deaconess, 21–2. 17 Adams, B293: 53. 18 Ibid., 57. 19 Vicinus, Independent Women, 220. 20 St Saviour’s, Southwark, 90. 21 Ibid., 91. 22 Ibid., 91. 23 Vicinus, Independent Women, 239. 24 Dodge, B 275: 15–17; Booth, “Religious Influences,” 102, 105. 25 Bartlett, “The Church in Bermondsey,” 133–78. 26 Ibid., 93; Miss Annie Macpherson, B229: 173–5; Jay, B 228: 49. 27 Lewis, Women and Social Action, 31; Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy. 28 Elliott, The Angel Out of the House, 204; Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, 55–6. See also Englander and O’Day, Retrieved Riches, 35. 29 Vicinus, Independent Women, 230–1. 30 Koven, Slumming, 183, 225. 31 De Fontaine, B 269: 127. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 127–9. 35 Ibid. 36 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 21. 37 Miss Jane Burrell, B 174: 49–51, 53–5. 38 Miss Davis, B188: 21. 39 Sommerville (Miss Busk), B 269: 27.

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Notes to pages 96–104

185

40 41 42 43

Ibid., 27. Ibid., 35; 25–7. Ibid., 31. Ibid.; “St. George the Martyr, Southwark: Report and Statement of Accounts,” 11. 44 Ibid. 45 Miss Postill, B270: 213. 46 Koven, Slumming, 202. 47 See, for example, Steinmetz, B172: 44. 48 Rae, B 312: 245. 49 Charles, The Relief of the Poor, 3, 15. 50 District Visiting, 8. 51 Ibid., 9–10. 52 Ibid., 11–12, 14. 53 Glossop, B 294: 133–5; “The Rochester Diocesan Deaconess Institution” (Report, January 1900), 1–2. 54 Ibid., 137–9. 55 Ibid., 151–3. See also Miss Gresham, B242: 223–5. 56 Miss Parnell, B188: 99–101. 57 Quoted in Prelinger, “The Female Diaconate in the Anglican Church,” 175. 58 District Visiting, 7–8, 10–12. 59 Calder, The People’s War, ch. 2. 60 Miss Barclay, B 280: 187–9, 191. 61 Ibid., 183. 62 Ibid., 195. See also Somerville (Miss Busk), B269: 37; Walsh (Mrs Walsh), B279: 53. 63 Miss Barclay, B 280: 193–5. 64 District Visiting, 12, 15–16. My italics. chapter five

  1 Quoted in Miss Ward, B273: 3–5; “Southwark, Newington and Walworth District Nursing Association for Nursing the Sick Poor in their Own Homes,” 9; “The State of Central South London,” South London Press (4 April 1903), 2; Gregory, B229: 29–31; Adamson, B 175: 147–9.  2 Coad, B176: 213.   3 Dr Sullivan, B179: 35; Martley, B173: 39; Barge, B173: 97.  4 Davin, Growing Up Poor, 70.

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Notes to pages 105–8

  5 Davis, “Jennings’ Building and the Royal Borough,” 30.  6 Weston, B270: 157.   7 Briggs, “The Language of ‘Class.’”   8 Foucault urged a focus on “power at its extremities,” at its “extreme points of exercise” in his Power/Knowledge, 96–7.   9 Webb and Webb, The History of Trade Unionism; Cole, British Working Class Politics; Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party; Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 10 Hobsbawm, “The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-Century Britain”; Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society; Gray, The Labour Aristocracy. 11 Savage and Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840– 1914, introduction. 12 McKibbin, “Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?”; Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture.” 13 Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, esp. ch. 5. 14 Ibid., 142–3. 15 See Ross, “Survival Networks.” See also Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 11– 12; Roberts, Classic Slum, 47. 16 Walter Arnstein, review of Bourke, Journal of Modern History 69, 2 (June 1997): 348. 17 Obelkevich, “From Labour History to the History of Consumption,” 416. 18 Vincent, Poor Citizens, preface and ch. 1. 19 Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men, 48. 20 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 162. A number of Booth’s interviewees mention the availability of cheap meat: Thompson, B180: 19; Mr Chisham and Others, B188: 43–5; Bosanquet, “Life and Labour of the People in London, by Charles Booth,” 411. 21 Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society, 199, 202–3; Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, 201; Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?, 621. 22 Wilkinson, Impact of Inequality, 12. 23 Ibid, 64. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 12–13. 26 Wilkinson’s book inspired pieces by a number of writers for the Guardian newspaper in the second half of 2005, coinciding as it did

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Notes to pages 109–13

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with the release of a “Report on Inequality” which seemed wholly to support his findings. See Polly Toynbee’s review of Wilkinson, “Inequality Kills,” Guardian (30 July 2005); Guardian editorial (15 August 2005); Polly Toynbee, “Don’t shrug off low pay,” Guardian (26 August 2005); Peter Wilby, “Forget raw fish and berries, it’s equality that saves lives,” Guardian (27 August 2005); Jonathan Freedland, “It may be beyond passé but we’ll have to do something about the rich,” Guardian (23 November 2005). 27 Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, 125. 28 Roberts, The Classic Slum, 23–4. 29 Ibid., 139. 30 Figg, B280: 121. 31 Booth, Charles Booth, 114–16; O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 50. 32 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 7. 33 Ibid., 126, 128. 34 J. Harper, a local Wesleyan missioner with a small working-class following (and, in Arkell’s assessment, either a “good class mechanic” or a salesman), recommended the Booth men speak to Falkner as an old resident of the area (B 306: 129–31). 35 Falkner, B309: 7. 36 Jones, Outcast London, 207–8. 37 Falkner, B309: 9. 38 Ibid. 39 Jones, Outcast London, 210. 40 Falkner, B 309: 11. 41 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality. 42 Falkner, B 309: 11. 43 Later, Falkner contradicted himself somewhat when he added how there had been both improvements in working-class sobriety and a tendency toward the distinctly middle-class habit of “private drinking”: “Drink the curse of Dulwich. Not so many drunkards as there were. People drink at home and even the drunkards themselves don’t think the people who ‘drink at the public house are respectable members of society.’” Falkner, B309: 11–13. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 13–15. 46 Ibid., 15. 47 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 40–1.

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Notes to pages 113–19

48 Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, 167. 49 For the similar flight to suburban areas outside East London, see Grigg, B171: 62–3; Williams, B173: 79; Hazzard, B176: 7; Knight Chaplin, B176: 59; Clark Hallam, B183: 133, 139–43; Leonard, B 186: 3–5; Fletcher, B224: 85; Davies, B 229: 89; Howe, B282: 73. 50 See Archer, B282: 89; Roberts, B306: 51, 45. 51 Ensign Willis, B310: 87–9; Cook, B310: 223; Adjutant Halsey, B310: 191; Howe, B 282: 69; Tydeman, B306: 63; Brian and “his colleague,” B 310: 53–5. 52 Walsh, B 279: 55. See also Blakeston, B279: 129. 53 Holland, B276: 115–17. See also B277: 71–3; Pim, B307: 111; Gilbert, B311: 39–41. 54 James, B310: 140–1. 55 Bell, B 276: 53. See also Barley, B 175: 243; Daniel, B171: 41–2; Knapp, B186: 77; Carnall, B223: 125. 56 Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 208–9; Burleigh, B280: 179. 57 Cowley, B 274: 109–11; Goodman, B271: 25. 58 See James, B310: 135; Burros, B282: 131; Nicholson, B274: 169–71. 59 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 431. 60 Sweetnam, B 175: 85; Gilbert, B311: 31–3; Russell, B274: 127; Murray, B310: 179. 61 Wilkins, B282: 47–9. See also Lennard, B186: 7; Johnston, B 190: 88. 62 Wilkins, B 282: 49. 63 Sister Jennie, B 176: 165. 64 Maddock, B173: 139; Roe, B176: 89. 65 Roberts, Classic Slum, 139. See also Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, 171–2; Gregory, B183: 219. 66 Aylett, B307: 25–7. 67 Cowan, B 169: 75; Alpe, B169: 211; Sweetnam, B175: 85. 68 “Notes on a visit to St Antholin’s, Cheltenham Mission and other meetings in Peckham Rye,” B309: 23. 69 Richards, B281, 43–5. 70 Barly, B 175: 237–9. 71 Clatworthy, B 280: 107. 72 Cowley, B274: 119–21. 73 Slingo, B283: 29–31. Also see Bain, B273: 187–9. 74 Rosier, B280: 155. 75 Roberts, Classic Slum, 38–9. 76 Smith, B 229: 181–3. 77 Foster Owen, B 270: 99; Davin, Growing Up Poor, 71.

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Notes to pages 119–27

189

  78   79   80   81   82  83   84   85   86

Miss Richardson, B283: 111. Paul Johnson, Saving and Spending, 221. Miss Blatch, B 174: 47. “Charterhouse in Southwark,” 19–20. Ibid., 20. Roberts, Classic Slum, 22. Hereford Brooke, B218: 7–9. Miss Parish, B188: 129. Miss Price, B173: 109; East London Observer (14 July 1888), quoted in Fishman, East End 1888, 286.   87 J. Hartley Knight, “A Complete Short Story: The Loafer’s Ride,” South London Press (26 March 1898), 6.   88 Reid, “Old Unionism Reconsidered,” 223.  89 Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, 46n133.   90 See “Gospel of Labour,” 29.   91 G.K. Chesterton, introduction to Haw, The Life Story of Will Crooks, xv–xvi. See also McKibbin, “Why was there no Marxism in Britain?”, 40.  92 Brown, B 171: 11.  93 Crooks, B173: 47.   94 Ibid., 47, 51, 53, 94.   95 Ibid., 63.   96 Crooks, “An Address on the Unemployed Problem,” 12–13.   97 “Gospel of Labour,” 38–9.   98 Historians have tried to distance working-class men, and Lansbury in particular, from the authoritarian side of labour colonies, painting them as utopian anti-capitalist entities rather than work/penal colonies. See Sheppard, George Lansbury, 60–3; Harris, Unemployment and Politics, 139, 189; Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 335. Certainly the difficulty of criticizing Lansbury arises from his status as a much-loved figure in British Labour History. A.J.P. Taylor, in his England: 1914–45, 142, called him “the most loveable figure in modern politics.”  99 Haw, The Life Story of Will Crooks, 264–8. 100 Ibid., 269–70. 101 Lough, The Poplar Labour Colony, 6, 17; Bentham, Report of Mr F.H. Bentham on his Visits of Lingfield and Poplar Farm Colonies, 8. 102 Crooks, “An Address on the Unemployed Problem,” 6–7. I borrow the term “pauper syndrome” from Rachel Vorspan and her intrepid essay, “Vagrancy and the New Poor Law,” 73.

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Notes to pages 128–33

103 Crooks, “An Address on the Unemployed Problem,” 7. 104 Even after this time, the most stark evidence of Lansbury’s continued support for labour colonies was the simple fact of his signature on the 1909 Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, which advocated that “The most recalcitrant cases could be committed by order of a magistrate to semi-penal detention colonies.” Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, 242; Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform, 74. 105 Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the New Poor Law,” 78. 106 Quoted in ibid. Vorspan notes that Reynolds’s Newspaper (6 November 1906) also demanded the detainment of “casual wastrels,” of either sex, in farm colonies, and that they be “forced to work pretty stiffly for their living.” Ibid. 107 See O’Day and Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 8n24. 108 Johnson, Saving and Spending, 4, 232. 109 Johnson, Saving and Spending. See also Griffiths, The Lancashire Working Classes. 110 Williams, Culture and Society, 313; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 456–69; Hobsbawm et al., The Forward March of Labour Halted, 8, 10. 111 Johnson, Saving and Spending, 222. 112 Richardson, B280: 41, 49. 113 Cox, English Churches, 58–9. 114 Dyke, B 190: 8. 115 Ainsworth, B275: 111, 113–15. 116 Ibid., 115. 117 “Surrey Chapel Southwark: Questions and Answers,” 6–7. 118 “Surrey Chapel Central Mission, Annual Report, 1899,” 9. 119 Ibid., 10, 28. 120 “Charterhouse in Southwark,” 29. 121 Kaye Dunn, B274: 37; Murray, B223: 105. 122 Vyvyan, B 275: 79 123 Caine, “Wheatsheaf Hall,” 17. 124 Howe, B282: 81. 125 Murray, B280: 213. 126 Booth, “Religious Influences,” 7: 401; Masterman, “Problem of South London,” 196; McLeod, Class and Religion, 74–8; McLeod, Religion and Society, 42–5; Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939. 127 Brown, B271: 175.

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Notes to pages 134–43

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128 Joyner, B280: 79. My italics. 129 Newton, B270: 171. 130 McLeod, Religion and Society, 147–8. 131 Schneer, London 1900, 59. 132 “St. Peter’s, Vauxhall, Parish Magazine, 1899.” 133 Thorne, Congregational Missions, 137. 134 Ibid., 126. 135 Quoted in Thorne, Congregational Missions, 134. 136 For similar, abortive attempts by the C OS, see Moore, “Social Work and Social Welfare,” 92; Mowat, Charity Organization Society, 27–8. 137 Sweetnam, B175: 89–91; Miss Nash, B178: 67. 138 Wentworth-Bennett, B175: 129. 139 Hawkins, B 185: 225. 140 Leonard, B186: 5–7. 141 Asker, B 269: 143–5; Booth, “Religious Influences,” 4: 39. 142 Quoted by O’Day, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry, 197. 143 Rev. Escreet, B288: 1–3; 9. 144 Blakeston, B279: 127; Bardsley, B279: 93. 145 Bardsley, B279: 93. 146 Ibid., 1. chapter six

  1 See Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 72–80.    2 Ibid., 76. And see Fishman, East End 1888.   3 Nash, B178: 67.   4 Smart, B173: 171–3.    5 Booth, 4: 155.   6 Murray, B310: 177, 181.   7 Bain, B273: 187–9 (my italics). Mr Bain is the unnamed “headmaster … in one poor board school” that Stedman Jones quotes in his “Working-Class Culture,” 222.   8 Bain, B273: 191–3.   9 Winkworth, B185: 21.  10 Codling, A Marvel of Mercy, 1, 8. See also Cook, B 274: 199.  11 Bain, B 273: 197.  12 Hayward, B176: 47.   13 “St Alphege’s Mission, 24th Annual Report,” 34.  14 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 45.  15 Pitchford, B269: 177–9.

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Notes to pages 143–50

16 Ross, Love and Toil, 101–2, 105. 17 Jennings, B 308: 33–5. 18 Pitchford, B269: 177–9. 19 Corbett, B269: 209. 20 Ibid., 99, 103. 21 Quoted in McLaren, “Abortion in England, 1890–1914,” 399. 22 Bain, B273: 199. 23 Newland, B 283, “Miss Newland’s Notes,” 222–3. The Booth men drew a large star in the margin next to the phrase “both parents go to work.” 24 Appleton, B281: 19. 25 “Southwark, Newington and Walworth District Nursing Association,” 9, 18. 26 Report of the Trinity College Mission [cover missing], “Report of the Clergy, 1898,” 17–19. 27 Malcolmson, “Laundresses and the Laundry Trade,” 439. 28 Roberts, A Woman’s Place, 148. 29 Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture,” 196–7. 30 McLeod, “New Perspectives on Victorian Working-Class Religion,” 33; Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 140. 31 “Notes of a Visit to St John the Evangelist, Goose Green,” B309: 20–1. 32 For a parallel among millworkers in the American South, see Pope, Millhands and Preachers, 90. 33 “A Visit to St Thomas’, Lambeth (From our Special Correspondent.) Reprinted from the ‘English Churchman,’ in ‘In Lambeth Slums,’” 8. 34 Tomkins, B277: 217–19. 35 Donaldson, B 185: 191. 36 Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture, 151. See also McLeod, Religion and Society, 105; Tamke, Make a Joyful Noise unto the Lord. 37 “Watch-Night at the ‘Vic’,” appended to Rounsefell, B 270: 30. See also an article from the Methodist Times (17 November 1899) ­appended to ibid., 31. 38 Rounsefell, B270: 29–31; Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture, 153. 39 “Report of the Lambeth Central (South) Mission,” 3. 40 Richardson, B 280: 41, 49; Bartlett, “The Churches of Bermondsey,” 261; McLeod, Religion and Society, 144. 41 See Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture, 152. 42 Ibid., 51–2, 152.

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Notes to pages 150–8

193

43 Saunders, B176: 207. 44 Clemens, B228: 195. 45 Goodbody, B184: 53, 59. 46 Knight, B 310: 27. 47 Carter, B307: 133–5. These two ministers are Rev. Knight and Rev. G. Carter of the Avondale Road Unitarian Church. 48 South London Observer and Camberwell and Peckham Times (26 October 1895), B307: 145. 49 Aves, “Visit to St Antholin’s, Cheltenam Mission and other meetings on Peckham Rye,” B309: 25. 50 Ibid. 51 “Notes of a Visit to St John the Evangelist, Goose Green,” B309: 41. 52 Ibid., 25–7. 53 Knight, B310: 19. 54 Ibid., 23. 55 Carter, B 307: 133. 56 The two ministers above, Revs Knight and Carter, each agreed that, out of the church and on the Rye, it was the Salvation Army that was most successful. Ibid.; Knight, B310: 19. 57 Aves, “Visit to St John the Evangelist, Goose Green,” 7 July 1901, B 309: 39. 58 Ibid. 59 Ensign Wills, B 310: 91. 60 Cook, B310: 217–19. 61 Ibid., 221. 62 “Sunday on Peckham Rye: More Scenes of Disorder,” South London Press (8 October 1898), 1. 63 Ibid. 64 Knight, B 310: 21. See also Barley, B175: 245. 65 Carter, B307: 135. 66 South London Observer B307: 145. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 145–7. 69 “Visit to St Antholin’s,” B309: 29–31. 70 Lewis, “Third Despatch,” 31–2. 71 King, B229: 111; Townsend, B284: 83; “Widow’s Sad Suicide: Result of Notice to Quit,” South London Press (28 August 1897), 2. See also Roberts, Classic Slum, 15. 72 “A Camberwell Tragedy: Mother and Child in the Canal: A Miserable Life Ends Miserably,” South London Press (11 September 1897), 1.

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Notes to pages 158–66

73 “Surrey Chapel Central Mission, Annual Report, 1899,” 11. 74 Caine, B 270: 121; De Carteret, B269: 195; Barraclough B 269: 165; Connors, B270: 189; “Charterhouse Mission. Annual Report, 1898,” 6; Wallace, B 279: 39; Coles, B270: 53. 75 “Notes concerning poverty, drink, housing, education, amusements, religion, marriage and housing by Mr Denmore, [1898]”; Howarth, B 225: 66–77. 76 Wilkinson, “The Price of Inequality,” 11–12. 77 Caine, “Friar Street Mission Hall,” 3. See also Burrows, B183: 245. 78 Bearne, B190: 38. 79 Appleton, “Mothers in South London,” 7–8. 80 Wright and Chomiawry, “Women and Drink,” 118, 131. See also Steams, “The Effort at Continuity in Working-Class Culture,” 639. 81 See Day-MacLeod, “Labours of Love: Mothers and Their Critics,” 208–9; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 75–6; Walker, “‘I live but not yet I for Christ liveth in me’,” 103, 106. 82 Ross, 43–4. See a similar “present-absence” of the subject of women’s drinking in Elizabeth Roberts’s discussion of “Power Relationships within Marriage,” A Woman’s Place, 110–21. 83 Wright and Chorniawry, “Women and Drink,” 128; Bourke, WorkingClass Cultures, ch. 5. 84 Brickmaster, B188: 171–3. 85 See Fraser, Coming of the Mass Market, 209–10; Girouard, The Victorian Pub, 181; Thompson, The Edwardians, 201–2. 86 Mr Chisham and Others, B188: 41–3. 87 Wilkins, B274: 55–7. 88 Caine, “Friar Street Mission Hall,” 3. 89 South London Press (10 April 1897), 2. 90 Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 209; Dingle, “Drink and Working-Class Living Standards,” 610–11, 617; Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 162. 91 Bain, B273: 195; Mellows, B225: 127. 92 Bain, B273: 195. 93 Cook, B 310: 223. 94 Cook, B274: 199. 95 Hulls, B 278: 135. conclusion

  1 For an excellent summary of the century-long rhetoric surrounding the British “underclass,” see Welshman, Underclass.

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Notes to pages 166–7

195

  2 Iain Martin, “Britain is going to need far more people like Sir Michael Caine,” Daily Telegraph (28 April 2009).   3 Alexander Chancellor, “So taxing the rich encourages ‘layabouts’, ­rages Michael Caine. It’s time he enjoyed a lie-in,” Guardian (1 May 2009).

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Index

abortion, 143–4. See also birth control Adams, Mr, Hammersmith Congregationalist, 74 Adamson, Rev. W., St Paul’s, Old Ford, Bow, 62–3 Adorno, Theodor, philosopher, 111 Ainsworth, Rev. J., St Luke’s Bermondsey, 57, 130–1 alcohol, 43, 63–6, 100–3, 112, 142, 165; drunkenness, 59, 63–5, 100–3, 112, 140–1, 158; historians’ views on, 16; use by women, 16, 63, 90, 112, 140–1, 158 Alpe, Rev. P., St Peter’s Limehouse, 117 Appleton, Rev., St George’s Camberwell, 145, 160 Argyle, Jesse, Booth investigator, 7, 51–3; interviews by, 45, 52–3, 74, 105 Arkell, George, Booth investigator, 7, 49, 51–2; interviews by, 57, 59–60, 62, 65, 92, 110–12, 116, 119, 134, 148–9, 187n34 Arnstein, Walter, historian, 106–7

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Asker, Rev., St Andrew’s Lambeth, 65, 81, 137 Aves, Ernest, Booth investigator, 7, 13, 49–51, 67–8, 114; interviews by, 54–7, 61–2, 77–8, 81–3, 93–8, 117, 134, 137–8, 146–7, 151–7, 161, 179n71 Aylett, Rev., Camberwell Green Congregational, 116 Bain, Mr, headmaster, 142, 144, 161–2 Bainbridge-Bell, Rev., St John the Evangelist, 75 Ball, Sidney, Fabian, 44 Barclay, Miss, missioner, 101–2 Bardsley, Rev., Christ Church Rotherhithe, 137–8 Barly, Rev. Vere, Bromley, 118 banks, 130–1. See also money Barnes, Rev. G., St Barnabas Bethnal Green, 56–7 Barnett, Canon Samuel, 44, 50, 74 Barnett, Mrs Henrietta, 50 Bartlett, Alan, historian, 91–2, 149–50

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218 Index

Baxter, Arthur Lionel, Booth investigator, 7, 9, 13, 48–50, 52; interviews by, 56–7, 61–2, 64–5, 68, 72, 75, 79, 89, 95–102, 137, 140, 148, 160–1 Beale, Rev. Alfred, Clapton Congregationalist, 159 begging, 35 behaviour, civil, 45, 101, 139–46, 154–6 Bell, Rev. E.H., All Souls Walworth, 114 Bennett, Rev. J. Wentworth, St Gabriel’s Bromley, 136 Besant, Annie, Fabian, 44 Beveridge, William, New Liberal, 44 birth control, 15, 139, 143–4. See also abortion Blair, Tony, 166 Board of Guardians, 124 Booth, Alfred, 19–21, 36, 172n13 Booth, Charles, 3–17, 18–36, 37–55, 74–81, 83, 105, 109–10, 137, 143, 163; as businessman, 18, 20–2, 26, 29, 39; on capitalism, 6, 12, 29, 38–9; on charity, 4–5, 9, 11, 16, 18, 38–49, 69, 77–85, 95, 126, 133; class bias, 9–10; health of, 18, 22, 24–6, 32, 39, 173n32; intellectual formation, 8–9, 18–26, 31–6; in Italy, 11, 33–4, 173n32; personal character of, 5, 9, 18–26, 38–9, 42; political loyalties, 23, 26; posthumous reputation, 3–10, 13, 18–22, 36, 42, 105–6; on poverty, 3–6, 9, 11, 27–8, 38–46; religious and moral views, 4–9, 11, 18–20, 22–4, 26, 29, 31–6, 37–9, 139, 141; in

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United States of America, 11, 31–2; on work, 4, 6–7, 21–2, 44; on working classes, 6, 16, 38–47, 53. See also Life and Labour of the People in London Booth, George, 8 Booth, Mary (Macaulay), 10, 18, 20, 22–6, 31–6, 47, 49, 80, 175n7 Booth, Meg, 8 “Booth men,” 38, 49–53, 55–7, 60, 66, 68, 69–70, 75, 77–8, 81–2. See also Argyle, Jesse; Arkell, George; Aves, Ernest; Baxter, Arthur Lionel; Duckworth, George Booth, Thomas, 20 Bosanquet, Helen, 129 Bourke, Joanna, historian, 13, 106–7 Bowen, Lady, district worker, 91 Briggs, Asa, historian, 105 British Empire, 15, 26, 134–6 Brooke, Rev. Hereford, Unitarian minister, 121 Brown, John, historian, 3, 9, 27 Burrell, Jane, charity worker, 95 Busk, Miss, charity worker, 95–8 Butler, Fred, clerk, 53 “cadgers,” 121–2, 128 Caine, James, LCM, evangelist, 65, 159, 161 Caine, Rev. James, Lambeth Congregationalist, 132 Caine, Sir Michael, actor, 166–7 Cannadine, David, historian, 108 capitalism, 6, 12, 38–9; Booth on, 6, 12, 29, 38–9 Cardwell, Rev. Rowland, Fulham, 62

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Carter, Rev. G., Unitarian minister, 152, 155, 193n56 Carteret, Rev. D., St Paul’s Southwark, 158 Century, 42 Chalmers, Rev. Thomas, evangelical minister, 27–30, 39–4 Chancellor, Alexander, journalist, 166–7 Chapman, Rev. Hugh, St Luke’s Bermondsey, 69–72 character, concepts of, 4–5, 35, 39, 44, 79; language and, 30; of the poor, 4, 101–3, 124, 164 charity, 4, 76–85, 86–103, 121–2, 164–5; dependence on, 7–9, 11, 38, 76–85, 86–103; overseas 133–6; by the poor, 15, 121, 131–8; strategies regarding, 15, 38, 46–9, 52–3, 69, 71–2, 76–85, 121–3, 137–8; women’s role in dispensing, 86–103, 137 Charity Commissioners, 80 Charity Organisation Review, 48 Charity Organisation Society (C O S ), 9, 11, 26, 38, 43, 44, 47–8, 49–50, 79–85, 88; Committee on Training, 48 Charterhouse, 131–2 Chesterton, G.K., author, 124 children, 46, 53, 74, 116, 123–4, 151, 157–61; behaviour of, 59–60, 142–3; charity by, 135; charity to, 48, 90, 101; clothing of, 14–5, 76–8, 118–20; education of, 74; rearing practices, 63 cholera, 29 Chorniawry, Cathy, historian, 16, 160 Christian Social Union, 73

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Index 219

churchworkers, 136–8. See also missions Clapham Sect, 26–8, 36, 175n7 Clatworthy, Rev., 118 Clemens, Rev., Bethnal Green vicar, 150 clergy, 11–12, 15–16, 27, 29, 53–85; education of, 60–1; ­failures of, 11–12, 55–8, 64–5, 71–2, 78; masculinity of, 59, 67, 87, 103; philanthropic approach of, 11–12, 54–9, 79–85, 149– 50; violence against, 66–7 Clifford, Dr John, London Baptist, 73 Clifton House Institute, 140 clothing. See dress Coldwill, Rev. C.S., Christ Church Isle of Dogs, 64–5 Collini, Stefan, historian, 4–5, 19–20, 35 Comte, August, philosopher, 25, 33 Congregationalists, 32, 51, 115 Conservative Party, 26 Cook, H., band president, 162 Corbett, Rev., St Peter’s, 1, 83, 144 Cowan, Rev. D.G., St John’s Isle of Dogs, 64, 117, 183n3 Cox, Jeffrey, historian, 55, 130 crime, 43–4, 157 Crooks, Will, politician, 14, 44, 123–8, 136–7 Cullen, Michael, historian, 9, 27 Curry, J.G., missioner, 45–6 Daily News, 42 Daily Telegraph, 166 Daniels, Annie, suicide of, 157–8 Darwin, Charles, 27–8. See also social Darwinism

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220 Index

Darwinian science, 36, 72–3. See also science Davin, Anna, historian, 104 Davis, Jennifer, historian, 104–5 Deane, Anthony C., author, 60 De Fontaine, Rev., 93–5 Dellamora, Richard, historian, 12, 59 Denison, Rev. H.P., St Michael’s, 75, 78 Despard, Mrs, socialist, 161 disease. See health; Booth, health of Disraeli, Benjamin, statesman, 26 Donaldson, Rev. St Clair, Hackney, 76, 148 Dodge, Rev., St Stephen’s, 78–9 dress, 14–5, 76–8, 112, 116–23, 147–8 dress making, 120 drink. See alcohol Duckworth, George, Booth investigator, 7, 49, 51–2; interviews by, 58, 63–4, 84, 124–5, 179n82 Dunn, Rev. Kaye, minister, 132 Eck, Rev., St Andrew’s Bethnal Green, 84 education: children’s, 14–15, 74, 116, 118–9; technical, 8; theological and missionary, 60–1, 72–4, 88–9 Elliott, Dorice Williams, historian, 92–3 Elmy, Elizabeth Wolstenholme, suffragist, 93 emigration, 92 Englander, David, historian, 9–10, 36, 39, 47, 50 Escreet, Rev., Woolwich, 137

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evangelicalism, 4, 24, 29–30, 40, 147, 164; influence of, 20, 24, 28–30, 147, 150–2; and science, 27–8 Fabian Society, 44 Falkner, E.M., interviewee, 110– 14, 87n34 and 43 Fegan, Rev. J.W.C., Nonconformist missioner, 46, 81–4 Feltes, N.N., historian, 92–3 Fielding, Steven, historian, 133 Foucault, Michel, philosopher, 105, 186n8 Fowler, Captain, missioner, 59–60 Free Trade, 27 Gatrell, V.A.C., historian, 43–4 Gill, Sean, historian, 87 Gilmour, Isabella, nursing sister, 89, 184n12 Gilmour, Robin, minister, 59 Glossop, Florence, deaconess, 99 Gold Standard, 27 Goodbody, A.A., Y MC A Secretary, 150 Goold, Mrs, missioner, 120 Gregory, Rev. Arthur E., Wesleyan minister, 57 Griffiths, Trevor, historian, 15 Grundy, Rev., Lambeth minister, 67 Guardian, 108, 166 Haig, Alan, historian, 73 Harrison, Brian, historian, 113 health, 57–8, 107–10, 131, 145. See also Booth, Charles, health of Helmstadter, Richard, historian, 29, 73 Hennock, E.P., historian, 9, 27

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Hill, Octavia, charity worker, 47, 51 Hilton, Boyd, historian, 27, 29–30 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, historian, 4, 9, 40–4 Hitchcock, Mr, Southwark missioner, 142 Hobbs, Rev. W., 161 Hobhouse, Leonard T., sociologist, 19–20, 53 Hobsbawm, Eric, historian, 107 Hobson, J.A., New Liberal, 44 Hodson, Rev. J., 66 Hoggart, Richard, academic, 143 Holland, Rev., St Agnes’s, Kennington Road, 113–14 Holloway, F.D., accountant, 81–2 Holy Hooligans, 154–5 homosexuality, 12, 59 housing, 23, 110–11, 114 Howe, Rev. T.E., Bermondsey minister, 132–3 Hudson, Thomas, court witness, 157–8 Hughes, Hugh Price, Wesleyan minister, 74 Humphries, Mr, bookseller, 155 idleness, 4–5, 127–8 Ireland, potato famine, 28–9 Irish, 133 Jennings, Rev., East Dulwich vicar, 144 Jephson, Rev. A.W., Walworth vicar, 30 Jews, 122–3 John, A.H., historian, 19, 21, 39 Johnson, Paul, historian 15, 119, 129 Joyner, William, missioner, 134

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Kathleen, Sister, Baptist missioner, 89–90 Kemble, Charles, author, 55 Kendall, Rev. Henry, St George’s Blackheath, 56 Kirk, Rev. John, missioner, 76 Kirkham, John, painter, 114 Knight, Rev., Baptist minister, 152, 155, 193n56 Koven, Seth, historian, 10, 93 labour colonies, 5, 44, 46–8, 126– 8, 164 Laindon Labour Colony, 126–8 Labour Exchange Act, 43 Labour Party, 44 Langridge, Rev. A.H., St Peter’s Vauxhall, 134–5 language, 139, 142–3, 146, 154–5, 162 Lansbury, George, Labour politician, 44, 126–8, 189n98, 190n104 Leary, Rev., St Philip’s, 180n6 Lee, Rev., Lambeth minister, 62 Leonard, Rev., St John’s Hackney, 136–7 Lewis, Jane, historian, 92 Lewis, Rev. Henry, 45 Lewis, S.A., clerk, 52–3 Liberal Party, 26; New Liberals, 44 Life and Labour of the People in London, 3, 6–7, 19, 23, 37, 50, 74–5, 110, 167; Industry series, 3, 22, 39, 50–1; Labour series, 6, 22; Poverty series, 3, 6, 22, 37, 46; Religious Influences series, 3, 5–8, 10, 37–53, 75, 79–80, 117, 150–1 Liverpool, 18, 26, 41; Renshaw Street Chapel, 19

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222 Index

loafers, 51–3, 72, 85, 122–3, 129; Booth’s view of, 6, 10–11, 42–4, 47–8; definition of, 6, 76, 164. See also poor Loch, C.S., charity worker, 44, 47 London, 40–1; Battersea, 89, 99, 114; Bermondsey, 69, 112, 114– 16, 130–3, 158–9; Bethnal Green, 64, 65, 67, 119, 150, 159; Blackfriars Road, 7, 37–8, 61, 80; Bow, 62, 76, 104, 117, 125, 136; Bromley, 81, 104; Camberwell Green, 116; Canning Town, 104; East Battersea, 49; East Dulwich, 63, 110–12, 144, 151; Greenwich, 59, 66; Hackney, 59–60, 67, 95, 99–100, 120, 130, 136–7; Hackney Wick, 58, 76, 130, 148, 160–1; Isle of Dogs, 64, 117; Kensington, 64, 95; Lambeth, 54, 67, 78, 80, 114– 15, 118–19, 130, 132–3, 149; North Kensington, 75; Peckham, 70, 112–15, 117, 141–2; Peckham Rye, 32, 112, 150–6; “Poor South London,” 11, 14, 41, 44, 84, 89, 113, 118, 122, 176n20; Poplar, 68, 104, 122, 124–5, 137; Rotherhithe, 109, 115, 118, 133, 137–8, 166; Southwark, 76–7, 95–7, 105, 118, 123–4, 130–2, 137, 142–3, 145, 149, 158, 176n20; Spitalfields, 132 London City Missionaries (LCM ), 30, 58–9, 63 London Missionary Society, 135 London parishes: All Saints, Poplar, 137; All Souls, Grosvenor Park,

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114; Christ Church, Rotherhithe, 137–8; St Alban’s, Holborn, 68; St Andrew’s, Bethnal Green, 84; St Andrew’s, Lambeth, 65–6; St Barnabas, Bethnal Green, 56; Christ Church, Isle of Dogs, 64; St Etheldreda, Fulham, 62; St George’s, Blackheath, 56; St George’s, Camberwell, 145; St George the Martyr, Southwark, 76, 95; St John’s, Hackney, 137; St Jude’s, South Kensington, 54; St Luke’s, Bethnal Green, 57; St Luke’s, Bermondsey, 69–72, 130–1; St Mark’s Walworth, 119, 148; St Mary Abbott’s, Kensington, 95; St Michael’s, North Kensington, 69; St Peter’s, Battersea, 99; St Peter’s, Limehouse, 117; St Phillip’s, Lambeth, 54; St Stephen’s, Bow, 62; Victoria Park Wesleyan, 57 Lough, G. Herbert, clerk, 127 love, concepts of, 12, 68–70, 138; “New Love,” 12, 68–70, 90–2 Macaulay family, 18, 26, 36; Charles Macaulay, 26; Thomas Babington Macaulay, 26 MacGregor, Rev., 60 McIlheney, D.B., scholar, 55 McKibbin, Ross, historian, 106 McLaren, Angus, historian, 144 McLeod, Hugh, historian, 49, 133–4, 149–50 Macpherson, Annie, administrator, 92 Malcolmson, Patricia, historian, 145

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Index 223

Malthus, Thomas, economist, 28, 174n65 maps, 3, 7–8, 50–1, 75, 109, 163 Marshall, Alfred, economist, 44 Meakin, Rev. Henry T., 77–8 Mellows, J., headmaster, 162 Methodism, 32–4, 77 Methodists, 77, 149–50 ministers. See individual names missions, 87–90, 97–8, 120, 123– 4, 132; clientele, 77–8, 117, 124, 147–8; J.W.C. Fegan’s missions, 46, 80–4; social mixing in, 16, 45–6 money, 15, 110–12, 122–5, 128– 37; wages, 14, 40, 107, 112, 117, 132. See also charity; ­pensions; thrift Morning Post, 8 Mowat, Charles Loch, historian, 47–8 “mumpers,” 121–2 Murray, Rev. T.G., Presbyterian minister, 133 Murray, Rev. W.B., Spitalfields minister, 132, 141–2 music, 148–51, 153 National Insurance Act, 43 Newland, Miss, Borough headmistress, 144–5 Newton, Fr, Southwark priest, 76, 134 Nonconformity, 12, 58–60, 67, 73–5, 80, 97, 171n35; Booth as Nonconformist, 19; and evangelism, 29. See also Congregation­ alists; evangelicalism; Unitarians Norman, Edward, historian, 55

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Norman-Butler, Belinda, historian, 26 Norwich Citadel Band, 153–4 Obelkevich, James, historian, 107 Ocean Grove, New Jersey, 32 O’Day, Rosemary, historian, 49–50, 60, 73, 86, 88, 170n31; on Booth, 8–10, 36, 39, 47 Palmer, Rev. Canon, 51 Parish, Miss, district visitor, 121–2 Parnell, Miss, church visitor, 99–100 Parr, Rev. Tolefree, 131, 158 Parry, Rev. J., of Bromley, 81 Parsons, Gerald, historian, 68 Pension Act, 43 pensions, 8–9, 23–4, 43, 46–8, 95–7 philanthropy. See charity Phillips, Rev., Fulham vicar, 62 Pigou, Arthur, economist, 44 poor, 7, 13, 28, 89–90, 104–28; antagonism towards relief, 59–60, 123–4; as charity workers, 136–8; division of by others, 4–7, 11, 13–14, 16–17, 38–47, 69, 73, 76, 87, 101; division of by themselves, 105–28, 163–4; disreputable, 6, 9, 16, 27, 34–47, 53, 73, 99, 104–25, 139– 62; drunkenness amongst, 100– 1, 158–62; respectable, 6, 9–16, 27, 38–47, 53, 73, 99, 104–25, 134, 136, 139–62, 164, 176n21; self-criticism, 10, 105. See also loafers; thrift; working classes Poor Law Unions Association, 44 poor relief. See charity

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224 Index

Positivism, 8, 23, 25, 33, 39 Postill, Miss, missioner, 97–8 Potter, Beatrice. See Webb, Beatrice poverty. See poor Presbyterian Church, 60–1 Prochaska, Frank, historian, 92 prostitution, 65–6, 146, 156 Rae, Rev., West Dulwich minister, 98 Reeve, Rev. Andrews, Lambeth rector, 78 Reform Act (1884/5), 40 Reid, Alistair, historian, 123 religion, 4–7, 37–53, 55, 139–62, 159, 164. See also Booth, religious and moral views; and specific denominations respectability, 14–15, 17, 39–42, 104–23, 139–48, 157, 160. See also poor, respectable Richards, Rev. J.A., St Bartholomew’s minister, 117–18 Richardson, Thomas, Rotherhithe minister, 149–50 Roadnight, Sarah, court witness, 158 Roberts, Elizabeth, historian, 145–6 Roberts, Robert, 13, 106, 108–9, 116, 119, 121, 147–8 Roman Catholic Church, 33, 54–5, 68, 86, 133–4 Roman Catholics, 97, 101–2, 133–4 Ross, Ellen, historian, 16, 106, 143–4, 160 Rounsefell, Rev. D.J., Waterloo Road minister, 148–9 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 24, 46

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Saberton, John, Greenwich missionary, 58 St James Gazette, 42 Salford, 108, 116 Salvation Army, 61, 97, 152–3, 193n56 Schneer, Jonathan, historian, 134 science, influence of, 4, 7–8, 12, 27–8, 72–81, 88, 103, 163. See also Darwin; Darwinian science; social Darwinism self-discipline, 4, 15, 21, 24, 35, 39, 43, 139–62, 164 Sewell, Margaret, settlement worker, 13, 48, 99–101, 103 sexual morals, 65–8; 156. See also prostitution Shand, Augustus, 85 silk manufacture, 52 Simey, Margaret, historian, 3, 8–9, 19–20, 24–5, 33, 39, 41, 50, 74, 176–7n32 Simey, Thomas, historian, 3, 8–9, 19–20, 24–5, 33, 39, 41, 50, 74, 176–7n32 Slingo, Feargus O’Conner, headmaster, 118 Smith, Captain Miss, Hackney Wick, 58, 67 Smith, Hubert Llewellyn, Booth researcher, 43 social Darwinism, 30–1, 100–1 Social Gospellers, 74 socialism, 5, 9, 13, 23, 36, 40, 47–8, 73, 124 Solly, Henry, club founder, 44 Sommerville, Rev., Southwark minister, 88, 96 South London Press, 14, 84, 104, 122–3, 154, 157, 161

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Spencer, Herbert, social theorist, 30, 39 Sprott, W.J.H., sociologist, 22 Spurgeon, C.H., Calvinist, 174n75 Stanton, Rev. Arthur, St Alban’s Holborn, 68–9 starvation, 14, 43 Stedman Jones, Gareth, historian, 9, 105, 110, 114, 146 Steer, Rev. W.H. Hornby, St Phillip’s Lambeth and Kennington, 54–6, 116 Stepney Guardians, 52–3 strikes, 15, 139–41; Bryant and May Matchgirls’ Strike (1888), 122, 139–41; Dock Strike (1889) 50, 141 suicide, 144, 156–8 Sumner, Rev. John Bird, Archbishop of Canterbury, 27 Sweetnam, Rev., Bow minister, 117, 136 Switzerland, 25 Talbot, Rev. Edward S., Bishop of Southwark, 73, 90–2 teachers, 90, 136, 141–2, 161–2 teaching, 134–6 Thane, Pat, historian, 43 theatre(s), 16, 107, 146–50 theology, incarnational, 68–72. See also religion Thompson, E.P., historian, 115 Thorne, Susan, historian, 135 thrift, 15, 41, 46, 48, 53, 101, 112, 129–36 Tomkins, Mr, missioner, 148 Topham, Mr, Salvation Army ­official, 61–2 Tosh, John, historian, 21

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Index 225

Toynbee, Harry V., COS official, 11, 48, 84–5, 94–5 Toynbee Hall, 50–1 Tozer, F.E., Hackney missioner, 120 Trevelyan, Charles, civil servant, 26, 28–9, 36, 80 unions, 15, 50, 105, 106, 140; Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union, 50; New Unionism, 50 Unitarians, 19, 26, 36 Vance, Norman, historian, 59 Vicinus, Martha, historian, 91, 93 Vincent, A.W., historian, 9–10 Vincent, David, historian, 107 violence, 15, 46, 66–7, 109, 142–3, 158–9 Vorspan, Rachel, historian, 128 wages. See money Walker, F.A., economist, 39 Walkowitz, Judith, historian, 140 Wallace, Rev., St Luke’s Bethnal Green, 57 Walsh, Rev., St Anne’s South London, 113–14 Ward, Nurse, Southwark, 145 Webb, Beatrice (Potter), social reformer, 21, 33, 44, 47–8, 142 Webb, Sidney, social reformer, 44, 47–8 Wheeler, Charles, social worker, 75 Whewell, Professor William, 27–8 Wilkins, Rev. John, Camberwell Congregationalist, 115–16 Wilkinson, Richard, social epidemiologist, 107–8, 139, 159, 162, 186–7n26

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Williams, Rev. Fletcher, Hackney Unitarian, 67 Williams, Rev. William, Lambeth preacher, 59 Williams, S.C., historian, 150 Wills, Ensign, Salvationist, 153 Winkworth, J., Mile End teacher, 142 women, 15–17, 45, 48, 86–103, 131, 140–6, 152, 158–62; and alcohol, 16, 63, 90, 112, 140–1, 156–62; and charity, 86–103; emancipation of, 12, 93; employment of, 145–6; feminists, 12–13; ministers’ wives, 12, 88; as relief workers and missioners, 12–13, 16–17, 45, 86–103, 136; violence amongst, 158–9 Women’s University Settlement, 13, 87–8, 99–100 Woollcombe, H.L., charity official, 48, 89

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workhouse(s), 5, 115, 121, 124, 126–7. See also labour colonies working classes, 5–18, 26–7, 30, 35, 38–42, 44, 52–3, 63–8, 75, 98–9, 102, 104–38, 163–4; antipathy towards charity, 59–60, 121–4, 166–7; anxiety of, 14, 91, 107–8, 119, 147, 156–63, 165; as charity workers, 136–8; divisions of, 4–6, 10, 14, 38–47, 104–23, 140–5, 163– 4; mass meetings of, 150–2; mobility of, 60–1, 110–15, 136– 7, 142, 155, 164; morality and behaviour of, 5–6, 63–7, 104– 14, 139–62; self-criticism, 10, 110–11, 166–7; status consciousness of, 13, 40, 106–15, 124–9, 135–6, 140–1, 149, 152, 163. See also poor workingmen’s clubs, 44 Wright, David, historian, 16, 160

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