THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS OF 'SIBYL'
Exterior of a University settlement in the East End. The scene in the
street. Various functions of the University settlers within. General
supervision of health arrangements; putting the law in motion to that
end. Conciliation between masters and men. The higher culture for East
End pupils. Coaching a Bethnal Green four. Earlier efforts in this
direction. S.W. slum boys in Belgravian drawing rooms. The young lady
and the ubiquitous jockey. The settlements and clubs of to-day at the
East End of London foreshadowed by earlier organizations in the
provinces by the agencies of the Christian socialists; the working
man's colleges, etc. The inside life of settlements and clubs to-day.
Schools of character to all concerned. General analogy between West
End and East End clubs. Some details of the good work done for, and
by, both sexes, young and old. A City missioner's testimony. Then and
now in the East End. A. Toynbee; T. H. Green and this movement. Rules
suggested by personal experience for the conduct of this intercourse
between different classes.
In a street broad and clean, as many of those at the extreme East End of
London are, but still in the heart of an unmistakably poor, often a
squalid quarter, is a house which, resembling its fellows in architecture,
presents even as to its exterior the appearance of being inhabited by
persons of a better sort. On the pavement outside groups of men, women and
boys are waiting for admission. The door is opened presently, not by a
servant of either sex, but by a person, evidently a gentleman, in the
prime of early and athletic manhood. The men and women are introduced into
a room on the ground floor. Their host hears perhaps of a fever having
broken out not a hundred yards off; of a home distrained upon for unpaid
rent by an impatient landlord, or gutted of its furniture by the broker's
man, of a local inspector's failure to order the demolition of dwellings
unfit for human habitation, of a strike imminent near the Docks, and
likely in its results to leave tens of households without clothing or
food. If this be the tale poured into the ears of the young Oxford or
Cambridge graduate, he at once hurries off to see whether his personal
influence, strengthened as it is by some years of varied local experience,
cannot move the landlord to give his tenants one more chance; or whether
the tact, that is not likely to grow rusty from lack of practice, cannot
promote a compromise between masters and men; or whether the knowledge of
municipal law, acquired by many months of careful reading, with the help
of local illustrations, cannot be so brought to bear upon the parochial
officer as to induce him duly to execute the letter of the Sanitary
Statute.
If none of these things have to be done the lads may be called into the
chamber which serves the resident for the purpose of study and pupil-room.
It is, in fact, just such another den as very likely may have been
occupied by our graduate a couple of years ago when he was an Eton master
and saw his private pupils at his quarters in Keate's Lane. It by no means
follows that the subject of his conversation with these East End lads is
primarily scholastic or strictly educational. The University resident at
the East End has brought with him the taste for athletics of all kinds
which he acquired on the Isis or the Cam. He devotes as much time to
teaching his East End pupils cricket or oarsmanship as to awakening and
satisfying their interest in learning or letters. He and his party are
therefore very likely to be seen taking the omnibus or rail if the
afternoon be fine, to Putney or Hammersmith, where the spectators on the
bank will soon be cheering a Bethnal Green four practising starts with a
Leander or a University crew.
The building of whose interior a glance has been given is probably the
hired house in which two or three members of the Academic or Public School
settlement live. It may be one of the many clubs for adults, for boys or
girls, which to-day are scarcely less common in the purlieus of Poplar
than are clubs of a different sort in St James's or Pall Mall. These
institutions are among the chief instruments of civilization on which the
new settlers rely. No one now doubts the service to the manners and the
morals of the upper classes rendered by the joint-stock caravanserais of
the West End. Three bottle men, as readers of Thackeray may see for
themselves, lasted throughout the epoch of coffee houses. They very
generally disappeared with the replacement of coffee houses by clubs, and
with the early adjournment from the dinner table to the smoking room. A
club-man in his cups was found to be a nuisance. A new public opinion was
created against an old vice. Protracted potations rapidly became, as
Hamlet desired, more honoured in the breach than in the observance, till a
toper in St James's became as rare as a bishop in a billiard room. An
analogous reform in the East End as in the West has been worked by a like
agency. The fittings and the environments of the institution differ in the
two regions. Their moral influence is identical in both. In this matter,
too, as in so many other modes of social improvement, the Metropolis
followed the lead of the provinces. East End clubs, in contradistinction
to boozing-dens, existed indeed long before University settlements were
known, or before Edward Denison's first visit to Whitechapel was paid; but
not before at Lancaster in 1860, the Working Men's Mutual Improvement and
Recreation Society had flourished for some little time. In like manner,
the University settlements now spoken of, had been preceded by the
organized efforts of the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Thomas Hughes, and other
representatives of what was then called Christian socialism, to establish
by the college for working men in Great Ormond Street a living connection
between University influence and industrial well being. Even working men's
colleges had existed in the country before F. D. Maurice made his London
experiment. Sheffield witnessed the first of these during the early
fifties. Oxford and Cambridge towns were not long behind. Thus the
promoters of academic settlements were not without the benefit of the
experience of their earlier predecessors as well as of the public spirited
association of their contemporaries. The Working Men's Club and Institute
Union had been founded in 1862 by Lord Brougham and Lord Lyttelton. Much
of the machinery, as well as a nucleus, for the endeavours of the
settlers of a latter day was ready to their hands before they began their
work. But the idea of the combination of gymnasium with club, and of the
subordination of the roughest kind of physical exercise to the ends of
social culture had not been illustrated on any extensive scale before
institutions like the Repton or the Oxford House clubs were controlled by
men who took this way of doing honour to the name of their University or
their school.
Before this, ladies living in Belgravia, revering the memory and example
of Maurice, were in the habit of inviting to their drawing rooms from the
alleys and by-ways in which the fashionable district abounds poor boys who
could not be tempted, even with the bait of magic lanterns, to the night
school. The work was found to be rather too exacting. The chivalry of
street boyhood did not, as might have been foreseen, prevent the urchins
from gratifying their sense of fun at her expense in the drawing room of
the amateur teacher. The joke of giving, as their names, those of the
famous jockeys of the hour, Fordham, Archer, Cannon, as the case may be,
proved too good to be resisted. Gravity, once disturbed, could not be
restored. The pupils could do nothing but laugh at each other's fun. Their
would-be instructress had to acquiesce in their removal when the servant
came to clear away the tea things. A public feeling in favour of order and
even cleanliness has long since been generated in the boys' clubs
controlled by the University settlers. First the prejudice against collars
as an article of attire goes out; then a feeling in favour of washed hands
sets in. In the recreation rooms upstairs boxing gloves are provided as a
safety valve for the escape of the superfluous humours of Arab animalism.
Then by slow degrees comes the hour when bagatelle boards may be
introduced without danger of their being used for the breaking of heads,
or of the bagatelle cues being employed for the perforation of the
lath-and-plaster walls instead of for the propulsion of the ivory balls.
The parents are provided with the same sort of accommodation as their
children. The adult clubs are chiefly of two kinds. In some, the first
purpose is political. In that case the society becomes an agency for the
propagation of Radical ideas, and probably an outwork of Trades-Unionism.
But from many of these foundations politics, which are generally
synonymous with advanced Liberalism, are excluded. In the majority, if not
in all, of the non-political clubs, intoxicating drinks, though under
conditions they were sanctioned by the early founders, are by common
agreement, prohibited also. The popularity of these clubs with the wives
of their habitues is a sufficient proof of the sobering tendency of the
new resorts. In all cases, the women gain scarcely less advantage from
them than the men. Each club is an organization for social entertainments
and hospitalities to which members are free to bring all their women-kind.
The dominant idea of the University settlement to which these clubs are
subsidiary, is to give the poorest and most densely populated working
class districts the benefit of a resident gentry such as, in the clergyman
or the squire, is generally commanded in rural parishes. The local
separation between employer and employed; the fact that the workers do
not, as they used to do, dwell to-day within sight of their masters, but
are segregated into colonies of their own in another quarter of the
capital, and have no access to persons better informed than themselves in
the troubles and perplexities, big or small, of everyday existence, first
prompted those who realized the perils of this situation, to make, as far
as might be, common lot with their less fortunate fellow creatures. In New
York, where these societies seem to have been known longer than in
England, the phrase employed is Neighbourhood Guild. To obtain the local
knowledge which can alone enable the most wise or charitable to give
effective help, habitual residence under conditions and in neighbourhoods
identical with the class to be benefited is absolutely necessary. The
University settler becomes in fact a sort of Delphic Oracle, consulted on
all embarrassing contingencies by the entire neighbourhood. To vary the
simile, the enquiries made of him are not less various than the questions
which the editor of a popular print undertakes to answer in his
Correspondence column. The doubts and complications arising out of the law
of landlord and tenant, especially out of that enigmatic being, the
compound householder who so long obstructed the path of Household
Franchise, require a practical knowledge of often abstruse legal points
and sometimes compel resort to a professional solicitor. The precise steps
necessary to put in motion the Statute for the removal of hopelessly
insanitary dwellings are not likely to be within the knowledge of the
dwellers by the Docks. These are only a few of the knots which for the
instruction of those he has chosen for neighbours, the University settler
must be prepared to untie. And this is only one of the duties which he
actually performs. He not only takes part in the municipal government of
his neighbourhood; he helps others to take part in it, too. Already he has
himself sat on School Boards and trained grown-up pupils to fill his
place.
Nor is it always necessary to speak in the masculine gender. University
settlements are no more limited to a single sex than the tripos work of
the Cambridge Senate House, or of the Extension lecture rooms, which enjoy
the patronage of the Oxford schools. Nor is it the Universities only that
are represented by these feminine settlements. The Cheltenham Ladies'
College, one of the earliest, if not the first, of that kind of public
schools for English girls, has already made a sensible difference in
hundreds of lives in the extreme East of the town. Among the special works
of which the Cheltonians have set an example is that of enabling poor
mothers to procure for their children at seasons of need not merely the
conventional 'day in the country,' but a sojourn of weeks, or even months,
in a healthy cottage home on the seashore of Sussex or on the fragrant
uplands of Kent. The machinery for accomplishing this has now been brought
to a very high point of efficiency and indeed perfection. The Cheltenham
ladies and their colleagues, associated under the respective matrons of
the institutions, have a long list of simple honest folk within a few
hours' journey of London who can be trusted to look after their little
charges during their stay beneath their roof, and to send back to their
homes the small boys and girls visibly better than when the children were
first received by their hosts. Sometimes the Guilds of the different sexes
may combine their efforts for hospitalities and entertainments, a magic
lantern and lecture, it may be, or during the winter season a Christmas
tree followed by supper and a dance, or to speak more correctly a general,
though not uncontrolled, romp.
Most, if not all, of these East End clubs, which the University settlers
aim at teaching their members to run for themselves, rather than
indefinitely to leave their management to outside friends, are federated
to a central association, that the late Lord Lyttelton took a prominent
part in organizing. This was the body which, as has been already said,
decided that stronger drinks than water should not absolutely be
forbidden; but that central supervision should be exercised closely over
all the establishments, and that prompt action should be taken when any
breach of order, corporate or individual, was reported. The average
standard of order maintained has improved, and is still improving.
Generally and individually the club members have realized that their
material interest lies in checking the first beginnings of misconduct, and
in dealing with the offenders not only as guilty individually of a breach
of order, but as violating the first principles of collective fellowship.
Such a conviction indicates the progress made towards the creation of a
healthy opinion upon social matters with those who, a few years ago, would
have been pronounced by experts to be invulnerably proof against any
sentiment of the sort. East End boys are no doubt mischievous, and even
destructive creatures. So, for that matter, are all boys. If their
brethren of the upper class do not break out in the same way as the urchin
East Enders, that is because the march of refinement through the West End
has trodden out the old race of small boys and girls, and has replaced
them by little men and women whose only childhood will be reached in their
dotage. The very interesting experiences recorded in the volume entitled:
_The Universities and the Social Problem_[32] do indeed include some
rather alarming freaks of the East End waggishness. But to the small boy
in rags the process of whose reclamation from Bethnal Green barbarism to
Christian civilization had only begun a few weeks since, the trick of
pouring a paraffin can over a sleeping foe, and then applying a match, did
not seem more of an atrocity than to a West End boy of the same age might
have appeared the joke, borrowed from the pantomime stage, of placing the
baby on the floor by the door for the entering nurse to tumble over, or of
putting a red hot poker too close to be pleasant or even safe to the nose
of an unpopular housemaid. Men like Dr Barnardo or General Booth, who
both know something of Whitechapel waifs and strays, have not thought that
poor children in the East End inherit an exceptional amount of original
sin. Nor have they, nor others, discovered that ragged boys, nurtured on
fried fish and unspeakable pudding are incapable of being disciplined into
habits of obedience, truthfulness, and humanity, even though their ideas
of permissible humour be not bounded by the conventional limits of
gentleness and good taste. The administrators of the People's Palace, for
some time after the fancy of Sir Walter Besant was translated into fact,
were not always sanguine as to the feasibility of civilizing their young
patrons, even through the agency of pictures or swimming baths, thick
slices of bread and butter, buns, and fried haddock purchasable not much
above, if not something below, cost price. To-day, though the social
deportment in the pleasure grounds of Bethnal Green may lack the
superficial polish, and the innate breeding, of the crowds at the
Westminster Aquarium or the South Kensington Museum, a considerable
advance is recorded on the part of the Harrys and the Harriets of Poplar
and Whitechapel towards the carriage and conduct of the cynosures of less
outlandish suburbs on Bank Holiday. There is no body of men who know
unfashionable London better, or who deserve more honour for the service
which they render to it than the members of the London City Mission. The
work of these missioners, though undenominational, is religious rather
than aesthetic. But they are shrewd observers of the social aspects of the
neighbourhoods they visit. Their opinion of the practical results of the
agencies that have here been described may be summed up in the words of a
missioner to the present writer: 'It marks an epoch in East End
civilization of which ten years ago Christian charity would itself have
despaired.'
The functions exercised by the controlling authority of the Working Men's
Club and Institute Union are educational as well as disciplinary. There is
no reason now why any one of the affiliated societies, however impecunious
it may be or however impoverished the district wherein it may exist,
should be without as good a library as one of Mr Mudie's subscribers, or
should not know almost as much about the history and antiquities of the
British capital as the late Dean Stanley himself. The controllers of the
union often make liberal advances in money for the purchase of books by
the local clubs. Should these funds not be forthcoming, book boxes with
wisely chosen contents circulate among the members of a Home Readers'
Union. The volumes thus distributed are real literature. The subjects to
which they relate are methodically mastered by the readers who themselves
have selected them, and have not acted on the initiative of the more
highly educated residents, Peripatetic encyclopaedias like Mr Augustus Hare
or Mr Percy Fitz-Gerald are ever ready to 'take walks' with them.
Omniscient divines, such as Dean Bradley or Dean Farrar personally conduct
them through their cathedrals into the heart of English history. Nor are
the literary studies chosen merely because they are likely to help the
student in his everyday work, and therefore improve his earnings. The
biographies of the statesmen and soldiers of old Greece, the dramatic
vicissitudes of the Republics of mediaeval Italy, even the philosophy as
well as the language of Dante or of Macchiavelli are taken up by men after
a day's manual work with an energy that would shame an undergraduate
returning from a wine party to read for his Schools. This, too, seems to
be the experience of American settlements as well, of Hull House, Chicago,
or of Andover House, Boston. In their capacity of schools of citizenship,
as well as of education, the American settlements have felt the immediate
benefit of the Oxford influence and example, incarnated not only in Arnold
Toynbee, but in the late T. H. Green, professor of mental and moral
philosophy, whose pupil Toynbee was; while Green in his turn had been the
disciple of Benjamin Jowett. Good citizenship was the ideal ever present
to the late Master of Balliol in his dealings with his pupils, just as it
had been present centuries earlier to Socrates in his discourses to Plato,
or in his conversations with Alcibiades. Green probably made the most
valuable of recent contributions to the speculative thought and science of
his University, of his country, or of his generation. He was, also, a
prominent and active member of the Oxford Town Council, and of other local
bodies. By their lessons in the theory and practice of citizenship, taught
more publicly than it fell to the lot of their master to teach, the Oxford
settlers at the East End have improved upon Green's example, with much of
his zeal, and not a little of his success. More than twenty years ago the
East End neighbourhoods now mentioned were first visited by the present
writer, to inform himself for those portions of an earlier work, relating
to that part of unfashionable London.[33] Thanks mainly to the influence
and teaching of the Rev. S. A., since Canon, Barnett, great improvements
in the domestic economy and material fittings of the humblest households
had begun, even then to be visible. The later experiences and their social
results, which have now been described, have made it possible for the
writer to contrast the East End of the later eighties with that of the
later nineties. The scale and the precise modes of manifestation are of
course widely different, but if due allowance be made for the social
disparity of Mayfair and Mile End, it is no exaggeration to say that the
increased attention to the prettinesses of life shown in the boudoirs and
drawing rooms of fashionable London is reflected in the parlours of those
purlieus now spoken of. These though their civilization be still
incomplete, have to a great extent under the agencies that have here been
examined, ceased to be manifestly poverty-stricken or repulsively hideous.
The discipline of character that the settlements provide for the settlers
is at least as salutary as the consequences they involve for the district,
whether it be in the East End, in Camberwell, or in Notting Hill, that the
settlement is made. The social education for the West End club-man of his
joint stock palace in Pall Mall is trivial in comparison with the training
that will be administered to him by a few visits to the East End club, of
which he may be made free, or of which perhaps he may himself have been a
founder. The assistance of those in such a position as the University
settlers is appreciated cordially by the working club-men. 'We always
need, to begin with, the help of some of you gentlemen of the Oxford
Settlement. Afterwards if you look in upon us from time to time, we can
keep things going pretty well for ourselves.' Such is the common remark of
the settler's friends. Of its practical truth there seems little doubt.
The University settler and his friends in his own station are not,
however, on this account to suppose that within these clubs their society
is courted as a favour or regarded as a compliment. On the contrary, the
atmosphere and sentiment of the place are uncompromisingly democratic. If
the West Ender, by his talk or manner contributes anything of pleasure or
profit to the social pool, then he is welcomed just as he would be on the
same terms in the coteries of Pall Mall, or at the dining tables of Hyde
Park. If, on the other hand, there be, perhaps unconsciously to himself a
suspicion of condescension in his bearing, or a too visible effort after
edification in his talk, then as peremptorily as he could be among his own
equals at the West End, he will be voted a bore, and shunned as a prig at
the East End. The roughest specimens of Whitechapel or Ratcliffe require,
not less, but rather more tact for their management, than other people
need. If that be forthcoming, the youths, whose element is destruction,
whose ambition is to be a professional pugilist or a champion strong man,
but who seldom desert one to whom their loyalty has been given, and who
are the raw material with which British officers win victories on the
field against the heaviest odds, are perfectly manageable. The most
aggressively republican of Arabs becomes the most gentle and gracious of
fellow citizens. But if either of them detect signs of patronage among
their politer visitors, their backs are at once up; metaphorically their
bristles stand on end like hairs upon the fretful porcupine. Familiarity
they neither expect nor wish. They would even resent it. Their view of the
courtesies and proprieties of friendly intercourse do not in effect differ
from those held by their superiors. They are abundantly content if these
ideas are practically recognized. It is with those who are removed by a
single degree in the social scale above these rough diamonds, but who
consider themselves altogether their superiors, that the difficulty
begins. No class of servants are so troublesome as the footman tribe. No
section of the body politic proves more vexatious than the intermediate
order between the lower and the very lowest division of the middle class.
The genuine working man in the working man's club causes none of those
embarrassments which one encounters upon a level rather higher than that
of the outcasts of Camberwell or Notting Hill, the waifs and strays of
Whitechapel or Shoreditch. If the problem of association is practically to
be solved to the satisfaction of all those concerned, there is one golden
rule always to be followed. Postulating a common amount of tact and sense
on the part of the University settler, or one who essays that position,
let him begin by being natural, let him shun as the presage of failure any
conscious effort to place his lowlier fellow creature at his ease. Above
all, let him never offer his hand to shake. He himself may think the
manual overture will gratify the person to whom it is made by showing
that the maker 'has no false pride.' A greater mistake there could not be,
as a well-born academic socialist found out when, to demonstrate his faith
in the equality of all men, he shook hands with his brother's footman on
receiving his shaving water. These strained amenities are an effort to him
who volunteers them, and an infliction to him who receives them, a failure
and a mistake, in fact, all round. The secret of Edward Denison's and of
Arnold Toynbee's influence for good with their inferiors was that they not
only knew these truths, but always acted on them. Hence, by their own
work, and by the generation of workers whom they raised up to follow them
and at whose methods we have now glanced, so much was done to span the
gulf separating 'the two nations' of the English people.