SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND
Private and individual efforts which have quickened the sense of
citizenship in England and bridged the gulf between rich and poor.
Historic and abiding influences of the Young England movement of 1846.
How it facilitated the Factory Acts and prompted private owners to
open their parks to the public. Temple Gardens and Lincoln's Inn.
Effect produced by the brothers Mayhew with their _London Labour_ and
_London Poor_ during the fifties, and also by certain articles in the
_Times_ and _Quarterly Review_. Lord Shaftesbury, the Poor Man's Peer.
Origin of Public School and University settlements in great towns.
Edward Denison and his friends before Arnold Toynbee. Individual
example acting on public or corporate owners. Educate the public and
actuate legislation when the time is ripe for it. Sir Erasmus Wilson's
gift of Cleopatra's Needle preceded beautification of Thames
Embankment.
The practical sense of citizenship by which, in the preceding chapter, the
Jewish community in England has been seen to be animated is among native
Englishmen themselves pre-eminently the development of the Victorian era.
Its manifestation in the capital was preceded by its active display in the
provinces. Few individuals of our epoch have more appreciably and
definitely impressed the image of their genius on the social history of
their age, than Benjamin Disraeli, first, and only, Earl of Beaconsfield.
This is not the occasion on which to examine his position in, and
services to, the public life of the period, as well as his place in the
inner economy of the polite world. In the social movement of the
industrial classes of the community, especially in their relations with
their more highly placed neighbours, the work done by this remarkable man
is not less conspicuous than it is seemingly enduring.[17] The political
school which, at the outset of his career his genius created, that of
Young England in the ninth year of the present reign, did not last long as
a political organization. It was never intended to do so. Of the little
coterie whose inspiring literature is contained in the trilogy of romance
that is constituted by _Coningsby_, _Sibyl_, and _Tancred_, the sole
survivor is the Duke of Rutland. Even he, perhaps, is better known to many
readers as Lord John Manners. He was first introduced to the general
public by the style of 'Lord Henry Sidney' in his friend's earliest novel.
With pardonable pride in a letter incorporated by the editor of the
_Quarterly Review_ in an article on _Sibyl_,[18] the Duke of Rutland
points back to the undoubted service which the sentiment generated by the
Young Englanders rendered to Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, and to Mr
Oastler in their gradually successful efforts to pass the First Factory
Act as well as generally to soften, perhaps even to sweeten the daily lot
of the suffering, the defenceless, and the poor. At that time, the humane
and religious fervour of Lord John Russell had not yet leavened, as it
soon afterwards did, aristocratic Whiggism. Mr Gladstone's spiritualizing
touch was still to be laid upon the party that he was yet to join. The
scientific economists of the school of Peel, comprising as they did Cobden
and Bright, were the enemies of the movement. Even the pioneer of that
movement, who afterwards nobly vindicated his claim to the title of the
Poor Man's Peer, was indignantly asked what he, Lord Shaftesbury, had been
doing, when Lord Ashley was fighting for the Ten Hours Bill of 1844.[19]
His virtuous indignation obscured this critic's view of the fact that the
peer he praised was identical with the peer he denounced.
If this were the context in which to illustrate the political permanence
of the Young England agency, it would be enough to point to the
perpetuation in the knights, dames, and chancellors of the Primrose
League, of the sensibility to picturesque or semi-feudal effects which
inspired Disraeli and his friends in their manipulation of Conservative
sentiment. These qualities, at an interval of just half a century, were to
reappear in Disraeli's aptest[20] pupil, Lord Randolph Churchill. As a
social and unpolitical testimony to the quickening power of the new
England propaganda, when its promulgation was an affair of yesterday, it
may be mentioned that at the Queen's accession, as for many years
thereafter, it was comparatively an unknown thing for the private parks
surrounding gentlemen's houses in the provinces to be used as people's
pleasure grounds. Show places on such a scale as Blenheim or Chatsworth
existed then as they exist to-day. Even in the case of the former of
these, in prae-_Coningsby_ or ante-Victorian days, it is not likely to have
occurred to a Duke of Marlborough, as it did occur to the seventh
successor of John Churchill, being the eighth Duke, to engage a special
train to convey several thousands of East End children from their native
courts and alleys to the undulating woodlands of his Oxfordshire park.
Within a few years of the appearance of _Coningsby_, Eaton was only one of
the great parks which, so long as certain reasonable restrictions were
observed, became not less free to town or country labourers with their
wives and children than Kensington Gardens, or, as what till our age was
called Battersea Fields.[21] Royal patronage had not been withheld from
the movement. The memories of the present generation stop short of a time
when Windsor Park, together with the gardens and terraces of the Castle,
was inaccessible to excursionists by the Great Western Railway to view the
natural panorama bright with all the beauties of 'blossom week,' or to
hear the band on the slopes play the favourite pieces of the Queen. The
capital was not yet fully abreast with this piece of social progress. Long
after the gardens and the general maintenance of the public parks endowed
them with fresh attractions, the private pleasure grounds of corporate
owners were closed. The new philanthropic reforms were introduced here by
the noble structure of the Thames Embankment. The Temple Gardens had,
indeed, long been open. The flower beds and their careful tending were
still to come. The Benchers of Lincoln's Inn were more exclusive. The new
buildings, as they are called, flanking this enclosure, date from 1845.
The Lincoln's Inn Fields' theatre had disappeared in 1848. Nearly half a
century was still to elapse before the leafy paradise in the heart of this
austere kingdom of Chancery law was to ring with childish voices from the
courts and alleys which abut on Chancery Lane.
Within fifty years of the Queen's accession, the personal example of that
Lord Shaftesbury whose name has been mentioned already was to bear rich
fruit. In the _Times_ newspaper during the earlier sixties, there appeared
a leading article on the subject of the homeless poor of London. It was
equally noticeable for the humanity which inspired it, and for its
vigorous and graphic expression. Not long before this, an interest, then
entirely new, had been imparted to the grim subject by an essay in the
_Quarterly Review_ based on the then comparatively recent volumes about
London labour and the London poor by the brothers Mayhew. A host of
writers have treated this subject subsequently. Many of them,
conspicuously the late Thomas Archer, with a thoroughness and freshness of
knowledge scarcely inferior to that with which it had been approached by
the Mayhews. But in their hands the topic was absolutely new. Without
hyperbole, in literal truth, the West End was then not only ignorant of
how the East End lived, but with very rare individual exceptions, entirely
indifferent to the mingled squalor and tragedy of that existence. Horace
Mayhew survived to a vigorous and remarkably handsome old age, dying only
a few years ago. His work on the deeper depths of London poverty was the
one effort of his life. All his energies were thrown into it. The work
when finished, if it did not exhaust him, left him so depressed by the
misery which he had been investigating that he had no mind to return to
the lighter departments of periodical letters wherein his career
commenced, and his earlier reputation was made. A long period of social
indifference and legislative lethargy as to the condition of the very poor
in the capital and in other great towns now ensued. In 1865, the first
editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, Frederick Greenwood, conceived the idea
of commissioning his brother James, a well known writer on social
subjects, to pass a night in the casual ward of a workhouse, rumours of
abuses in the management of which were then attracting attention. About a
year after this, a winter of exceptional severity afflicted the poorest
portions of London, near the Docks and elsewhere, with the combined
calamities of lack of labour, and as a consequence with famine,
firelessness, and pestilence. Three friends, each of them then young men,
all Conservatives by conviction and all under the influence of the
philanthropic teaching of Disraeli's novels, were in the habit of
frequently meeting with a view of maturing some scheme for the relief of
that destitution at the East End, with which existing agencies of help had
proved themselves impotent to deal. One of these belonged to a well known
Shropshire family, Baldwyn Leighton.[22] Another, Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach, has since become Chancellor of the Exchequer. The third was a
son of a former Bishop of Salisbury. Edward Denison was equally quick to
master the dominant facts in a social situation, and to take the action
that seemed the best thereupon. Within a few days, he decided that the
first step towards remedying the evils recorded morning after morning in
the newspapers must be personal acquaintance with their magnitude, and
their origin, as well as with the habits and homes of the distressed
masses. Denison, therefore, established himself in a small house in
Whitechapel, the very heart of the necessitous district.
Since then, the example thus set has been followed frequently. Denison of
course was sometimes visited in his East End lodging by his West End
friends. These returned, bringing with them a more vivid sense of the
industrial suffering just outside the doors of the polite world than
literary descriptions, however graphic, could convey to the perfunctory
reader of the morning paper. Other incidents were to prove unexpectedly
instrumental in deepening the interest of well-to-do Londoners in their
destitute neighbours. Within a year or two of Denison's mission, the
Fenian outrage at Clerkenwell Prison not only robbed many poor families of
their breadwinners, but left them literally homeless. Disraeli, at that
time Prime Minister, sent down his private secretary to distribute alms
among the victims of the explosion. Mr Montague Corry, since Lord
Rowton,[23] saw sad and strange sights during this charitable errand. His
recital of these experiences was followed by liberal subscriptions to the
sufferers from Pall Mall and Mayfair. From that day to this, not only has
the stream of charity flowed less sluggishly; there has been also awakened
a new personal and intelligent interest in the condition of the most
squalid of poverty's perennial children. That feeling has not evaporated
in charitable doles. Substantial funds have been organized by private or
corporate munificence for improving the dwellings of the poor and for
practically testifying the neighbourly solicitude of more fortunate
citizens.
The demoralizing effects of public executions were exposed by Thackeray.
His essay, 'Going to see a man hung' gave shape, and eventually success to
the movement for the hanging of criminals within, and not outside, the
prison walls. So, at an earlier day, Dickens, who of all our greatest
writers was the first to interest the public in the waifs and strays in
the London streets, had initiated in _Oliver Twist_ a social demand for
workhouse reform. The best causes are liable to abuse and caricature.
There have been moments when, since the Mayhews wrote, sympathy with the
lot of the London poor has seemed in danger of becoming overdone, or being
degraded into a fad, a craze, a fashionable hobby, and thus of ceasing to
be an actuating conviction. The modish popularity of 'slumming' as it used
a few years ago to be called had of course its absurd aspects, but was,
nevertheless, not an unhealthy sign. It could be compared to the froth
upon the surface which concealed, and did not necessarily weaken, the
stimulating and strengthening qualities below. Whether this philanthropic
curiosity was displayed in town or country, the social truth of which it
constituted evidence was that the commercial spirit and its harsher
influences, not unfortunately uncommon among the upper classes in the
early days of the new poor law, were becoming obsolete, and that the class
fusion born of class sympathy to which De Tocqueville has attributed our
later freedom from organic revolutions was in steady process of evolution.
Edward Denison came first of all, and could only see with the eye of faith
the fruits which his example was to bear in the beneficent experiment of
Arnold Toynbee and in the People's Palace. So it has continued, till
to-day the University and public school settlements in the East End of
London and in other great cities are institutions not less deeply rooted
than the parochial system itself. The kindly work is not confined to a
single sex. St Margaret's House, Bethnal Green, the ladies' branch of the
Oxford agency, presided over by Mrs Burrows, is as firmly established as
the homes founded by Trinity or Christ Church in the same neighbourhood.
Throughout the English speaking world, the same beneficent inspiration
seems to have been almost simultaneously operative. One hears of analogous
enterprises in the great cities of Australia and in the United States. The
American movement even claims seniority over the English. Andover House,
Boston, was in full working order before the cognate agencies in our own
capital were complete. The devotion of Trade Unionists to their Union has
been employed as a figure to illustrate the mutual loyalty to a great and
good idea of those brought up in the same College or University or public
school. This reciprocal enthusiasm has now been active and productive long
enough to entitle it to the praise of solidity and permanence. The public
and legal provisions for quickening the sense of citizenship in town and
country will presently be examined in detail. That which seems important
to bear in mind is that the legislature did not interpose its machinery
until the private agencies, social or moral, already recapitulated, had
done their work. Even the improvement in the open spaces of the capital
which is so marked a feature in metropolitan progress during the last few
decades, has been helped or encouraged largely by private initiative. The
late Mr Matthew Arnold recognized as a graceful and original act of public
service, the transport of Cleopatra's Needle from Alexandria to London at
the cost of Sir Erasmus Wilson. Before the obelisk was established on the
Thames Embankment the municipal authorities had prepared a home for it and
converted into daintily kept pleasure grounds the little enclosures by the
side of the riverain promenade.