British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

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British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900 Beauty for the People

Diana Maltz

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the ﬁn de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing inﬂuence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reﬂects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every ﬁeld within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. Titles include: Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors) ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS Editors, Authors, Readers Dennis Denisoff SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950 Laura E. Franey VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE Lawrence Frank VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE The Scientiﬁc Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle Jarlath Killeen THE FAITHS OF OSCAR WILDE Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland Stephanie Kuduk Weiner REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874 Diana Maltz BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900 David Payne THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization Ana Parejo Vadillo WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM Passengers of Modernity

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth Century Writing and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–97700–9 (hardback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900 Beauty for the People Diana Maltz

© Diana Maltz 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4569–3 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4569–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maltz, Diana, 1965– British aestheticism and the urban working classes, 1870–1900 : beauty for the people / Diana Maltz. p. cm. – (Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4569–1 1. English literature–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Aestheticism (Literature) 3. Art and literature–Great Britain–History–19th century. 4. City and town life–Great Britain–History–19th century. 5. Social problems–Great Britain–History–19th century. 6. Working class–Great Britain–History– 19th century. 7. Urban poor–Great Britain–History–19th century. 8. Working class–Great Britain–Intellectual life. 9. Asthetic movement (Art)–Great Britain. 10. Aesthetics, British–19th century. I. Title. II. Series. PR468.A33.M35 2005 820.9′357–dc22

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To my mother, Millie Maltz, and my nieces, Susannah, Julia, and Olivia Maltz

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Contents List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

What is Missionary Aestheticism? An Introduction

1

1 The Social Strands of Aestheticism

19

2 Octavia Hill and the Aesthetics of Victorian Tenement Reform

41

3 ‘In ample halls adorned with mysterious things aesthetic’: Toynbee Hall as Aesthetic Haven

67

4 The Museum Opening Debate and the Combative Discourses of Sabbatarianism and Missionary Aestheticism

98

5 ‘Art is the Handmaid of Religion’: Slum Ritualism as Missionary Aestheticism

132

6 George Gissing’s Hopes and Fears for a Popular British Aestheticism

174

Conclusion: Missionary Aestheticism as Emancipatory Aesthetics?

206

Notes

218

Works Cited

263

Index

279

vii

List of Figures Figure 1.1 G. F. Watts, Janey Nassau Senior. 26 Figure 1.2 Luke Fildes, ‘Houseless and Hungry,’ The Graphic 1 (1869): 9. 29 Figure 1.3 Charles Keene, ‘Mrs. M: “Oh you must see my cabinet of cur’osities. I’m awful partial to Bric-Bats,”’ Punch 84 (17 March 1883): 131. 35 Figure 1.4 W. P. Frith, Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. 36 Figure 1.5 (unsigned cartoon), ‘Our Academy Guide, No. 163 – Private Frith’s View. Members of the Salvation Army, led by General Oscar Wilde, joining in a hymn,’ Punch 84 (12 May 1883): 220. 37 Figure 1.6 George Du Maurier, ‘What It Has Come To,’ Punch 80 (16 April 1881): 177. 38 Figure 1.7 George Du Maurier, ‘Reﬁnements of Modern Speech,’ Punch 76 (14 June 1879): 270. 39 Figure 3.1 Michelangelo, Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici. 83 Figure 3.2 Frontispiece from the Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Florence. 85 Figure 3.3 Page of painting and text from the Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Siena, Perugia and Assisi. 86 Figure 3.4 Sketch of Italian peasants from the Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Siena, Perugia and Assisi. 87 Figure 3.5 George Du Maurier, ‘The Very Latest Craze; Or, Overdoing It,’ Punch 85 (22 December 1883): 294. 90 Figure 3.6 George Du Maurier, ‘In Slummibus,’ Punch 86 (3 May 1884): 210. 90 Figure 3.7 W. Q. Orchardson, Her First Dance (1884). 91 Figure 3.8 Napoleon Sarony, photograph of Oscar Wilde (1882). 92 Figure 4.1 Charles Keene, ‘Shocking!’ Punch 82 (6 May 1882): 207. 122

viii

Acknowledgments In its earliest incarnation as a Stanford doctoral thesis, this study beneﬁted from the insights of a congenial and thoughtful committee, Regenia Gagnier, Robert Polhemus, and Jocelyn Marsh. Over time, Dr Gagnier has reread various sections in evolution, and has continued to offer her ideas, kind encouragement and wise mentorship. At Stanford, I was also fortunate to join an extraordinarily friendly and supportive Victorianist graduate reading group. Kenneth Brewer, Jason Camlot, Lisa Jenkins, Stephanie Kuduk, Richard Menke, Paul SaintAmour, Ardel Thomas, and Kate Washington read and critiqued sections of this work with characteristic good humor and intellectual rigor. Beyond the Stanford circle, two scholars have kindly exchanged drafts-in-progress with me for many years. The social historian Seth Koven was instrumental in pointing me to the Toynbee Travellers’ journals, and his work on slumming and cultural philanthropy is imprinted on many of my chapters. Talia Schaffer’s delight in ﬁnde-siècle aesthetic culture and mastery of it were as inspiring to me as her perceptive ideas for revision. I am also grateful for the kindness and friendliness of Mark Samuels Lasner, Margaret Stetz, and Kathy Psomiades. Warren Hedges and Jim Rible helped prepare this book’s images, and in the last days, Pierre Coustillas, Ann Gelder, Anna Grzeszkiewicz, Millie Maltz, and Mitsuharu Matsuoka each assisted me in locating bibliographic cites. Any errors, however, are solely my own. My research developed with the aid of generous postdoctoral fellowships through UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Ahmanson-Getty Foundation in 1999 and the Yale Center for British Art and Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art in 2000. These research fellowships and later participation in a teacher’s exchange in England in 2002 granted me access to new materials and new scholarly company: Anne Anderson, Meaghan Clark, Janice Helland, Ruth Livesey, Joseph McBrinn, Morna O’Neill, Elaine Cheasley Paterson, and Shelagh Wilson have generously shared their research with me. I wish to thank the staffs of the Lenn and Dixie Hannon Library at Southern Oregon University, Stanford University Libraries, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA, the New York ix

x Acknowledgements

Public Library, the Brooklyn Art Museum Library, Yale University Libraries, the Paul Mellon Center Library, the British Library, and the London Metropolian Archives. I am especially indebted to two Inter-Library Loan specialists: Sonia Moss at Stanford, whose nearmiraculous acquisition of Sabbatarian penny pamphlets enabled me to write Chapter 4, and Anna Beauchamp at Southern Oregon University, whose assiduousness and speed were matched only by her cheer and optimism about the project. Chapter 1 appeared in a shorter form in the essay collection Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, eds. H. M. Daleski and Murray Baumgarten (New York: AMS Press, 1999), 187–211. Earlier versions of Chapter 6 were published as ‘George Gissing as Thwarted Aesthete,’ in A Garland for Gissing, ed. Bouwe Postmus (Rodopi, 2001), 203–13, and ‘Practical Aesthetics and Decadent Rationale in George Gissing,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 55–71. These chapters appear here through the permission of AMS Press, Rodopi Press, and VLC/Cambridge University Press. IIIustrations accompanying my text are courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library; The Corporation of London, London Metropolitan Archives; the IIIustrated London News Picture Library; the National Trust; Scala/Art Resource, New York; the Tate Picture Library; and the William Andrews Clark Library. At Southern Oregon University, Terry DeHay, Bill Gholson, and Ed Battistella worked to secure release time and summer research funding for the completion of this book. I am tremendously obliged to them for their advocacy. The acceptance and prodution of this book by Palgrave Macmillan reawakened me to the pleasures of writing and editorial collaboration. I am grateful to my editors Paula Kennedy, Helen Craine, and Ruth Willats. The typescript beneﬁted greatly from suggestions by the anonymous reviewer and the series editor, Joseph Bristow. On all counts, Dr Bristow has been an inspiring model: an industrious scholar, a tactful editor, a committed mentor, and a kind, gracious friend. As my friends well know, my life has been peripatetic even by academic standards. Fortunately, I found courteous hosts in Rupert Belfrage, Larry Maltz and Chris Kottcamp, Tom and Joyce Moser, Geoff Ridden, and Marijana Weiner. I owe special thanks to two of my oldest friends, Nancy Morowitz and Alfred Eberle. They suggest to me the possibilities of living a life with joy, compassion, and the freedom of art. Lastly, I thank my mother, Millie Maltz, who has never stinted in her love and encouragement.

What is Missionary Aestheticism? An Introduction

One evening Mrs Nassau Senior was in our school, when a specially noisy ﬁght resulted in all the girls tearing out to watch or join in it. ‘What shall we do?’ I asked, as she and I stood alone in the deserted heavy-aired room. ‘I will sing to them,’ she replied, and standing on the raised step at the doorway, the shouting angry ﬁghting crowd just below her, she lifted up her beautiful voice and sang – ‘Angels, ever bright and fair, Take, oh! take me to your care.’ The people heard, found something more interesting than the ﬁght, and gathered round her to listen, and as she stood in the dark court with a background of ﬂaring gas light which turned her ﬂaxen hair into a halo, she seemed to some of us to be one of the angels of whom she sang.1 The narrator of this passage, Henrietta Barnett, and her subject, Janey Nassau Senior, are familiar ﬁgures to scholars of Victorian social reform. Barnett is best known as the energetic co-founder of the university settlement Toynbee Hall. She was also active in the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, an association headed by her friend, the physically frail but equally capable Janey Nassau Senior, with the mission of promoting social purity among working women. Devoting their lives to improving the material and moral condition of the poor, both women fulﬁll our expectations of earnest, bourgeois reformers. Yet this particular excerpt from Barnett’s memoir illuminates an implicit facet of their philanthropic experience: the fantasy of remedying slum chaos and slum brutality through communal aesthetic revelation. 1

2 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

Scenes like this one recur again and again in the letters, diaries, and novels of slum-workers of the 1880s. Philanthropists treasured such moments: here the rightness of their mission seemed luminously clear, conﬁrmed by the natural effects of light and music. Barnett’s narrative reminds us that as engaged as they were in the pragmatic business of philanthropy and invested in heated debates about the dangers of indiscriminate almsgiving, these middle-class reformers were also disciples of John Ruskin, who descended into London’s East End believing that gifts of beauty and culture would civilize and spiritually elevate the poor. In 1987, Ian Fletcher coined the term ‘missionary aesthete’ to describe such men and women.2 He focused on a small and (relative to other societies) more explicitly aesthetic group, the Kyrle Society for the Diffusion of Beauty among the People. Concentrating on satirical representations of wraith-like Kyrle girls and effeminate Kyrle men, Fletcher represented them as a fringe group in the hinterland of legitimate Victorian philanthropy. Yet as I argue in this study, the rhetoric of missionary aestheticism occurs in the literature of reform groups whose aims were more wide-reaching and less obviously cosmetic than the Kyrle’s planting of ﬂowers and laying of mosaic tiles in urban public spaces. A desire to teach the poor an appreciation of beauty pervades the literature of even the most practical late Victorian programs for the social reform of the working classes. The Victorian middle and upper classes institutionalized aestheticism as a species of philanthropy, employing both the rhetoric of aestheticism and actual manifestations of aesthetic style as remedies for urban degradation. Not to be confused with the Victorian phenomenon of the Christian missionary abroad, missionary aestheticism surfaced through an assortment of interrelated movements and societies all bonded by their concern that working people be exposed to beauty. These aesthetes believed that to live an aesthetic life in a practical sense required a commitment to organized movements, so they worked accordingly to provide free concerts, playgrounds, and public gardens in working-class neighborhoods, lobbied for extended museum and gallery opening hours on Sundays, and encouraged artists to open their studios to the poor. While numerous critical studies have been written in the last twenty years about the Aesthetic Movement, and even more on particular nineteenthcentury social reform movements, until now none has investigated the comprehensive inﬂuence of Victorian aestheticism upon philan-

What is Missionary Aestheticism? 3

thropy. It is a sign of how limited received wisdom about British aestheticism has been that no other scholar has devoted a book to its practical application to working-class life and culture. Nor has any historian of Victorian social reform traced the presence of aesthetes on Boards of Guardians and the direct application of aesthetic terminology and trends in the arena of slum philanthropy. My study identiﬁes the social networks that bonded aesthetes to reformers, and, in many cases, claimed aesthetes as reformers.3 As a sub-movement, missionary aestheticism complicates the greater artistic and social movement of British aestheticism. We most commonly associate the Aesthetic Movement proper with the goal of ‘art for art’s sake,’ as popularized by the French novelist Théophile Gautier who, in 1835, had asserted the primacy of artistic form and the freedom of art from performing any political and moral service. Yet in practice, the Aesthetic Movement which evolved in the last quarter of the century in Britain was far more complex.4 While young, selfidentiﬁed Decadents such as the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and the poets Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons pursued art for art’s sake through their daring experiments in form, some aesthetes insisted that art should serve a social purpose: the enhancement of everyday life for everyone. Because the incentives of these aesthetes derived from a tradition other than Gautier, this introduction offers an explanation of missionary aestheticism’s theoretical foundations and a brief overview of its complexities in practice. Beginning with John Ruskin’s and Matthew Arnold’s treatises on the moral and social beneﬁts of disseminating art, it turns to the contributions of Walter Pater, who idealized the Italian Renaissance as an epoch of universal artistic sensibility and venerated the sensitive spectator of art. Pater’s aesthetics, as well as the burgeoning culture of lifestyle aestheticism, complicated the aesthetes’ mission and their reception.5 Aesthetes in the slums became associated in the popular mind, some of them deservedly, with commodities such as aesthetic dress, art-furniture, lilies, and sunﬂowers. Through selected examples, I illustrate the complex entanglements between popular and philanthropic aestheticism in practice. This introduction works to lay the ground for a chapter-by-chapter exploration of missionary aesthetic programs and their reception in late Victorian ﬁction and periodical literature. It concludes with a survey of the book’s chapters and a short note on my methodology and chosen terminology while writing about the working-class recipients of aesthetic charity.

4 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

Ruskinian paternalism and Arnoldian culture The Victorian middle class gained its faith in the dissemination of taste by reading John Ruskin, whose work alternately shows sympathy for the working man made dull by the division of labor and contempt for the ways in which that working man squandered his rare hours of leisure. The answer, he claimed, was in educating the people to know what was beautiful and good; hence, an aesthetic education would teach them discipline as well. For Ruskin, the practice of seeing art rightly was not only contingent upon one’s moral vision, but also beneﬁcial to it. The diligent study of art would ultimately bring about a better society. ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophesy and religion, all in one,’ he wrote in Modern Painters III (1856), asserting that the beauties of nature were proof of God’s existence and that art in itself was praise of God.6 Ruskin further developed his moral aesthetic in the chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’ in the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853): there he determined that no beautiful, noble art could be produced under conditions degrading to its maker. He pursued this idea in lectures at the Working Men’s College in London: ‘Industry without art is brutality, and art without industry is guilt.’7 In his incendiary treatise Unto This Last (1862), Ruskin developed his theory of an ethical aesthetic into an attack on Victorian political economy. Using the model of Biblical parable and dramatically simpliﬁed syntax, Ruskin guided the reader through a series of syllogisms, to show how laissez-faire capitalism, through its abstract goal of increasing production, denied workers a decent livelihood while it rewarded greed. Ruskin distinguishes between the deprivation (‘illth’) that comes from commercial exploitation and the beneﬁcent social ‘wealth’ that would come from distributive justice.8 Yet even as Ruskin demanded the recognition of each worker’s right to fulﬁlling labor and relief from poverty, he found answers not in socialism, but in the model of protective social relations exempliﬁed by the idealized medieval lord toward his vassal. Suspicious of democracy and staunch in his paternalism, Ruskin entrusted a learned aristocracy to assume the task of guiding the poor toward the appreciation of art. Ruskin himself was involved in occasional projects of outreach to teach laborers to ‘see clearly,’ from his role as art instructor at F. D. Maurice’s Working Men’s College beginning in 1854 to his later establishment of the Guild of St George in 1871 and of the Guild’s museum in Shefﬁeld in 1878. The Guild was the channel through which Ruskin attempted small-scale improvements on the quality of

What is Missionary Aestheticism? 5

workers’ lives. Yet each of his modest efforts to maintain a single clean street in the middle of St Giles’ slums, to provide cheap but unadulterated tea to laborers through his own tea-shop in Paddington Street, and to purify the polluted waters of the River Wandel failed.9 To some extent, Ruskin’s poetic temperament undermined his more tangible efforts at educational and social reform. Designing the layout of the Guild Museum, for instance, he insisted that visitors ought to climb a steep hill to reach it because ‘[t]he climb to knowledge was ever steep, and the gems found at the top are small, but precious and beautiful.’10 (Compelled by a similar idealism, in 1874, he guided undergraduates, including Arnold Toynbee and Oscar Wilde, in the illfated building of a road at Ferry Hinksey, outside Oxford, so that they might experience service through honest manual labor.) Ruskin’s uneven writing of the 1870s was hardly a more efﬁcacious means of guiding working people, though he did address his monumental Fors Clavigera, Letters for the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871–84) directly to them. If Ruskin failed to reach many working people directly,11 his insistence that beauty was a necessity of everyday life strongly inspired a generation of middle-class art-philanthropists, including those who founded museums for the poor.12 T. C. Horsfall of the Manchester City Art Museum, Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and William Rossiter of the South London Art Gallery each heeded Ruskin’s advice on what to exhibit for the ediﬁcation of ‘simple persons’: ‘the manifestation to them of what is lovely in the life of Nature, and heroic in the life of Men.’13 Art-philanthropists found that their work entailed teaching workers a new literacy: a Manchester girl, who was passing under a mountain ash-tree, the red berries of which hung close to her face, asked if these were roses. The Rev. Mr Lund told me that a Manchester Sunday School teacher and one of the scholars who had caught a dragon-ﬂy thought – the one that it was a kind of bird, the other that it was a serpent.14 These curators commonly featured as remedies scenes of rural beauty, specimens of birds and insects, and etchings of wildﬂowers and trees. They also exhibited illustrations from the New Testament, representations of moments in English history, and prints from the Old Masters. They maintained ties with existent societies such as the Arundel Society, founded in 1849 to produce cheap chromolithographs of Italian Renaissance art for schoolrooms, and they participated in newer

6 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

societies with similar goals such as the Art for Schools Association (founded in 1883), the Fitzroy Picture Society (1891), and the Medici Society (1908).15 Horsfall displayed etchings of beautiful towns in Europe, so that children in Manchester would grow up to demand equally ‘healthy happy’ lives.16 Art-philanthropists provided practical classes in woodcarving and drawing, and in the case of Manchester and Whitechapel, such course offerings expanded with the development of contiguous university settlements. Galleries for the working classes and the promotional literature about them were saturated in Ruskinism. The Barnetts frequently quoted Ruskin in their exhibition catalogues.17 The central room of William Rossiter’s South London Art Gallery was named after Ruskin, and the gallery’s decorative symbol was inspired by a line of his writings.18 Ruskin himself was a direct and early participant in such ventures. He not only praised Horsfall’s plan for the Manchester City Art Museum in the July, 1877 issue of Fors; he also chose Turners to be copied, wrote notes to accompany them, furnished two copies from his own collection, and issued permission for his writings to be excerpted by Horsfall’s museum committees.19 Horsfall not only cited Ruskin directly throughout his career, but in his pamphlets on the beneﬁts of galleries for the poor, he appears to have imbibed Ruskin’s style along with his ideals.20 In Unto This Last, Ruskin had concluded, ‘That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings’; Horsfall declared that ‘the full healthy life of community is the highest, the noblest product of human Art.’21 In a pamphlet promoting the circulation of print collections for school children nationwide, Horsfall contrasts the early aesthetic experiences of two boys, immediately recalling Ruskin’s essay ‘The Two Boyhoods.’22 Yet unlike Ruskin’s boy Turner, Horsfall’s unexceptional city boy does not have the genius of sympathy, and, in his words, goes to the dogs. Horsfall based his entire educational project on the premise that children denied beautiful things grew up without a ‘desire for rightness,’ and that this was akin to a ‘moral shipwreck.’23 In another metaphor that seems reminiscent of Ruskin’s protective ship’s captain and his crew in ‘The Roots of Honour’ in Unto This Last, Horsfall conﬁgures the poor as a ship in need of steering.24 Missionary aesthetes very literally applied Ruskin’s faith in a redemptive aesthetic to his belief in a beneﬁcent distribution of resources, arriving at the solution of the gift of art. Then they integrated this gift within an Arnoldian institutional framework. Like Ruskin, Matthew Arnold was concerned with the inadequacy of popular social and moral

What is Missionary Aestheticism? 7

values. Conceiving of culture as the study and pursuit of complete human perfection, he sought not only the sharpening of the moral sense, but also the cultivation of the intellect. As Ruskin had merged ethics and aesthetics in phrases such as ‘noble beauty,’ in Culture and Anarchy (1869) Arnold fused ‘culture, beauty and intelligence.’25 ‘Culture tends always … to deal with the men of a system, of disciples, of a school’ (224). Arnold characterized British laborers as ‘raw and rough’ and unready for self-government (235). Whereas Ruskin endorsed sympathetic paternalism as a means of guiding the working classes, Arnold pointed out that the middle and upper classes were ﬂawed as well, each seduced by types of ‘machinery,’ such as their respective faiths in industry and in sterile reﬁnement. The aristocracy particularly demonstrated an ‘insufﬁciency of light,’ a disregard for learning (253). In answer, Arnold claimed that each individual could cultivate his own ‘best self’ through ‘reading, observing and thinking’ (247, 241). Missionary aesthetes eagerly adopted Arnold’s idea that any devoted student might rise above the limitations of his class. They identiﬁed themselves as the minority whom Arnold declared was qualiﬁed to aid the diffusion of culture by ‘carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time’ (226). On the grounds that ‘[p]eople feel and think and speak what their eyes have seen,’ the university settlements sponsored lectures and lantern-slide shows on the natural sciences, ancient Athens, and Shakespeare. 26 Samuel Barnett endorsed university settlement in terms of ‘making common the property of knowledge’ and disseminating ‘the best for the lowest.’27 Lobbyists for Sunday Opening also had an investment in intellectual diffusion: they advocated not only the extension of opening hours at art galleries, but also access on Sundays to collections in science museums and libraries, on the premise that the earnest laborer would gain more time for self-improving study. Socialists too put their trust in an education in desire in hopes that workers would learn to distinguish ﬁner arts and pleasures from mediocre ones. The socialist priest Stewart Headlam envisioned young workers graduating from boxing to reading Shakespeare and painting in oils. Just as Arnold had trumpeted the potential inﬂuences of the best that has been thought and known, George Gissing, in his earliest published novel, Workers in the Dawn, venerated art for its disseminative powers: ‘In appearance, [a beautiful picture] may do no more [than please its painter and a few rich dilettanti] but in reality its spirit permeates every level of society … nothing in this world is more

8 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

useful than the beautiful, nothing works so powerfully for the ultimate beneﬁt of mankind.’28 Like Ruskin’s, Arnold’s prose was incorporated, however sloppily, into the rhetoric of missionary aestheticism: one Kyrle Society volunteer recommended gifts of ﬂowers to ‘send a breath of sweetness and light into some of the darkest places of this dark city.’29 The phrase ‘the darkest places of this dark city’ reminds us that as much as missionary aesthetes found inspiration in Ruskin and Arnold, they were guided in a practical sense by the example of British evangelical missions overseas. Their notion that they were entering a foreign territory was reinforced by popular Victorian terminology, from Benjamin Disraeli’s famous characterization in 1845 of England as ‘The Two Nations’ of rich and poor, to Andrew Mearns’s invocation in 1883 of an autonomous, deserted ‘Outcast London.’ The metaphor of East Londoners as heathen savages culminated in the Salvation Army general, William Booth, titling his proposal for social reform Into Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). In the 1870s and 1880s, the ﬁrst generation of missionary aesthetes fused the ethical and social intent of Ruskin and Arnold with Christian Socialist F. D. Maurice’s radical theology and Balliol professor T. H. Green’s philosophy of service. In their consequent slum philanthropy, these aesthetes entrusted high culture with the goals of reﬁning and redeeming the uncultivated masses.

Paterian aesthetics and lifestyle aestheticism If Ruskin’s and Arnold’s tenets each shaped the art-philanthropic vocation, Walter Pater’s relationship to missionary aestheticism was more complex. Pater did in fact appear in 1888 as a speaker at Toynbee Hall where he gave a scheduled reading of his essay on William Wordsworth from the forthcoming Appreciations (1889). According to witnesses, the lecture was less than a success, mostly because the shy Pater did not look up from his manuscript. His refusal to make eye contact with his audience is perhaps a symbol of Pater’s problematic relationship with missionary aesthetes and their imperative.30 Despite an attraction to Comtean Positivism in his youth and a later pull towards the spiritual fellowship embodied in the Anglo-Catholic mass, Pater could not sacriﬁce the call of his singular temperament to that of any group. This pained him, but was a ﬁxed feature in his relations with others.31 Hardly an amoral decadent, Pater appeared at a settlement house and lectured for working people, but without truly engaging

What is Missionary Aestheticism? 9

with them, or subsuming himself, as others did, in the identity of a Toynbee associate. The very content of his lecture praised the act of retreating into one’s own consciousness.32 Pater’s determined maintenance of his autonomous personality and reluctant alliance with institutionalized social schemes are apparent in his review of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) – a widely discussed novel of spiritual doubt and moral development. The ﬁctional Elsmere’s iconoclastic understanding of Christianity inspired impassioned intellectual debates at Oxford during this period. In his review, Pater praises the author’s patient analysis of certain characters, the textures of the landscape, and the gradual development of themes (all qualities of his own style) at the expense of Elsmere’s late crisis of faith and his ultimate adoption of a Religion of Man.33 (Pater also takes a dig at Elsmere’s ﬁnal sermon in the slums, which he claims lacks imagination.34) In contrast to Pater, two years after the publication of her novel, Mrs Humphry Ward actively enlisted in the cause of practical social reform by founding a Unitarian settlement, University Hall (later renamed the Passmore Edwards Settlement). It was a natural growth from her role as a disciple of the philosopher T. H. Green over twenty years before. Yet for all his personal distance, Pater could broadly be termed a missionary aesthete in the sense that he wanted others to perfect their abilities to see and cherish the beautiful. His idealized Renaissance is, after all, magniﬁcent for the way that its spirit of inventiveness and curiosity has become universal. Pater characterized the pervasiveness of the Renaissance spirit as generally as a wash over a painter’s canvas. He was unconcerned with the practical methods of institutions and teacher-emissaries: instead, ‘There come … from time to time, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of men draw nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of the intellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture …. Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts.’35 The dissemination of culture is less a trickling down to the general public than a diffusion across – from artist to artist, genre to genre. Class and power do not come into play; individual genius does. Pater promoted the cultivation of the aesthetic sense through the individual’s own self-disciplined observation of passing phenomena. In early works like his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and ‘The Child in the House’ (1878), he emphasized that one could live an

10 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

aesthetic life apart from social engagement of any kind, let alone social activism. His model of aesthetic absorption, Florian Deleal in ‘The Child in the House,’ is by nature withdrawn and introspective. In Pater’s day, such aesthetics were easily equated in the popular mind with self-indulgent, even nihilistic decadence. Yet it would be an oversimpliﬁcation to claim that Pater’s aestheticism is divorced from ethics. Even his Conclusion to The Renaissance, infamous in its time for ostensibly prescribing decadent behavior, ﬂeetingly alludes to good works: ‘Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us,’ he writes, and that small phrase, ‘disinterested or not,’ embraces the civic-minded do-gooder at the same time that it justiﬁes the asocial, pleasure-seeking aesthete.36 David DeLaura has deﬁned Pater’s aestheticism as ‘a special morality – not art for art’s sake but art for the sake of a special conception of the perfected life.’37 DeLaura describes Pater’s uneasy synthesis between his dual impulses for Hellenism (selfrealization) and Hebraism (moralism and care). This tension found most acute expression during Pater’s crisis in the 1880s when he perceived his habitual isolation as a hindrance to self-perfection. Noting this conﬂict, Hilary Fraser has observed that although ‘sensibility supercedes morality’ in Pater’s works, ‘[e]ven in The Renaissance, Pater cherishes many of the deeper ethical values that art should hold for humanity.’38 Most recently, Paul Tucker has helped clarify the ‘confusion between [Pater’s] ethics and aesthetics’ by attributing Pater’s use of the terms ‘sympathy’ and ‘passion’ to the respective writings of the Positivist Auguste Comte and philosopher J. G. Fichte. He demonstrates instances where Pater, following Comte’s theories of altruism in development, proposes art as a catalyst for tolerance and moral action. Pater draws on Fichte in characterizing passion as a ‘higher morality,’ but, as Tucker argues, he carries his discourse beyond ethics by privileging sensation as a means towards spiritual ecstasy and by celebrating the pursuit of objective knowledge.39 Because he tends to recoil from the speed of the modern world rather than the squalor of it, and settles on scenes of the remote past as a respite from modernity, Pater hardly acknowledges the modern class injustices that so infuriated his fellow aesthetes Ruskin and the artsocialist William Morris. His famous appeal to the reader to relish ‘the splendour of our experience’ assumes the sensations at hand are pleasant, or at least intriguing ones: ‘strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s

What is Missionary Aestheticism? 11

friend.’40 It goes without saying that Pater is dismissive of the way that economic class determines material conditions. As the beneﬁciary of harmonious, quaint and delicate surroundings, his exemplary child in the house, Florian Deleal, grows up in a state of prosperity. Pater assumes the same class status of his readership. His implicit assumptions were spelled out more pointedly by his descendent Oscar Wilde who insisted during his lecture tour in America in 1882 that an environment of beautiful furniture, china, and draperies was a precondition for aesthetic sensibility: unlike Pater, Wilde openly afﬁrmed that such entities were objects for purchase. Florian’s charming attic ‘where the white mice ran in the twilight – an inﬁnite, unexplored wonderland of childish treasures, glass beads, empty scent-bottles still sweet, thrum of colored silks, among its lumber’ becomes, in Wilde’s hands, the Liberty showroom.41 Pater and Wilde complicate the philanthropic aesthetic mission, Pater by disregarding class distinctions and emphasizing the connoisseur as an individual who needs no authoritative mentor for his improvement, and Wilde, by reminding aesthetes of the materiality at the heart of their ﬁner taste. Inasmuch as missionary aesthetes declared their distance from popular aestheticism, they were in fact negotiating within the burgeoning world of consumerist aesthetic economics, the world of peacock’s feathers, blue and white china, lacquered furniture, and sunﬂowers. The 1880s were a period of consolidation and confusion between these strands of practical and popular aestheticism. William Morris, despite his contempt for the palliatives philanthropists were offering the poor in lieu of revolutionary leadership, was a public ﬁgure whose lectures on the arts and crafts and the ‘arts of life’ were sponsored by missionary aesthetic societies.42 By the end of the century, political groups like Morris’s Social Democratic Federation emanated aesthetic associations by the mere presence of Morris or his aesthetically clad daughter, May Morris, at their meetings. The social investigator Beatrice Webb gained her introduction to state socialism by reading a copy of Fabian Essays (1889) with a frontispiece designed by the art-socialist Walter Crane and a green cover by May Morris. Webb’s cousin, the novelist Margaret Harkness, celebrated the unencumbered female middle-class slum-worker through a ﬁctional ﬁgure who lives in an all-women residence in a room ‘furnished with Japanese ware, art muslin, and the various nick-knacks that lady students and their consoeurie gather.’43 In that one line, Harkness yokes social conscience to aesthetic sensibility, with the affectedly French ‘consoeurie’ literally blending and encapsulating sisterliness (‘soeurie’) and connoisseurship. Similarly, the heroine

12 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Marcella (1894) begins the novel as a lady rent collector in the slums who wears ‘“art serges” and velveteens’ and has posed for the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones.44 Aesthetic taste and its signiﬁers were indeed a visible part of the life of Victorian slum philanthropy. Henrietta Barnett, pursuing Arnoldian culture, speciﬁcally equated it with the Aesthetic Movement and commissioned paintings for the St Jude’s Easter Free Picture Exhibition and Toynbee Hall from artists who exhibited at the epicenter of aestheticism, the Grosvenor Gallery. One social worker recalls Henrietta Barnett: ‘I never forget the picture she made in her somewhat unusual dress – what we called “aesthetic” in those days …’45 In her memoir of her husband’s life, Henrietta Barnett fondly remembered the work of two sisters, Emily and Harriete Harrison, ‘those beautiful and generous artistic souls, the one so fat and short and the other so tall and thin,’ who painted the Chancel of St Jude’s with ‘great panels of growing corn and vines,’ popular aesthetic motifs in Britain and America.46 (The church would later be redone by William Morris.) Even the book into which Barnett entered the names of poor girls for the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants was covered in vellum and hand-painted with images of sweetbriar, thyme, and corn by Emily Harrison.47 The schoolrooms of St Jude’s were decorated with a dado of Walter Crane’s colored illustrations from Aesop’s Fables.48 On one occasion, the only way a volunteer worker could resolve a debate between Henrietta Barnett and working women on the possibilities of curbing working-class husbands’ alcoholism was to ‘read a little gem of Oscar Wilde’s, I think it was “A House of Pomegranates”…’49 Any man or woman attentive to popular aesthetic styles and committed to social work would have discovered a network of other enthusiastic, selfidentiﬁed art-philanthropists. Yet this group was not uniform. Within the missionary aesthetic community, independent specialist societies pursued their own causes and fought their own political and rhetorical battles. The individual chapters of my study highlight these lobbies as well as the underlying faiths that bound aesthetic activists together. *** Chapter 1 provides a sociological overview of missionary aestheticism in practice, taking the reader through some of the main issues central to our understanding of missionary aesthetes as a community. It deﬁnes the missionary aesthete in the context of our present working categories of aestheticism, dandyism, and decadence; it identiﬁes a

What is Missionary Aestheticism? 13

missionary aesthetic network of friends and co-workers; and it locates these slum-workers as residents of aesthetic-identiﬁed neighborhoods. It further examines the presence and contributions of women in the movement. While popular parodies of art-philanthropic programs were exaggerated and preposterous, they aid our social portrait of the movement, since missionary aesthetes were well aware of them and discussed them in their own circles. These parodies also demonstrate how aesthetic reforms provoked defensiveness among the middle-class public. Although satirists characterized aesthetic activism as ludicrous, they nonetheless perceived the missionary aesthetes’ educational agenda as a threat to class distinctions. Chapter 2 offers a case study of missionary aestheticism through its analysis of the social reformer Octavia Hill, who purchased properties in impoverished London neighborhoods and trained middle-class lady visitors to collect rents there. Hill hoped that beyond encouraging temperance, thrift, and cleanliness, lady visitors would teach the poor to desire the light, color, and joyfulness that she herself required of a home. With this aesthetic imperative, Hill defended lady visitors as ‘bright’ presences in the slums; she also judged tenants by the value of their household ornaments (hence preventing poor casual laborers from renting from her). But, above all, she attributed a moral inﬂuence to neighborhood gardens, outdoor mosaic descriptions, and the lesser gifts lady visitors could offer tenants such as ﬂowers and trips to country estates. Hill collaborated with her sister Miranda’s Kyrle Society for the Diffusion of Beauty among the People on the assumption that the Society’s promotion of gardening and choral singing would elevate the character of her tenants. The popular press satirized ‘Kyrley girls’ as slummers invading the homes of the poor with peacocks’ feathers and lilies. However, with her gift for management, Hill had in fact prevented Kyrle ladies gaining direct access to the poor at home, instead celebrating their adornment of public spaces. As anxious as she was to protect her tenants from slumming voyeurs, she was equally determined to keep the categories of ‘good philanthropy’ and ‘slumming’ distinct. It followed that Hill accused others of decadence in order to afﬁrm the legitimacy of the Kyrle Society and her own Ruskinian aesthetics. Reclaiming wholesome, archaic forms of leisure such as Maypole dances, she pursued a nostalgic desire for Merrie England typical of the aesthete William Morris; yet Hill’s politics were far less progressive than Morris’s socialism. The university settlement Toynbee Hall, the subject of my third chapter, earned the title of ‘aesthetic’ not only through its Queen Anne

14 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

architectural design, or the adornment of its rooms with G. F. Watts’s paintings, William Morris’s fabrics, and William De Morgan’s tiles. At Toynbee Hall missionary aestheticism was also a system of daily praxis. Overseeing clubs, conducting educational outings, and organizing guest lectures, settlers brought East Enders into contact with such luminaries as Walter Pater, William Morris, and the art historian John Addington Symonds, and literally into the art studios of the painter Hubert Herkomer and the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft. As followers of Ruskin, the founders of the settlement Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett were concerned not merely that laborers saw good art, but that they saw it rightly. This chapter focuses on two particular missionary aesthetic educational schemes: the annual St Jude’s Easter Free Art Exhibitions and the subsidized excursions of the Toynbee Travellers’ Club to the continent. While Henrietta Barnett’s reﬂective essay, ‘Pictures for the People,’ rather complacently afﬁrms the art exhibit as an effective means for workers’ embourgeoisement, the journals of the lower-middle-class Toynbee Travellers, as they toured Italy, expose the shame and self-consciousness of recipients of aesthetic education. The Travellers experienced an uneasy division in their ranks between those who embraced and imitated the aesthetic mannerisms they knew from the popular press, and those who found such behavior effusive and silly. Ironically, one way that the Travellers in Italy performed their aestheticism – and identiﬁed as bourgeois – was through the act of slumming. Just as they were dismissed as voyeuristic slummers in popular journalism, missionary aesthetes who petitioned for the opening of national galleries on Sundays were also ridiculed as shortsighted dreamers by religious groups. Chapter 4 examines the two sides of the Sunday debate, weighing the groups’ interests and class identiﬁcations, and the rhetorical paradigms that sustained their respective lobbies. The bourgeois art-philanthropists in the Sunday Society preached a Ruskinian ‘Religion of Art,’ characterizing beautiful paintings as ‘revealed scriptures’ capable of civilizing the poor. In contrast, Sabbatarians, many of them working people, pragmatically saw Sunday opening as a threat to labor, reasoning that the mandatory Sunday employment of museum guards and those in related travel and service industries would lead to a universal seven-day work week in Britain. Aesthetes and Sabbatarians each demonstrated sympathy with the needs of the working classes, distinguishing in their writings between haves and have-nots. However, because of their respective focuses on the provision of cultural amenities and freedom from exploitative

What is Missionary Aestheticism? 15

labor, they maintained incompatible deﬁnitions of ‘Sunday rest’ and the pursuits that they claimed would grant ‘refreshment,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘elevation.’ Missionary aesthetes defended museums and galleries as healthy escapes from dull, cramped, tenement lodgings and as counter-attractions to the pub. Sabbatarians, however, argued that such rational recreations not only distracted workers from domestic family life, but also paved the way for the Sunday licensing of commercialized mass entertainments, uncontrolled expenditure, and further consumption of alcohol. Among its resources, this chapter makes use of rare pamphlets by the Sunday Society as well as penny tracts of two Sabbatarian organizations, the Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS) and Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association (WMLDRA). It ends with a case study of the marriage of the minister Hugh Reginald Haweis to the female aesthete Mary Eliza Joy Haweis, demonstrating how anti-Sabbatarianism was a ramiﬁcation of the aesthetic life. The intersection between late Victorian aesthetic and religious cultures continues into Chapter 5, which examines Anglo-Catholic churches in the slums as arenas for missionary aestheticism. Spanning two generations, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, ‘Ritualist’ clergy believed that sacramental worship, along with ecclesiastical architecture and ornament, would draw the poor into churches and that this initial experience of aesthetic pleasure would provoke their spiritual awakening. Some Ritualists, such as the socialist-aesthete Stewart Headlam and the Bishop of Lincoln, Edward King, easily acknowledged a union between their Ritualism and secular aestheticism. Others, however, including the famous mission priests Robert Dolling and Charles Lowder, distanced themselves from it, wary that it would discredit their mission work. And, in fact, the parishioners drawn to Ritualism for its aesthetic allure were not working-class, but bourgeois aesthetes, particularly ‘giddy young men’ who found in its subculture a particular refuge from Victorian ideological norms of marriage and manliness. Periodicals and popular ﬁction had long satirized Anglo-Catholic clergy as effeminate and dandyish, and had claimed that their meticulous attention to churchly rites diverted them from their pastoral responsibilities. In the 1880s and 1890s, novelists sympathetic to Ritualism did not attempt to vindicate it. In their respective historical novels Marius the Epicurean (1885) and John Inglesant (1880), Walter Pater and J. H. Shorthouse each bypassed the theme of pastoral care to emphasize the shifting temperament of a hero susceptible to the aesthetic thrills of ritual. In contrast, in their respective slum ﬁctions, A Child of the Jago (1896), Stephen Remarx

16 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

(1893), and The Christian (1897), Arthur Morrison, James Adderly, and Hall Caine venerated priests’ social services while obscuring the rites they practiced daily. The faith in the elevating potential of the beautiful ﬁltered down to many of the labor aristocracy, clerks who sought transcendence over daily urban experience through free musical concerts, classes in art history, and other rational recreations proffered by art-philanthropists. The novelist George Gissing, himself tragically caught between high tastes and a low income, reproduced this longing for beauty in his ﬁction: he describes one of his protagonists entering an artist’s studio, ‘How often had he seen studios in the spirit – the studios of the great masters, to his imagination more sacred than any holy of holies reared by human superstition; but with how faint a hope of ever sating his bodily eyes with the appearance of an actual one.’50 This young man would have been an ideal eager recipient of the Sunday Society’s largesse. (We ﬁnd him a generation later reborn as E. M. Forster’s Leonard Bast, the earnest clerk in Howards End [1910] who attends classical concerts and reads Ruskin on Venice.) While the ﬁrst ﬁve chapters concentrate on art-philanthropic institutions, my sixth and ﬁnal chapter focuses on the autonomous novelist George Gissing and his vacillating responses to missionary aestheticism. Gissing enthusiastically identiﬁed with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1880s, only to end by vilifying aesthetes in his later ﬁction. Caught between his intense desire for an art-loving English populace and his belief that no educational scheme could crush widespread vulgarity, Gissing designed narratives that punctured missionary aesthetic programs’ optimism and conduct. Initially blaming the degradation of national manners on the biology of the poor, the anti-culture of socialism, and the insufﬁciency of statefunded educational programs, Gissing ended by targeting missionary aesthetes themselves. While Gissing had admired Pater’s style in the early 1880s and even imitated it in his travelogue of Italy, in later novels such as The Odd Women (1893), The Whirlpool (1897), and Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), he denounced male aesthetic instructors as seductive dandies and satirized female aesthetic missionaries as prigs and social climbers. Gissing seemed to favor aestheticism only as long as it remained outside the public arena, remote from class and power relations. Gissing’s allegations lead directly into my Conclusion, which assesses the liberatory potential of missionary aestheticism and its relative successes and failures in practice. Acknowledging missionary

What is Missionary Aestheticism? 17

aesthetes’ good intentions, I also explore their limited vision, particularly the exclusionary temperament that guided exhibition practices and the colonialist ideologies that fueled Irish and Scottish home arts programs. This Conclusion tests art-philanthropic schemes against contemporary theories of emancipatory aesthetics.

‘The poor’ as cultural recipients and resisters Before I proceed, however, I need to address brieﬂy a methodological issue that necessarily arises whenever social historians and literary critics attempt to analyze the lives of a large abstract group they variously name ‘the poor,’ ‘the people,’ and ‘the working class.’ Such categories are clearly loaded. Referring to ‘the poor’ or ‘the people’ sets one up for an oversimpliﬁcation that is anathema to any good social historian and uncannily evokes bourgeois Victorians’ own generalizations about the working classes (with the exception of the sociologists in the ﬁn de siècle who sought to classify them empirically).51 Victorian cultural philanthropists varied in their familiarity with their constituents. Spurred by thrilling sensationalistic journalism, some slummers arrived in ‘Darkest London’ anticipating a glimpse of brutalized, exotic Others. Instead, they met with an extraordinary array of classes, from skilled artisans to sweated seamstresses to the truly indigent and homeless, who all fell under the umbrella of ‘the poor.’ As the historian Ellen Ross has argued, working people themselves accepted the term ‘the poor’; however, they were highly conscious of the gradations within their ranks ‘between those with regular and those with only casual employment, between the skilled and unskilled, and between tidy housekeepers and those careless by choice or necessity.’52 Ross adds: ‘These ‘rough/respectable’ divisions, meaningful sources of pride and shame, were highly unstable, as circumstances pushed households into and out of the respectable category, and people socialized readily over the rough/respectable divide.’53 Working people experienced their respectability as a deeply charged emotional identiﬁcation, even when – especially when – they were struggling to feed their children and pay the rent. This feeling was heightened by the strong mutual surveillance between neighbors living on the same street. A phrase like ‘the poor’ is an admitted generalization that spares us having to specify subtle degrees of self-identiﬁcation and economic security as they varied from house to house or position to position in the workplace (for instance, the distinction between a stevedore and a

18 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

casual docker). In this book, I frequently use the phrase ‘working people’ or the plural ‘working classes’ to describe this population. When focusing on bourgeois Victorians’ psychological and social motives for entering the slums, I have also adopted their simplifying phrase ‘the poor.’ As social historian Seth Koven has remarked, ‘“Elite,” “poor,” “well-to-do,” and “laboring people” remain useful though descriptively imprecise terms because they signal the social distance that lay at the heart of slumming and slum benevolence.’54 In recent years, Ross, Koven, and other historians such as Ruth Livesey have consulted the archival records of social reform agencies and have done an admirable job of resurrecting the voices of the working poor during cross-class exchanges.55 Scholars such as Jonathan Rose and Regenia Gagnier have also been aided by John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall’s outstanding collection of working-class autobiographies, housed at the Brunel University Library in West London.56 When they speak to one’s particular subject of study, these voices are a treasure. In the realm of aesthetic reform, they are especially rare. Self-identiﬁed working-class voices are elusory because the people who embraced free classes and cultural opportunities were eagerly claiming a bourgeois subjectivity and some were already lower-middle-class, as in the case of the Toynbee Travellers in Chapter 3. When I have been able to cite individual responses to art-philanthropic programs, I have done so, as in the case of working-class opponents to Sabbatarianism and followers of Ritualist mission priests in Chapters 4 and 5. Elsewhere, the voices of the poor are ﬁltered through the narratives of the philanthropists themselves, like the woman in Octavia Hill’s account who hesitates to move to a better room for fear that her ‘bits of things’ will look even more decayed in the sunlight. Hill sees her as a pupil who has not yet learned her lesson in higher standards; we might see her as an autonomous individual holding her ground. Applying theories of emancipatory aesthetics to missionary aestheticism, the Conclusion of my study does cite instances of working-class resistance, often non-verbal, to acts of aesthetic education and neighborhood beautiﬁcation. Yet even in the Conclusion, I bring the subject back to the varied self-knowledge and impulses of missionary aesthetes – not simply the relative improvements that they enacted in the lives of the poor, but also their comparative willingness to see and rectify economic distress by providing paid work over mere rational recreations. Working-class attitudes to missionary aesthetes are indeed fascinating, but my primary focus throughout the study has been the aims, methods, and contradictions of missionary aesthetes in their attempts to bring beauty to the masses whom they readily named ‘the people.’

1 The Social Strands of Aestheticism

How did an aesthete live his or her life as art? Because aestheticism was both a high art movement and a popular social movement, charitable, missionary aestheticism existed within a constellation of social activities one might call aesthetic. One might attend a gallery opening at the institutional center for aestheticism, the Grosvenor Gallery (1877–1890), return home to one’s Norman Shaw house in the aesthetic suburb of Bedford Park, and the next day, a Sunday, attend an aesthetic church service led by the Rev. Hugh Reginald Haweis, whose wife’s treatises on The Art of Beauty (1878) and The Art of Dress (1879) would have inspired one’s own home and costume. Then in the afternoon one might volunteer as a docent guiding working people through a free art exhibition in the East End, lecturing them on silverwork or the paintings of G. F. Watts. Missionary aesthetes constituted a closely-knit community: they knew one another, deliberated on social schemes together, admired one another, and occasionally battled with one another. An aesthete who chaired a committee on, say, the provision of public parks, might also be a trustee for an art museum in a working-class neighborhood, or a teacher in a university settlement scheme. At the time of her encounter with the schoolgirls cited in my Introduction, Henrietta Barnett had already worked under the tenement reformer Octavia Hill where she used her role as a volunteer rent collector to supervise and regulate slum families. It was through Hill that she had met her husband Samuel Barnett, and under Hill’s guidance, the couple accepted the ministry of the slum parish St Jude’s in Whitechapel, committing themselves to a life among East Enders. In the years to come, the Barnetts and their friends would be at the vortex of the missionary aesthetic community in London, facilitating various 19

20 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

movements to improve workers’ livelihoods and to educate workers to what they after Matthew Arnold called a ‘higher life.’1 Starting with small voluntary organizations like the People’s Concert Society which performed free concerts in St Jude’s church, the Barnetts went on to establish such national institutions as the garden suburb, the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, and the university settlement movement. The Barnetts’ names and those of their circle appear consistently on the rosters of different committees. This mutual membership among various philanthropic and cultural agencies is representative of civic organizations in the 1880s.2 Until now, activists like Octavia Hill and the Barnetts have been labeled cultural missionaries but not aesthetes. This characterization opens up a difﬁcult but signiﬁcant quandary over deﬁnitions of aestheticism. If a cultural missionary dressed conservatively (swearing off Oscar Wilde’s velvet breeches and lilies) while lobbying for Sunday art gallery openings, then can we still call him an aesthete? If an aesthetic activist wrote essays on the need for fresh air and decent housing rather than poems, then can we still call her an aesthete? This chapter is concerned with classiﬁcation of a certain kind of aestheticism. It builds on the work of Ruth Z. Temple and Ian Fletcher who each observed that British aestheticism was not one coherent movement, but actually encompassed several sub-movements with often contradictory agendas.3 For instance, all decadents might have been aesthetes, but not every aesthete was a decadent.4 This chapter will ask: how aesthetic were missionary aesthetes? Were they enmeshed in the material culture of aestheticism? Or do we consider ‘missionary’ in ‘missionary aesthete’ a kind of qualiﬁer? One way of broaching these questions is to adopt Talia Schaffer’s recent metaphor of a map of aestheticism, and to imagine the ﬁgures and institutions in this study occupying an intersection between social reform and aestheticism, a space where these two worlds overlap.5

Aesthetes, dandies, decadents In order to explore the link between social reformers and British aestheticism, we must ﬁrst re-examine some of our original assumptions about aestheticism itself. We most frequently associate the Aesthetic Movement with a series of artifacts and attitudes: blue and white china, peacocks feathers and lilies, an effeminate man or fragile woman rapturously or listlessly drooping over them. These images come to us not merely from satires of the movement, such as George

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 21

Du Maurier’s cartoons in Punch and Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1881 opera Patience, but also from the postures of aesthetes like Oscar Wilde and James Whistler, who in the 1880s embodied aestheticism through public performances in which they affected languor and a kind of selfdevotion. When we imagine an aesthete, we are still likely to envision Wilde and parodies of him, that aesthetic young man ‘walk[ing] down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in his medieval hand.’ So Wilde has come to represent aestheticism in practice at the expense of less dandyish aesthetes. He commands our attention by participating in the performative codes that we customarily recognize as ‘aesthetic’: languor, narcissism, effeminacy, artiﬁciality, frothy aphoristic humor. We must ask, then, if Wildean dandyism and preciosity were requisites for the aesthetic life. It has been argued that anyone who works toward art as transformation of everyday life is a ‘practical aesthete,’ an inclusive term that describes Ruskin as well as Wilde.6 As disciples of Ruskin, both Octavia Hill and Samuel Barnett lobbied for aesthetic improvements in the lives of the poor, but neither lived as dandies. In fact, as a friend of theirs observed, the intentionally plain Hill ‘did not dress, she only wore clothes,’ and Barnett ‘dressed very badly, generally obtaining his clothes by employing out-of-work tailors in the district.’7 The task of deﬁning aestheticism has been problematized by a critical tradition that has centered on the Decadents at the expense of practitioners of Ruskinian aesthetics.8 For instance, in his introduction to the anthology, Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s (1966), Karl Beckson banished non-Decadent aesthetes like Morris and Ruskin to a footnote.9 We can envision a more inclusive British aestheticism by reevaluating what aesthetes did and looked like and reminding ourselves that the aesthetic man ‘walking down Piccadilly …’ was indeed a stereotype. In this way, we arrive at the picture of a diverse aesthetic community. The missionary aesthete teaching rough lads classes in woodworking may not wear velvet breeches. He may of course work on committees with those who do. He may disdain those who do. The extent to which one demonstrated one’s aestheticism through bohemian dress and speech varied. These divisions and alliances lent the Victorian aesthetic life its depth and vigor. Just as the art-loving aesthete is not always a fashionable dandy, we may also argue that the fashionable dandy is not always a selﬁsh, perverse decadent. In 1994, Regenia Gagnier proposed a dichotomy between aestheticism and decadence as practices; she argued that while the aesthete works towards the beautiﬁcation of daily life for everyone, the decadent claims art as an escape from others, hoarding pleasures

22 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

and using others to obtain those pleasures for himself.10 (We might think of the reclusive decadent Des Esseintes collecting laces and perfumes in J. K. Huysmans’s novel A Rebours [1884].) Gagnier did not target where dandyism falls on the scale, because she could see that it was unstable; in fact, she situated Wilde beside Ruskin and Morris, the well-meaning, generous-minded aesthetes. Again, the dandy is not always a decadent. Henrietta Barnett fondly recalled the Rev. S. A. Thompson Yates: ‘He took a house in Commercial Road and brought his footman, his maid, his china, his Chippendale furniture, his pictures, and his cellar, to share with us all. “I refuse to be too busy in improving other people’s lives to live my own properly.”’11 Among the ﬁgures devoted to enhancing the physical life of the poor were the famous aesthetic ministers Stewart Headlam, Moncure Conway, and H. R. Haweis, all of whom dressed fashionably, lived self-consciously and cultivated friendships with artists of the day. Aesthetes who have been remembered for their social exclusivity, wit, and fashion were actually invested in relieving the squalor of the slums and providing aesthetic comforts to the poor. Although known for their parlor games and exclusive club-slang,12 the artistic wives in the clique the Souls pursued philanthropic slum work and spearheaded educational art programs. The gifted amateur painter among the Souls, Madeline Wyndham, and her friend, Lady Marion Alford, both accomplished embroiderers, founded the Royal School of Art Needlework in 1872 to provide work to gentlewoman left without means.13 Its students carried out designs by Walter Crane, William Morris, Edward Poynter, George Aitchison, Edward Burne-Jones, and Val Prinsep.14 Lady Alford’s daughter-in-law, Adelaide, Countess Brownlow, and son-in-law, Earl Brownlow, were patrons of Eglantyne Louisa Jebb’s philanthropic Home Arts and Industries Association and organized soirées at their London home to exhibit crafts by rural laborers.15 Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, who frequented the Friday night salons of the Souls, founded the Highland Home Industries, which provided poor Scotswomen with training and employment in traditional local cottage industries.16 That another Soul, the young, high-spirited Margot Tennant, should accidentally barge into the railway compartment of General William Booth of the Salvation Army, only to debate religious and social questions with him and ﬁnally join him in prayer, is not outrageous when we remember that she had helped found a crèche in Wapping and sought comfort after her sister Laura’s death through friendships with factory girls in Booth’s home turf, Whitechapel.17

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 23

The very aesthetes whom we would assume indifferent to slum poverty were often at least nominally afﬁliated with missionary aesthetic reform. Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, who served as a model for the decadent Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) and whose book Bric à Brac (1888) surveys the contents of his baronial home bibelot by bibelot, begins his published diaries by recording a Kyrle Society meeting in Kensington.18 In the same diaries, he later praises the free holidays that poor children are being provided at family seats Castle Howard and Cliveden.19 Between slumming forays into poor London neighborhoods (where he paid soldiers and working men for sex),20 and pleasurable jaunts to the continent, Gower customarily attended events like charity bazaars. At one point, Gower was escorted by the painter Edward Clifford, another Kyrle Society member, to a Salvation Army meeting and hostel.21 Although not much is known of Clifford, a favorite painter among the Souls, the female aesthete Lady St Helier recalls in her memoirs that ‘his great delight was in coming across people whom he hoped to interest in the good works that lay so near his heart.’22 It is clear that some missionary aesthetes acted as catalysts for others’ charity. The statesman Viscount Alfred Milner, who had been a friend of Arnold Toynbee and became Chairman of the Council of Toynbee Hall in 1912, acknowledges and beats a hasty retreat from the dandyism of one philanthropist in his memoir of Leonard Monteﬁore. A nephew of Lady Rothschild, Monteﬁore served as a member of the Jewish Board of Guardians and secretary of the Tower Hamlets Branch of University Extension before his death at age 26. Associated with Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett from his time as an Oxford student when he would stay in Whitechapel during each ‘Long Vac,’ Monteﬁore embraced their goal of forming friendships across class lines, lectured the poor on history and literature, and in 1878, organized a children’s ﬂower show in Whitechapel. Henrietta Barnett praised his ‘passion for the beautiful’ in her memoirs.23 Conﬁrming Monteﬁore’s tastes and personality, Lord Milner wrote: He was intensely unconventional and preached incessantly against convention and formality. ‘Live the life which you feel to be best for you and never mind what people say.’ Such was his constant exhortation. He laughed at people who furnished their houses elaborately in a style they did not care for to suit the prevalent taste of the day. ‘Buy only what pleases you,’ that was his canon of artistic

24 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

decoration …. He rather ridiculed than renounced the world of fashion, while proclaiming half in jest and half in earnest his own allegiance to the vie de Bohème. And to a certain extent he actually sought out Bohemian society, but his liking for it was probably all the greater because his acquaintance with it was only superﬁcial. He loved its freedom, but its license would have disgusted him; for it was the outward conventionalities which distort society, not the deeper moral conventions which make society possible, against which his crusade was directed.24 Of Monteﬁore’s style of speech, Milner adds, ‘He was in truth a great improvisatore and would run on in the most spontaneous fashion, blending fact and ﬁction, sense and nonsense, till those who heard him were quite carried away with wonder and amusement.’25 As a compelling speaker and advocate of personal freedom through design and fashion, Monteﬁore sounds remarkably like Wilde.26 (There is a likelihood the two knew one another, as both had worked under Ruskin as ‘diggers’ on the road at Ferry Hinksey.) Yet as a biographer Milner feels compelled to act as an apologist for certain details he has let slip of Monteﬁore’s character – and further to act as qualiﬁer of them. Milner assures us that Monteﬁore’s alliances with unconventional, Bohemian society are superﬁcial, and, even more, that Monteﬁore was too sheltered to have known Bohemia at ﬁrst hand (notice the conditional ‘would have disgusted him’). Given Monteﬁore’s clear dedication to service in his lifetime, we need to see his aestheticism in context: that is, he celebrates bohemian life at the same time that he works tirelessly with poor East End Jews; the two proclivities do not cancel each other out. Before he died, Monteﬁore published articles on working women’s cooperatives in London, the boarding out of workhouse children, and the exquisite Titians and del Sartos in the art museum in Berlin. We are not accustomed to viewing the high-minded families who dominated the Victorian civil service and university life as anything less than puritanical: these were the people whom Beatrice Webb would describe as suffering from ‘the class-consciousness of sin.’27 In his classic essay on the Victorian intellectual aristocracy, Noel Annan claims they were suspicious of beauty and inhibited by it: ‘A fashionably-dressed wife would not only have been an extravagance but an act of submission to worldly vanity: and the pre-Raphaelite cloaks and dresses which had been donned as an homage to beauty and a protest against the world of upper-class fashion degenerated in some cases into thick woollen stockings and ﬂannel petticoats which were proudly

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 25

worn as a badge of ﬁnancial and spiritual austerity.’28 Certainly, one can identify this frugality in Octavia Hill. Yet half-buried in Annan’s sentence is the idea that these people availed themselves of aestheticism at all, that they found in alternative fashions, ‘pre-Raphaelite cloaks and dresses,’ means of expressing a moral rebellion. Think of William Morris’s purposeful self-representation: he usually appeared in a workman’s shirt, which he himself had dyed indigo – an insistence on classless socialism through aesthetic simplicity and an assertion of craft at the same time. Exhaustive and thorough in its genealogical links, Annan’s essay does not take into account the social complexities which joined Oxbridge and the civil service to Grosvenor Gallery bohemia. Many of the names Annan includes in his political genealogy have aesthetic resonances: speciﬁcally, we ﬁnd them among the Ritualists Stewart Duckworth Headlam and A. C. Benson, and the art critics Edmund Gosse, Roger Fry, and Bernard Bosanquet, and the political families of Balfour, Wyndham, and Curzon whose members constituted the aesthetic clique of the Souls and who acted as patrons to Grosvenor Gallery artists.

A missionary aesthetic family tree: colonies and coteries Beyond reconsidering our assumptions about aesthetes’ dandyish selfrepresentation, we can turn to social networks, constructing a missionary aesthetic genealogy. For instance, we might look at Janey Nassau Senior, the woman whose singing entrances the working-class court in Henrietta Barnett’s narrative. The ﬁrst female inspector of workhouses and founder of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, she was also a close friend of the symbolist painter G. F. Watts and frequent visitor to his studio, where she posed for him in an ﬂowing midnightblue gown with trailing medieval sleeves and her golden hair unbound (Figure 1.1).29 She introduced him to Mrs Russell Barrington, an amateur painter and essayist on art who had studied under Ruskin and who would become a neighbor of Watts and Lord Frederic Leighton in the exclusive, aesthetic suburb of Holland Park; Barrington ultimately wrote Watts’s and Leighton’s biographies. In addition to being an infamous ‘indefatigable pursuer of artistic big game,’ Emilie Barrington was a friend of the Barnetts, and it was she who encouraged Watts to exhibit his work in the St Jude’s exhibitions and to host the poor as visitors to his gallery.30 Mrs Barrington was also instrumental in coordinating the painting of Walter Crane’s murals for Octavia Hill’s working-class community center Red Cross Hall in 1889.31

26 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

Figure 1.1 G. F. Watts, Janey Nassau Senior. (Courtesy of Wightwick Manor, The Mander Collection [The National Trust]/NTPL/John Hammond.)

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 27

Another example: Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett were the inlaws of Dr Ernest Hart, whose essays in the Sanitary Record and British Medical Journal urged the improvement of urban health resources for the poor, including the indigent in workhouses. In 1904, Hart’s spouse Alice, Henrietta Barnett’s sister, edited the magazine The House Beautiful and the Home: A Journal for Those Who Design, Beautify, Furnish and Inhabit Houses, a missionary aesthetic tour de force, whose articles not only suggested where to buy the perfect early English-style cabinet, but also honored ‘the work being done to make the homes of the poor happier and healthier.’32 Essays in the ﬁrst issue explored the challenges of securing open spaces and building garden suburbs for laborers, and praised the efforts of the National Health Society which distributed tracts and soap, advising workers on keeping homes clean. In the same issue and in others to follow, Mrs Hart waxes lyrical about Japanese art and culture, and in a review of James Whistler’s ‘Ten o’ Clock Lecture,’ adds that she and her husband have invited the painter to see their own Japanese porcelain. The Harts shared this same collection, souvenirs from their holiday in Japan, with the poor during their ‘At Homes.’33 In her memoir, Henrietta Barnett afﬁrms that Ernest Hart had ‘a great love of beauty, a keen appreciation of art, and an unashamed enjoyment of luxury.’34 Was Hart an aesthete, then? Yes, a lover of beauty and a social reformer concerned to improve the material environment of the poor: a missionary aesthete.35

Aesthetic map-making We can further draw geographical London connections between aesthetic and social reform circles. From the time that Dante Gabriel Rossetti moved into the Tudor House at 16 Cheyne Walk in the early 1860s, the streets facing the Chelsea Embankment were identiﬁed as an aesthetic enclave. In the late 1870s, the epicenter of aestheticism shifted slightly to Tite Street, Chelsea, where James Whistler brieﬂy lived at no. 13, the ‘White House,’ a studio-home designed by E. W. Godwin, until he was forced out by his bankruptcy in 1879. (Upon returning to London and unable to recover the house from its new owner, Whistler moved into a block of ﬂats, also on Tite Street.) Oscar Wilde also moved from house to house on Tite Street, ﬁrst residing with his friend Frank Miles in a house designed by E. W. Godwin at no. 44, and then living from 1884 to 1895 in no. 34 with his wife and children, penning his plays in a study with buttercup-yellow walls and red lacquer accents.36

28 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

Cheyne Walk nevertheless retained a bohemian cachet. On Rossetti’s death in 1882, Mrs Mary Eliza Joy Haweis, the female aesthete and author of descriptive essays on artists’ homes, moved into the Tudor House, where she maintained the blue-tiled ﬁreplaces and yellow walls just as Rossetti had left them.37 There she hosted fashionable soirées in fancy dress. Yet her Cheyne Walk community was not merely fanciful or politically insular. Haweis’s husband, the minister Hugh Reginald Haweis, a friend of Octavia Hill, lobbied for Sunday Opening, open spaces, and concerts for the poor. He bought and resided in the Tudor House with full awareness and pride in its history. Among the Haweises’ neighbors in Cheyne Walk in the 1880s and 1890s were Liberal MP Leonard Courtney and his wife Catherine Potter Courtney who, prior to her marriage, had worked under Octavia Hill as a volunteer rent-collector near the East End docks.38 Catherine Potter Courtney’s sister, Beatrice Potter (later Webb), continued to visit and stay with the Courtneys as a relief from her days of social investigation in East London. In her diary, she recounts taking the journey ‘by the evening light’ from the Tower Pier to ‘that perfect house’ in Chelsea by means of a Thames river steamer, certainly a picturesque end to days amid squalor.39 The socialist-craftsman C. R. Ashbee cycled to his work on the Mile End Road, Whitechapel while living on Cheyne Walk and designing houses for other artists there.40 The art historian and voice of the Charity Organization Society, Bernard Bosanquet, lived at 7 Cheyne Gardens in a house furnished with papers by William Morris and tiles by William de Morgan.41 The realist painters Frank Holl and Luke Fildes, who had begun their careers illustrating slum articles for The Graphic and who gained inspiration by visiting doss houses and Salvation Army hostels (see, for instance, Figure 1.2), lived in houses designed by the fashionable architect Richard Norman Shaw, Holl in Hampstead, Fildes in another aesthetic alternative, Melbury Road in Holland Park.42 For any painter in the 1870s and 1880s, a home in the elite community of Holland Park in Kensington was a mark of ﬁnancial success: artists moved there for greater proximity to wealthy patrons and in the hope that their work would more likely be accepted at Royal Academy exhibitions. The artistic colony originated in Little Holland House, where Mrs Thoby Prinsep famously provided a home and studio to the painter G. F. Watts. The Holland Park salon hosted D. G. Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, the cartoonist George Du Maurier, and Prinsep’s own son, Val, who studied under Watts. Living also in Kensington, where he gained proximity to the painters whose works he purchased,

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 29

Figure 1.2 Luke Fildes, ‘Houseless and Hungry,’ The Graphic 1 (1869): 9. (Courtesy of the Illustrated London News Picture Library.)

was the art collector Stephen Winkworth.43 His sister Emily, a workhouse visitor and the manager of ﬁve Board Schools and several refuges for unmarried mothers, resided nearby with her husband William Shaen, Octavia Hill’s solicitor, who managed the legal details of her tenement schemes and the National Trust. The Shaens lived in a home designed by Benjamin Woodward, a friend of Rossetti. In her memoir, Henrietta Barnett fondly remembers attending ‘At Homes’ for the poor at the Winkworths’ home.44 As testimony to the artistic life in practice, the eclectic minister Moncure Conway, writing his aesthetic guide Travels in South Kensington (1882), devoted space not only to Cheyne Walk and Kensington but also to the new artistic suburb of Bedford Park in Turnham Green. ‘[A]m I dreaming?’ he asked, ‘Right before me is the apparition of a little red town made up of quaintest Queen Anne houses …. I was almost afraid to rub my eyes, lest the antique townlet should vanish, and crept softly along, as one expecting to surprise fairies in their retreat.’45 Conway’s effusive praise was partly an expression of pride, for he was himself a Bedford Park resident. The ﬁrst English garden suburb, Bedford Park was founded in 1880 by Jonathan T. Carr, the brother of the famous art critic J. Comyns Carr, as an aesthetic retreat from inner London.

30 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

Admired by its contemporaries for its spacious, curving streets and fashionable Queen Anne-style homes, Bedford Park also gained attention for the eccentricities of its residents, who advocated any number of reforms from vegetarianism to rational dress. As its historians have noted, with its clubhouse and amateur theater, residents engaged in an active local social life. Neighbors who attended all-night fancy-dress balls were placidly observed playing lawn tennis the following morning still dressed in their costumes.46 This was a self-consciously creative, middleclass community, whose members included the poet W. B. Yeats, female aesthete and Theosophist Florence Farr (who recited his poems while accompanying herself on the zither), the playwrights Arthur W. Pinero and John Todhunter, and the painter T. M. Rooke. Rooke’s aesthetic credentials were sterling: he had done topographical drawing for Ruskin and worked as a studio assistant to Edward Burne-Jones.47 The sign of the old-fashioned local pub, the Tabard Inn, was painted by Rooke; tiles by William De Morgan still decorate the doorway. However varied its community of New Women, socialists, and agnostics, the common denominator in Bedford Park was aesthetic style. Although the developer Carr offered advice on decoration, even papering residents’ walls free of charge, his neighbors needed little encouragement before opting for Morris prints and purchasing Japanese laquered furniture.48 It was while living in Bedford Park that W. B. Yeats’s sister Susan (known as Lily) apprenticed for May Morris as an embroiderer.49 The Chiswick School of Art, built in 1880–81, specialized in the decorative arts, and one visitor to the school observed a female student ‘putting the ﬁnishing touches to a very life-like representation of that aesthetic favorite, that bright emblem of constancy – the brilliant sunﬂower.’50 It is perhaps unexpected, then, to ﬁnd amidst Bedford Park’s self-consciously aesthetic residents the secretary of the Charity Organization Society, Charles Loch.51 (Signiﬁcantly, Loch not only had studied under the philosopher and ethicist T. H. Green at Balliol, but also under Ruskin as a drawing student.)52 Other neighbors in Bedford Park were the Liberal MP Corrie Grant who, with his sister Marion Grant, hosted ‘At Homes’ for the poor at the suggestion of the Barnetts, and the Clerkenwell Prison chaplain Rev. John W. Horsley, who regularly invited reformed criminals to stay with him at his house.53 In addition to his role as penal reformer, Horsley was the ﬁrst clerical secretary of the Waifs and Strays Society. With the welfare of poor children in mind, he followed the precepts of Octavia Hill and Lord Reginald Brabazon, the Earl of Meath, and transformed the crypt of his church St Peter’s in Walworth into a neighborhood playground.54 Finally, our guide through aesthetic bohemia,

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 31

Moncure Conway, was a Unitarian preacher who led an eclectic congregation at the South Place Chapel, off Liverpool Street, a social space that had been associated with radical politics since the 1820s. An American, Conway had toured Britain as an abolitionist in the 1860s; now, he preached the beneﬁts of Sunday museum opening for the poor.55

Gender lines: commissioned artists and female aestheticist economics Ironically, the great painters whom art philanthropists commissioned were not always closely in touch with the poor. In contrast to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had taught at F. D. Maurice’s Working Men’s College in the 1850s, and the socialist William Morris who lectured laborers on art in the 1870s and 1880s, the painter Edward Burne-Jones confessed impatience with committee work and art institutions in general. While he believed in the value of bringing art to the poor, his wife Georgiana Burne-Jones found a more receptive ear for her sympathies with Ruskinian aesthetics in William Morris, who introduced her to socialism and with whom she sustained a longstanding correspondence.56 Burne-Jones maintained a studio at his home, The Grange, in Fulham, West London, far from Whitechapel. Contemporaries described the most popular painter among missionary aesthetes, George Frederic Watts, as a rather sheltered ﬁgure who scarcely left his exclusive enclave in the suburb of Holland Park, where he worked amidst adoring, self-proclaimed bohemian female patrons.57 Despite the social themes of early paintings like Found Drowned and Song of the Shirt, and the ubiquity of his work throughout the East End from the Whitechapel Art Gallery to Toynbee Hall itself, he appears to have had very little correspondence with Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett. Watts seems to have been more concerned for the posterity of his art collection than the aesthetic education of the masses.58 Yet he contributed ﬁnancially to a variety of missionary aesthetic schemes, including Ruskin’s Guild of St George, the South London Art Gallery, the Home Arts and Industries Association, and a People’s Playground. In her memoirs, Henrietta Barnett recalls Watts hosting the poor at his gallery.59 One might assume that painters’ wives, speciﬁcally Mary Seton Watts and Georgiana Burne-Jones, committed themselves to the administrative end of missionary aesthetic work simply so that their husbands would have more time to paint. However, this would be a simplistic conclusion, given Georgiana Burne-Jones’s strained relationship with her husband and her embrace

32 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

of socialist politics, and (following the Watts’ move to Surrey) Mary Seton Watts’ rigorous investment in her own aesthetic enterprise, the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild.60 Watts’ neighbor, Lord Frederic Leighton, also worked and resided far from the slums in his famed red-brick studio mansion in Holland Park. Elected President of the Royal Academy in 1876, Leighton was on the borders of aesthetic subculture, working in an individual classicist style that was nevertheless inﬂuenced by Pater, Pre-Raphaelitism, Whistlerian formalism, and the decorative arts.61 Apparently a genius at arts administration, Leighton lobbied tirelessly on a number of museum committees, sitting on the boards of the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, advising the trustees of the National Gallery on purchases, and painting frescoes for the South Kensington Museum. He also fostered the collections at the large provincial art galleries of Liverpool and Manchester. With an eye to the poorest, he served as president of the council of William Rossiter’s South London Art Gallery, which opened in 1891.62 Leighton, whose biographer Emilie Barrington equated him with Alexander Pope’s charitable ‘Man of Ross’ for his commitment to art for the poor,63 gained further alliances with other missionary aesthetes through membership on committees for smoke abatement and Sunday museum opening. Very recently, Rafael Cardoso Denis has considered Leighton’s participation on the board of the South London Art Gallery as an expression of his aspirations for universal design education.64 Among the painters exhibiting work at the St Jude’s Picture Exhibitions, Hubert Herkomer appears to have been the most involved in workers’ art education. He guest-lectured at C. R. Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft in 1887, guided laborers who attended art exhibitions in Whitechapel in the 1890s, and succeeded Ruskin as a Slade Professor of Art who hoped to bridge the gulf between classes through art.65 Herkomer extended his participation in art education when he founded his own art school in Bushey in 1883.66 The monthly calendar of The Toynbee Record cites visits by working men to the school in the late 1880s and 1890s.67 The fact that Mary Seton Watts and Georgiana Burne-Jones led the administration of galleries in poor neighborhoods indicates women’s positions in the forefront of the missionary aesthetic subculture. Like an astonishing number of female art activists, they were themselves gifted, trained artists. (Social reformers in the slums Emma Cons and Octavia Hill had each studied art under Ruskin.) Yet women’s participation as missionary aesthetes in the 1880s surpassed the mere organization of gallery exhibitions. In the 1880s, Mary Seton Watts became

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 33

invested in Eglantyne Louisa Jebb’s Home Arts and Industries Association, which proposed the revival of forgotten crafts industries as a means of revitalizing impoverished rural communities. Women’s organizations like the HAIA, founded by Jebb in 1884, the Donegal Industrial Fund founded by Henrietta Barnett’s sister Alice Hart in 1884, the Highland Home Industries founded by Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland in 1886, the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild founded by Mary Seton Watts in 1896, and the Dun Emer Guild founded by Evelyn Gleeson in 1902 have recently gained the notice of art historians.68 Following Ruskin, these female philanthropists sought to civilize the poor through art. Rather than promoting spectatorship of the ﬁne arts in gallery settings, they introduced the poor to craftsmanship ﬁrsthand by teaching lace-making, spinning, and embroidery. As employers promising decent wages and a better livelihood in return for artistic work, many female aesthetes advocated a visionary economics in which poor people could achieve economic stability through aesthetic cottage industries.69 Yet, at the same time, within the greater context of late Victorian capitalism, such programs were doomed to failure without the long-term auxiliary support and marketing savoir-faire of their mother-founders. Programs like the Donegal Industrial Fund and Highland Home Industries were inspired by the popular back-to-theland ethos, as well as speciﬁc Irish and Scottish nationalisms. Although they functioned as missionary aesthetic experiments (and I do return to them in my Conclusion), this study does not focus on them. Rather, as an organizing principle, the chapters look to the direct contact between aesthetes and urban laborers in late Victorian London, concentrating on Octavia Hill, the Barnetts, their ‘fellow workers,’ and their working-class constituents.70

The popular response and historical record Most of our surviving visual representations of aesthetic reformers appeared in the middle-class popular press as satire. In addition to portraying missionary aesthetes as weak-minded and affected, they inadvertently reveal bourgeois apprehensions about working-class social mobility and access to bourgeois cultural comforts. Years before the Punch cartoonist George Du Maurier created his famous series on the Aesthetic Movement, he had produced a correlative series of cartoons for the Punch Almanac entitled, ‘Culture for the Million, or Society as it May Be.’71 Here Du Maurier’s workers appropriate middleclass behaviors and authority: servants sing arias from Italian operas;

34 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

a butler helps a duchess with her spelling; nursemaids excel at art criticism. Notably, this series appeared the same year as the Educational Reform Bill of 1870, a measure that sought to prepare laborers for the responsibilities that came with suffrage and that intensiﬁed the Ruskinian goal of civilizing workers through art education. Through his cartoons, Du Maurier conveys the fear of class lines breaking down.72 Punch made it a practice of satirizing missionary aesthetic efforts as silly, impractical, and wrongheaded. We read in the papers that a series of entertainments to Sandwich Men have recently been given, and that they were greatly delighted with the mental treat afforded by the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, and the literature of Shakspeare [sic], Tennyson and Dickens. If at these gatherings, there was a combination of Beethoven and Beefsteaks, Mozart and Mutton-chops, Schubert and Sandwiches, Dickens and Dutch cheese, Tennyson and Tea, and Shakspeare [sic] and Shrimps, we can imagine the entertainment to be very satisfactory. But we fail to see that Shakspeare [sic] would satisfy the cravings of hunger, that Tennyson would quench thirst, or that Mozart and Schubert would be equivalent to a warm coat and a sound pair of shoes.73 This protest may be fueled not only by practicality, but also by a discomfort with workers appreciating music and art that had been a middle-class preserve. Through a clumsy malapropism, one of Charles Keene’s working-class characters vividly suggests mass art education as social upheaval when she urges her visitor, ‘Oh you must see my cabinet of cur’osities. I’m awful partial to Bric-Bats’ (Figure 1.3).74 Uneasiness with practical aestheticism, or aestheticism as lifestyle, also permeated the higher arts. Perhaps there is no clearer illustration of this anxiety than in W. P. Frith’s famous ‘Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881,’ where the ﬁgure of Oscar Wilde is extemporizing on paintings before a rapt audience of aesthetically attired young women (Figure 1.4). Featuring a veritable Who’s Who of artistic personages, including Royal Academicians John Everett Millais, Frederic Leighton, and G. F. Watts, and actresses Ellen Terry and Lillie Langtry, the painting would also appear to be a didactic genre painting on the dangers of inﬂuence. The aesthetic women on the left-hand side of the picture, including the one who stares raptur-

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 35

Figure 1.3 Charles Keene, ‘Mrs M: “Oh you must see my cabinet of cur’osities. I’m awful partial to Bric-Bats,”’ Punch 84 (17 March 1883): 131.

ously in our direction, are ostensibly also the mothers of the children in the painting, and Frith fears for their teaching. Will this new generation be schooled in mere intensity and grow up ignorant of proper methods for reading art? Given the concerns of Frith’s painting, we now shift our attention to the second image, an obvious parody of it (Figure 1.5).75 In this Punch

36

Figure 1.4

W. P. Frith, Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. (Courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.)

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 37

Figure 1.5 (unsigned cartoon), ‘Our Academy Guide, No. 163 – Private Frith’s View – Members of the Salvation Army, led by General Oscar Wilde, joining in a hymn,’ Punch 84 (12 May 1883): 220.

cartoon, ‘Our Academy Guide, No. 163 – Private Frith’s View – Members of the Salvation Army, led by General Oscar Wilde, joining in a hymn,’ Wilde is again an apostle, but what is the relevance of this image, and where is the joke in it? The Salvation Army was almost universally detested among the middle classes for its vulgarity, its appropriation of tunes that were popular among workers, and the accompaniment of these tunes by the harmonium – in all, its loud claim to public attention on the streets. Wilde, here its general, is associated with noise and vulgarity as well as with a proximity to low forms of culture. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, as an apostle of aestheticism who has famously toured America lecturing on the Italian Renaissance and revival of English crafts, he is rescuing workers from low forms of culture. The satirist seems to claim that Wilde offers in the place of the usual vulgarity a merely different version of vulgarity, also showy, inappropriate, and self-conscious. For the clearest representation of misdirected aesthetic education for the masses, we can turn to a Du Maurier cartoon of 1881, ‘What It Has Come To,’ in which a Mrs Muggles conﬁdes in the visiting doctor, ‘I don’t know as what’s the matter with Marier since she come from her last siterwation in Lunnon. There she sits all day a-staring at an old chiney dish, which she calls a-going in for Athletics!’ The rest of the narrative follows in brackets: ‘Of course Mrs M meant ‘Aesthetics’’ (Figure 1.6).76 Hands clasped, stooped in her chair, and worshipping the dish on the mantel, Maria the maid is a working-class facsimile of the pallid female Chinamaniacs whom Du Maurier has represented in earlier cartoons like ‘The Passion for Old China’ and more famously,

38 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

Figure 1.6 George Du Maurier, ‘What It Has Come To,’ Punch 80 (16 April 1881): 177.

‘The Six-Mark Tea-Pot’; her posture even echoes that of the Fair Aesthetic in ‘Reﬁnements of Modern Speech’ (Figure 1.7).77 While Du Maurier had used these cartoons to characterize bourgeois aesthetes as self-absorbed and neurotic, here he sustains a class-based critique. From her last employer Maria has acquired the fashionable posture of

The Social Strands of Aestheticism 39

Figure 1.7 George Du Maurier, ‘Reﬁnements of Modern Speech,’ Punch 76 (14 June 1879): 270.

40 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

‘intensity’ which translates into idleness and non-productivity. As such, she embodies a world turned upside-down, being a maid of all work who does no work. This is what ‘it’ – the dissemination of taste – has ‘come to.’ Du Maurier is able to pursue this joke by deﬁning practical aestheticism not as the application of Ruskin’s ideas, but as the Wildean performance of languor. *** It is a sign of how widespread Du Maurier’s satire has cast a shadow over modern understandings of aestheticism that our most exhaustive contemporary analysis of missionary aestheticism, Ian Fletcher’s 1987 essay ‘Some Aspects of Aestheticism,’ continues to depict missionary aesthetes sardonically. Fletcher describes his subjects in a light tone, and for that reason, he glosses over missionary aestheticism’s cultural resonances and place in philanthropic history that one might take more seriously. The following chapters reassess missionary aesthetic experiments as serious programs with institutional guidelines, administrative networks, and presumptions of authority over working-class constituents; these chapters also demonstrate how practical aesthetes, as much as they advanced a Ruskinian ethical agenda, sustained a slippery, sometimes troubling consanguinity with the tastes and commodities of the popular Aesthetic Movement.

2 Octavia Hill and the Aesthetics of Victorian Tenement Reform

At the age of 22 and just out of the university, Sydney C. Cockerell wrote to his family friend Octavia Hill for advice on his career path. He was torn between his obligation to earn a living and his artistic calling.1 She directed him toward business, assuring him that it was gratifying, ‘practical, serviceable work, gloriﬁed by imaginative thought, high ideals, and artistic joy …’2 Cockerell dutifully entered the family ﬁrm and stayed for seven years, ultimately moving on to more appealing administrative roles as secretary of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Cockerell’s friendship with Morris placed him in the center of art-socialist circles, so that while he was neither a painter nor poet, he remains a familiar ﬁgure to scholars of the Aesthetic Movement. His ultimate vocation as a curator of beautiful and rare objects seems a ﬁtting merger of his artistic interests with service in the public sphere. One might wonder whether Cockerell, by sustaining his alliances with artists and connoisseurs, was compromising Hill’s dictates. In an early letter, she had expressed contempt for the ‘sensitive elegant artist’ whose keen feelings ‘overpower his weak body and mind,’ characterizing professional artists as languorous, neurasthenic dandies.3 She assured Cockerell that a steady career in business would ‘give continuity and reality to a life that might else have gone like so many artists’ lives into freaks and fancies …’4 Hill’s allusions to artists’ degenerative bodies and unhealthy caprices echo much of her contemporaries’ discourse about decadent aesthetics. In contrast to Pater and Wilde, who encouraged self-realization through discriminative pleasures, Hill believed that true enjoyment of life would come only to an unselfconscious and modest nature. She claimed that only by the study of ‘facts’ and ‘mathematics’ and by ‘learn[ing] patience and quiet’ would an artist gain noble impressions.5 41

42 British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class

This ethos of service and self-sacriﬁce seems to conﬁrm the image we gain of Hill from her colleagues at the end of the century: she was gentle-mannered, but intractable and rather austere. Certainly in pursuing her scheme of voluntary rent-collection, which I describe below, she modeled a severity for her lady visitors to imitate. Yet Hill’s invocation of the stereotypical aesthete is perhaps disingenuous, for she was not merely a friend and protégée of John Ruskin, but also afﬁliated with artistic and radical communities from the 1850s on. Active in the Christian Socialist circle of Frederick Denison Maurice’s Working Men’s College, Hill encountered aesthetic society there as well, including Ruskin’s other protégé, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.6 Hill felt no antipathy to art or artists, only contempt for those who used their artistic talents to escape from social commitments. Emphatic about the usefulness of art and conceiving of beauty as a source of comfort and health, Hill was determined to forge a place for it in the world of reform. After some perplexity, she arrived at the goal of bringing decorative art into the public arena and used her administrative talents to do it. Hill epitomized the conscientious, reform-minded missionary aesthete who created institutional networks to enhance the physical lives of the poor. This chapter distinguishes the strands of her philanthropic and aesthetic education, and identiﬁes the way she reconciled her own abandonment of the artistic profession by justifying house management as a creative art in itself. Through his integration of the worlds of art and administration, Cockerell was in fact emulating Hill. Indeed, it had been Hill who employed him in the late 1880s at the Red Cross Hall in Southwark, where he organized social events such as dances, exhibitions, and dramas for working people and their families. Aesthetics were a fulcrum in the machinery of Hill’s housing schemes: she based central policies on the sensory impressions she received while in the slums, implementing practical solutions to ugliness. She gloriﬁed her lady visitors as sanctifying inﬂuences within the ﬂats; she even attributed their popularity among the poor to their aesthetic appeal. These visitors echoed Hill in proposing the attainment of a higher aesthetic sensibility through more pragmatic improvements of the home. They used the beautiﬁcation of the ﬂat as a means of bribing tenants into bourgeois behavior. Further, equating domestic assets with moral ones, they selected better-off laborers over the very poor as tenants. Hill’s political conservatism found expression in a narrow village aesthetic which enabled her to know and inﬂuence

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a limited number of families intimately, to impose her own uncontested aesthetic subjectivity in the design of outdoor sites, and to dictate recreations such as gardening and ordered children’s games. The construction of the Red Cross Hall and Cottages in 1887 saw the culmination of Hill’s social and artistic control through her dual employment of her lady visitors and the Kyrle Society for the Diffusion of Beauty among the People, a volunteer association she co-founded whose mission included the adornment of public spaces. Even as her methods of house management met with obsolescence under the welfare state, Hill’s aestheticizing mission survived into twentiethcentury British town planning. Hill maintained a complex position toward the world of popular aestheticism. In public essays, Hill was anxious to distinguish her lady rent-collectors as well as the practical aesthetes in the Kyrle Society from slumming decadents who betrayed their ‘depraved hunger for rags, sharp need, and slums.’7 She defended Kyrle volunteers as responsible contributors to the East End, but nevertheless limited their access to the poor at home, instead situating her lady rent-collectors as intermediaries who would deliver the Kyrle’s ﬂowers to the tenements. Hill set up institutional and rhetorical boundaries to protect her fellow volunteers from accusations of decadence and to guard her working-class tenants from the intrusions of slumming aesthetes. Studies of Octavia Hill have generally reserved her artistic inclinations for a brief summary of the Kyrle Society, the Open Spaces Movement and origins of the National Trust. 8 We can likewise consider Hill’s work in housing reform in the light of her artistic abilities and assumptions. It is not my intention to reduce Hill to a feverish, silly aesthete out of the pages of Punch; indeed, it would be a great disservice to underestimate the moral earnestness behind her work. As I have suggested in Chapter 1, by describing Hill as a missionary aesthete, I am redeﬁning the term aesthete as much as I am theoretically repositioning Hill. As we pursue this analysis, it is necessary to walk a delicate line. We cannot construct a skewed picture that highlights the aesthete in Hill while ignoring her other motivations for activism, especially since all of her charitable undertakings were interrelated. Hill’s aesthetic ideals merged with those about thrift, cleanliness, honor, and responsibility. My analysis in this chapter beneﬁts from recent scholarship by Jane Lewis who explores Hill’s call to social activism and particularly her heartfelt insistence on individual duty.

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The lady visitors and philanthropy at 5 per cent In 1865, at the age of 27, Hill purchased several tenement-courts in Marylebone, North London with money from John Ruskin, and began an experiment in managing the homes of the poor. Through the act of volunteer rent-collecting, she and her fellow lady visitors gained a ‘legitimate’ access to the lives of the poor, whom they met at least twice a week. Hill’s system of house management rested on the premise that renovation of a house’s physical structure was secondary to the crucial reform of the character and manners of its tenants. Inspired by the precepts of the Charity Organization Society of which she was a member, Hill blamed irresponsible landlords for allowing tenants’ arrears to accrue, claiming that the increasing indebtedness demoralized tenants, who grew accustomed to improvidence.9 Hill guaranteed investors that, through proper management, the houses of the poor could net a 5 per cent proﬁt. As a constant presence in the community, the lady visitor exerted inﬂuence, demanding mandatory employment of tenants (by insisting that rents had to be paid on time) and providing jobs as handymen around the court for the underemployed. Urging improvement through self-help, encouraging temperance and thrift, and discouraging ﬁghts between neighbors, a lady visitor could effect moral improvement upon a family and, by extension, on the court. Her advice often extended to sanitary matters, addressing the maintenance of the home and of one’s body, particularly the care of infants.10 More complexly, Hill took as an ancillary part of her philanthropic mission the civilizing of the poor. She hoped that by ‘raising the people’ hygienically she might also raise their expectations, instilling in them a longing for more reﬁned pleasures as well as a renunciation of the disorder that made the slum.11 Hill resolved that her tenants seek the aesthetic qualities she herself demanded of a home: light, color, cheerfulness, and an escape from monotony. To determine where her preoccupation with hygiene ceased and aesthetic desires began is impossible, for surely they fueled one another. Hill censured sanitary ‘nuisances’ (as Parliament aptly called them), because they offended her senses as a visitor. When a ﬂat’s airlessness sends each family outside, the children, according to Hill, crawl vermin-like on the hot stones ‘till every corner of the place looks alive.’12 Inadequate drainage is recounted in Hill’s essays in terms of damp, cold walls, oozy to her (middle-class) touch.13 As for overcrowding, she urges her reader to imagine what she has heard: ‘the ceaseless echo, the shout, the scream, the bustle in the narrow court.’14 Hill is

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determined that her tenants will feel revulsion where and when she feels it, and more, ﬁnd God’s grace in the beauties they customarily overlook. In a telling passage in her essay ‘Space for the People,’ she stands in the crowded court trying to placate some quarreling women when she spots a bright ray of sunlight catching the top of a red chimney-pot. It is ‘beautiful there, though too directly above their heads for the crowd below to notice it much.’15 Yet given the ‘healing gift of space,’ they might see it; they might ‘reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us gently.’16 The image of the women’s insensibility to beauty seems a mere step in her argument for ample urban spaces, but the transformation of these women may be another end in itself. For Hill, a ﬁner aesthetic sensibility does not mean a nervous frenzy of sensations, but a peaceful awakening by Nature’s beauty to visions of a better life and ideals. Hence Hill lobbied for sanitary measures to ensure Nature’s accessibility to the people and foster their gentility. Unlike her fellow philanthropists whose ‘depraved hunger for rags, sharp need and slums’ disgusted her, Hill pointed to one desolate, less sensationalistic, fact in the lives of the working poor: the blank, high, black wall that stands before a family’s window and prevents light from entering.17 She pressed for the Metropolitan Building Act of 1884 which prescribed that a yard should be in proportion to the houses surrounding it, hence providing those indoors with light, proper ventilation, and a sense of space.

Fine art to management; management as art Octavia Hill was born into a family shaped by Victorian ideals of duty and human perfectibility: her parents, James Hill and Caroline Southwood Smith, were each devoted to education reform and Owenite cooperativism. Octavia Hill’s maternal grandfather, sanitary engineer Thomas Southwood Smith, anticipated later health care workers and urban reformers in blaming contaminated water and overcrowding for outbreaks of cholera and typhoid in the metropolis. A member of the ﬁrst General Board of Health along with Edwin Chadwick and the Earl of Shaftesbury, Southwood Smith lobbied for an administrative machinery to regulate the provision of clean water. His insights into the privations of the poor aided Charles Dickens, who sought him as a consultant for his industrial novels. After James Hill suffered ﬁnancial ruin in the depression of 1840, the family settled intermittently in Southwood Smith’s Highgate home. There, as a young girl, Octavia Hill

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copied and edited her grandfather’s sanitary reports. As much as his ideas resonate in her later work in tenement reform, the culture of Hill’s girlhood was by no means one-sided. As I demonstrate, her artistic eye was as engaged as her conscience. The tension between social duty and aesthetic desire would lead her to forge a compromise in the life of missionary aestheticism. Still struggling to pay off James Hill’s debts in 1852, Octavia Hill and her mother gained employment as managers to the Ladies Cooperative Guild whose workshops were intended to augment the incomes of the poor. Hill’s work in a toy-making scheme, during which she befriended the Ragged School children under her and visited their impoverished homes, occurred simultaneously to her early aesthetic education under John Ruskin. Such paid activities as doll-making and glass designing, as well as the classes she offered young girls, were bolstered by a developing artistic sensibility. When Hill later taught classes for women at the Working Men’s College (1855–61) and at her family’s private school at Nottingham Place (1861–65), she was primarily responsible for providing lessons in drawing. Her correspondence further attests to her position in two worlds. She records a visit to the attic lodgings of a pupil’s family during the same months that she was spending long hours each week at the Dulwich Gallery, where Ruskin employed her to copy Turners for Modern Painters.18 As much she was gaining from Ruskin’s inﬂuence, in her teens Hill had also begun developing a sense of personal mission through the Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice, whose sermons she attended and whom she claimed as a spiritual mentor. Maurice’s forays into cooperativism and his Working Men’s College, founded in 1854, promoted brotherhood and a common culture between people of all classes. Maurice enlisted various members of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy to teach at the college, including his fellow Christian Socialists F. J. Furnivall and Tom Hughes, painter Ford Madox Brown, and John Ruskin.19 Although we can see parallels between Maurice’s educational agenda and the benevolent paternalism that Ruskin promoted in his social criticism of the 1850s and 1860s, Ruskin himself was never a Christian Socialist. As I demonstrate below, in the face of Ruskin’s increasing depression and lethargy in the early 1860s, Octavia Hill found herself defending the spiritual ideals of community and duty which she had learned from Maurice, and ironically, from Ruskin’s writings as well. In all, Hill’s apprenticeship as a copyist under Ruskin lasted ten years, and Ruskin’s investment in her development points to a talent

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that Hill’s biographers underestimated until quite recently.20 The tension between Hill’s artistic leanings and social responsibilities runs through her correspondence and Ruskin’s as a leitmotif. Early on, Ruskin and Hill debate whether the world of poverty should have any place in her drawings. Acknowledging that a commitment to the poor in her art as well as her social work would be ‘intensely wearing,’ she compliantly continues to paint Turner landscapes for Ruskin instead of pathetic scenes like the Wallis she has admired at the Royal Academy, a stone-breaker dead on his heap of stones in the twilight.21 Ruskin, at this period subject to a melancholic cynicism, argues that the best art can only be done in isolation. Hill rather priggishly censures his escapism: ‘I can’t help feeling a little sad that you can’t have your nice cave, and chip stones and paint mosses; should you really be so very happy without all the expressions of faces you spoke of to-day?’(133). She wavers, ‘But indeed, in spite of all the precious character of London people, I would gladly give them up for one ray of sunlight on a bank of weeds, and how about a sunrise among the Alps?’ but then reafﬁrms her calling, ‘Sometimes, when I can only see one sunset cloud above the houses, dimmed with smoke, I think of all there is to see, but not for me to see’ (133). Confronted by Ruskin’s escapism, Hill answers by advocating the sense of personal mission she has learned from Maurice. Hill’s conviction that God has placed her in London leads her to value art not for its formal qualities, but by its service to others (124). She appreciates Ruskin less as an artist and more as an educator (132). Likewise, she says of herself, ‘If I did not love [the people], if I had in no degree learned what ought to be said to them, I should care very little whether or not I ever tell them what I see and believe’ (142). Still preoccupied with the poor, Hill moves from the idea of using them as content for her paintings to the goal of reforming them through art. Her mission is ‘ﬁrst to love Nature and Art, second, to care that all should love Nature and Art, and third to see how to help them do so.’22 I have a distinct vision of an attic I hope to possess, when I have time and money to procure and use one little spot for quiet. My St Michael would be on its walls, and inscriptions, and I should like to preserve a record of some of the numberless messages natural things have recalled to me. Oh, the colours of that attic! I long to paint our houses and churches. I think to arrange beautiful colour, to show what I believe God’s works are symbols of, and to tell a little about the good and the suffering I have seen, these are the

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only desires I have about it all. I care immensely, almost exclusively, for decorative art. My room, my home, my college, my church are my dreams, when I dream. I have puzzled people because I have set myself so resolutely to become a painter, and yet have cared for people so very much. If I did not care for them, would not all that is not selﬁsh in my artistic plans be lost? If I had no desire to set down my faith in righteous strength, St Michael’s ﬁgure on my walls would have lost its glory. If I did not care that little boys in the back streets should have some pleasure, the earnest faces of the little children, who stretched their heads out of the attic window into the sunlight on the ﬁrst spring day that they might see the little lark and hear his full song, would have no interest for me.23 Hill’s initial image of the attic as an atelier of rest and escape emerges later in the paragraph as a room for her children, who would proﬁt ethically and aesthetically from its inscriptions and colors. Commemorating ‘incidents in common life that showed some good’ (127), she will adorn public spaces with didactic tableaux of everyday virtue: if her room is theirs, her home, college, and church are as well. Hence, her motives are strictly social and remedial. Like the song of the lark, her efforts will mitigate the horrors of urban life. Her last line above is particularly revealing: as an artist, a recorder of ‘good and suffering,’ she is interested not so much in the children as in their faces, where she eagerly searches for their longing for beauty, their acquiescence with her own expectations. One would expect after her dream vision that Hill would justify her drawing lessons as preparation for a life of decorative philanthropy, yet in the 1860s, missionary aestheticism had not yet been constructed as an institution. Without this category as a possibility, Hill struggles to ﬁnd a framework for her future. Following her vision, she shifts into a defense of the distinction between her two worlds of art and social work. If ‘human and artistic work ought to go hand in hand,’ these will not encroach upon one another (130).24 Determined as she is to ‘set down [her] faith in righteous strength’ (127), she feels a strong sense of inadequacy at ‘preach[ing] a Gospel to the people by … brush’ and so dismisses art as her medium for change altogether (128). In her view, the Turners she copies have no social value, for they are not didactic enough to aid her in her mission. Entrapped by her own circuitous ruminations, she is compelled to justify copying for copying’s sake. Despite her question above, ‘if I did not care for [the people] would all that is not selﬁsh in my artistic plans be lost?’

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she denies that copying is a simple diversion from the ‘real’ work with the poor. Instead, copying Turners will humble and purify her. She claims that, rather than stir her into a passion, ﬁne art disciplines and calms her, much in the way she hopes gifts of space, light and color will work on the people. Hill later claimed in her correspondence that the sacriﬁce of her art as a profession brought her ‘by ways that I did not know’ to her ideal.25 Hill’s assertion makes sense if we deﬁne the aesthetics of tenement reform by Ruskin’s terms in his essay ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’: ‘… the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle, – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision.’26 With the phrase ‘sweet ordering,’ Ruskin formulates an odd practical aesthetic, wherein the job of hegemonic ‘ordering’ is aestheticized – for ‘sweetness’ in this context seems synonymous with subtlety, grace, and loveliness – and aesthetic appeal relies upon rigorous standards of simplicity and symmetry. Let us consider Hill’s tenement mission as a conscious effort at ‘sweet ordering’ and her arrangement of the urban landscape in the context of the other managerial jobs she created: maintaining detailed, ﬂawless ledgers of arrears; relaying information about individual tenants through a network between charity workers, state health inspectors and school board visitors that she herself established, even drilling neighborhood boys as cadets. Hill relished minor, detail-oriented duties and through them, she fulﬁlled a desire that was as fundamentally aesthetic as it was moral: the imposition of order upon chaos. She wrote in 1877, ‘I think no one who has not experienced it can fully realise the almost awed sense of joy with which one enters upon such a possession [of a court], conscious of having the power to set it, even partially, in order.’27 So then, Hill’s aesthetic agenda includes the overt beautifying of the slums, but extends to administration itself. We can deﬁne her art as the satisfying application of her own organizing faculty.

The lady visitor, the Kyrle Society and the right to visit When the social phenomenon of slumming hit its peak in the early 1880s, philanthropic organizations whose workers visited impoverished neighborhoods were held under a kind of comic scrutiny. During the meeting of the 1884 Royal Commission on Housing, Lord Salisbury asked Hill about ‘the danger … that [lady visitors] are liable to crotchets and caprices and fashionable follies.’ She replied, ‘we get rid of the fashionable people pretty soon.’28 The job of ‘lady visitor’ required, in

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fact, a remarkable ability to deal quickly with inﬁnite minutiae: Ellen Chase’s memoir of her life as a rent collector under Hill ends with 20 pages of detailed advice on such jobs as plastering walls and clearing gutters.29 Indeed, Catherine (Kate) Potter, sister of Beatrice Potter (later Webb), who devoted six years to collecting rents in one of the roughest courts in the East End, complained that the life, with its scrupulous accounting of arrears each week, made her feel ‘like a bit of lifeless perpetually moving machinery.’30 Yet as witnesses to families’ starvation, alcoholism, and the evidence of domestic abuse, those pursuing the work were keenly awakened to a new sense of conscience. Elizabeth Haldane, who worked with Octavia Hill in 1884, reﬂected, ‘We were red hot with the idea of social service.’31 In her essay ‘A Home from Home: Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century,’ Anne Summers writes, ‘It was assumed that women graced the homes of the poor as they graced their own, exuding a wonderful and mysterious inﬂuence without abandoning an essentially passive role …’32 Certainly, the belief in the lady visitors’ charm was articulated by many in Octavia Hill’s circle: Oscar Tottie, a Toynbee Hall resident, claimed, ‘The sight and contact of such must be to the poor a “vision of delight” every week, like primroses in spring to us.’33 Having denied their passivity, does Hill afﬁrm an ornamentality, a grace in her lady visitors which facilitates a spiritual inﬂuence? Hill seems to voice her answer through her disapproval of the religious Sisterhoods. In contrast to the nuns who work among the poor, her visitors bestow ‘bright visits’ on the tenements; one tenant even requests ‘the lady with the sweet smile and the bright golden hair.’34 This word bright seems to sum up so much of what Hill assumes the nuns are not: happy, light, lively and yes, pretty. And it occurs again in another volume: you want to know them, to enter into their lives, their thoughts, to let them enter into some of your brightness, to make their lives a little fuller, a little gladder. You who know so much more than they might help them so much at important crises of their lives; you might gladden their homes by bringing them ﬂowers, or, better still, by teaching them to grow plants; you might meet them face to face as friends; you might teach them; you might collect their savings; you might sing for and with them; you might take them into parks, or out for quiet days in the country in small companies, or to your own or your friends’ grounds, or to exhibitions or picture galleries; you might teach and reﬁne and make them cleaner by merely going among them.35

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Notice the entanglement here of different kinds of gifts: one can improve the poor through pragmatic lessons in thrift and cleanliness, but also by introducing them to aesthetic delights: song, gardens, pastoral retreats, and art viewing in museums. Intersecting moral and aesthetic discourses culminate in that peculiar term ‘brightness’ which all at once connotes a sanitary gleam, a moral untaintedness, and the charisma of aesthetic ornament. ‘Entering into their lives, their thoughts’ means inﬂuencing them; the poor do not enter your life, but your ‘brightness,’ your aura, and that also means inﬂuencing them. The visitor will always have the upper hand. Hill writes elsewhere, ‘The poor of London (as of all large towns) need the development of every power which can open to them noble sources of joy.’36 Here, joy itself is not noble (Hill perceived the court as rowdy and drunken), but it may come from noble sources if the tenant can identify and choose them. Hill claims here that the poor have an innate power of distinction, that we, their teachers, must encourage its development. Hill posits that the tenant learns sanitary standards through the moral guidance of the visitor, and from these sanitary standards the tenant moves on to acquire ‘spiritual elevation’ (17). Hence, a true aesthetic sensibility ultimately rests upon moral criteria. All in the space of a paragraph, Hill complexly merges sanitary, moral, and aesthetic discourses. For example, Hill exploits contemporary medical fallacies about airborne contagion when she depicts cleanliness as an independent counter-miasma that pervades the building: ‘I knew from former experience that the example of [clean stairs and passages] would, in time, silently spread itself to the rooms themselves’ (41–2). Yet later on, she rephrases it: ‘the dark line of demarcation between the cleaned passage and the still dirty room arouses the attention, and begins to trouble the minds of its inmates’ (46). Here cleanliness comes not of its own will; it is proof of the tenant’s new conscience. ‘First I go at regular times, and then they clean to receive me, and have the pleasure of preparing for me, and seeing my satisfaction; then I go at unexpected times, to raise them to the power of having it always clean’ (45). The tenants seek her approval and take ‘pleasure’ in preparing for and witnessing the sight of it. Following the steps in Hill’s paradigm, from moral indebtedness to sanitary responsibility, one assumes that at the ﬁnal stage of aesthetic sensibility, the tenants will take pleasure in the room itself. Yet in none of her essays does Hill claim the domestic interior as a source of aesthetic elevation: she always points beyond it to the outdoors. What are Hill’s ‘noble sources of joy’? Beyond the love of God and family, they are sensory: light, space, color, peace, and music. These are

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rarely available in the squalid, noisy courts of the East End. ‘Our lives in London are overcrowded, overexcited, over-restrained. This is true of all classes; we all want quiet; we all want beauty for the refreshment of our souls’ (95). Hill does what she can to the houses themselves: she knocks out walls to provide better ventilation and light through new windows; she has drains repaired, cisterns installed, and a washhouse opened in each court for tenants’ use. To discourage overcrowding and ensure space, she clears away piles of rubbish from stairwells. She also allows no family to sublet to another and pressures families who reside in one room to take two. Those unaccustomed to paying for two rooms protest the new standard of space she imposes, but ‘they … gradually [learn] to feel the comfort of having two rooms, and pay willingly for them’ (22). Hill recounts tales of pathetic resistance to these elevated standards: one woman, when offered an alternative to her basement room, fears that her ‘bits of things’ will look even more decrepit in the sunlight (45). Signiﬁcantly, aesthetic enlightenment is not the prime goal of the lady collector: rather, it is to promote self-reliance among tenants. Yet Hill trusts that the ‘lesser gifts’ that produce aesthetic delight will somehow bring out an Arnoldian ‘right self’ in her tenants, and so she enlists citizens to aid the poor with gifts of aesthetic value: ‘things which no one is bound to provide for himself, but which give joy – as if you helped to put coloured decoration outside our schools or houses in dingy streets, or invited a company of poor people whom you know to tea in your garden during the fair June weather, or even sent some shells from your home by the sea to small children in one of our few London playgrounds.’37 Escaping the city for a day or bringing vestiges of the country to it became the focus of her aesthetic agenda. Hill made it a point to bring ﬂowers from the countryside to her tenants; nine years before the Kyrle Society was established, she had cleared a space for a neighborhood garden in her second court, Freshwater Place, and she was already organizing regular visits to the country.38 By 1874, so many tenants were under Hill’s management that to get each family to the countryside for a day each year required no fewer than 15 excursions.39 Seeing this, Hill’s sister, Miranda Hill, suggested bringing the country into the city, and together they cofounded the Kyrle Society to facilitate the conversion of London’s burial grounds into small gardens. Octavia Hill, also active in the separate Commons Preservation Society, justiﬁed the Kyrle’s existence by stating that while the CPS would preserve open spaces, the Kyrle would create private gardens in the cities. Just as in Hill’s tenement reform,

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thinking small was the answer: ‘tiny plots, backyards, and small forecourts, may be fuller of trees or grass or creepers.’40 To the hopeful middle class, a window box or a vase of ﬂowers in the window were signs of culture. A perusal of the Dictionary of British Artists, 1880–1940 and the 1875 Artists’ Directory reveals that the Kyrle Society membership was composed largely of practicing artists.41 A great number of Kyrle Society members were women, and their appearance in the Kyrle membership lists as ‘Miss Berry’ or ‘Miss Shand’ makes it difﬁcult to conﬁrm if these were Maud Berry and Christine R. Shand, who are listed in the reference books under the rubric ‘ﬂower painter.’ However, Kyrle artists tended to engage in exactly this sort of decorative work. Harriete Harrison and Maria Harrison (presumably sisters, living at the same address) both work as painters of ‘fruit and ﬂowers.’ Their inclusion in the Artists’ Directory of 1875 means that apart from their charitable work, they were accustomed to working, or expected to work, for pay. However, Kyrle Reports describe the women working from the stencils of the more established male Kyrle Society volunteer Audley Mackworth, a hint that the gender politics in the society may have been skewed. We ought to acknowledge as well Kyrle Society members not merely as artists themselves but as family relations of established painters.42 It is remarkable in fact how few names on the Kyrle Society list are not afﬁliated with the arts. The exceptions are instead conspicuously associated with social work: Emily Shaw-Lefevre, Charles and Emily Southwood Maurice, Octavia Hill, and Harriot Yorke. The reports of the Kyrle’s Decorative Branch indicate volunteers’ fashionable tastes. The following entry describes the changes in St Gabriel’s Home for Young Women in Business, Mortimer Street. The walls of the recreation room of this home have been decorated with stencilled scrolls. Below the cornice runs a band of conventional roses and above the dado a narrower one of vine, both in natural but subdued harmony. The dado, and all the woodwork in the room, are painted brown, as is also the overmantel, bearing in illuminated letters the names of the members of the Guild; above this, the vine scroll is carried up to the ceiling in a bold design, forming a very complete decoration to this end of the room. In the two spaces between the windows are kneeling ﬁgures of the Blessed Virgin and St Gabriel copied from a picture by

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Mr Albertinelli, in the Galleria dell’Arcispedale di S. Maria Nuova in Florence. The dark panels of the doors are relieved by a design of wheat ears, in the buff tint of the wall covering, which is also the ground colour for the rest of the paintings.43 There is the design for St Luke’s Parish Hall, Camberwell: A frieze of texts on dark red with stencilled borders surrounds the top of this large hall; the windows and doors also being framed by borders in shaded green and salmon colour, on the same ground. The spaces beneath the windows at the east and west end are ﬁlled by panels of pomegranates and foliage on salmon colour, and the pilasters dividing the side walls are painted with garlands, ribbons and musical instruments in the Renaissance style.44 Muted tints, stenciled borders of vines and garlands, emblematic pomegranates and wheat ears, allusions to the Italian Renaissance, and an overall concern with harmony of color were elements of style preached by Victorian aesthetes. Punch’s satires of the Kyrle Society misleadingly depict Kyrle men and women soliciting slum tenants at home, one-to-one – therein lies the bitter humor of the cartoons and doggerel verses.45 Although the Kyrle Society had been founded in 1875, it appears that Punch did not discover it until the Aesthetic Craze of 1881 (the year of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience and the eve of Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour in America). Punch’s songs relentlessly associate the Kyrle Society with the telltale signs of lifestyle aestheticism, portraying Kyrle members foisting gifts of peacock feathers, lilies, and dados upon the poor. In one case, a Kyrle visitor leaves an impoverished family in a garret with a lily and ‘Miss Hill’s little book,’ here referring to Hill’s manual on house management in such precious terms that it might be a slim volume of poetry.46 It seems, however, that members of the Kyrle recognized that the pursuit of beauty was not in itself a valid reason for intruding upon the poor at home. One could justify visitation to promote concrete measures, such as the renovation of a dilapidated staircase, but no philanthropist would knock on doors in the name of that more abstract goal, beauty. Hill herself admitted, ‘If we could alter this [ugliness of London], it would go far to reﬁne and civilise [the people]. Now it would be difﬁcult to do this in their own homes at once; besides, that is a sphere where each should do for his own family …’47 The Kyrle

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Society accordingly averted its attentions from domestic interiors, instead performing good works on the garden plot, the hospital, and the town hall. Hill’s detailed accounts of life in the courts bear witness to her horror, not merely at the dirt, but at the bleakness there: Dirty distemper, or at best, of a pale, dingy, yellow brown if quite new; ﬂat ceilings often blackened with gas and smoke; heavy, long, comfortless benches, frequently without backs; old dusty cords to the windows; no mantel-piece, bracket or pillar where one can put a glass of ﬂowers; not a picture on the walls unless some wretched rolled glaze print or map; not a curtain to introduce colour, nor break the line of square, ﬂat windows; draughts under the doors; black coal-skuttles, broken fenders – everything ugly, everything dingy. If there are tea-things, they are sure to be of the commonest; if there are urns they probably leak. Bare and hideous, their surfaces broken with nothing but holes made by nails torn out from the plaster, the walls stare at one.48 Hill claims as necessities the familiar objects of the middle-class home of the 1880s: her demands for a proper mantel, bracket, and china echo popular treatises on house decoration. The better-off of her tenants purchase pictures in gilt frames, wax ﬂowers, a colored table cover, ‘signs of care and taste’ which relieve an eye accustomed to dreary rooms (743). She appeals to her middle-class readership, ‘Till you stay a little in the colourless, forlorn desolation of the houses in the worst courts, till you have lived among the monotonous, dirty tints of the poor districts of London, you little know what the colours of your curtains, carpets and wall-papers are to you’ (743). Yet in the context of her essay, her aesthetic demands for appropriately tinted ‘curtains, carpets and wall-papers’ are not domestic: the dingy room she describes is a meeting hall. The Kyrle’s Decorative Branch commissioned popular artists like Walter Crane and William De Morgan to brighten such halls with murals and tiled insignia. So, in defense of the Kyrle Society, Hill steers her listeners away from the homes of the poor, instead describing desolate hospital walls which confront the crippled dockworker; cheerless ‘schoolrooms, mission-rooms, parish rooms’ for which the Kyrle supplies vases, ﬂags, and table-covers, all to ameliorate the oppressive dreariness and comfortlessness there (743). She draws attention to churches as well, where the Kyrle choir transports the poor into ‘some vista of awe, wonder,

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and peace’ through ﬁne music (745). In fact, Hill’s essay about the Kyrle Society is designed to dissuade her listeners from visiting the poor: in the same breath that she states how the poor love receiving ﬂowers, she says, ‘let it be remembered also that we have a machinery for giving them quickly, and therefore quite fresh, in the worst courts …’ (747). The Kyrle Society enlists the lady visitors to distribute ﬂowers, for they are familiar, professional friends to the poor.49 So the Kyrle Society complements the lady visitors; the groups share common interests, but distinct responsibilities. Arguably, Hill’s rigid institutionalization of charity-work was intended to protect the poor from the worst slummers, like the woman who cheerfully told Hill, ‘I should like to go where there is condensed misery.’50 But implicitly, the boundary lines she drew also prevented Kyrle men and women from home visitation and therefore raise questions about their possible status as slummers. Hill was determined to distinguish ‘good philanthropists’ from ‘bad slummers,’ even as, in reality, many philanthropists engaged in slumming.51 As a means of pursuing this false distinction, Hill defends her allies in the Kyrle Society by accusing others outside her established circles, such as the misguided, cheerful lady in her essay. (As I argue in the next chapter, while missionary aesthetes insisted upon their legitimacy by emphasizing such boundaries between philanthropist and mere slumming voyeur, more radical authors like Oscar Wilde demonstrated the ﬂuidity between these ﬁgures in the slums.)

Tenant selection, interior decoration, and the signs of virtue If the Kyrle Society provided a means for aesthetes to aid the poor without invading their homes, was aesthetic intrusion still practiced, albeit left to the professionals? ‘Remember,’ Hill told her workers, ‘you have no right to cross the tenant’s threshold.’52 Yet how ﬂexible that rule seems to have been so long as the visitor held ﬂowers in her hand, a book, a jar of jam. One lady visitor, Ellen Chase, goes so far as to suggest that a glimpse of growing plants in the room ‘suggests entrance or inquiry,’ as if Culture were inviting the visitor in.53 Getting one’s lady house-manager to ﬁnance the beautiﬁcation of one’s home was always contingent upon assimilation and subordination. In her memoir, Tenant Friends in Old Deptford (1929), Ellen Chase learns that a young working-class mother, Mary, is unmarried, and prompts Mary in a campaign to get the father to post banns. The key? To dazzle him with the beauty of her new room. ‘I told her that it

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seemed we had been waiting for each other. I had meant to repaper her walls, but had been waiting to see the ﬂoor white ﬁrst; and I undertook to do up her room directly on the understanding that she, for her part, would keep it fresh and inviting’ (159) (and on the understanding that Mary, a former alcoholic, would not drink). Days later, ‘It was rumoured that [Mary] had even rubbed black lead over the grate, and she seemed bent on living up to her improved surroundings …’ (160). She thriftily accumulates a rug, a bureau, and ﬁner clothes for her children and herself. ‘[S]tarting at the end of the line, she had won her way to a foremost place’ (166). Yet months after her lover’s desertion has become obvious, another child is born and Mary is given notice to leave. Hill herself did not hesitate to advise her tenants on the choice of furniture and curtains; she even taught lessons in ﬂower arrangement.54 Yet in her essays on house management, she elides her control of the domestic aesthetic and does not cite it as an example for fellow workers. She is not silent out of a delicacy about the tenants’ pride or a sense of her own invasion; rather, the visitor’s improvements depend upon the individual family and its ﬁnances. How could a visitor advise a working-class mother on household ornaments when that mother would have to purchase them? Despite the profusion of cheap, massproduced furniture and knick-knacks in the homes of the bourgeoisie, eyewitness reports of the homes of the working classes describe a scarcity of furnishings.55 A ‘rag and bone man’ tells the journalist Henry Mayhew, ‘For pictures I have given from 3d to 1s. I fancy they’re among the last things some sorts of poor people, which is a bit fanciful, parts with.’56 Laborers’ reluctance to pawn colored prints may have been in part because, as Mayhew reports, these covered damp and rotting patches on the walls, just as matting covered scuffed and corroded ﬂoors.57 Octavia Hill’s ﬁrst tenants in Nottingham Place hang pictures from The Illustrated News on their walls.58 Prints mean much to the middle-class observer, too. Ellen Chase ruefully recounts how devious applicants stage interviews in homes other than their own in order to give the impression that they are worthy of the new cottages. A man displays a portrait before the rent-collectors, leading them to believe ‘surely the street [is] looking up!’ The same afternoon they ﬁnd the portrait in a pawnshop window; he moves into his new parlor with a straw mattress and a mesh bag of onions.59 Octavia Hill wrote that her tenants were ‘mostly of a class far below that of mechanics’ and some ‘costermongers and small hawkers.’60 Historian Anthony Wohl estimates that generally they would fall in

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Classes C and D of the sociologist Charles Booth’s categories of the poor rather than the more desperate casual earners of Class B, let alone the residuum of Class A.61 In short, Hill’s rents were too high to attract the poorer Class B worker who had stayed in the tenements to be close to possible work as it arose.62 When Chase chooses her tenants, she surveys their possessions, which might indicate the character of the applicant. The contradiction seems clear: accepting tenants with material, and tacitly moral, assets might set a precedent for providing homes to artisans of a higher class rather than the casual laborers so desperately in need of cheap housing. And so the variety is great: Gypsies who arrive with nothing but a few overturned boxes for seats; the seaman’s mother with the elaborate piece of worsted work by her son; the Irishman with the grand set of bagpipes. No wonder that Chase feels regret at evicting a tenant who, despite a drinking problem, keeps a cosy and tidy room, with curtained windows and ‘nice pictures and ornaments, according to local standards.’63

Aesthetic recreation and self-help in the model community Just as Parliament sought cosmetic cures to the problem of the poor and homeless by ﬁnancing large-scale demolitions of neighborhoods, Octavia Hill, spurred by her belief in personal relations between visitors and the poor, maintained a myopic view of tenement reform. She remained optimistic that her own example would prompt other individuals to rehabilitate courts and, by extension, London.64 Yet London was growing at a rate of 80,000 people a year.65 By favoring small cottages over large blocks, Hill ignored the enormous demand for workers’ housing: even William Morris admitted that one would have to build up, using ‘vertical streets’ to insure green spaces.66 Her unwillingness to make structural changes in her properties meant that renovation consisted of little more than scrubbing and repairs.67 Hill defended her repairs as ‘vital as to health and comfort.’68 The question is, the health and comfort of whom? Perhaps twelve families in a court. This was enough for Hill, whose attention, as Martin Gaskell states, ‘was focused on the quality of the immediate environment of the individual family.’69 She declared, ‘a third-rate cottage with a small garden, or even a back yard, is better for a working man than that best tenement that the London County Council can build.’70 Yet that thirdrate cottage lacked an indoor toilet the new ﬂats could provide; surely, the pastoral domesticity Hill envisioned in the small cottage was a fantasy.

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Hill’s anachronistic desire to recreate a small insular village out of a court, and her refusal to see the city as a whole, were politically as well as aesthetically motivated. As Anne Summers has observed, ‘If social problems really could be solved on a house-to-house basis, and by voluntary workers, then disturbing thoughts on structural change, or expensive reforms, could be conveniently shelved.’71 Concerned as Hill was with the individual’s improvement, the high-density block, characterized by those founded by the Peabody Trust, did not conform to her vision of the personal and aesthetic exchange between landlord and family. The painting of rooms was forbidden in the Peabody Buildings, and the uniform façades featured no grillwork as a relief from monotony: Nikolaus Pevsner would write that the Peabody era was ‘truly humanitarian in its intensions, yet depressing in its results.’72 If Hill was repulsed by the ‘dreadful sameness’ and ‘dreary whitewash’ of the tenement blocks, she also found imminent large-scale state-funded housing equally distasteful.73 So, for Hill, the green inner courtyard with creepers trained up the walls was the solution, not the provision of more ﬂats. As part of a generation haunted by what it perceived as signs of moral, mental, and physical degeneration among the urban poor, Hill was prepared to see the garden as a panacea for all social and psychological ills.74 First, by providing a respite from the crowded home, the neighborhood garden offered a healthy alternative to the attractions of the local public house and music hall.75 Second, gardening was considered physically invigorating, foliage an antidote to smallpox and fevers. Third, tending one’s own garden was thought of as an ennobling activity, extending the virtues of hard work and efﬁciency into leisure hours.76 Octavia Hill promoted small gardens and ﬂower shows on her properties, introducing a rivalry among local gardeners, and in this way, disseminating middle-class values of industry and competition. Hill trusted that the garden would restore to the working poor the integrity they had forfeited in their ‘hustling, jostling, restless, struggling, noisy, tearing existence.’77 Undeveloped land was a growing rarity in London: with each new building erected in the city and each new fence enclosing land outside it, Hill felt the working man was being deprived of the space and quiet that were his birthright. ‘Sometimes we think of it as a luxury, but when God made the world, He made it very beautiful, and meant that we should live among its beauties and that they should speak peace to us in our daily lives.’78 The 1870s and 1880s saw various campaigns by Hill to obtain small plots of land from Board Schools as playgrounds

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for children, disused burial grounds from churches, and parks from noblemen. Urging landholders with large tracts of land to give the poor access to them, she wrote, ‘It must be observed that the nation as a nation is not held to possess the open, uncultivated, unappropriated land of England. … Are those who own estates to have their gardens and the people to have none?’79 It is a leveling statement, yet the strain of populism in Hill ceases there and her desire for practical control of that land takes over. Proposing the creation of ‘outdoor sitting rooms’ from disused churchyards, she begins to shape their design: a small space can seem less conﬁning if the boundaries are pleasing, such as a cloister or colored wall.80 She suggests ornamental fountains and birds in cages to delight the children and advises admitting only a few people at a time to insure enough space.81 At one point, she even quibbles with the ceramicist William De Morgan over the color of the tiles she is commissioning. ‘I think I mean to decide the matter according to my desire,’ she says, choosing a subtle gradated blue over the ‘vulgar completeness’ of brighter colors so popular among those with ‘modern taste.’82 Ironically, the philanthropist’s choice of outdoor beautiﬁcation over that in the tenement really constituted no less of an intrusion. Just as Hill did not provide her courts with new cisterns until the tenants had claimed the property as their own (and expressed a proper respect for it), so she had to anticipate the destruction of outdoor amenities by working-class patrons who felt the new gardens were not their own.83 It is to our credit as historians that we not dismiss these acts of resistance as random pranks on the part of working-class boys. Locals understood the new gardens, with their regulations and surveillance by hired inspectors, as attempts at social control by middle- and upperclass interlopers.84 When residents of Hill’s second court slowed the building of a garden wall by stealing the bricks at night, Hill managed to complete the job only by employing a watchman to guard it.85 Visiting the new gardens, literate laborers detected upper-class condescension in the chiseled messages of virtue and temperance inscribed on the fountains.86 In addition, philanthropists had not considered the traditional practices of the poor in the limited open spaces that fell within their reach.87 The poor appropriated unimproved land to serve their needs, growing cabbages here, hanging clothes out to dry there, yet park designers spared land for decorative gardens alone.88 Laying out the ground at her second court, Freshwater Place, Hill had mud ﬂung at her by locals; this would also occur to the secretary of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association years later.89

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Like the Kyrle Society, Hill as a house-manager invested faith in craft media, murals and mosaics as a means of elevating the poor to higher thought and feeling.90 However, in contrast to the cheerfulness of the Kyrle’s mosaics, a grim moral current runs through Hill’s designs. One can read Hill’s haughtiness towards her tenants in the didactic mosaic inscriptions she commissioned for them. Could any working man read the inscription at Freshwater Place – ’Every House is Built by Some Man, but He that Built All Things is God’ – without thinking of the actual laborers who had built the house, perhaps reﬂecting that he himself had contributed to its upkeep for extra pay? In her 1877 essay ‘Open Spaces,’ Hill proposes tiles on the side of a church in bright colors: ‘Do noble things, not dream them, all day long, / And so make life, death and the vast for-ever, / One grand, sweet song.’91 She hopes it will ‘startle [each man hurrying home through the thoroughfare] to memories, at least, of a greater, nobler life than he was leading …’92 Surely any working man would question the prerogative of Hill or anyone to urge him to live a ‘nobler life’: indeed, the poem is more a nudge than an inspiration. Hill targeted the leisure activities of the poor for aesthetic enhancement. When she stated, ‘I have tried, as far as opportunity has permitted, to develop the love of beauty among my tenants. The poor of London need joy and beauty in their lives,’ she followed with an argument for innocent amusements: here the tenants’ ‘joy and beauty’ were not contemplative, but recreational.93 The order Hill imposed upon her tenants’ lives by assigning them paying jobs in the court, getting the girls into work clubs and the women into savings clubs, she extended into their leisure hours, setting the boys into ﬁfe and drum bands, offering singing lessons to children. She had a strong will to ‘rule’ this ‘wild, lawless, desolate, little kingdom’ – and to the less selfassured lady visitors under her, it must have been difﬁcult to implement this benevolent despotism in their own courts (41). Acute to every detail in the lives of her families, Hill expressed dismay at the call-and-response songs the children sang while at play, ‘Here comes my father [mother, daughter] all down the hill, all down the hill,’ ‘We won’t get up for his ugly face – ugly face’ (29). Where Hill found offensiveness, she claimed control: lady visitors would act as umpires, teaching new, competitive games ‘with ordered companions, deﬁnite object, and progressive skill’ (29). The Kyrle Society too declared its commitment to enhancing working-class recreations through the 1887 construction of the Red Cross Hall in Southwark, which served as a culminating manifestation

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of the interdependence between the Kyrle and Hill’s lady visitors. The Hall and its Red Cross Cottages would occupy the site of a hop warehouse, a court that had been vacated as unﬁt for human habitation, and a former paper factory that had burnt down. Contemporaries celebrated the razing of the warehouse because it allowed for more light and air to pass between the homes. For six weeks round the clock Hill’s workers burnt the paper that had lain in heaps 4 or 5 feet deep – today we recognize this as an environmental atrocity – but at the time, they boasted how the ashes would go, naturally, towards fertilizing the garden. Architect Elijah Hoole designed the Red Cross Cottages according to Hill’s instructions; they were irregularly gabled and quaintly ornamented like the homes she had observed on her visits to the Tyrol. Plainly, the design of the Hall and its surrounding houses were incongruous to the industrial landscape of South London.94 On opening day, the Kyrle choir sang and there was a debut of the ﬁrst of a series of painted panels in the Hall by Walter Crane, commemorating the ‘peaceful heroism’ of the poor, in this case, the recent heroic death of a local girl, Alice Ayres, in a Southwark ﬁre.95 Red Cross Hall served as the center for various community activities including Sunday band concerts and Christmas carol-singing; the Working Man’s Club met there and the boy’s Volunteer Cadet Corps drilled there. (Hill characteristically objected to the color of the uniforms.) The children performed verse-plays written by Miranda Hill; costumes were designed by Kyrle volunteers. Likewise, visitors and tenants in Marylebone used their hall, St Christopher’s, for dance-nights and staged annual Gilbert and Sullivan operettas through 1911; all events were free. A program of the Red Cross Hall’s weekly activities indicates the often educational, sometimes quirky offerings under Octavia Hill: amidst the concerts and lantern-slide lectures, one ﬁnds an entry entitled ‘Flamingo [sic] Troupe in Costume.’96 The Red Cross Cottages grounds were amply planted with bulbs and trees, and adorned with an artiﬁcial pond, a little bridge, and ornamental and drinking fountains. A raised balcony gave additional space for those wishing to sit outside and served as a roof to the children’s playground, insuring that they could get fresh air even when it was wet out. A pigeon house was built and pigeons were kept there. The Red Cross Garden was the sight of an annual May Festival for the children and an annual tenants’ Flower Show where ‘women contributed geraniums with every leaf washed as if it were a baby.’97 The program commemorating the opening of the Hall reveals the aesthetic priorities at work: besides the donations to cover the costs of building and fuel,

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gifts included ﬂower seeds, music stands and Indian draperies, and of course, Hill’s homage to a medieval Arcadia, the maypole.98 Following a tenants’ May Day celebration, Miranda Hill reﬂected that the children’s customary dishevelment as they received wreaths from the Queen of the May today passed merely for picturesqueness.99 Years later, one Toynbee associate admired Canon Barnett at Toynbee Hall for having bypassed this nostalgia: ‘he never mistook memories for hopes – was never tempted by petty revivals of the handicrafts, maypoles, and cheaping-steads that made Morris the fashion of the time.’100 Yet others in the settlement movement were. The Bermondsey Settlement (also designed by Elijah Hoole) played at Merrie England through the May Festivals of its Guild of Play and even used Old English lettering on its programs.101 Such revivalism surely has aesthetic resonances, recalling the antiquarianism of various strands of aesthetes from back-to-the-land enthusiasts to the Pre-Raphaelites. Beyond selective cul-de-sacs like the Red Cross Hall and Cottages, the greater working-class culture of pub, music hall, and racecourse ﬂourished in late Victorian London.102 Ironically, as Hill’s inﬂuence spread, she could no longer control the design of the increasing number of houses under her management, nor could she contain the entertainments sought there. The Katherine Buildings, model tenements in Aldgate managed by Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett, were run in collaboration with Hill. The architect had adhered to Hill’s frugal suggestion that residents needed only one water tap per ﬂoor. Different families rented one room a piece, forming a ‘nest’ of independent rooms around a single outdoor balcony.103 Octavia Hill did not foresee that the social center she had recommended to foster communal self-consciousness would end up as the access to the lavatories: in short, the tenants socialized in the latrines, the only illuminated places in the building, and the young Beatrice Potter, who collected rents there, viewed this as an indecency. She censured these grim ﬂats, with their uniform iron balconies, as ‘an utter failure,’ seeing in their layout a willful disregard for the tenants’ privacy and aesthetic needs.104 Yet, as Jane Lewis states, any housing director who complied with Hill’s prescriptions on plumbing, but ignored her supplication for ﬂowers and gardens, was offering a stingy interpretation at best.105 To understand the variety of housing under Hill’s care, contrast the daily aesthetic experience of Potter’s tenants against that of artisan-residents in the dwellings Elijah Hoole designed in 1877 for the philanthropist Caroline Stephen (who was a younger sister of the writer and philosopher, Leslie Stephen).106 A structure accommodating 28 ﬂats with

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individual entrances through iron balconies, the Hereford Buildings had strict rules: among them, residents had to hang lace curtains in their windows and care for geraniums by their doors.107 Hill acquired the management of this property in 1881. Hill’s pastoral romanticism invites a comparison to that of William Morris.108 Like Morris, Hill valued the sensual pleasures of tactile, everyday experience. She defended aesthetic aspects of life against charges of frivolousness, claiming that space, quiet, and green areas were necessary for a tolerable urban existence. As a visitor to the slums, Hill valued the experience of ‘liv[ing], as it were, side by side with those who need [open spaces]’ over mere theoretical knowledge of crowding. She asserted, ‘This is different from reason and science: this is life, and this is pain.’109 Morris too gauged the quality of daily life by its immediate sensations: ‘To feel mere life a pleasure; to enjoy moving one’s limbs and exercising one’s bodily powers …’110 Morris deﬁned aesthetic experience to include those qualities that make daily life bearable: good health; education and the pleasures of reading and knowledgeable discourse; leisure; ease of mind (freedom from want and worry through steady employment); reasonable work and a pleasant place to do it in; pleasant material surroundings generally; and decency of accommodation. Unlike Morris, Hill did not extend her vision of comfort to a consideration of the workplace and the quality of labor. She rejected Morris’s claim that every man’s work should be a pleasurable art, and instead reafﬁrmed the distinction between daily labor and a happy home whose joy compensates for, ‘gloriﬁes and gladdens’ work.111 Hill’s belief that extended house visitation would sufﬁciently remedy Britain’s slum problem grew more untenable as the century drew towards a close. 112 In 1888, Charles Booth’s monumental survey of city neighborhoods by economic class, Life and Labour of the People of London, revealed that the source of overcrowding was poverty and that poverty was not a result of one’s individual improvidence, but the product of extensive underemployment. Following Morris, socialists framed an aesthetic based upon daily comfort in all aspects of life, essentially demanding an enforceable standard of living that would guarantee adequate conditions in the workplace (including protection against sweated labor), and consequently, attainable material comforts at home and sufﬁcient leisure for the appreciation of nature outdoors. Hill, however, remained obstinately resistant to state intervention. Though she provided workingmen with reading rooms for their improvement, Hill made no demand on

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their behalf for the leisure that could come only through work-legislation. She valued her tenants’ health, yet insisted that each wife and mother was responsible for her family’s diet and so fought against state provision of school lunches for poor children.113 Lastly, still trusting in her prescribed regimen of self-help, Hill opposed guaranteed pensions for the elderly, as if green ‘places to sit in’ were all they required. 114 While Hill’s theories seemed anachronistic by the turn of the century, Morris’s vision anticipated each of the social security measures drafted by Parliament in 1909–11.115 As schemes of 5 per cent philanthropy were eclipsed by the provisions of the welfare state, Hill’s courts were dismissed as irrelevant to the greater issue of housing the masses and lady visitors were supplanted by or absorbed into a system of trained state social workers. The Kyrle Society, too, was well on its way to obsolescence. ‘It remained in the public eye largely a clubbish group of the well intentioned, whose social vision was limited to ﬂower boxes and musical concerts for the poor.’116 Lacking political awareness, its members were content to raise philanthropic gifts of land independently rather than lobby local authorities to undertake greater responsibility for open spaces.117 The Kyrle declined to merge with the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, founded in 1882, and was in time supplanted by it. A far more activist group than the Kyrle, the MPGA continued to act directly in the creation of new parks and playgrounds, but its chairman Lord Reginald Brabazon, Earl of Meath aided by the medical authority Ernest Hart, pushed for legal changes as well, claiming that the Metropolitan Board of Works should protect and provide more open spaces.118 The MPGA thus lobbied for public bathhouses, swimming pools, recreational ﬁelds, and gymnastic equipment, all to be ﬁnanced through municipal taxes. As an interest group, it kept an eye out for encroachments on burial grounds by railway and housing developers.119 By 1890, the MPGA had laid out about 200 small city gardens.120 The Kyrle Society would falter in the early 1900s due to lack of funds.121 Surprisingly, however, the name crops up in different contexts through the 1950s, though clearly by then it had lost its original meaning; The Kyrle Hall Flash, a children’s magazine, invokes the Kyrle’s interests in recreation, but not its goal of decorative philanthropy.122

Conclusion As a tenement reformer with alliances to British aestheticism, Hill left double-edged legacies for early twentieth-century British town planners.

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The Scottish socio-ecologist Patrick Geddes used his observations of Kyrle Society functions to frame a demand for cities that would provide their inhabitants with accessible cultural amenities such as libraries, museums, and open spaces.123 Early town planners recognized the futility of Hill’s vision of an inner-city village where individual rents would not be driven up by the costs of speculative, commercial building. But they remained tempted by her pastoralism, with its attention to the small details of restoration, and they encountered difﬁculties in formulating pragmatic solutions to the housing shortage. Herself interested in suburban utopian housing experiments, Hill had visited the model community Saltaire outside Bradford in 1869; in 1903, she served on the committee that chose Raymond Unwin’s Arts-and-Crafts-inﬂuenced design for Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, Letchworth. As had been the case with Hill’s own tenancies, Letchworth proved to be beyond the grasp of the poorest: conceived in the 1890s as an industrial as well as residential community, its factory workers had to commute in from cheaper housing elsewhere.124 Once again, unskilled laborers like dockworkers, charwomen, and costermongers remained in the slums in order to seize work as it was made available and could not afford the time or money to commute from new suburbs. Nor could they ultimately afford the rents of the working-class cottages there, perhaps because Unwin, swayed by the same Arts and Crafts aesthetic as Hill, trusted that designs based on quaintness and ornament would yield their own economy and utility.

3 ‘In ample halls adorned with mysterious things aesthetic’: Toynbee Hall as Aesthetic Haven

The founders of the university settlement Toynbee Hall, Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett, believed that the social ills of poverty could be counteracted not through material charity, but through oneto-one friendships between the rich and poor, and the dissemination of a bourgeois culture that the poor had been denied. Students and graduates came down from Oxford to live at Toynbee Hall, where they gained access to the poor in East London by living among them as neighbors. Their work largely consisted of teaching classes and running social clubs, as well as organizing debates, concerts, and art exhibitions for working people.1 As self-conscious new citizens in the municipality, they also collaborated with the social machinery already at work in the East End. The reorganization of local government with the founding of the London County Council in 1888 afforded them new positions on school boards and local councils. As Toynbee Hall shifted its focus at the end of the century away from one-to-one, cross-class relations to economic study of the poor, its residents used their practical experience as advocates and researchers to enter the civil service as authoritative professionals. This story has been told before.2 In more recent years, Seth Koven has excavated a more colorful history of university settlement and the culture of slumming vis-à-vis constructions of masculinity and cross-class homosocial and homosexual desires.3 Toynbee Hall was not merely a source of high culture, but a notorious center of popular aestheticism – and was satirized for this. Eyeing visits by Oxford undergraduates to Whitechapel in 1885, The Spectator expressed doubt that East Enders were likely to be ‘regenerated by the efforts of undergraduates and the sight of aesthetic furniture and Japanese fans.’4 An American residing at Toynbee Hall in 1888 wondered what ideals working-class men were receiving through ‘dinners, 67

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pipes, lectures, songs, and magic lanterns, in ample halls adorned with mysterious things aesthetic …’5 As late as 1899, a character in a settlement-novel jokingly tells his friend, ‘We give [the people] peacock’s feathers.’6 But what exactly made Toynbee Hall ‘aesthetic’? From the ﬁreplace’s green glazed tiles ‘of rather ecclesiastical pattern’ to the Eastern rugs on the ﬂoor, Henrietta Barnett seems to have adopted aesthetic style when preparing the drawing room at Toynbee Hall as a space for cross-class exchanges.7 Observers noted that the room was ‘ﬁlled with a strange medley of upholstery’ and the walls ‘hung with Japanese designs of very beautiful creation.’8 Barnett tellingly writes in her memoir that she solved the problem of ‘greasy heads leaning against Morris papers’ and ‘dirty damp garments ruining furniture covers’ by placing chairs and backless sofas away from the walls and by upholstering furniture in ‘washable Liberty cottons.’9 An equally obvious signiﬁer of aestheticism, C. R. Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft was established in 1888 in conjunction with the settlement. (It was ﬁrst housed a couple of doors away at 34 Commercial Street.) On the one hand, Ashbee ﬁtted the bill of the classic idealistic Toynbee resident who arrived at the Hall fresh from Cambridge where he and his friends had embraced the works of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle and trusted in salvation through culture. Yet as a homosexual and disciple of the homosexual apologist and promoter of the simple life, Edward Carpenter, Ashbee stamped his alliances with working men with his own expectations for an eclectic comradeship. Romantically drawn to working men, he sought a utopian brotherhood ideal in which men of all classes would bond through cooperative art labor. In 1886, Ashbee had led a small reading group of working men at Toynbee Hall through Ruskin’s Time and Tide and excerpts of Fors Clavigera, and then emboldened by his success, he lectured on Ruskin to larger audiences at the settlement.10 The men and boys in his Ruskin reading class joined him in a creative endeavor to adorn the walls of Toynbee Hall’s dining room with heraldic friezes.11 From this ﬁrst giddy group effort, which Ashbee described in his journal as a gift of ‘2000 hours of love time’ from his men, he went on to formulate the idea of a permanent Guild and School of Handicraft.12 In his return to a pre-industrial workshop ideal, Ashbee was following a pattern set by other founders of guilds in the last quarter of the century, including Ruskin himself, who had established the St George’s Guild in 1874. From its inception, Ashbee relied on funding from Toynbee Hall’s

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circle of supporters and Samuel Barnett undertook responsibility for chairing the Committee of the School of Handicraft afﬁliated with the Guild.13 The elite craftsmen of the Guild taught metal smithing and woodcarving to boys from Whitechapel, many of whom eventually entered the Guild as paid employees. The beams of the workshop were inscribed with, among others, Ruskin’s lines, ‘Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.’14 Although Ashbee began his Guild and School while still a resident at Toynbee Hall, he soon broke away, dissolving his corporate and personal allegiances with Barnett, and ultimately moving his now-thriving workshops and his Cockney employees and their families, 150 people in all, to rural Gloucestershire. Ashbee left a physical legacy of the crafts at Toynbee Hall in the dining room fresco itself. Plaster coats-of-arms of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges were surrounded by sunﬂowers, and painted and gilded in a frieze around the top of the wall. Still, the aesthetic ethos of the university settlement could not rest upon one room or one man, even if he did affect foppish attitudes and bear a striking resemblance to the dandy James Whistler.15 Certainly, an argument can be made about Toynbee Hall’s physical presence and architectural design. The visitor who comes to Toynbee Hall knowing only that it is fashioned on the university quadrangle is surprised to ﬁnd that it is constructed not of grey stone but of red brick. In her excellent book, Architecture and Social Reform in LateVictorian London, Deborah Weiner traces Toynbee Hall’s claims to be, in Samuel Barnett’s words, ‘a manorial residence in Whitechapel.’16 Elijah Hoole, the same architect who, as we have seen, constructed artisans’ housing and social halls for Octavia Hill, designed the hall in a red brick, mullioned style. As such, the Hall seemed to embody settlers’ nostalgic regard for a mutual responsibility that had existed between feudal lord and peasant, rich and poor. Weiner writes, ‘Toynbee Hall drew its architectural vocabulary from the “Old English” style popularised by the architects George Devey, William Eden Nesﬁeld and Norman Shaw in their manor house designs of the 1860s onward …’17 Weiner does not explore how architects like Norman Shaw were designing the new artistic communities of Bedford Park in Chiswick and Holland Park in Kensington during the same decade of the 1880s.18 Members of these communities identiﬁed themselves as ‘aesthetes’ and were known as such by the popular press. Toynbee Hall would not look out of place on Melbury Road, Kensington or other new artistic avenues in its vicinity, where sculptor Hamo Thorneycroft

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and painters George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, Val Prinsep, William Holman Hunt, and Lord Frederic Leighton kept their massive red-brick studios. The poor would see Thornycroft’s and Leighton’s studios ﬁrsthand when Toynbee Hall residents escorted them to Kensington on art studio tours in the 1880s and 1890s.19 To understand aestheticism at Toynbee Hall, we need to examine missionary aestheticism as a daily social practice, and the ways in which the Barnetts deﬁned a beautiful life by providing speciﬁc sensory enjoyments for the poor. The Children’s Country Holiday Fund and Hampstead Garden City, both founded by Henrietta Barnett, grew out of her conviction that fresh air and green spaces were necessary to health and wellbeing. The Toynbee Travellers’ Club rested on the premise that interested workers should have access to the cultural and artistic glories of Europe. Like the St Jude’s Easter Free Picture Exhibitions, the Toynbee Travellers’ Club perpetuated the notion that exposure to art was ennobling, that the soul could be elevated through the senses. In her advocacy of At Homes and Conversaziones, Henrietta Barnett insisted as well that evenings of high-minded entertainment in well-lit, pretty houses helped laborers discover their best selves. Toynbee Hall’s ventures into the political arena in the late 1880s, both as a site of regular trade union arbitration and particularly in its support of striking matchgirls in 1888 and dockworkers in 1889, might be said to be an advocacy of William Morris’s socialist aesthetics, asserting the right to a life of healthy work under decent, humane conditions. And while Toynbee Hall offered what we would today call the components of a liberal education, with lectures on electricity and moral science as well as those on art and literature, course catalogues and listings of social clubs indicate subtle loci of aestheticism. The broad selection of clubs sponsored by the settlement on topics like Elizabethan drama, natural history, antiquarian London, and English ballad-singing attest to the settlement’s investment in locals’ intellectual stimulation, bodily health, cultural education, and aesthetic awareness. More obviously, the monthly journal The Toynbee Record offers evidence of lectures and activities led by visiting aesthetic ﬁgures. Walter Pater read his essay ‘Wordsworth’ from Appreciations here.20 C. R. Ashbee headed a Ruskin society.21 The artist Joseph Pennell (who with his spouse, the female aesthete Elizabeth Robins Pennell, wrote Whistler’s biography) lectured on the growth of popular illustration in tandem with a Toynbee-sponsored exhibition of engravings (which featured work by Edward Burne-Jones, George Du Maurier, Henry Holiday, Walter Crane, and Pennell).22 Historian of the Renaissance

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John Addington Symonds and literary critic Edmund Gosse lectured on Elizabethan literature.23 William Morris spoke on Gothic architecture, and undoubtedly following his lead, W. B. Richmond, RA on the dignity of handicraft, and poet and journalist Ernest Radford on ‘The Beauty of Useful Things.’24 The painter Henry Holiday drew on Morris and Edward Bellamy’s utopian ﬁction for his lecture ‘The Future of the Workers.’25 Selwyn Image lectured on ‘The Growth of Taste and its Effects on the Decorative Arts.’26 The young artist William Rothenstein taught drawing and clay modeling each week to a boys’ club.27 The ceramicist Mary Seton Watts also taught clay modeling.28 In her autobiography, Margaret Wynn Nevinson, who served with her husband Henry Nevinson as an associate of Toynbee Hall, recalled ‘the doomed Oscar Wilde’ among the ‘celebrants of the day to be met’ at the settlement.29 As there is no record of Wilde lecturing or residing there, one assumes he was a mere visitor for the day. Most of these talks were not offered as part of classroom courses. Frequently, they were sponsored as independent events, like the Saturday Popular Lectures and the famous Smoking Conferences, so called because the founders permitted smoking there in the belief that it fostered easiness between men of all classes. Most often, however, talks were sponsored through clubs. Although the founders of Toynbee Hall had hoped that the settlement would grow into an East London university, it served as a kind of community center, housing classes of the University Extension Society, but also volunteering its halls to any number of local clubs, often clubs founded by its own associates and residents. Integral to the settlement idea, residents were not merely to educate slum-dwellers inside classrooms, but to socialize with them in the evenings. Some clubs, like the local Whittington and Lolesworth Clubs, appear to have had various sub-clubs, including those managing the leisure activities of boys and girls. Toynbee residents taught drill, swimming, rowing, and boxing to boys. The Toynbee Shakspere [sic] Society, Toynbee Philosophical Society, Adam Smith Club, Toynbee Natural History Society, Elizabethan Literary Society, Elizabethan Society, Scientiﬁc Reading Society, Working Men’s Club and Institute Union, Pupil Teachers Debating Society, Toynbee Tennis Club, and Argonauts Rowing Club are only a portion of the clubs that met at Toynbee Hall. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the settlers having demonstrated their sympathy with striking dock laborers and match girls, hosted the meetings of the Dockers’ Union and women’s cooperative organizations as well. Debates on working-class housing, sweating, cooperativism, and the

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Eight Hours Bill deﬁned Toynbee Hall as a center for deliberation about the worker’s quality of life. As for the narrower deﬁnition of aestheticism as it pertains not to social welfare but to the speciﬁc art movement, British aestheticism, clubs addressed this less broadly. It is difﬁcult, for instance, to measure how much the East London Antiquarian Society bordered on aesthetic antiquarianism, though like Morris, its members were concerned about shoddy and tasteless restorations. The Toynbee Record is a very far cry from an aesthetic magazine, both in its content and physical presentation. But the reader who is looking for them will ﬁnd occasional but powerful alliances with aestheticism. The Students’ Union sponsored excursions to Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s studio in St John’s Wood and Hubert Herkomer’s house and art school in Bushey.30 The Elizabethan Society and Working Men’s College joined forces to encourage publishers and literary executors to produce a shilling edition of Browning.31 The most overt institutional links to popular aestheticism were manifested in the St Jude Easter Free Picture Exhibitions and the Toynbee Travellers’ Club.32 In ‘Pictures for the People,’ her 1883 essay on gallery tours at St Jude’s, Henrietta Barnett uses the occasion of working-class attendance at the gallery to critique a nation that permits poverty and to gently satirize the uneducated poor.33 Her essay simply dramatizes and advocates a straightforward Ruskinian dissemination of art and ethics. Through my emphasis on the essay as a rhetorical text, I see Barnett’s interpretations positioned as retaliatory ‘frames’ which encircle and undermine laborers’ responses to art. She interjects her own readings, not merely of the paintings but of their spectators, at key conclusive moments. I therefore tend toward a slightly more negative reading than Seth Koven, who sees the gallery as a site of ‘cross-class exchange as well as contestation.’34 More dialogic than Barnett’s didactic essay, the journals of the Toynbee Travellers report a conﬂicted experience of practical aesthetics under the auspices of university settlement. The Toynbee Travellers’ Club introduced lowbudget tourists to the Italy of John Addington Symonds and Vernon Lee, a Renaissance Italy ﬁltered through the eyes of late Victorian aesthetes. Many of the lower-middle-class Travellers, already inﬂuenced by popular representations of aestheticism, aspired to a dramatic aesthetic intensity – to the discomﬁture of their companions. As I will demonstrate below, both Henrietta Barnett’s rhetorical strategies and the Italian tours acted to afﬁrm bourgeois self-expression and self-identiﬁcation.

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The St Jude’s Easter Free Picture Exhibitions As early as 1881, the Barnetts had sponsored an annual Easter Free Loan Exhibition in the parish schoolroom of St Jude’s where they displayed paintings by contemporary artists such as William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, and particularly, the symbolist painter George Frederick Watts. This paved the way for the founding of the permanent Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1898. Simply hanging an exhibit was not enough. How would art be presented to the people so that they could most successfully grasp its intellectual message and savor its emotional impact? The Barnetts hired about 20 volunteers to ‘take a watch’ of the rooms at four-hour intervals. ‘[T]heir presence,’ wrote Henrietta Barnett, ‘not only served to prevent unseemly conduct, but their descriptions of pictures and homely chats with the people made often all the difference between an intelligent visit and a listless ten-minutes’ stare.’35 Because they were employed both to police crowds and interpret paintings, these gentlemen were aptly called ‘watchers’ by the working-class patrons, and as no disturbances occurred (particularly, none of the vandalism feared by art collectors who refused to loan their works), the watcher with a ‘gift for popular exposition’ was commonly trailed by patrons, ‘who [would] not leave him until he [had] made the tour of the rooms.’36 The Barnetts also sold penny-catalogues with descriptions of the paintings for literate viewers’ ediﬁcation. Provided with the meanings of great pictures, whether by a man of cultured taste or a penny pamphlet, the working spectator would reach their intended goal: lessons more ethical than historical or intellectual. Henrietta Barnett writes ‘Pictures for the People’ to convince a middle-class readership that the poor, however much they are thwarted by the expenses of transit, ignorance of the city beyond their neighborhoods, and limited viewing hours, have an interest in seeing art and seeing it rightly. In fact, one is tempted to ask whether the representative working people who speak in her essay are genuine, because their speeches seem so designed to satisfy the bourgeois reader. One woman’s comment, ‘I should not have believed I could have enjoyed myself so much, and yet been so quiet,’ anticipates the common bourgeois assumption that the recreations of the poor are necessarily boisterous, and even appropriates the voice of the middle class (‘I should not have believed’) before negating it.37 So then, Barnett puts her own arguments in the mouths of those who would ideally be taught and tamed.

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Anticipating Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that the laborer judges paintings on the basis of their realism while the bourgeois welcomes allusive representation, Barnett demonstrates that because of their lack of education, working-class patrons at the Whitechapel gallery read art differently from herself and her readers. It is impossible for the ignorant to even look at a picture with any interest unless they are acquainted with the subject; but when once the story is told to them, their plain, direct method of looking at things enables them to go straight to the point, and perhaps to reach the artist’s meaning more clearly than some of those art critics whose vision is obscured by thoughts of ‘tone, harmony, and construction.’ (178) Responding to the catalogue’s description of Briton Riviere’s Dying Gladiator (which reads ‘God has kissed him and he will sleep’), a laborer comments, ‘“God kissed him,” it says; I should have said the tiger clawed him’ (179). Literal-minded reactions tend to deﬂate the hyperbole of the catalogue, whose phrasing Barnett defends as ‘[s]omewhat fanciful, perhaps, but reaching, maybe, the spirit of the picture more truly than a plainer statement of facts would have done’ (179). Thus, while the working-class viewer is technically correct, in the end Barnett does not commend the ‘plain, direct method’ and many of the vignettes she tells here are of a pattern: working-class reactions followed by middle-class emendations and the crowd’s subsequent yielding to ‘thoughtful consideration’ (179). In fact, one may interpret the dialogue as a struggle for the last interpretive word, and a challenge to the pride of the laborer who has ventured his reading. The working-class critic of the Dying Gladiator had originally assumed that it was a painting of the Biblical Daniel and had authoritatively told his small son so: ‘There, my boy, there’s your ancestor in the lion’s den!’ (179). When Barnett writes, ‘a reference to the catalogue changed his opinion on the subject,’ her passive construction softens, euphemizes, the actual correction, attributing the agency of the man’s changed opinion to himself rather than to the catalogue-writer (179). Barnett, judging the poor as they experience rare gifts of beauty, alternately mocks and valorizes them.38 Much of the humor of the essay derives from the mistakes of the populace as they cling ‘with almost comical persistency’ to the guidebook.39 One man accidentally applies the catalogue’s description of Christ Walking on the Water

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to a picture of a street in Amsterdam (185). Another assumes that Tintoretto’s painting of Mary the Virgin and Elisabeth represents Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth, ‘I suppose that was before they quarrelled, then’, to which Barnett adds snidely, ‘a sign that historical had, in this instance, made more mark than Biblical instruction’ (185). At times she unapologetically makes light of the poor’s literal interpretations of art. One viewer reacts with irritation to Watt’s Sleep and Death, ‘It don’t matter which [ﬁgure is which]. I don’t call it proper, anyhow, to see a man pickaback of an angel!’(180). Consider as well this passage by Mrs Barnett about two viewers’ reactions to W. B. Richmond’s Ariadne. ‘Why, it is crazy Jane!’ exclaimed one woman, following up the declaration in a few moments by, ‘and it’s ﬁnely done, too’; but the story once explained, either by catalogue or talk, the interest increased. ‘Poor soul! she’s seen her day,’ came from a genuine sympathizer. ‘Oh, no! she’ll get another lover; rest sure of that.’ ‘’Tain’t quite likely, seeing that it’s a desert island!’ was the practical retort, which rather dumbfounded the hopeful commentator; but she would have the last word: ‘Well, I would, if it were myself, and she’ll ﬁnd a way, sure enough, somehow.’ ‘The light is all behind her,’ showed a delicate perception of what, perhaps, the artist himself had put in with the truth of unconsciousness. (178) The quarrel between the ‘hopeful’ and ‘practical’ viewers focuses entirely upon an untold conclusion, so they are reading the painting as they might a serial novel in a magazine; clearly absorbed by the plot, they show no concern for visual nuances. The dialogue, with its short retorts, syntactically grounded in daily life, ‘she’s seen her day,’ ‘’Tain’t quite likely,’ ‘sure enough, somehow,’ maintains a tone set by the ﬁrst misreading of ‘crazy Jane.’ Then unexpectedly, Barnett undermines the parody she has set up by inserting the observation, ‘The light is all behind her’ – unique in that context for its use of metaphor, and transcendent above the informal observations that preceded it. Barnett sanctions that last line because it is a bourgeois reading: it ironically incorporates those ‘thoughts of “tone, harmony and construction”’ that she has warned are likely to ‘obscure’ critics’ vision. Again, while at the onset she has privileged working-class readings for their clarity, she ultimately caps them with the (perhaps contrived) ‘delicate perception’ of the anomalous bourgeois reader of images. Using this culminating remark, Barnett saves herself from

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any accusation that she is ridiculing the poor. By artfully transforming the working-class reader into a bourgeois, she re-establishes her respect for her subjects, and leads bourgeois readers to feel respect as well, though they may be unconscious of the reason why. Often Barnett will quote the ‘more thoughtful’ of the spectators who have seen what ‘the mass’ are blind to in art (182). For instance, Jozef Israe¨ls’ The Canal Boat depicts a weary man and woman; the catalogue entry elaborates, ‘Nature is in tune with their hard life; still there is progress.’ Barnett’s unusually sensitive viewer again catches the metaphor and carries it forward: ‘Ah! poor chap, he’s got into a wrong current, but he’ll get out all right. Pull away’ (182). A good many of the paintings exhibited in Whitechapel were allegorical in nature, G. F. Watts’s works among them. Barnett’s accounts of these stand at the core of her essay, for they particularly serve her: she will exploit the laborers’ words through a narrative framing as, with conscious solemnity, she draws ‘truths’ from their bald statements. ‘You can’t see Judgment’s face for his arm,’ perhaps had, perhaps had not, more meaning in it than the speaker meant; while in reference to the woman’s listless dropping of her ﬂowers from her lap in Time, Death and Judgment, the remark, ‘Death does not want the ﬂowers now she’s got ‘em,’ told of thoughtful suffering at the apparent wastefulness of Death. (179) Barnett intervenes to invest observations stated at face value with symbolic overtones. She also manages to lend her working-class patrons some credibility by presenting their observations in the social context of the poverty that has educated them. As many of the paintings depict pathetic scenes, Barnett describes them according to the hopelessness they convey or the hope they may inspire in this ‘class of people whose external lives are drearily barren of ideals’ (179). ‘That’s the best of the whole lot, to my mind’ may not be an illuminating comment about Watts’s Sleep and Death, but when Barnett describes its speaker as ‘a pale, trouble-stricken man, whose sorrows Sleep had not always helped to bear, and whose loveless life had made Death’s enfolding arms seem wondrous kind,’ her description overshadows his statement to impress her reader with a pathos his own words cannot achieve alone (180). Such descriptions amount to tableaux of their own and often correspond to the scenes on the

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canvasses. She ﬁrst quotes from the catalogue to describe for the reader Miha´ly Munka´csy’s painting, The Lint Pickers. A soldier, with a bandaged leg, is telling the story of the war to the women and children who are picking lint to dress wounds. The different feelings with which the news is received are shown with wonderful skill in the different faces. Some are waiting to hear the worst; another has already heard it, and can only bury her face in her hands. To others it is but an interesting story; while the little child is only intent on his basket of lint. Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn. (180) The catalogue’s narrative tells the viewer who to look for (the soldier, the mourner hiding her face in misery, the child) and what to compare (the expressions of anticipation or discovery on their faces.) Barnett then adds her own conclusive interpretation of the painting: ‘The gloom of the picture, the utter dejection of the workers, relieved nowhere by a gleam of light – even the child (around whom Hope might have hovered) ﬁnding a grim plaything in the lint – all combine to tell the tale of what the artist evidently felt – the cruelty of war’ (180–1). She then moves to its audience’s reaction, her new ‘subject’: ‘[Their interest] spoke, though, a little sadly, for the want of joyousness in East London entertainments that more than one sightseer, before reading the catalogue or being helped by a verbal explanation, thought “it was a lot of poor people at tea”’ (181). Framed by her narration, Cockney misreadings serve to substantiate her social critique of a nation that permits poverty. In his work Pierre Bourdieu has demonstrated how ‘a life of ease’ induces ‘elective distance’ in the bourgeois viewer.40 Barnett determinedly shows how economic necessity conditions the way one sees as well; want or need do not compel detachment but projection and identiﬁcation. An eye for detail becomes an eye for pragmatic appraisal of an object: Barnett complains of the viewers’ recurring ‘What, now, is it all worth? How much would it fetch?’ and characteristically adds that it is ‘not the less [wearisome] because expressive of one of the signs of the times.’41 The Barnetts and other middle-class patrons of the arts would have the poor believe that price never enters into the estimation of art. But life under capitalism has taught these viewers that nothing is free; they refuse to deny the exchange value of the paintings. Assuring Mrs Barnett that the exhibition will ‘pay’ after a time (though she

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repeatedly reminds them that there is no admission fee), they try to tip the watchers on the way out (181). Finally, Barnett uses poor viewers’ reactions to critique their own cultural practices and toleration of the low life. Watts’s allegorical representation of Sleep bearing a warrior into the arms of a motherly Death is ‘good for the poor to see’ (180), for it will remind the poor to treat death with more modesty; she contrasts it to the spectacle of the working-class funeral with the corpse laid out for the neighborhood – ‘even the youngest child’ – to see (180). Likewise, one particular image will teach fallen women to seek a higher life. Sometimes … one overhears talks which reveal much. Mr Schmalz’s picture of Forever had one evening been beautifully explained, the room being crowded by some of the humblest people, who received the explanation with interest but in silence. The picture represented a dying girl to whom her lover has been playing his lute, until, dropping it, he seemed to be telling her with impassioned words that his love is stronger than death, and that in spite of the grave and separation, he will love her forever. I was standing outside the Exhibition in the half-darkness, when two girls, hatless, with one shawl between them thrown round both their shoulders, came out. They might not be living the worst life; but, if not, they were low down enough to be familiar with it, and to see in that the only relation between men and women. The idea of love lasting beyond this life, making eternity real, a spiritual bond between man and woman, had not occurred to them until the picture with the simple story was shown them. ‘Real beautiful, ain’t it all?’ said one. ‘Ay, ﬁne, but that Forever, I did take on with that,’ was the answer. Could anything be more touching? What work is there nobler than that of the artist who, by his art, shows the degraded the lesson that Christ himself lived to teach? (183) Beyond conﬁrming Barnett’s role as a voyeur who observes and records viewers’ reactions, this passage insists that the middle classes need to translate paintings to working-class viewers who cannot conceive of their spiritual themes. The catalogue, Barnett says, is intended to indicate ‘the lines along which the people could make their own discoveries’ (185). That Barnett intended these discoveries to reverse the patterns of their lives is no surprise; in an earlier essay, she claimed that art galleries were potential ‘mission-halls for the degraded.’42 Certainly Barnett’s solemn, almost hushed reverence for the paintings

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and emphasis on their didactic content demonstrates her trust in Ruskin’s tenet, ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophesy and religion – all in one.’43

Lower-middle-class aesthetes: the Toynbee Travellers’ Club As we have seen in Chapter 1, the term aesthete as I use it is an inclusive one, encompassing the subgroup of missionary aesthetes, some of whom dressed and acted more ﬂamboyantly than others. But if there were anything, or anyone, approaching the stereotype of the giddy aesthete, we ﬁnd this specimen not among the teachers and administrators of Toynbee Hall, nor among the submerged tenth of Whitechapel. My study of the Toynbee Travellers looks at the ways that a lower-middle-class contingent, many of them from London suburbs, absorbed images of aestheticism, no doubt from the popular press, and aspired to an intense, affected aestheticism. The Toynbee Travellers’ Club was the brainchild of the university settler Bolton King, an enthusiast of the Italian democrat Giuseppe Mazzini and a teacher of Italian literature and culture at Toynbee Hall. He determined that by sharing costs, planning ahead, and traveling as a group, working men and women would be able to afford brief trips to the continent for their cultural ediﬁcation. In the early years, he was joined in his efforts by Thomas Okey, a skilled basket weaver, student, and later teacher there, whose brilliant facility with languages eventually won him a professorship in Italian at Oxford. In anticipation of each journey, these administrators provided a thorough preparatory course at Toynbee Hall, negotiated with the Great Eastern Railway for group travel, managed the details of group lodging, printed up special museum tickets, and secured the services of voluntary lecturers on art and history.44 As historians have noted, the men and women who constituted the Toynbee Travellers were not ultimately working-class, but lower-middle-class, many of them elementary school teachers.45 Following a ﬁrst brief trip to Belgium in 1887, groups traveled to Florence and Siena in 1888 and 1890. Before each of these trips to Italy, the ‘pilgrims,’ as they called themselves, chose from among their party an editor who would compile a diary and scrapbook of their experiences. The preserved memoirs offer an unintentionally keen insight into the cultural aspirations and shamed defenses of the Travellers. Before exploring these, however, we must step back a moment and consider the Travellers from the point of view of the settlers themselves. In 1873, the Barnetts and their associates had founded a club

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and classes for pupil teachers, teachers in training whom the settlers found sadly wanting in practical education. Henrietta Barnett reﬂected on the difﬁculties of the experiment. They were very trying, some of these early students: young ladies whose affectations when ‘seeking cultivation’ made one long to shake them; prigs who quoted Browning on all occasions; excellent persons whose little learning made them mad – with conceit; pretentious youths who patronized all who had not read the few books they had perused, and who killed by bad manners the belief that education made equality. Oh! how difﬁcult they were, and with them all Mr Barnett was patient, pointing out the heroic determination which made them turn to mental work after perhaps ten hours in the factory or behind the counter, or still longer days of domestic drudgery; and discovering in each qualities which would live longer than the attendant irritations.46 While none of the archival materials explicitly states that the teachers in the Toynbee Travellers’ Club were later classes of the pupil teachers whom Mrs Barnett critiques here, both groups seems to share the same cultural pretensions. Even more interestingly, the two Italian journals paint a picture of a divided community, one faction unashamedly ‘artistic’ and ‘intense,’ the other perplexed and cynical over their companions’ aesthetic effusions. Because the 1888 and 1890 journals are narrated by different editors, each has its own tone. The ﬁrst editor, who never signs this compilation, is under great pressure, one assumes, to justify the trip as a success so as to ensure future excursions. He fashions the work as a Baedeker at times, trying to name the signiﬁcant art works the pilgrims encountered at the Ufﬁzi Gallery and Pitti Palace. We gain a glimpse of the presence of artistic types within the group when he claims that at Customs, ‘the cherished freight of pirated Ruskins of which the Aesthetes of the party had cleared the shops in Florence escaped unnoticed.’47 With some pride, the editor notes that the gallery pass admitting the Travellers to Italian galleries describes Toynbee Hall as ‘Accademia delle Arte del Toynbee Hall di Londra’ (53).48 But the impatience of the editor surfaces when he complains that of the 80 who visited Florence with him on the trip, only ﬁve responded to his request for a written reﬂection of some impressions of Florence. As a scientist who values an anemone more than an oil painting, he sardonically reproaches himself as a ‘poor art educationless

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Philistine,’ but clearly feels greater, more sincere contempt for those who ‘apparently came home impressionless’ (109). This sets the stage for the further play in the journal between images of philistine and aesthete. It is not mere banter, but a sign of the intense self-consciousness that pervades the whole scheme. In anticipation of the trip, the Toynbee Travellers in King’s class spent many months studying introductory Italian, and reading Italian history and Dante’s Inferno and Vita Nuova. It was in effect equivalent to the aesthetic education that Vernon Lee’s female protagonist undergoes prior to entering aesthetic society in the novel Miss Brown (1884). For in 1888, an immersion into Renaissance Italy as a ﬁeld of study could not help but have resonances of popular aestheticism, the aesthetics of Pater and Burne-Jones. Once in Florence, the guided tours that the pilgrims received by Vernon Lee herself seem to have been a point of confusion and contention about how to read and value art. Travellers were at a loss as to whether to judge artworks as specimens of stages of ‘history’ (as they seem to have practiced doing in classes prior to the voyage) or as subjects of a more elusive ‘art-criticism.’ The latter technique continues to stymie the Toynbee Travellers and prompts apologetic self-recriminations. The editor confesses: Personally we went to Italy feeling hopelessly Philistinic … with no power of art appreciation while art criticism was a product which far transcended the humble range of our mind: to it we could only listen and wonder …. [W]hen we read the comments of art critics and heard people give vent to spasms of hysterical panegyric upon the Old Masters and expressly deny that they are to be admired from an historical standpoint it simply convinced us that Art was a sphere quite out of the range of vision of most poor mortals. (146–9) ‘Spasms of hysterical panegyric’ characterize the famous emotionalism of the Paterian aesthete attentive to, perhaps engulfed in, his or her own sensations. One suspects that it was Vernon Lee and her partner Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s lectures on Italian art at the Belle Arti that prompted both this sarcasm and the pilgrims’ sense of helplessness.49 Probably the most striking entry in the journal of the 1888 journey to Florence is one pilgrim’s creative account of the experience. It begins as an ostensibly level-headed critique of those same ‘spasms of hysterical panegyric,’ ‘I ﬁnd that when people begin talking or writing about Italy they naturally and necessarily talk or write a heap of transcendental nonsense about art and that sort of thing,’ and the author

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promises that he will write ‘like a plain man as I’m proud to be’ (118). Yet the piece turns out not to be a critique of aesthetes but a satire on the bovine Englishman in Italy. It is signed ‘Phil S. Tine,’ and is worth quoting at length. Of course the ﬁrst thing that everybody does who goes to Italy is to visit the picture galleries. Well I did them for I walked through the whole length of the Pitti and Ufﬁzi Galleries – nearly a mile (It took me nearly an hour to do it) and I must say I didn’t see any picture that particularly struck me. Some people have said this was my fault but I know better … I don’t want to be hard on our English painters for after all the pictures of Madonnas and Saints and Cardinals that I saw in Florence I’d rather own my own portrait of the Grand Old Man set in a splendid gilt frame with the motto beneath ‘justice to Ireland’ than the best Madonna of them all. (120) Of the sculptures by Michelangelo in the Chapel of the Medici (Figure 3.1), he writes, With regard to the ideal ﬁgures it seemed however that if they had been really lying in such attitudes alive they would certainly have slipped off their pedestals while the statues of the princes are evidently made to sit down in their niches because there is no room to stand up. (120) This contributor is apparently satirizing the worst of the ‘Philistines’ among his own party, people with whom he had little patience. Against his own receptivity, he targets the philistine’s nationalism, anti-Roman Catholicism, and boorish simplicity. The satire seems to underline the Toynbee Travellers’ compulsion to self-identiﬁcation. One associates oneself either with the aesthetic faction by deriding the philistines or with common sense by dismissing the frothy enunciations of the aesthetes. The sheer number of educational lectures and tours during the Florence trip seems to have taxed the participants, so that they respond with impatience either to the impenetrable ‘art criticism’ or to the other’s bluntness. The editor of the diary writes, ‘a member … declared that during the whole of the time in Florence there was a great deal of high art talked that was much too high for her to understand, and though the member could not be induced to send in notes on the subject, the opinion may as well be quoted’ (131). The phrase ‘high art … too high’ perhaps indi-

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Figure 3.1 Michelangelo, Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici. (Courtesy of Scala/Art Resource, New York.)

cates the editor’s amusement at the cultural gulf between Travellers. Yet at the same time, he too is implicated in a sense of shame over what he does not know.

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The journal of the following trip to Siena, Perugia, and Assisi in 1890 is a remarkable contrast to the ﬁrst: it bears no signs of internal rancor or satire, no shame over others’ or one’s own philistinism, no resentment on the part of its editor. The editor, J. Charles Scargill of Surrey, who in this case does sign the journal, feels no pressure to catalogue the artworks visited or justify the educational value of the trip; this holiday appears to have been less strenuous, less overtly educational. The pilgrims spend long afternoons outdoors visiting the villages and markets of Siena and Perugia, climbing mountains, boating on Lake Como, and observing the peasants as opposed to attending highpowered lectures on art. They visit Florence only brieﬂy. While the earlier bound journal featured photos in the frontispiece and lovely calligraphic ﬂourishes throughout, here many more have been pasted in, as have drawings of the local peasants (Figures 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4). The 1890 diary is indeed a more democratic production, a scrapbook of quotes from various participants, and a sign of a far less disgruntled and divided party. It ends with a series of signatures, attesting to itself as a group effort. Here, in short, the aesthetes have won. This diary is less a report than an amalgam of impressionistic prose-poetry and emotional outbursts. The beauty of the Rigi Mountain in Lucerne reduces them to tears. At the shrine of St Francis of Assisi, ‘Thought and feeling rush over one’s mind and unable to see longer we turn away. Vainly we struggle for composure,’ marvels one contributor who then leads into long quotations by Browning and Dante.50 One suspects that these are indeed Mrs Barnett’s affected young ladies and ‘excellent persons whose little learning made them mad – with conceit,’ the ones who ‘quote Browning on all occasions.’ The Travellers describe Italian sunsets in purple prose. ‘The exquisite colours!’ one writes, ‘Who shall describe them? Who shall set down all the scene means to him as he looks on the old towers “centuries old” crowning the olive-clad hill and standing up black and erect against the deepest of the golden tints that fade away upwards into the twilight grey. So sky and earth are ﬁlled with a divine harmony of colour; even the distant snows are tinged with the loveliest of pinks’ (38). The Traveller has asked, who shall describe these colors? The answer is that Dante, Tennyson, Shelley, Swinburne, and Rossetti will: this journal is in fact awash in block quotations which cover page after handwritten page. It takes very little to prompt the contributors into a literary allusion, in part because they are so conscious of their educational achievements that they feel compelled to display them. For instance, ‘Pilatus even doffed his nightcap of clouds to give us a glorious greeting and at our feet rushed the rapid

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Figure 3.2 Frontispiece from the Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Florence. (Courtesy of the Corporation of London, London Metropolitan Archives.)

river Reuss spanned by the curious covered bridge mentioned by Longfellow,’ – the Longfellow quotation follows (5). Twice the diary

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Figure 3.3 Page of painting and text from the Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Siena, Perugia and Assisi. (Courtesy of the Corporation of London, London Metropolitan Archives.)

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Figure 3.4 Sketch of Italian peasants from the Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Siena, Perugia and Assisi. (Courtesy of the Corporation of London, London Metropolitan Archives.)

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quotes these lines from the poet Arthur Hugh Clough: ‘Drinking in deep in their soul the beautiful hue and the clearness, the silence grows softer and more live …’ (8, 60). To these pilgrims, Clough’s lines seem a prescription for how to live each moment with aesthetic intensity.51 A Traveller writes reverently of Siena, ‘[Here] comes the artist to study pre-Raphaelite art from Guido da Siena and Duccio di Buoninsigna down to Matteo di Giovanni, contemporaries respectively of Cimabue and of Botticelli …’52 We have entered the realm of D. G. Rossetti’s essay ‘Hand and Soul,’ the aesthetic Italiophilia that the cartoonist George Du Maurier had spoofed in his Cimabue Brown series. That both groups of tourists were not working-class is obvious. The departure of the ﬁrst Toynbee Travellers’ Club to Italy had been attended by crowds who, having read the English newspapers, went to ‘see Petticoat Lane off to the Continent.’53 It is all the more ironic then that in 1890 the Toynbee Travellers’ Club should have sought entertainment thus: ‘One day we spent in “slumming.” Oh! what slums!’54 Social questions were never far from aesthetic pursuits. In Florence in 1888, the Travellers had attended a lecture by Professor Pasquale Villari on ‘The Social Conditions of Italy,’ an account of the sufferings of the underemployed rural peasantry. Imitating Ruskin’s polemics against laissez-faire economics, he had concluded that ‘the end of civilization is not merely to make money but to make people happy.’55 Had the Travellers been working-class, Bolton King and Thomas Okey would probably not have spent valuable time exposing them to social ills they knew all too well. Instead, an ostensibly working-class group (who are actually middle-class) journey to Italy to gain exposure to aesthetic delights … and go slumming.

Slumming as decadence; living one’s slum life as art Samuel Barnett would have been dismayed at the tone of those words, ‘Oh! what slums!’, troubled to learn that the Toynbee Travellers were acting as casual slummers. He had established university settlement not as a species of slumming but a retaliatory response to it. He had witnessed how the middle class descended on the slum for cheap thrills for a day only after the press or a local tragedy drew their attention to it. In contrast to sporadic and sentimental voyeurism, settlements proposed a new kind of relations with the poor: intimate, consistent, and neighborly. Barnett and his circle frequently voiced their contempt for casual slummers.56 His colleague Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, commented, ‘[T]o so many of

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them it could truly be said, Thou hast nothing to draw with and the well is deep.’57 Ironically, once Toynbee Hall gained acclaim for its contributions to the East End, slummers descended on it. Listed in Baedekers guides, it served as what historian Seth Koven has called ‘the locus classicus of shallow, fashionable slumming’ and ‘a mandatory stop on high society’s tour of east London.’58 The Toynbee Travellers’ pursuit of squalor as an aesthetic experience in Italy was an uncomfortable reminder of the more obscure and less disinterested psychological motivations for entering the slum. Poverty provoked either disciplined action in the form of charity or the passive spectactorship of the dilettante ‘ﬂâneur’ or stroller of the city, who did not seek to enhance mean streets, but instead savored their genuine grime. The term ‘slumming’ encompassed both practices: it was deﬁned in 1884 as ‘visiting slums for charitable or philanthropic purpose,’ but also ‘out of curiosity, especially as a fashionable pursuit.’59 It was common for slumming journalists to mingle among the poor by traveling incognito, and there is evidence that they delighted in donning the costume of the down-and-out.60 Anonymity was practiced as well in the arena of ‘legitimate’ slumming, as when Beatrice Webb worked as an ordinary seamstress in the East End while examining sweatshops for the social investigator Charles Booth.61 To accuse a philanthropist of voyeurism was akin to accusing him or her of unhealthy, decadent aestheticism, yet viewing and exhibiting authentic squalor were necessary parts of the machinery for effective charity work. Occasional slummers concluded a day in the courts by contributing out of their pocketbooks. Occasional slumming (as opposed to slum settlement) followed certain codes of conduct. Given the ostensible threat working-class men posed to middle-class women, these women toured the slums escorted by local ministers who introduced them to speciﬁc families in need. (The duo of the slum-priest and well-meaning young woman is ﬁctionalized in George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn [1880].) As slumming grew more fashionable in the mid-1880s, Punch’s George Du Maurier satirized it in cartoons like ‘The Very Latest Craze; Or, Overdoing It’ where a young woman explains why she and her female companions are leaving the house so late and in raincoats, ‘Lord Archibald is going to take us to a dear little Slum he’s found out near the Minories – such a fearful place! Fourteen poor Things sleeping in One Bed, and no Window! – And the Macintoshes are to keep out Infection, you know, and hide one’s Diamonds, and all that!’ (Figure 3.5). 62 Du Maurier thus questioned the sincerity of young women ﬂocking, escorted, to the slums.

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Figure 3.5 George Du Maurier, ‘The Very Latest Craze; Or, Overdoing It,’ Punch 85 (22 December 1883): 294.

Figure 3.6

George Du Maurier, ‘In Slummibus,’ Punch 86 (3 May 1884): 210.

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Through the popular press, the middle class and aspiring lower middle class absorbed images of slummers who were not merely thrillseekers but also aesthetes. Du Maurier’s cartoon ‘In Slummibus’ inadvertently captures and reproduces late Victorian confusion over ‘good’ and ‘bad’ slumming. The cartoon represents a minister guiding two young women along a slum street to the derisive catcalls of the ragged children: “Ello! ’Ere’s a Masher! Look at ‘is Collar an’ ‘At!’ (Figure 3.6).63 In Victorian parlance, a ‘masher’ was not a do-gooder or a prig, but ‘a name applied to a fop of affected manners and an exaggerated style of dress who frequented music halls and fashionable promenades and who posed as a “lady-killer.”’64 In fact, the masher was a kind of workingclass dandy.65 Du Maurier displaces the ﬁgure of the masher, traditionally a working man who aspired to middle-class self-representation, onto a middle-class tour-guide of the slum. He therefore identiﬁes a selfinterest in the priest who uses his self-proclaimed authority of the East End to gain the admiration of the callow young women at his side. The priest’s effeminacy thus serves Du Maurier here. According to Alan Sinﬁeld, until the Wilde trials in 1895 the effeminate man was perceived as a heterosexual rake whose affectations implied his easy access to the boudoir.66 Here the dress of the minister

Figure 3.7 W. Q. Orchardson, Her First Dance (1884). (Courtesy of Tate, London, 2005.)

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Figure 3.8 Napoleon Sarony, photograph of Oscar Wilde (1882). (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.)

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is a hybrid of conservatism and aestheticism. While he wears a traditional clerical collar, his breeches, a residual feature of eighteenthcentury clerical dress, might also be seen as Wildean. Given his posture and high instep, the dark, feminine curve of his calf dominates the foreground of the sketch. He bears a resemblance to the dancing master in W. Q. Orchardson’s painting, Her First Dance, of the same year, and to the Sarony photographs of Wilde distributed for public consumption just two years before in 1882 (Figures 3.7 and 3.8). By equating the philanthropic priest with the dandy, Du Maurier seems to aim to expose the self-consciousness and decadent self-interest of all philanthropists engaged in slum reform. The connection between slumming and decadent aestheticism probably begins with Walter Pater’s incitement in the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) to ‘be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions,’ a message which Pater’s contemporaries found dangerous to the Oxford undergraduate and which he famously omitted from later editions of the book.67 Decadent novels from J. K. Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884) to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) feature dandies who, having exhausted conventional pleasures close to home, descend into the slums for darker, more unnatural and more exotic ones. So aesthetic desire – desire for the beautiful – becomes murkier – desire for sensation – only to be ﬁnally conﬂated with vice – desire for what is physically and morally repugnant. Through slumming, the decadent aesthete gains access to opium, gambling dens, and brothels. Scenes of decadent slumming in novels coexisted with an older tradition of sensationalistic slum journalism. If we were to examine ﬁrstperson narratives of slumming as a confessedly voyeuristic enterprise, then we would turn to the prose of newspaper journalists like George Sims and G. Augustus Sala. As conscientious social reformers, missionary aesthetes entered the slums wholly committed to aiding and raising the poor, yet at the same time they were conscious that they were entering another world with its own complex codes of behavior and they responded to it with as much curiosity as zeal to change it. One might recall that Wilde’s ﬁctional Dorian Gray begins the novel as a responsible missionary aesthete who plays piano duets with Aunt Agatha in Whitechapel, yet succumbs to Lord Henry’s inﬂuence, frequents nefarious haunts in the East End, and is later chastened in the novel for going down ‘into the depths’ and dragging his companions with him.68 Wilde himself could hold forth on beauty at society dinners, paraphrasing Ruskin in paeans to what he called the English

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Renaissance of art and design, and then seek thrills in the low life of rent boys. Wilde, through his slumming aesthete, suggests how easily the boundaries between responsible missionary aestheticism and decadence can be transgressed.69 Slum reformers took pains to deny this and would not readily admit to voyeurism or a nostalgie de la boue in their diaries or letters. Yet one discovers the occasional exception. An afﬁliate of Toynbee Hall who had studied under Ruskin at Oxford, Henry Nevinson went on to become a slum journalist and ultimately an editor of the Daily Chronicle, where his contributors included a number of aesthetes: Joseph Pennell, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Florence Farr, W. B. Yeats, Lionel Johnson, Evelyn Sharp, Ellen Terry, Gordon Craig, Alice Meynell, and Wilfred Meynell.70 In his memoir Changes and Chances (1923), Nevinson ﬁrst describes slumming as a tantalizing experience for the middle classes. Notice how he uses the passive voice in the following passage to distance himself from slumming and lend a satirical tone. Society was seized by one of its brief and ﬁtful fevers for doing good, such as recur about twice a century. … Single-roomed homes, partitioned by rags of underlinen, were visited with horriﬁed enthusiasm. Money was poured into Lord Mayor’s funds… enthralling descriptions of misery were added to dinner-table conversation … . the Trafalgar Square riots of November, 1887, added a spasm of tremulous terror, such as a child might feel when, after venturing playfully into a dark room, it saw the grey shadow of something move. (78–9) Slumming is the source of ‘horriﬁed enthusiasm’; it is ‘enthralling’ and creates ‘spasms of tremulous terror’: all in all, it is perversely titillating. In his autobiography, Nevinson is therefore careful to distinguish the sensationalistic curiosity and frivolity of occasional slummers from the motives of settlers like himself. Then the distinctions break down. He at ﬁrst describes his slumming instinct through Wildean paradox: ‘I was drawn to the Black Country chieﬂy by repulsion, for one always likes to see things at their worst’ (119). But later in a moving passage he confesses to a strong ‘attraction of repulsion,’ adding, ‘during those years my shamed sympathy with working people became an irresistible torment, so that I could hardly endure to live in the ordinary comfort of my surroundings. Many of us felt the same’ (121). Here we have returned to Beatrice Webb’s ‘class-consciousness of sin.’71 Nevinson demonstrates that ‘shamed sympathy,’ or middle-class

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guilt, not only coexists with, but also is manifested by, an attraction to repulsion, a desire to track down and see ‘things at their worst.’ His fellow settlers who ‘feel the same’ actually end up replicating the efforts of slum journalists who visit the poor wards and doss houses in ragged costume. Nevinson’s spouse, Margaret Wynn Nevinson, recalling a comically meager dinner with the South African novelist and socialist-feminist Olive Schreiner in her dingy East End ﬂat in the 1880s, comments, ‘she seemed to have chosen an extra uncomfortable place.’72 Stephen Hobhouse, a nephew of Beatrice Webb, had moved to a Hoxton tenement because, as he claimed in his autobiography, ‘I was living in an utterly false paradise, as a guilty sharer in the corporate sin of my class.’73 He stayed in Hoxton for eight years, and in his memoir recalls that while he chose not to live in a bug-infested, ﬁlthy basement ﬂat, at least two of his friends did (134–5). In a telling social experiment, Hobhouse substitutes his family furnishings with neighborhood purchases ‘in order to test the wearing quality of the type of furniture commonly bought in local shops by young couples setting up house’ (137). It is as if he is playing at poverty. He even imitates his neighbors in using a newspaper instead of a tablecloth, but adds, ‘However, I soon gave this up with other ascetic habits which seemed rather affectations’ (137). Hobhouse is self-conscious enough to see that he is performing and to be ashamed of it. Years later during World War I, when imprisoned for resisting army service, Hobhouse again fantasizes that he is a mere worker living in tenement housing. He writes from his cell, Into the weary sorrow of such lives I feel I have entered just a little. Sometimes when I feel tired and ill I long for some little homely comfort such as only a glass of hot water, or some tea and dry toast; but I know it is impossible, and I can share in the privations of others far braver than I am, by saying to myself, ‘No, you must keep that last penny for gas to cook the porridge, and manage with that or nothing at all.’ (167) This asceticism is not distant from the aestheticism of Toynbee Hall; rather, it is the alternate side of the same coin. (In fact, even as Stephen Hobhouse imitated working-class economies, he still echoed missionary aesthetic practices when he took his neighbors and their children out on holidays to Hampstead Heath and served in the LCC; after the war, his spouse taught art in a school in Stepney and he worked as a gardener for a Roman Catholic arts-and-crafts guild.)

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Perhaps anticipating settlers’ performance of ascetic renunciation, Samuel Barnett had insisted that the men on his premises live comfortably, pointing out that this comfort would be both a sensory respite for working people from ugly, impoverished homes and a tasteful model on which these working people could build their own domestic lives.74 Interestingly, men at the Anglican rival settlement, Oxford House, did live in a deliberate monk-like simplicity (though not squalor). We have moved from the application of aesthetic design, lilies and sunﬂowers, and reading of Ruskin in the slums, to the aestheticizing of the slum itself, and if this haunts us a bit, then perhaps we can attribute it to the part of the settler that is slummer, the ﬂâneur in the philanthropist. The celebrated musical priest H. R. Haweis, noted for his friendships with Hill and the Barnetts and his activism on behalf of such missionary aesthetic lobbies as open spaces, Sunday opening, and music for the masses recalled his stint as a curate in Bethnal Green, ‘I know not what glamour in those days hung over the grimy and repulsive aspects of Bethnal Green life,’ but then proceeded to explain that glamour: The reeking streets seemed beautiful to me in the evening sunshine; the unwashed and multitudinous children feeding on garbage in the gutter, ﬁlled me with inﬁnite tenderness and pity, the more because they seemed so happy; the sick poor dying in back rooms, the workhouse wards, the close factory houses packed with pale girls staring at straw bonnet work, the old men eternally dipping dolls’ heads, the button-hole sewers, the infatuated weavers, descendents of Huguenot refugees, still working at their antiquated handlooms at famine prices – all these scenes of my daily life seemed to me then exquisitely pathetic, novel, interesting and exciting. I was not in the least depressed by the surrounding misery; I was not responsible for it. It was a problem to work at. I was strangely exhilarated by it.75 In contrast to Webb and Nevinson’s rationales, Haweis’s sentimental and voyeuristic response to squalor is not a confession of his ‘classconsciousness of sin’: ‘I was not responsible for it,’ he says. For Haweis, poverty is a ‘problem to work at’ daily; it is also the source of admitted exhilaration and ‘exquisite’ pathos and pleasure. Yet there is more to the Toynbee Travellers than this. These members of the aspiring lower middle classes would have recognized aesthetic taste and its signiﬁers because, as I have argued in my Introduction, these were a visible part of the life of Victorian philanthropy. The par-

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ticularly aesthetic-identiﬁed group in Siena located the act of slumming as an aesthetic pastime, and by performing it, they were imitating what they thought upper-class aesthetes were and did. In this way, they did not distinguish between occasional slumming (slum tourism) and settlement; they were conﬁrming the satirical union of aesthetes and slummers as represented in magazines like Punch. But they were also unintentionally echoing Wilde himself who revealed the permeability between the three late Victorian bourgeois personalities in the slums: the philanthropist, the aesthete, and the slummer. The philanthropist hopes to change history by ameliorating poverty; the aesthete hopes to cleanse the city by relieving squalor; the slummer gains a heightened experience of luxury and beauty by glimpses of want and ugliness, and in turn treats ugliness as he would a species of beauty. ‘Oh! what slums!’ might be an exclamation of despair, but in the context of the Toynbee Travellers’ Log, it is more likely an enthusiastic response to picturesque poverty. Voiced by Travellers like J. Charles Scargill of Surrey – who have used the suburban commuter trains to escape the quotidian English poverty of Whitechapel and Stepney – ‘Oh! what slums!’ is a testimony to their adoption of a standardized mode of aestheticism informed by middle-class ways of seeing and acculturation into bourgeois values.

4 The Museum Opening Debate and the Combative Discourses of Sabbatarianism and Missionary Aestheticism

In his memoir, Father and Son (1907), Edmund Gosse recalls his Evangelical boyhood on the Devonshire coast and his later struggles to distance himself from his father’s faith. Looking back, he characterizes the early growth of his intellect as ‘a plant on which a pot has been placed, with the effect that the centre is crushed and arrested, while shoots are straggling up to the light on all sides.’1 These shoots, whether they represent childish fancy or writerly imagination, might also stand for an enduring curiosity about the aesthetic in life, a curiosity which pervades the book, from Gosse’s ‘strange freak’ of applying wild, brilliant colors to drawings of sea anemones to his passion for the morbid images in the volume of funereal poetry within his reach. Gosse’s longing for forbidden literature such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a heresy against the pious ways of the Plymouth Brethren, and particularly his imminent dedication, for which his father seeks evidence daily. The traditional observance of Sunday epitomizes the constraints of his childhood: What made these Sundays, the observance of which was absolutely uniform, so particularly trying was that I was not permitted the indulgence of any secular respite. I might not open a scientiﬁc book, nor make a drawing, nor examine a specimen. I was not allowed to go into the road, except to proceed with my parents to the Room, nor to discuss worldly subjects at meals, nor to enter the little chamber where I kept my treasures. (169) His body stiﬂed in Sunday black wool, his mind barred from customary thought, Gosse’s senses (including aesthetic subjectivity) are equally 98

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blunted through an enforced distance from his books, drawings and treasures. He learns to endure a Sunday weariness that is ‘like physical pain’ (169). When he is brought to a gallery to view oil paintings for the ﬁrst time, it appears that Philip Gosse’s emotional conservatism and scientiﬁc objectivity have conquered: William Holman Hunt’s Christ impresses Edmund ‘not exactly as a work of art, but [because of its clear representation of minute details] as a brilliant natural specimen’ (166). Yet the choice of aesthetic pleasure over piety and the particular identiﬁcation with a liberatory, forbidden aesthetic surface after his neighbor in her hysterical zeal has dashed Greek statuary from the pedestals of the Crystal Palace: It was ﬁrst whispered among us, and then openly stated, that these relatives had taken her to the Crystal Palace, where, in passing through the Sculpture Gallery, Susan’s sense of decency had been so grievously affronted, that she smashed the naked ﬁgures with the handle of her parasol, before her horriﬁed companions could stop her. She had, in fact, run amok among the statuary …. [After her arrest] she was ready to recount to every one, in vague and veiled language, how she had been able to testify for the Lord ‘in the very temple of Belial,’ for so she poetically described the Crystal Palace. (180) Young Gosse, enchanted by the engravings he has seen of such statues (‘too beautiful to be so wicked as my Father thought they were’ [179]), consecrates his estrangement from his father’s faith by foolishly, affectionately mourning for the shattered pagan gods. I begin this chapter by balancing these two excerpts of Gosse’s book against one another: Gosse’s longing for his ‘treasures’ on Sunday and Susan Flood’s outburst against other treasures. Together, they lead into my central topic: the particular investment in the art gallery as a site of social and spiritual renewal, and the threat felt by late Victorians of strong religious conviction when confronted with a developing public faith in aestheticism. The parallel may not seem immediate: Susan Flood’s iconoclasm derives from her shock at viewing nude sculpture for the ﬁrst time, and my topic here is not religious zealots’ ignorance of the Greek nude (though Gosse assures us that most of Philip Gosse’s congregation had no idea what it was that Susan had smashed). I will explore, instead, the propriety of viewing art on the Sabbath, or the Lord’s Day, as most Sabbatarians were wont to call it. Although it is

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not explicit whether Susan’s outburst occurs on a Sunday, she does see her onslaught as a defense against Satan and his creations, as if she is escaping from the ‘Hellenic hypodrome’ that Gosse imagines is the source of his father’s rage against pagan art (179). The Crystal Palace at which Susan Flood ‘runs amok’ is a great signiﬁer not merely of mid-century nationalism and industrial progress, but also of the imposition of Victorian Sabbatarianism on workingclass leisure. In the 1850s, the Sabbatarian cause hit its peak of popularity and topicality when its representatives proscribed Sunday visits to the exhibitions there. Opponents protested that at the sight of Britain’s grand inventions working men had acquired a new respect for mechanical aptitude, acumen, and property.2 Still, Sabbatarian restrictions prevailed, and as a concession, Parliament permitted the gardens to be opened on Sundays as parks for working-class excursionists. In the 1880s, Ruskin wrote the infamous passage in his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89) in which he condemned the destruction of the countryside by roughs who arrived by trains on Crystal Palace showdays.3 By that time, the leisure of the working classes had become an aesthetic concern to many who prized their suburban idyll. A rise in real wages beneﬁting from trade union activism in the 1870s, legislative limitations on working hours deriving from the Early Closing Movement and the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, and the successful expansion of cheap train travel all contributed to British laborers’ new expenditure on leisure. Most workers satisﬁed themselves with promenading on the street and congregating afterward at the local pub. Given the enclosures of parklands within the city, they sought an escape through Bank Holiday excursions to popular seaside resorts. The 1890s witnessed the ﬁrst extensive commercialization of leisure and with it a wider range of public amusements: cycling; professional spectator sports such as football; the variety entertainments of the music hall; early cinema; and the development of extravagant amusement parks in resort towns. The affordability and availability of these new activities led the working classes to bypass the restrictive nature of the traditional English Sunday with renewed vigor.4 Although the Sabbatarian Society for Promoting the Due Observance of the Lord’s Day (LDOS) was founded as early as 1831, disputes over the uses of Sunday saw periodical resurgences throughout the century. The lobby to extend the opening hours of the British Museum and National Gallery was reawakened in the 1850s and then the 1870s, a decade marked by the founding of the Sunday Society in 1875 and a bill for Sunday Opening raised by one of its members, Peter Taylor,

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before the House of Commons in 1877. This chapter focuses on the anti-Sabbatarian public art lobby from the 1870s through the 1890s, and its reliance on aesthetic rhetoric. Working from reports and a published round-table discussion by the missionary aesthetic Sunday Society, as well as tracts of two Sabbatarian organizations, the LDOS and the Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association (WMLDRA), I will demonstrate that the Sunday debate persisted because each side spoke its own language, or rather, because each deﬁned key terms differently. The bourgeois art-philanthropists in the Sunday Society preached a Ruskin-inﬂuenced Religion of Art, by which they entrusted beautiful paintings with the capacity to civilize the poor; they therefore viewed Sunday Opening as an opportunity for diffusing rational recreations. In contrast, Sabbatarians understood it as a labor issue, because these new entertainments would require Sunday employment of those in the travel, entertainment, and service industries. The Sunday Society and Sabbatarians rooted their rhetoric in incompatible deﬁnitions of ‘Sunday rest,’ and the activities to which they attributed ‘refreshment,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘elevation.’ Beginning this introduction with Gosse’s personal account is perhaps dangerous: it paves the way for a slanted argument that favors the Sunday Society. It is imperative then to emphasize that Sabbatarians were not Scrooges intent on depriving working people of pleasure (though ultimately they worked to establish a division in the public mind between the joys of worship and gratiﬁcation through secular art and music). Not every man advocating Sabbath observance subjected his family to Sundays as austere as those of Philip Gosse and the Plymouth Brethren. Sabbatarians were conscious that their opponents represented them as fanatical and bigoted.5 Sabbatarians were, in fact, acting to protect workers from the threat of a seven-day working week. As I will show, Sabbatarians believed the missionary aesthetes in the Sunday Society well meaning, but naive as to the repercussions of Sunday gallery openings.

The Sabbatarian cause … we not infrequently ﬁnd in pulpits and reviews, in social circles and art coteries, much loose talk about the worship of the beautiful. Men speak of prayers to ﬂowers and stars – of the devotion of the chemist, the astronomer, and the naturalist. It is not the worship of the creature we demand, it is the adoration of God; not the culture

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of the beautiful, but the worship of the alone gloriously beautiful and perfectly holy Redeemer.6 From its founding in 1831, the Society for the Due Observance of the Lord’s Day (also known as the Lord’s Day Observance Society, or LDOS) published cheap penny pamphlets, often no longer than two pages, addressed to audiences of speciﬁc occupations (tradesmen, ships captains, shareholders of railways, and street-sweepers) or of speciﬁc habits (readers of Sunday newspapers, and those who receive or read letters on the Sabbath). The LDOS and other Sabbatarian associations not only spoke to, but also claimed to speak for, working people.7 Referring to themselves in the third person, members of the LDOS claimed to ‘consider themselves in some measure the representatives of all those numerous classes and they hesitate even to appear to desert one of these classes, for however short a time: they are also unwilling, by separating the claims of the classes, to distract public attention or divide the common effort.’8 Were the ‘Tracts for Working Men and their Firesides’ that the LDOS distributed written by working men or merely for them? In 1840, LDOS membership cost ten shillings a year, and clergymen constituted its local secretaries.9 One LDOS pamphleteer appears to be addressing an upper-class readership when he argues that gentlemen who do not respect God’s authority by observing the Sabbath open the door for their servants’ insubordination and ultimately social revolution.10 In the 1850s, the LDOS sponsored essay contests seeking working people’s afﬁrmation of Sabbatarianism, and rewarded the winners with cash prizes. Despite these maneuvers, it seems clear that Sabbatarian societies had their share of earnest working-class members; transit workers even established their own Cab and Omnibus Man’s Sunday Rest Association. In 1832, ﬁshmongers, bakers, butchers, and coachmen testiﬁed before a Select Committee of the House of Commons on the commercial pressure to work on the Sabbath; during that time, 7,000 bakers in London alone were employed to work on Sundays.11 The Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association (WMLDRA), with its annual subscription of a mere shilling, fostered branches in London and the provinces, and by 1866, distributed nearly half a million publications annually.12 As Brian Harrison writes, ‘Cabmen, postmen, railway workers, and hairdressers had everything to gain from sabbatarian restriction.’13 Lord Shaftesbury, the most visible representative of the Sabbatarian cause, admitted that at least 25,000 of the 30,000 workers who protested the Sunday opening of the Bethnal Green Museum in

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1880 were motivated not by religious enthusiasm, but by fear of a seven-day working week.14 From the start, the Sabbatarian cause relied on a rhetoric of class division and class rights. LDOS pamphlets use vignettes to illustrate how the rich, governed by their own selﬁsh predilections, dictate Sunday labor for the poor. For instance, the gentleman who travels for his own pleasure thoughtlessly demands the services of innkeepers. The innkeepers in turn yield to the temptation to earn extra money and thus require Sunday work of their servants, waiters, post boys, and horsemen:15 [Any master] will tell you that he too has a master to satisfy, and competition of trade to contend with, as irresistible as that which oppresses the labourer in his employ: for if he refuses to serve his employers on the Lord’s Day, they will leave him and deal with less conscientious tradesman. Thus, if you ascend step by step up the scale of society, through all the ranks, you will ﬁnd the thoughtlessness, avarice, or self-indulgence of each upper class is depriving the class below them of all the privileges of the Sabbath …16 As much as Sabbatarians accuse shopkeepers of avarice, they recognize that the real enemy is institutionalized competition. One Sabbatarian concluded that otherwise Christian members of railway boards act selﬁshly under the guise of their corporate identity: ‘[I]ncorporated individual shareholders are enabled to give themselves privily to the undisturbed consideration of proﬁt or loss, behind the board, which has neither soul nor conscience; while the board, thus destitute, as a board, of the moral faculty, makes merchandise with the souls and consciences of individual shareholders.’17 Referring to Sunday observance as a ‘civil right,’ Sabbatarians lobbied in Parliament for legislation that would compel employers to close shop on Sundays.18 They did not aim to force all citizens to attend church on Sundays, but to ensure religious liberties to all who desired them.19 If the crucial ‘poor man’s question’ was, as they claimed, the Sabbath question, then Sabbatarians phrased that question thus: ‘Shall the labourer continue legally to be guaranteed in the enjoyment of his day of rest?’20 Sabbatarians extended their attacks on abusive commercial competition in their growing literature against Sunday museum and gallery opening. They feared that Sunday opening would provide the chink in the dam through which more Sunday employment would emerge: how would the populace arrive at these art galleries if not by coaches, trams,

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or omnibuses, and who would drive them? If spiritual nourishment through art did not sufﬁce, then where would the poor eat when they had reached the galleries, and who would serve them? By the mid-century, Sabbatarians espoused the following domino theory. The opening of national cultural institutions on Sundays would entail compulsory labor seven days a week for hired docents and guards. By extension, the train, cab, and omnibus men and the sellers of food and drink in the region would also have to work on Sundays for the convenience of visitors. Local competitors would have to open their doors on Sundays to compete with the lower prices offered by their Sunday-working neighbors. Following government-sponsored Sunday recreations, other amusements and private industries across Britain would conduct business on Sundays, and Sunday labor would become the norm. Given employers’ custom of providing their workers with just enough to live on, laborers would make no more money, but they would work seven days a week for it. The unskilled worker would be at the mercy of employers who could easily ﬁnd others to take his job were he unwilling to work on Sunday. If an employer offered to give the worker an alternative day off, say, a Monday, then that employer would be equally empowered to revoke it, since it was not sanctioned by anyone but himself.21 Sabbatarians were especially threatened by the popularity of the Continental Sunday abroad – a Sunday equally divided between religious services in the morning and secular rational recreations in the afternoon. Missionary aesthetes in the Sunday Society looked admiringly to France and Germany as models, pleased by what they observed: outdoor concerts and dancing, theatres and operas, lively streets and promenades, people in art galleries and cafés. But according to Sabbatarians, these art philanthropists saw with the limited vision of tourists.22 Sabbatarians highlighted the Sunday labor that sustains such urban amusements. In France, The moment you leave the Place de la Concorde you ﬁnd, in the Rue Royale, shopmen and shopwomen behind the counter; it is the employer’s day. In the ﬁrst bank you reach on the Boulevards, the clerks are at the desk; it is the banker’s day. In the Faubourgs the mechanics are busy; it is the manufacturer’s day. The PostOfﬁce is full of working men; it is the merchant’s day. The Rue Rivoli rings with the mason’s hammer; it is the contractor’s day. In the timber-yards, you hear the saw; it is the master’s day.23

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All of this has happened because increasing amusements have cost Sunday its sense of sacredness and employers’ sanction of it.24 When Sunday Society members argued that recreations would not necessarily instigate more labor, Sabbatarians accused them of myopia.25 For the Sabbatarian, then, the Sunday Question is not about how one spends one’s free time, but about whether one has free time to spend at all. For that reason, Sabbatarians deﬁned ‘rest’ simply and literally as relief from labor. Rest is not itself worship, but provides the space for it: This periodic weekly rest is supplemental to that of the night, and is needed to make up for the insufﬁcient rest obtained in sleep. Like that rest, it refreshes body and mind, but it is better than that, inasmuch as it is rest combined with activity, and is of spiritual value also by its connexion with worship. He who denies to himself adequate rest in sleep will necessarily suffer in body and mind. This suffering will attend also the neglect of Sabbatic rest, but will be intensiﬁed by spiritual loss. Whoever tries to live without the refreshment provided by God in the Sabbath will fail of the full enjoyment and use of his various powers.26 Ironically, as we shall see, anti-Sabbatarian lobbyists adopted the same terms – ‘refreshment’ and ‘enjoyment’ – to justify rational recreations such as gallery attendance on Sundays. Working-class proponents of a Free Sunday further seized upon and subverted phrases common in Sabbatarian literature. While Sabbatarians alleged that museum opening would be the ‘thin end of the wedge’ that would threaten all workers’ Sunday freedoms, one laborer warned his mates of the latest Sabbatarian effort against a local publican’s Sunday hours: ‘They would legislate for our morals … it is only the prelude to a series of attempts to prevent, if possible, all recreation and amusement – it is the thin end of the wedge which they will use all their efforts to drive home.’27

The Sunday Society Founded in 1875 as a small, private organization with an overtly aesthetic educational mission, the Sunday Society was an offshoot of the 20-year-old Sunday League. Objecting that complementary campaigns for Sunday band concerts in parks, Sunday lectures, and Sunday excursions were monopolizing the League’s attention, members of the Sunday

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Society reclaimed and reafﬁrmed the League’s original object: to make art accessible to the people by opening museums and galleries on Sundays. With its largely upper- and middle-class membership and its withdrawal from the rally for outdoor, mass entertainments, the Sunday Society invites the historian to assume a class-based embarrassment at the heart of the rift: the Sunday League had included a substantial number of working-class members.28 For the next 21 years, Mark Judge would serve as Honorary Secretary of the Sunday Society, often provoking a ‘friendly rivalry’ between his own group and the League.29 Individuals in both groups supported the Sunday opening of galleries and museums for a variety of reasons: socialists deﬁned the bill as a demand on the state to undertake ﬁscal responsibility for providing the public with varied means of leisure; manufacturers seeking to protect Britain’s economic leadership endorsed artisans’ training classes at museums and technological collections on Sundays; teetotallers, popularly known as counter-attractionists, backed Sunday gallery and museum attendance as an alternative to the less respectable pursuits of the public house; freethinkers perceived the advent of Sunday opening as a declarative triumph over Sabbatarians; and particularly in the Sunday Society, middle-class men and women with aesthetic leanings regarded galleries as the site of the working classes’ cultural education and consequent reﬁnement. The Sunday Society attracted MPs of both Tory and Radical afﬁliations, aristocrats, philanthropic women, civic leaders, painters, and not least, a cross-section of clergymen from the Lord Bishop of Hereford to less-known preachers in slum districts to Canon Samuel Barnett who served as its president during the 1890s. In contrast to the working-class presence in Sabbatarian groups, a breakdown of the Sunday Society’s executive membership reveals that of the 69 per cent who could be classed by occupation, 27 per cent were journalists, academics, those of ‘literary/scholarly’ occupations, and those in the ‘ﬁne arts,’ while another 14 per cent were businessmen, mostly manufacturers, and 14 per cent were clergy.30 The contributors mentioned in the organ of the Sunday Society, The Sunday Review, vividly demonstrate the overlap between missionary aesthetic societies. Here are central members of the intellectual aristocracy, many of whom had links to Toynbee Hall and East End philanthropy. Among them were solicitor William Shaen, Christian Socialist Frederick Furnivall, Rector of Bethnal Green, Septimus Hansard, philanthropist Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, head of the Working Man’s Club and Institute Union, Hodgson Pratt, and the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Penryn Stanley (who served as Sunday Society president in the late 1870s).

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Despite the limited sources available on the Sunday Society, what is clear are its links to an aesthetic milieu. The membership list in its annual report featured members of the Souls like Lady Violet BonhamCarter as well as the leading artists Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Rudolf Lehmann, G. F. Watts, and Lord Frederic Leighton. Its presidents included the founder of the Grosvenor Gallery, Sir Coutts Lindsay, and the painters George Howard, Earl of Carlisle and William Holman Hunt.31 Madame Jane Ronniger, a portrait painter and public elocutionist who taught recitation to young ladies in Kensington, belonged to the Sunday Society and applauded its efforts in her magazine, The Aesthetic Review and Art Observer. (Contributors to this journal included Mrs Mark Judge as well as journalist Ellen C. Clayton, whose visits to artists’ open houses were a regular feature in the Sunday Society’s Sunday Review.) Prominent clergymen advocating the Museum Sunday had aesthetic afﬁliations. The American Unitarian minister Moncure Conway, and the Ritualist priest Stewart Headlam, whom I discuss at length in the next chapter, campaigned energetically for Sunday opening; so did the Rev. Hugh Reginald Haweis, who resided on Cheyne Walk with his spouse, the female aesthete Mary Eliza Joy Haweis. As we have seen, Canon Samuel Barnett had directed art exhibitions at St Jude’s in Whitechapel since the early 1880s. Following Barnett’s opening of the annual exhibit on Sundays, the LDOS Secretary John Gritton not only complained to the Bishop of London, but also sent LDOS members into the street outside St Jude’s to preach perdition to those entering the gallery.32 Sunday Society members relied upon several rhetorical strategies in their advocacy of Sunday museum and gallery openings. First, in response to Sabbatarian accusations that they would be exploiting workers, they sought to remove the proﬁt motive inherent in Sunday businesses by urging the bourgeoisie to serve as volunteer museum and art gallery monitors. More radical Sunday Society members adopted the tactic of prescribing an alternative day off for full-time staff. In addition to campaigning for the opening of national institutions, the Sunday Society encouraged private galleries like the Grosvenor and Grafton Galleries, and private associations like the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours to lead the way and sponsor, if only for a short term, ‘Museum Sundays’ of their own.33 In debates, Mark Judge used the success of these private exhibitions as evidence for the feasibility of opening state-funded museums and galleries on Sundays, citing especially how little these extended hours

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taxed the energies of museum attendants. To the very end, the secretary of the LDOS, the Rev. Frederick Peake, doubted that this could be done, and after the passing of the Sunday Bill in 1896, he enumerated galleries in the provinces which he claimed were exploiting their attendants. Peake warned his readers that the museum attendant, given Monday off instead of Sunday, would suffer a social and spiritual alienation: ‘[he will] ﬁnd the family life broken up, the Sabbath restfulness of the home and of the streets replaced by the bustle and noise of the working week, and the opportunity of sharing in general worship and religious instruction no longer available.’34 Yet the Sunday Society asserted that galleries generally strengthened families who, by viewing artistic wonders together, had an opportunity to exchange thoughts and enjoy their leisure harmoniously.35 Just as Sabbatarians distinguished their laboring constituents from the wealthy and leisured, Sunday Society supporters also employed a rhetoric of haves and have-nots. Sabbatarian legislation complicated the lives of the poor by criminalizing necessary tasks like the purchase of food.36 Without the means to keep food fresh, workers were obliged to buy it on Sunday mornings after being paid on Saturday nights.37 Further, since many poor people did not own their own ovens, they were obliged to collect bread from the baker or go without; yet on a Sunday, a baker could be ﬁned for selling a loaf. Sunday Society members correlated Sabbatarians’ refusal to permit the poor basic nourishment with their refusal to permit the poor access to art. Congregational minister of the Brixton Independent Church Bernard J. Snell wrote that the opening of art institutions seemed to him ‘as natural of acceptance as the famous Spanish decree: “Every honest man is hereby commanded to go to dinner when he is hungry.”’38 The Sunday Society’s drive to extend gallery hours evolved in direct response to the development of the industrial landscape. Sunday Society aesthetes were keenly aware of the physical conditions of workers’ homes: overcrowded, noisy, damp, and monotonous. The radical MP Jacob Bright endorsed opening national museums and galleries not merely as instructive and entertaining sites, but as comfortable indoor ones as well, ‘large,’ ‘well-warmed,’ ‘well-aired’ – capable of providing the poor with the sort of comfort found in the pleasure gardens of European cities while protecting them from the British climate.39 We see in the missionary aesthetic literature of the Sunday Society the ﬁgure of the poor man who is shut up on a wet Sunday in a fever den with a wife and quarrelling children and barred from the National Gallery a mere stone’s throw away, denied the solace of art that is his

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birthright. Writers in the Sunday Society frequently exploited the image of the avowedly religious man in his splendid house, surrounded by picturesque gardens, who would deny the poor of London the right to visit museums on their one day of leisure. Sophia Beale, a distinguished watercolorist, author of gallery guides, and member of the Sunday Society, offered this solution to the inequity of art ownership: ‘Logically such persons [who would refuse the people access to art on Sunday] should hang dusting sheets round their walls each Saturday evening, so that their Sunday eyes should not be the instruments of pollution to their Sunday minds.’40 Quite apart from the defensive rhetoric it used to deny Sabbatarian claims that its policies exploited laborers, the Sunday Society had its own active rhetorical strategies. Its supporters contended that Sabbatarians were prolonging an observance of Sunday mistaken since its historical inception – the Puritan misappropriation of the Jews’ Sabbath. They exhaustively researched the Old and New Testaments to clarify the distinctions between the seventh day on which God rested (Genesis 2: 1.2) and the Fourth Commandment, which rather obscurely dictated that man ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy’ (Exodus 20: 8). They sought to distinguish between Sunday, the ‘Lord’s Day,’ as it was intended for rest, and the traditional Jewish Sabbath, or seventh day, which was characterized by fasting and prohibitions. Historians traced the merging of the two holidays under Constantine (AD 341) and the ensuing confusion between them that led Puritans to apply restrictions to Sunday practice. In their efforts to proclaim the ‘tyrannical’ Jewish observance of the Fourth Commandment obsolete, these critics cited Mark 2: 27, in which Christ scandalized the Pharisees by violating Jewish Sabbath worship, declaring, ‘The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.’ Jesus conﬁrmed this tenet in Mark 3: 4 when he healed a leper on the Sabbath. Since Jesus did not include or even mention Sabbath observance among his decrees in St Matthew’s and St Luke’s reports of the Sermon on the Mount, Victorian scholars concluded that he tacitly allowed it to slip into the background of duties and that he was implicitly insisting upon the spirit of the law rather than mechanical practice of it.41 Sunday Society supporters claimed that following the Cruciﬁxion, early Christians commemorated the Lord’s Supper at which Jesus had ofﬁciated by feasting: these celebrations were the ﬁrst Sunday observances. They were quick to label any of the strictures advocated by Sabbatarians as Jewish. ‘Sunday is not the Sabbath in the Jewish sense of the word …. it is a day for joyful worship, and not for spiritual penance …’42

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Through their analysis of the Fourth Commandment, members of the Sunday Society set up a dichotomy between rest (which would compel spiritual contemplation and thanks to God) and obligatory worship. For the Sunday Society, such rest included any activities that would restore the body, elevate the spirit, and, by conﬁrming the glories of nature, reﬁne the aesthetic sense. They translated this into a civic code, claiming that a government was responsible for funding schemes not only of utility (sewers, drains, roads), but also of beauty. Lobbyists for the opening of parks and the availability of excursion boats and trains on Sundays frequently phrased their demand for this civic law by describing how Scots were oppressed by Presbyterian codes against civic forms of leisure: To close a Botanic Garden on Sunday is thought a triumph of principle. Even to take a walk in the ﬁelds is with many a liberty, only to be enjoyed by stealth. The unhappy denizens of the courts and wynds of Edinburgh and Glasgow are to be fettered all day to their dismal abodes, or at least to the streets of the over-grown city, and may not take a trip down the Clyde, to inhale the fresh sea-breezes, and to gain from all the sights above and around them a new sense of the Creator’s power and love.43 The idea that green spaces and fresh air were necessary for a healthful and reverent life was not new; the arguments at the heart of the open spaces movement dated back to seventeenth-century enclosures. By the mid-1870s, however, Victorian social reformers were explicitly seeking to prevent the brutalization of urban workers to whom nature was already inaccessible. Reformers extended their goals beyond the founding and protection of city gardens to endorse art viewing in galleries as a means of the poor’s spiritual and moral elevation. A young man may go for a walk on the moors, or a ramble amongst the beauties of nature, and return refreshed in mind and body, or if the moors and meadows be not available, in some park or open space, or in some gallery where the highest creations of art may be studied, or museum ﬁlled with the wonders of nature; this can hardly fail to be a refreshment.44 ‘Refreshment’ is a recurring key word among Sunday Society members, frequently linked with religious ‘reverence,’ intellectual and religious ‘elevation,’ social ‘quiet’ and harmony, and aesthetic ‘brightness.’

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Rarely do the advocates of the Museum Sunday go deeper into the mechanics of this transformation; instead they are content to pair adjectives in a general, if not careless way in phrases like ‘moral and intellectual culture.’45 Still, such phrases occasionally imply a greater assumption at work. For instance, when Mark Judge describes Sunday as the one day ‘set apart for the religious, social, and intellectual recreation of the people,’ he is characterizing religious observance as a sort of recreation, along with ‘social and intellectual recreation.’46 Judge has stripped church attendance of its assumed supremacy; it is no more ‘observance’ than a walk in the park. The resonating theme in essays by Society members, especially the clergy among them, is the joy of Sunday. Those who attend musical concerts, picture galleries, and museums, and lectures on science, literature, and art are said to ‘enjoy [their] elevating inﬂuences,’ the implication being that one could be elevated, improved, by what one simply enjoyed (493). Recommending lecture-tours and the printing of guidebooks to accompany gallery visitors, Hodgson Pratt anticipates a culture for working men that ‘by its very nature, harmonizes with, and ministers to, that moral and religious culture which is essential to man’s completeness and happiness’ (610). The Sunday Society regarded formal learning through rational recreations as a sacrament. Samuel Barnett conﬂates intellectual growth and virtue when he writes in its defense: It is largely for want of knowledge that so many of the working classes take to drink and gambling, deﬁle the country with vulgar pleasures, become ﬁtful followers of any opinion, and stand aloof from religion. They have – what members of other classes often miss – the discipline which comes of work and the sympathy which comes of common suffering, but they want the knowledge which would give them the ‘life and fuller life of which their nerves are scant.’ They err in their hearts because they do not know God’s ways. (488) Following Barnett’s logic, lectures, classes, and musical performances will not merely educate men, but improve them. The Sabbath, characterized by Sabbatarians as a day of pure rest, will, in Barnett’s view, remain holy and restful with the inclusion of new food for thought. As the days of the rural laborer were enriched by ‘what the lilies and the mountains taught,’ so must the city provide cultural interests: ‘attractions to men’s minds as will draw them more than ﬁghts and games;

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they must ﬁll the pauses with the voices which tell of God’s ways; they must afford topics of talk for the family circle’ (488). Further, by recognizing how scant their knowledge is through gallery visitation, eager working-class debaters will learn humility, as they might have by viewing a mountain a hundred years earlier: ‘A glimpse of the inﬁnite is the best cure for the vanity which is the stumbling block of ability’ (487).

Sabbatarian conceptions of working-class home life While missionary aesthetes dwelled upon the dreary, unhealthy tenement environments of the poor and sought to provide art galleries and exhibition halls as refuges from squalor and as stimuli for original thought, Sabbatarians maintained that one spent a proper Sunday within the bounds of church and home. Sabbatarians reasoned that Sunday was the one day for a poor family (whose children worked) to spend time together. In the process, just as Sunday Society advocates attributed holiness to galleries, Sabbatarian writers sanctiﬁed the home hearth as a domestic altar. Speaking before the Working Man’s Sabbath Protection Society in Glasgow in 1882, Lord Shaftesbury extolled the workers’ home life: Now, nothing tends more to destroy the Sabbath-day from being the opportunity when a man meets his wife and children, when he enjoys the comforts of home, and not only the comforts – I am going much higher than that – but the sanctity of home domestic life which was in origin intended by a thoughtful Providence to be the great, true, and fruitful security of private virtue, peace, happiness and honour …. Destroy the Sabbath and you destroy domestic life altogether, particularly among the working people. If the Sabbath-day is to become a working day, when would the poor working man have any time to devote to his wife and children? He would have none.47 One Sabbatarian guides the reader through the ideal domestic Sunday of a laboring family: The parents, instead of indulging in sloth, rise, if not early, yet in time for the morning prayer; and for this purpose the children are gathered round the domestic altar, while the father pours out his heart to Him who hears the young ravens when they cry. The chil-

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dren, clean and neatly dressed, are then sent off to the Sundayschool, and the father and the mother, when she can be spared from her domestic cares, ﬁll up their places in the house of God. On returning from God’s house they meet in smiles around the table spread with what the father’s earnings have procured. There is nothing gloomy – the parents smile upon their offspring, and the children are happy with the parents. Hymns are repeated, perhaps sung. Questions are asked about the sermon. The lad is counselled. The girl cowers like a dove beneath the mother’s wing stretched over her. Again the children repair to school, and the parents to worship. Evening closes in, and all meet around the supper board, and ere they retire to rest, another hymn is sung, or chapter read, and a blessing having been invoked, they all retire to rest, wanting but light slumber for tomorrow’s labour, and not to rest from the fatiguing pleasures which they that day sought and enjoyed. We need not ask what is the week of this family, if this be its Sabbath. That house would know no idleness, no drunkenness, no bickering, no domestic strife. It may be the scene of poverty, but not of misery …. Will the Sunday’s excursion produce such order, such happiness as this?48 This home is poor but not impoverished, and its order is testimony to a working family’s ability to save their earnings and live decently. The author accuses Sunday excursions to cultural institutions of threatening this peace in two ways: ﬁrst, by promoting drunkenness, and second, by marketing ‘fatiguing pleasures.’49 In keeping with their theory of increased exploitative employment upon Sunday Opening, Sabbatarians believed that wherever there was Sunday monetary exchange, there would be excessive drinking and anarchical pleasureseeking.

Museums and galleries: purveyors of alcohol or counter-attractions? Because Sunday business at public houses had endured throughout the century, Sabbatarian writers associated the sale of refreshments at art galleries with the sale of beer. They claimed that even so-called respectable venues like museums would feel obliged to provide refreshment stalls where wines, spirits, and ales would be sold. (In answer to the Sunday Society’s maxim, ‘Better the Crystal Palace than the ginpalace,’ Sabbatarian minister Joseph Kingsmill asked, ‘But what if the

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Crystal Palace itself is also a gin-palace?’50) Sabbatarians anticipated that the Sunday opening of nationalized institutions would spread to the Sunday licensing of lesser amusements such as ‘theatres, music halls, dancing saloons and similar places,’ all of which would also sell liquor.51 Citing statistics, Sabbatarians blamed the Free Sunday for excessive drunkenness in countries on the Continent.52 In answer, Sunday Society members were quick to argue that the Sabbatarian Sabbath had, if anything, encouraged alcoholism by mandating idleness. Anna J. Parsons claimed that Sabbatarian legislation ‘blindly delivered over the working-man to the temptations of the gin shop, while debarring him on his only day of leisure the contemplation of the wonders of nature, science, and art collected for his beneﬁt.’53 Contrasting the hollow boredom of the Sabbatarian Sunday with its idle men loitering in the pub to an ennobling afternoon at the picture gallery, the Sunday Society defended Sunday museum exhibitions as counter-attractions, or deterrents to drink. ‘To close every decent resort, and keep shut every wholesome institution, museum, or library, to which the people might go, at the very time when our tens of thousands are being swept helplessly into dens of drink and debauchery, is a beautiful and touching thought, which could only occur to a really good clergyman or an enlightened M.P.,’ sneered the Rev. Hugh Reginald Haweis.54 Social reformers sought to provide galleries with lecturers and guidebooks, because they hoped these would instill in working-class children a preference for art institutions over grog-shops and music halls.55 One Sunday Society member stated that without access to galleries, the laborer would conceive of the ‘gin palace and contents of a ﬁfth-rate shop’ as the pinnacles of human invention.56 Like Sabbatarians, bourgeois Sunday Society members disregarded the social role of the pub as a community center for trade unions, savings clubs, and local working people’s associations for intellectual self-improvement. While Edmund Gosse recalled his boredom on his father’s restrictive Sabbath, his contemporary in the Sunday Society, James V. Davis, imagined the working-class experience of Sunday at home and recoiled from it for very different reasons. His account is a foil to the Sabbatarians’ ideal of a laboring family’s domestic Sunday: The Sunday atmosphere of the slums of large towns is appalling; the shutters, where they exist, are up till nearly the middle of the day, not for the sake of religious quiet, but because the man and his wife, and his grown up children too, are sleeping off their Saturday

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night’s booze. By-and-by, a slatternly girl, with unwashed face and uncombed hair, emerges from the door to open the closed shutters. Then there commences a gradual movement within, accompanied with the usual choice language and general benediction of your eyes. Such delicacies as the establishment affords are arranged on a rickety table along with some broken cups and mugs, and the unwashed, undressed little ones stand round with their bare feet and hardly decent clothing for their Sunday breakfast. The mother and the father go in, probably, for the hair of the dog that bit them. ‘These poor people of ours, so bedraggled as they are, must be lifted up, at least one day in the week, to higher thoughts, and interests, and employments. Such an uplifting could not fail to inﬂuence and brighten the other six days. It would brighten the whole life, it would introduce sunlight into the dingiest existence.’ So then we must aim at getting a little religion into Sunday. But how? Shall we tell them to sit down in the crowded airless houses and read a book? or shall we bring them to churches where they shall occupy free seats? Neither one nor the other will sufﬁce. The dull atmosphere of the Sunday must be brightened, its gloom driven away. The whole moral tone of the people must be improved, and such innocent amusements and cheerful surroundings placed within their reach as shall call forth in their nature some responsive feeling of goodness, and the hidden mysteries of truth and religion.57 This account of the aftermath of a typical Saturday night’s dissipation is full of references to misspent wages and thoughtless, irresponsible management. The narrator indicts the family through connotative vocabulary (‘booze’ and ‘slatternly’) and sarcasm (‘choice language’ and ‘benediction’). The ‘delicacies [that] the establishment affords’ are scant because wages have been wasted at another establishment, and that balance of scarcity and indulgence is perpetuated in the parents’ further pursuit of alcohol, while the children stand by, unwashed and hardly clothed. The shutters are not closed to hide Sabbath-day desecrations because this laboring family simply feels no shame at its habits or care for appearances – hence the girl can emerge unwashed. An unexpected departure, as we have seen, the narrator continues his analysis in quotations, as if to distinguish himself from the missionary aesthete, who claims the family as ‘ours,’ speaks of ‘lifting up’ the common people to ‘higher thoughts and interests’ and through this, ‘brightening’ an existence that is ‘dingy.’ (We have seen this

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slippage between the ethical, aesthetic, and hygienic in Octavia Hill’s essays.) Yet while differentiating himself from the aesthete, Davis assumes that the reader, whether a churchgoer or not, will agree with the aesthete’s and his own logic out of common sense. Quickly translating the aesthete’s call for intellectual and aesthetic elevation into a demand for religion, Davis moves on to deny the efﬁcacy of common solutions like book-reading and church attendance. In the end, he appropriates the aesthete’s own ideas, but they are more heavily tinged with concerns about curbing imprudent laborers by teaching a higher ‘moral tone.’ This caution is illustrated by his qualiﬁcation that amusements be ‘innocent’ and the amendment that cheerful surroundings call forth more than happiness; they promote righteousness as well. How did Sabbatarians respond to this counter-attraction argument? Henry Broadhurst, speaking in Parliament in 1882, vociferously challenged the Sunday Society’s claim that rational recreations at museums and galleries would distract working people from drink: [S]urely you will not attempt to persuade this house to believe that this class of people, who loiter around the doors of a public house during the hours that they cannot get admittance inside, are the people who are thirsting to worship your exhibitions of the ﬁne arts from their homes? Will you suggest that these are the class of people who would rush in their teeming thousands to the British Museum to make scientiﬁc and historical examinations of the mummies and other curiosities that crowd the galleries, and to worship at the feet of the works of the Old Masters in the National Gallery? 58 Another Sabbatarian similarly asserted, ‘the sort of persons who are seen lounging around public houses on the Sabbath are not likely to be found in any great numbers inspecting coins and Babylonian cylinders, and gazing at portraits and mythological pictures.’59 In light of allegations like these, it is no surprise that contributors to the antiSabbatarian Sunday Review would note that among Sunday visitors to the galleries and gardens at the mansion Cavendish House ‘mingled several who were evidently respectable mechanics’ and that ‘these men evidenced the most gratifying interest.’60 Sabbatarians managed to shut down night-lectures in London by rehabilitating old statutes under Charles II by which they alleged that sponsors of exhibitions and lectures were keepers of disorderly houses, hence liable to be prosecuted.61 The disorderly house was presumably a euphemism for a site of politically subversive activities or an

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unlicensed pub. When Sabbatarian Frederick Peake cautioned that the commercialization of art gallery attendance would provide a legal loophole for anyone wanting to set up a club without a license, however, he seemed less threatened by potential political collusion than by apolitical social anarchy.

‘The vortex of pleasure’ Sabbatarians anticipated that alcoholism would be a mere symptom of a greater, rampant social disorder if galleries and museums were to open on Sundays. As they saw it, Sunday monetary exchange could only lead to an orgy of consumption. LDOS secretary Frederick Peake warned that commercial forms of leisure ironically would tax the already ‘overstrained faculties’ of workers, and in this way, he reiterated Gissing’s visions in The Nether World (1889) and In the Year of Jubilee (1894) of crowd hysteria and consumer frenzy. Peake predicted that upon the sacriﬁce of the religious sanction of Sunday to modern ﬁctions of ‘refreshment,’ nothing would save the day from the ‘greed of gain,’ or even more, ‘the craving after pleasure.’62 The typical worker who spent his Sunday in pleasure was ‘jaded, unhinged, and in want of more excitement.’63 Joseph Kingsmill, chaplain of Pentonville Prison, London, suspected a conspiracy between railway proprietors, publicans, and Crystal Palace companies to part working people from their wages:64 The tradesman, the mechanic, the day-labourer, alike are, by this means, enticed away from their wives and their children on the only day when they can thoroughly enjoy home. Earnings are squandered on one day’s amusement in the week, by which the dwelling might be made more commodious and neat, the parents more respectable and happy, and the children better educated, better fed, better clad … . Few can afford to take their families with them on the Sunday excursion; and fewer still entertain the idea at all, selﬁshly reasoning that they alone are entitled to all the play, because they get all the earnings (though the hardest work, after all, may be the wife’s lot in the house); and the temptation constantly occurring, the habit of family neglect, and of pleasure-taking in company with strangers, is effectively formed, and home is dislocated and disorganized.65 Kingsmill voiced each parent’s worst nightmare of the lasciviousness of the Continental Sunday: ‘Daughters, at like critical age, accept invitations

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from thoughtless and vicious youths, rapidly become immersed in the vortex of pleasure, and form foolish attachments, which end in a miserable home, or in their irretrievable ruin.’66 As early as 1855, Sabbatarians alleged that the Sunday opening of national institutions would prompt the Sunday legalization of more questionable privately sponsored leisure activities. ‘Why not Madame Tussaud’s? Why not Astley’s?’ one essayist suggested sarcastically.67 His line of thinking was followed by the next generation of Sabbatarian writers in the 1870s and 1880s.68 Sabbatarians reasoned that once private art galleries were opened to the general public and maintained through charging patrons admissions fees, then art museums would be setting themselves up in competition with ‘low’ popular entertainments available in music halls and pubs. In 1880, the Rev. John Kennedy warned that the people’s increasing demand for recreations following the prospective openings of the British Museum and National Gallery would lead to the ‘promiscuous opening’ of theatres. He assured Sunday Society members that the Lyceum Theatre, eager for receipts, would not feature performances of ‘Elijah’ or recitations of Paradise Lost, because ‘The slums of Covent Garden would be insensible to the glories of Handel.’69 Lord Shaftesbury adopted the same argument, baiting the Sunday Society by mockingly asserting that working people might acquire the lessons of morality and social life by ‘sitting in the theatre enraptured with some Jim Crow, or harlequin farce or something of that kind.’70 The Rev. Frederick Peake keenly attacked the Sunday Society where it was weakest: its defenders had included the music hall performer Paul Blouet, commonly known by his stage name Max O’Rell, and George Alexander, an actor-manager. Peake warned that once art museums charged entry fees, lectures on ‘science, and art, and literature, and sociology stand but a poor chance without the aid of lantern views, and music, and broad humour of the Max O’Rell type.’71 One can only guess that the Honorary Secretary of the Sunday Society, Mark Judge, might have felt uneasy about O’Rell’s endorsement: he was so anxious to urge the rational character of the Sunday Society’s ideal recreations that he omitted aquariums from among the desired libraries, museums, and galleries in the Society’s charter, because ‘the Aquarium’ had become ‘synonymous with “a place of ordinary amusement.”’72 Likewise, Judge’s colleagues emphasized the rational character of the entertainments they promoted at the expense of taverns and racecourses. Some slyly adopted the rhetoric of their Sabbatarian rivals: they described certain low amusements as ‘strenu-

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ous pursuit[s],’ characterized by an ‘absorbing noise and strife of pleasure,’ and therefore deﬁned gambling and attendance at blood sports as kinds of work, to be despised not simply for their vulgarity, but as blasphemies against the fourth commandment.73 It is true that the elevating recreations that the Sunday Society promised as answers to Sunday boredom were unfamiliar to, and for the most part unpopular among, the working classes for whom they were intended. One Sabbatarian minister imagined the laborer asking, ‘On what principle do you open to me the pictures and antiques of the museum for which I care nothing, and close against me the stage and the concert which I enjoy? If it is right to give me coins and statues and mummies on Sunday, where is the wrong in giving me music and plays and dances?’74 To the response of one enthusiastic Sunday Society supporter, ‘Wherever the public institutions have been opened, do not the people crowd in?’, Sabbatarians replied that they did not, citing statistics of low Sunday attendance in the provincial libraries and galleries of Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham, and Leicester where Sunday Opening had been an experiment.75 Alexander M’Arthur recorded in 1882 that ‘the number of working people who attend is almost inﬁnitesimal.’76 As for those who do ‘crowd in,’ M’Arthur learned during his research that the youth of Manchester used the library as a place for ‘idle gossip … or reading comic and illustrated papers.’77 In Maidstone, ‘the institution is made use of simply for a meeting-house of young people (lads and servant girls – these we are continually turning out), who never come to the place during the week, or very rarely, and care for nothing. The lads go into the library, look at nothing else than the Illustrated London News, and it is very seldom any one requires a book on any subject.’78 As Peter Bailey has argued, many among the middle class may have found comfort in perceiving the working-class excursionist as a drunken lout on a spree: ‘a little gratuitous hooliganism was better than the fury of a Communard, and was small price to pay for its implicit conﬁrmation of bourgeois superiority of manners and morals.’79 A workingclass couple jostling and speaking loudly on a crowded train might appear to be drunk, arguing, and ﬁghting to the middle-class passenger sharing their compartment.80 But what was a working man’s Sunday actually like if not the church-going, museum, and reading room attendance or excessive drinking, sloth, and spending alleged by competing camps within the bourgeoisie? In Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, by a Journeyman Engineer (1867), Thomas Wright offers an observation of the Sunday practices of a representative working

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family, ‘The Joneses.’81 The piece highlights certain oversights of both Sabbatarian and aesthetic factions: neither really acknowledges the growing universality of half-Saturdays. No Sabbatarian would admit that working people are more likely to attend pubs and theatres on Saturday evenings than on Sundays. No advocate of Museum Sundays would want to remind his adversaries that museums were already open on Saturday evenings, and that working-class families, observing Sabbath restrictions on trade, had the option of shopping on Saturday evenings. We learn that a working man is more likely to lie in on a Sunday than to attend church, and that while his wife sends the children to Sunday school, she will stay home to prepare a formal Sunday lunch and tea (208, 214). During the day, clothed in their Sunday best, men congregate with friends in the local barbershop for gossip, perhaps place a few bets on a ﬁst ﬁght, and enjoy a glass of the barber’s alcoholic ‘revivers’ (223). Some may spend the day at the local pub, but the men here stop only brieﬂy before moving on (226). The family reconvenes for Sunday lunch, by far the most expensive meal of the week (Wright spends much time praising the thrift of the good wife), and after a walk or nap, for tea, to which friends of the family, particularly sons’ or lodgers’ ﬁancées, are invited (216–17, 236). On occasion, the family will take a planned outing to Brighton, to parks, or down the river, but more commonly Sundays are an opportunity for family rest, decorous hospitality, and local community leisure (241). Despite the allusions to drinking out of licensed hours and petty gambling, Wright conﬁrms the laboring-class ideology of propriety at work in the over-formal ceremony of tea and care for one’s Sunday best; indeed, lunch at home is the family’s central Sunday ritual. What Wright’s account suggests is that a Sunday divested of church attendance or a focus on theological concerns might be every bit as honorable a respite in respectable working-class home life. While not quite among the labor aristocracy (a point Wright illustrates through his passage on Mr Jones’s reluctance to write letters), this is the type of family who, 25 years later, might have chosen to attend a Sunday gallery exhibit at the newly opened British Museum as a means of performing their respectability.82 Signiﬁcantly, however, museum attendance, like visits to church or Brighton, would be a departure from the family routine. In summary, Wright’s account mediates between Sabbatarian prescriptions of strict domestic Sunday observance and aesthetic accounts of rational recreations, while not conﬁrming the overwhelming social popularity of either.

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The Sunday Society and high aesthetic rhetoric into the 1890s At any rate, we are justiﬁed in hoping that those Sunday afternoon Art Services will assist in the evolution of that religion which is to unite men. Felix Moscheles, painter (1896)83 It is fair to say that while it may have existed outside the Aesthetic Movement proper, rhetoric about the holiness of beauty was monopolized by aesthetes in the 1880s and 1890s. The French critic Theodore Duret, observing the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition of 1881, noted that Edward Burne-Jones ‘received the incense and homage in the temple of the faithful.’84 The Grosvenor Gallery deﬁed Sabbatarians by offering free Sunday viewing hours to the poor, and even maintained a Clergy Club for the more bohemian clerics who frequented its exhibitions.85 The Club offered ministers a means of networking with potential upper-class donors who could fund schemes for poor parishioners.86 Arguably, these clerical afﬁliates reinforced the gallery’s claim to be a kind of temple. Cartoonist Charles Keene captured the mainstream clergy’s horror at such alleged aesthetic excesses in his 1882 cartoon ‘Shocking!’ in which an aesthetically dressed lady carrying a fan and, featuring a sunﬂower embroidered on her gown, tells her visitor ‘Fond o’ bric-a-brac? Ao-h! Aw-ﬂy. Brown says I’m becoming quite an aetheist!’ (Figure 4.1).87 This conjoining of the spellings of aesthete and atheist mirrors the conﬂation between the art lover and inﬁdel, insisting that the worship of art is blasphemy. By the passing of the Sunday Opening Act in 1896, Sunday Society members, with an air of agreement and self-congratulation, freely celebrated the power of the arts. Some even extended the rhetoric of a religion of art at the expense of the established church. In one of the letters published as part of the round-table on Sunday Opening in the Westminster Review, George Jacob Holyoake boasts: The painter is greater than a thousand preachers. It is the artist who has made the scenes of Christianity imperishable in the minds of the cultivated. The works of the great painter or the great sculptor preach for a thousand years, while the preacher perishes in a generation in the memory of the people to whom the historical illustrations of art are unknown.88 His colleague Jacob Bright suggested that ‘a day spent among the beauties of nature, or in the galleries crowded with the art treasures and the

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Figure 4.1

Charles Keene, ‘Shocking!’ Punch 82 (6 May 1882): 207.

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curiosities of science, is perhaps as instructive to the moral and spiritual nature as are the sermons preached in some so-called “places of worship …”’89 Ministers adopting missionary aesthetic rhetoric posed a special threat to Sabbatarian clergy. Preaching at the South Place Chapel, London in November 1892, the American Unitarian preacher Moncure Conway offered a radically vivid reconception of early Christian Sundays as a celebration of the aesthetic: ‘on the Sun’s day, the human heart leapt for joy. The very churches were used for theatres and festivities. They were also then the art galleries and concert rooms.’90 He recalled the Reformation as ‘a relapse from a highly developed environment of beautiful images and shrines of art into a primitive temple of unhewn stones; a hard unlovely naturalism that denounced art’ (3499). The fear of idolatry compelled fanatics to ‘sweep pictures and statues out of our churches, wreaking and burning them in the name of the dark art-hating deity’ (3499). Conway continues: But these elevating forms, swept from our churches, are now in the art-galleries. These are our real cathedrals. There the divine legend of humanity is told. But Puritanism seems angry that even in galleries Moses’s hatred of graven images should be disobeyed, and virtually denies them to the working people altogether. It is to thousands a denial of any religious impression or spiritual culture at all. (3499) Conway wrote a history and guide of the South Kensington Museum that seems to have inspired his sermon on the new, liberated Sabbath observance. The sermon bears the rhetorical imprint of missionary aestheticism: ‘it is slavery when the people are locked out of their own houses – their communal museum, art gallery, theatre, library – and forced to beg for a little beauty at the doors of charitable collections and studios’ (3496). Conway uses his defense of popular beauty to propound a further vision: What, in London, might result, were the Museums and Galleries open? How many preachers can rival in attractions the wonders of the British Museum, the noblest institution in the world? What would be the condition of the conventicles, of the ‘Gospel Halls,’ if darkest England were ﬂooded with the splendor of arts now hid under their bushel of bigotry? Well, for a time, some of our chapels might be rather thin; but gradually their pulpits would be occupied

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by men able to preach up to an enlightened people instead of down to benighted people. The clerical intellect would be awakened and stimulated. The whole standard of religious thought and sentiment would be raised. The discourse of the scholar would be interpreted and illustrated by the beautiful Madonnas, the sacred scenes, and lofty ideals, portrayed by the artist and sculptor. (3499) One can see why a Sabbatarian minister like Frederick Peake would be alarmed by Conway’s proposal: ﬁrst, one’s church would lose its status as a house of God and its congregation once Sunday attendance was no longer mandatory; second, one would have to adapt and improve one’s skill at preaching to satisfy a new standard of faith informed by an exalted and exalting art. As Conway urged, ‘The religious guides must study and expound these newly revealed scriptures.’91 If men and women could learn from ‘painter-prophets,’ if gallery attendants performed ‘services analogous to those given by ofﬁcials at places of worship,’ if gallery tours were ‘Art Services,’ and newly accessible paintings were ‘revealed scriptures,’ then the awakening of the dormant aesthetic sense was nothing less than a resurrection.92 It was perhaps no accident that the Barnetts’ Free Loan Exhibitions at St Jude’s took place during Easter Week for eight years before the passing of the Sunday Bill, or that the ofﬁcial Sunday openings of the South Kensington Museum and Bethnal Green Branch Museum fell on Easter Sunday. When the Sunday Society member J. Allanson Picton, a former MP for Leicester, wrote, ‘We only claim that they who in the National Gallery to-day gaze upon the works of Raphael, Michael Angelo, or Turner are likewise breathing a purer air and recreating their souls also by an unfolding of the divine side of fact,’ he was intimating that Sunday ‘recreating’ (re-creating) has connotations beyond bodily exercise.93 H. R. Haweis put it in simple terms: ‘Religion and recreation … meant to a certain extent the same thing – both meant to be born again.’94

The Sabbatarian response to aesthetic rhetoric As representative of the LDOS, Frederick Peake responded in the ﬁnal cycle of letters in the Westminster Review with the observation that the Sunday Society tends ‘to substitute great painters and great sculptors for the ordinary teachers of religion.’ ‘This would be more satisfactory,’ he added, ‘if [the writer] had supplied evidence that great painters

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and great sculptors have been successful examples and teachers of godliness, righteousness and sobriety; or that nations which had given heed to their teachings on Sundays, instead of listening to the silliness of preaching, had exhibited the higher standard of religion and morality.’95 Sabbatarians earlier in the century had also denied art’s potential for morally reforming the masses. In the mid-1850s, following Sir Joshua Walmsley’s motion in the House of Commons for opening the British Museum and National Gallery on Sundays and Lord Stanley’s claim that these proffered ‘intellectual and moral improvement’ to the visitor, Roundell Palmer, an MP for Plymouth, responded that gallery tours were ‘mischievous,’ because they ‘impede[d] moral for the sake of intellectual improvement.’ 96 His contemporary William Arthur too questioned the practical ethical value of art: ‘The true province of art is, to reﬁne taste and polish manners … . But, to infer that by reﬁning taste and polishing manners you elevate morals, is what neither the philosophy of our nature nor the history of cities and nations will support.’ 97 In a move that anticipated the rhetoric of future Sabbatarians, Arthur went on to recall the corruption that developed with the cultures of early Greece and Rome and to malign the morals of the masses in European cities practicing the Continental Sunday, citing the modern art-loving city Munich where ‘one out of every two births is illegitimate.’ 98 In 1880, Sabbatarian John Kennedy likewise quoted Charles Kingsley on the questionable dignity of art-viewing: If we are to judge by the example of Italy, the country which has been most of all devoted to the practice of art, then a nation is not necessarily free, strong, moral or happy, because it can represent facts, or can understand how other people have represented them. The golden age of the English drama was one of private immorality, public hypocrisy, ecclesiastical pedantry, and regal tyranny, and ended in the temporary downfall of the Church and Crown.99 The Sabbatarian press customarily branded the visual arts as tawdry and demoralizing. Sunday openings would prove ‘the pencil … a more exciting corrupter than the pen, and the graces of colour … a public tempter and shame.’100 People would desert churches and Sunday Schools to be seduced by this dazzling trinity: ‘education in the arts, the strains of exquisite music, and frivolous amusements.’101 John Gritton, secretary of the LDOS, defended the glory of a personiﬁed

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Church by characterizing her spirituality as a blindness and deafness to sensory delights. She gladly rests from the sight of artistic beauty that she may gaze unhindered on the beauty of the supreme artist. She thankfully closes her ears to the strains of the earth’s music, that she may, in the quiet of Sabbatic repose, hear the voice of her King, and make His statutes her song in her house of her pilgrimage … . Herself satisﬁed with the higher and holier, shall she cater for [the people’s] carnal lusts, and lead them still further from heaven by the allurement of sense?102 Elsewhere he wrote, ‘Collections of statuary and paintings … are quite as likely to inﬂame the passions as to purge the life.’103 But this type of rhetoric came to sound eccentric and lost its power as the century progressed. Sabbatarians began to defend the sanctity of the Lord’s Day by claiming that while evening gallery talks and occasional school and bank holidays were indeed advantageous, they were all that the people needed.104 As Alexander M’Arthur declared in Parliament in 1882, ‘nor do we imagine it any sin to look at paintings, statuary or other works of art on Sunday, but we contend that the increase of labour, the increased consumption of spirituous liquors, and other evils which need not be enumerated, would far outweigh any good that might be accomplished.’105 With this, M’Arthur and the Sabbatarians of the 1880s and 1890s shifted the debate away from the Sunday Society’s discourse on the social value of art to address Sunday Opening on their more familiar, comfortable terms of labor and capital. Still active as a lobby group today, the LDOS continues to identify itself as a defender of the workers’ right to rest.

Conclusion: a case study In this conclusion, I return to my claim that the social movement for the legislation of Museum Sundays was afﬁliated with the Aesthetic Movement. The interdependence between Victorian anti-Sabbatarianism and institutionalized aestheticism had been established as early as 1882 through Walter Hamilton’s advocacy of Sunday Opening in his historical defense of popular aestheticism, The Aesthetic Movement in England (1882).106 I could end this chapter by continuing my analysis of Edmund Gosse, who upon maturity renounced his father’s evangelicalism and rose to prominence as a formalist literary critic. Gosse’s biography recounts

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his acclaimed Sunday afternoon ‘At Homes’ where he hosted such aesthetic ﬁgures as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, Henry James, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Arthur Symons.107 However, for more concrete connections between formal art philanthropy, political advocacy, and the Aesthetic Movement, I turn to the Rev. Hugh Reginald Haweis and Mrs Mary Eliza Joy Haweis. The Haweis marriage, I argue, embodied the union between the anti-Sabbatarian lobby and aestheticism. Further, Haweis’s sermon ‘Sunday Recreations for the People’ reiterates the main points of the Sunday Society and repudiates those of the Sabbatarians. One of the minority of Anglican clergy who promoted Sunday Museum Opening, H. R. Haweis occupied the even smaller minority of those who were outspoken about it; these were branded as eccentrics. And certainly, judging by his sermons, Haweis encouraged his reputation as a cure aesthétique. He went so far as to preach from the pulpit that blue and white china was not a wasteful purchase if acquired by one with taste enough to value it.108 Having visited the lavishly ornate blue and gold Peacock Room designed by James Whistler for the shipping magnate Frederick R. Leyland’s home in South Kensington, Haweis made it the occasion for a sermon on the artist as seer. ‘Something akin to a religious awe came over me as I began to understand the mystery and wealth of thought and beauty which lay hidden, nay, which lay like an open secret, in a peacock’s plume. I said, I never knew this before, but this man knew it. He has sat down before this great iridescent work of God, he has watched it and questioned it, and to him it has yielded up its secret, and he has here told it out for the joy of the whole world.’109 The diminutive, clubfooted Haweis drew thousands by virtue of his extraordinary charisma as an extempore preacher. Like the aesthetic Ritualist priest Stewart Headlam, Haweis had been a curate under the mission priest John Richard Green in Bethnal Green. Later the minister of St James, Marylebone, Haweis continued to take an interest in the recreations of the poor when he inaugurated his Sunday Evenings for the People to give them an alternative to the pubs and an opportunity to hear good music for free.110 Unlike Headlam, he gained a reputation as a society preacher, drawing upper-class and famous ﬁgures to his London church. Obliged to support his growing family (and later, in the 1890s, to pay the mistress who was blackmailing him), Haweis edited Cassell’s Magazine and frequented lecture circuits in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and America. Like Headlam, Haweis identiﬁed publicly as a man of aesthetic sensibility: on his tours of the United

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States, he was billed as an ‘Author, Artist, Critic and Myriad-Minded Speaker.’111 An accomplished violinist and campanologist, he wrote several works on music, including Music and Morals (1871) and My Musical Life (1875). He also served as a music critic for various periodicals. He was certainly aware of trends in the arts, and had courted Mary Eliza Joy through a succession of conversations about J. M. W. Turner and Lord Alfred Tennyson; he lent her Ruskin’s Stones of Venice a month before proposing. Through Mary Eliza Joy, H. R. Haweis found himself immersed in aesthetic life and culture. A daughter of the painter Thomas Musgrove Joy, she had exhibited at the Summer Academy in 1866 under the advice of family friend William Powell Frith. Following her marriage, Mrs Haweis would gain fame as a writer of guidebooks on aesthetic design and fashion, The Art of Beauty (1878) and The Art of Dress (1879). Mrs Haweis prescribed standards of taste for daily middle-class household management. She wrote Beautiful Houses (1882), a descriptive tour of a dozen artistic London houses (including Lord Frederic Leighton’s home) at the height of popular aestheticism. The volume features a prose purple enough to rival J. K. Huysmans’s, and, like his A Rebours (1884), stands as the apotheosis of the worldly aesthete’s obsession with the textures and colors of material culture. Renowned for her inexpensive fashion innovations, which she demonstrated by appearing in them, Mrs Haweis, more than male aesthetes, translated the precepts of aestheticism into particulars and applied them to everyday life.112 While her Chaucer for Children (1878) resembled the book arts of Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, Mrs Haweis was not content until she had dressed her own children in such styles – much to her daughter’s embarrassment.113 At the peak of their success in 1883, the Haweises moved from St John’s Wood to the Tudor House in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, also known as the Queen’s House and formerly owned by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In an act of reverence to the late Rossetti, Mrs Haweis devotedly preserved features of his home as he had known it (168, 172). When a commemorative medallion of Rossetti was unveiled in the front garden of the property in 1887, the Rev. Haweis invited the attendees, who included the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, to step inside and see the house (189). Although battling insolvency, the Haweises attended parties where they met the Prince and Princess of Wales; they also hosted ﬁgures explicitly afﬁliated with the Sunday Society, such as Archbishop Tait and the painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (124, 129). On her deathbed in 1897, in a missionary aesthetic spirit, Mrs Haweis

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gathered slides from her illustrated Chaucer for Children and with her husband, composed a lecture on Chaucer for working men to be given at the Browning Hall in Walworth (277). Many within the Sunday Society hinted at their desire to apply aesthetic precepts to workers’ lives as literally as Mrs Haweis applied them to her own. As I have illustrated in the chapter on tenement reform, missionary aesthetes did not advertise, but sometimes admitted their hope that the workers would emulate middle-class aesthetic domestic arrangements. Mark Judge read a paper before the 1877 Social Science Congress at Aberdeen, which posed the question, ‘How can Art best be introduced into the homes of persons with limited income?’114 A Toynbee Hall resident celebrated the construction of a working men’s house at the settlement as an alternative to ‘the Inferno of London lodgings … muslim curtains and antimacassars, and enlarged portraits of the dear deceased … cheerless tea and toast and the pipe of solitude … [At Wadham House] [e]ach man has his private room – small but not afﬂicting to the artistic soul.’115 Looking to family life, a member of the Sunday Society justiﬁed ‘the contemplation of beautiful objects at museums’ in the hope that it ‘serves to inspire a desire for more pleasing and tasteful objects at home, and the consequent betterment of the household …’116 Another suggested ‘many a wife will ﬁnd her home brighter and her life happier for the boon’ of gallery visits and their implicit inﬂuence on her taste.117 Anti-Sabbatarianism was a political ramiﬁcation of the aesthetic life. During her courtship to Haweis, Mary Eliza Joy subjected the English Sunday to her own scrutiny, and concluded by afﬁrming the argument of the Sunday Society’s aesthetes: ‘Once upon a time I thought it a heinous sin to buy anything on a Sunday or even to carry a toy – now I see it is not. Beauty makes all things and all places and all seasons holy.’118 The act of living one’s life as art, or at least living one’s life for art, permeated the Rev. Haweis’s clerical career as well. His sermon ‘Sunday Recreations for the People’ argues point-for-point against Sabbatarian logic, and stands as a comprehensive example of the Sunday Society’s rhetorical strategies. He questions Sabbatarians’ equation between the Jewish Sabbath and the Lord’s Day; he fuses terms like ‘refreshment, rest and recreation’ to argue that secular pursuits including museum visitation are ‘conducive to the moral progress of the masses.’119 He overturns protests that the poor are indifferent to rational recreations by declaring that they can be taught to appreciate them and that an inﬂuential minority among them will lead the way (410–11). He claims that free Saturday afternoons do not provide working people

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with enough opportunity for self-improvement. He advocates art museums and libraries as counter-attractions that will guide people to a better, more civilized life (413). He accuses Sabbatarians of driving working people into pubs when they proscribe alternative secular recreations (414). In response to popular fears that museums will draw people from church, he states baldly, ‘you have got to get them there ﬁrst’ (414). Haweis denies Sunday Opening’s threat to labor when he claims that without a choice of museums, the public will use buses and trains to go to worse places, and more places, demanding more diffuse services and exploiting even more labor (415). Haweis turns to a dual proposal, trusting in missionary aesthetes’ popular solution of volunteerism, and a faith in effective trades-union combination of railway workers. Finally, countering the horror that the ‘promiscuous opening’ of private entertainments will follow nationalized Sunday Opening, Haweis envisions the extension not of music hall extravaganzas, but of ennobling Sunday theatre attended by slum-residents, The Messiah at the Albert Hall, Henry Irving reciting from ‘In Memoriam’ – art as the handmaid of religion (422–3). The Rev. Haweis’s dramatic style of preaching, with its goal of awakening people to the presence of God in daily life, appealed to the sensibility of those working-class Christians who subscribed to nonconformist PSAs, or the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon movement. The name might sound misleading: while Haweis went so far as to advocate secular Sunday excursions and bicycling, PSAs themelves did not. PSAs were begun by an Independent minister, John Blackham of West Bromwich, in 1875 (the same year that the Sunday Society was founded) and thereafter adopted by Nonconformists seeking to bring ordinary people to Sunday worship.120 The leaders of PSAs adopted the motto ‘Brief, Bright and Brotherly’ to describe their services which were characterized by short sermons and many hymns and solos.121 Like other missionary aesthetic societies, PSAs also inaugurated lending libraries for the diffusion of ﬁner literature, ﬂower shows, clubs for thrift and self-improvement, organ recitals, and ‘At Homes.’122 Popular for their non-sectarianism, PSAs held prayer meetings in local sectarian churches, whose ministers frequently accused them of stealing their own congregants and of selling out religion for amusement.123 One critic commented, ‘the sight of well-ﬁlled chapels, halls, or meeting rooms must indeed be an inspiration to those taking part in the entertainment – I beg pardon, service.’124 Historian Kenneth Inglis cites a Congregational minister who warned, ‘it does not follow that everything which attracts the people

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is divine. The question comes, “To what are they attracted, and what is the effect on them?”’125 Such concern about the contamination of the church through sensory or even sensual pleasures expresses a fear about the perils of the Beautiful and one that we will encounter in the next chapter about late Victorian Anglo-Catholicism.

5 ‘Art is the Handmaid of Religion’: Slum Ritualism as Missionary Aestheticism

Near the conclusion of Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1913), the protagonist Michael Fane wonderingly observes the working-class criminal, Barnes, during an East End church service: At ﬁrst Barnes had kept an expression of injured boredom, but with each chant he seemed less able to resist the habits of the past. Michael felt bound to ascribe to habit his compliance with the forms and ceremonies, for it was scarcely conceivable that he could any longer be moved by the appeal of a sensuous worship, still less by the craving of his soul for God … . Michael turned a sidelong look at Barnes. Tears were in his eyes, and he was staring into the gloom of the dingy apse with its tesselations of dull gold. This was disconcerting to Michael’s opinion of the sermon, for Chator could not be shaking Barnes by his eloquence; these splutterings of dogma were surely not able to rouse one so deep in the quagmire of his own corruption. Must he confess that a positive sanctity abode in this church? He would be glad to believe it did; he would be glad to imagine that an imperishable temple of truth was deposited among these perishable streets.1 Implicit in his assessment of Barnes is an intuition, quickly stiﬂed, that the Mass might uplift a fallen, jaded nature through its own materiality. Michael extends his query about the efﬁcacy of church ceremonial to evoke the higher instincts in Barnes when he surveys the whole congregation. Strangely, although its ornaments are weighty with doctrinal meaning, Michael imagines that the church appeals to these people because it is familiar and ‘homely’: ‘The Stations of the Cross did not seem much more strange here than the lithographs in their 132

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own kitchens, and the raucous drone of Gregorians was familiar music.’2 Assuming that the laborers attend regularly, Michael concludes that they do so for warmth and rest, for the sensory solace they ﬁnd in the aroma of warm wax and incense, and that they will wearily shufﬂe back into the cold, to cabbage and cheese for supper. The scene ends there, rather ambiguously: Michael obscures his own distinction between the mere temporary, tactile comforts provided by formal worship (‘warm wax and incense’), and the spiritual fulﬁllment granted by fervent prayer when he suggests the embodiment of a vague ‘positive sanctity’ in the church. Simultaneously and in contradiction, Mackenzie leaves the reader wondering if a ﬁner church with a more dramatic service might inspire more than rest and withdrawal: passionate conviction and devotion. Michael Fane’s puzzlement about what the church satisﬁes in these poor people, and his curiosity about how it might better reach them, dramatize the theological concerns of the 1880s and 1890s, during which Mackenzie’s novel is set. In this chapter, I explore the presence of an aestheticizing mission within the Church of England in the last quarter of the century among the descendants of Newman and Pusey. Claiming Anglicanism as a sister to the Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic faiths under one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church, this second generation of High Churchmen known as Ritualists concentrated less on academic theories of doctrine and more on restoring pre-Reformation ceremonial to worship. While Tractarians had been consistently condemned as Papists since the 1830s, Ritualism itself emerged as a social movement and a subject of popular concern in the 1870s and 1880s simultaneous to two other social movements: ﬁrst, popular aestheticism; second, the humanitarian endeavor to know and rehabilitate Outcast London. This simultaneity was not coincidental: as a juncture between these two movements, slum Ritualism informed the material culture of aestheticism while providing a venue for the spirit in search of social work. Ritualist slum-priests formulated a theory of practical aesthetics for use in their own missions to the poor. They believed that, if orchestrated rightly, sacramental worship, along with the architectural and ornamental interiors of churches, would provide an initial experience of aesthetic appreciation that would prompt a spiritual awakening in the worker. In his controversial 1867 essay ‘The Missionary Aspect of Ritualism,’ the Rev. R. F. Littledale justiﬁed the reintroduction of preReformation rites to the Anglican Communion by claiming that beautiful ceremonial effectively attracted the poor to church. He maintained that one needed ‘histrionic’ worship with plenty of visual aids – the

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reinstituted Catholic practices of raised chalice, lighted candles, incense, and, not least, the Stations of the Cross noted in Mackenzie’s scene – to teach an illiterate congregation the story of Christ. Littledale argued that in order to contend against its rival, the gin house, the church must likewise adopt ‘internal decoration, abundant polished metal and vivid colour, with plenty of bright light.’3 To this end, Ritualists exploited the scholarly legacy of the Tractarian Cambridge Camden Society which had researched seventeenth-century precedents for church interiors and ceremonial: they installed authentic altar lights, plate, hangings, crosses and cruciﬁxes, chancels and rood-screens, miters and staffs, vestments, and incense. Ritualists further aimed to make the service more participatory by invoking bowings and prostrations and by adopting older Catholic traditions of church music, including hymnody and chanting. In response to the growing anti-Ritualist lobby, a Royal Commission on Ritual was appointed in 1867 to investigate ritual excesses, and recommended restraining Ritualist innovations. The ensuing Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 enabled the Evangelical Church Association (which had attempted lawsuits against High Anglican priests from 1867 to 1871) to use the Privy Council to prosecute Ritualists for administering ‘Roman rites.’ The Church Association published the Ritualist Clergy List, which identiﬁed suspect churches by observances that exceeded those speciﬁed in the Ornaments Rubric of the Anglican Prayer Book. These observances were known as the ‘six points’: the adoption of vestments, the Eastward position, incensing, the mixed chalice, altar lights, and the elevation of the sacrament. Additional implicating features included colored altar-frontals, altar crosses, cruciﬁxes, holy water, statues, and credence tables. The implementation of the P.W.R. Act unexpectedly gained Ritualist sympathizers when ﬁve priests went to prison on grounds of conscience rather than cease their modes of worship. In what follows, I interrogate ﬁn-de-siècle Ritualism as a species of missionary aestheticism.4 Claiming the Ritualist priest Stewart Headlam as the culmination of a late Victorian tradition of churchly aestheticism, I use him as a bridge back to his forbearers, the High Anglican slum-priests of the 1860s and 1870s. I trace a split in the Ritualist ranks between those who resisted the association of their practices with popular, secular aestheticism by insistently defending their sacramentalism on doctrinal grounds alone and those whose rhetoric placed Ritualism in the context of aestheticism proper. Aligning themselves with the latter, the bourgeoisie responded to the grandeur of

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Ritualist services with opprobrium, or if aesthetically inclined, with enthusiasm. Anti-Tractarian novelists of the 1850s and 1860s fueled popular stereotypes by characterizing ultra-High Churchmen as effeminate dandies and by claiming that excessive attention to ceremonial distracted such clergy from their parochial duties. What retaliation was in store for them when adherents to Ritualism wrote their own novels later in the century? None at all: novelists of the 1880s and 1890s, many of whom attended Ritualist services, and one of whom was a Ritualist mission priest, did not use their ﬁction to argue that ritual aestheticism and social work were mutually supportive; instead they committed themselves to one, the Beautiful or the Good, and ignored the other. We ﬁnd aesthetic Ritualist novels and slum mission novels, but there is no Victorian slum-Ritualist novel.

Stewart Headlam’s sacramental socialism A slum-priest whose theology was informed by his artistic sensibility, a bohemian whose aestheticism was inspired by his Christian Socialism, Stewart Headlam was a vivid fusion of late Victorian aestheticism, socialism, and Anglo-Catholicism. His biographers consistently characterize him as an eccentric whose uncompromising, rebellious nature and personal investment in eclectic causes undermined the possibility of a popular following. In his lifetime, he was mocked as a ‘dancing priest’ for his defense of music hall artistes.5 Among today’s literary critics, he is better remembered for having posted bail for Oscar Wilde in 1895. Headlam performed both acts out of a self-consciously Christian sense of duty, socialist desires to jolt bourgeois society and to support the maligned and helpless, and a strong commiseration for undervalued artists and, in Wilde’s case, their emissaries. Because of the singularity of his social vision, Headlam existed on the fringes of the very communities by which we would ordinarily classify him. As a student, he had gained inspiration through F. D. Maurice’s Christian Socialism and had adopted Maurice’s faith in universal redemption, in God as a loving father, and in a Kingdom of Christ on earth that included every man and woman united through their common humanity with Jesus.6 Headlam shared Maurice’s desire to awaken people to their status as God’s children in fellowship, so that their personal experience of conscience would inspire each to serve the common good (12). However, once witness to the poverty of Bethnal Green where he served as a curate the 1870s, Headlam exceeded Maurice’s radicalism by dismissing middle-class philanthropic

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schemes, business cooperatives, and programs in educating the masses as inadequate means for social change (21). Maurice had sought to unite the classes; Headlam wanted to ‘kindle a burning zeal’ to eradicate class distinctions altogether (12, 21). Headlam scandalized fellow clergy by voicing support for local social reforms headed by secularists like Charles Bradlaugh (whom he characterized as godly but unconscious of it) (24). Headlam later adopted Henry George’s Single Tax land reform program as a remedy for class inequality (52). Just as Headlam’s idiosyncratic platforms constituted a departure from mainstream Christian Socialism, so did his radical interpretations of scripture, which I address below. Moreover, in terms of sensibility, Headlam clearly did not subscribe to the ‘muscular Christianity’ of Christian Socialist forbearers Tom Hughes and Charles Kingsley, and his gravitation to Ritualism would particularly have offended Kingsley (who associated the ethereality of Catholic worship with priestly celibacy and asceticism.)7 From the time he ﬁrst encountered the beauty of the liturgy at St Michael’s, Shoreditch as a newly ordained curate, Headlam had adopted Anglo-Catholic practices, consistently referring to the Holy Communion as the Mass.8 Yet again, he was an individualist who appropriated formal ritualistic observances, extracted lesser points of doctrine, and elaborated upon them to his own satisfaction. Headlam differed with Anglo-Catholics on essential matters of doctrine, questioning, for example, deference to ecclesiastical authorities and their faith that baptism effected regeneration. Yet like his fellow Ritualists, Headlam preached the Real Presence of the Eucharist and the necessity of infant baptism and of a priest to administer the sacraments. It was the uses to which he put these beliefs – the political service he attributed to them – that were extraordinary. Headlam asserted the centrality of the sacraments to Maurice’s social vision, in the process lending Christian Socialism a claim to historical validity. Headlam earned notoriety not for his Ritualism per se, but for claiming sacramental observance crucial to a true understanding and achievement of socialism. Headlam assigned speciﬁc Eucharistic rites political signiﬁcance in accordance with his socialist program: for instance, he deﬁned baptism as a renunciation of class distinctions and a declaration of equality in a church that opened to everyone. He located the revelation of brotherhood in the moment of the Real Presence of the Holy Communion, because the spirit of Jesus then entered every man’s life. ‘There is no need for a new Socialist Religion, no need for a new Theology, no need for a new Church,’ he claimed,

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and to prove it, Headlam wrote The Laws of Eternal Life (1888), a lineby-line analysis of the Catechism, which he deﬁned as ‘the best manual of Socialism.’9 Headlam characterized Jesus as the ‘Great Emancipator’ and ‘the revolutionary Socialist of Galilee.’10 He depicted a Holy Communion that pledged ‘all who partake of it to be sharers of their wealth, whether spiritual or material, to be Holy Communists.’11 By pointing out that Jesus’ works were all secular acts of aid, feeding, and healing, Headlam insisted that holiness was not conﬁned to church walls, but inherent in all acts of service, and thus, possible on the meanest of streets. Accordingly, Headlam’s theology was a leveling one: God’s servants on earth included not only clergy, but also the lowly descendants of selﬂess Martha, anyone doing work for humanity. Characteristically, Headlam called the struggle for new hospitals and dispensaries in London a Holy War.12 Headlam anticipated that, once spiritually united through external practices of the Mass, people would challenge the social injustices that encumbered them, undermine the present order, and begin to build Christ’s Heaven on earth. Relying on his readings of Scripture, Headlam refused to deﬁne Heaven as an afterlife, arguing that Jesus told of ‘a Kingdom of Heaven to be set up on earth, of a righteous Communistic society.’13 This interpretation of Heaven, the foundation of all of his sermons, imputed theological importance to mundane improvements in the quality of contemporary life, positing these as advances toward God’s Kingdom on earth. As historian Kenneth Leech writes, ‘a common saved, or a playground made, or a swimming bath built, or a footpath preserved, by means of the united action of parishioners and maintained out of the common purse, were partial realizations of the ideas which the big phrases [e.g. universal brotherhood, workers’ emancipation] conveyed.’14 Because they maintained and perpetuated natural ‘beauty spots,’ such improvements were to be savored by the senses; Headlam’s aestheticism found expression in their defense. Just as he grounded his socialism in the tactile use of the sacraments, Headlam rooted the sacred in the spatial and the quotidian. ‘How full human and natural life is of sacraments!’ he wrote.15 Headlam justiﬁes the value he invests in daily pleasures through original, socialistic interpretations of Scripture. Recalling how, at Cana, Mary had told Jesus that the people wanted wine, Headlam concludes, ‘See then in Our Lady’s words a plea for the people’s joy.’16 Headlam further offers documented analysis of Jesus as a sort of William Morris who advocated not merely economic equality, but joy and beauty as

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rights in a democracy. Given his belief that Heaven is to be created on earth, Headlam judges Jesus’ line ‘I am come that ye might have life and ye might have it more abundantly’ as pertaining to daily life.17 He emphasizes Jesus’ aesthetic sensibility: ‘no one who had not an exquisite sense of beauty in nature could have spoken as He did about the birds and the ﬂowers, telling us that as Christian Socialists we should be fed as surely as the birds and clothed as beautifully as the ﬂowers.’18 To Headlam, the beginning of the parables, ‘Behold,’ is Jesus’ instruction that the disciples too should contemplate beauty present in nature; as further evidence, Headlam cites instances in which Jesus gives sight to the blind. Where did Headlam stand in relation to the aesthetic prophets, Ruskin and Morris? While he adopted their ideals, he also extended them to situate them within a radical theological framework. Like John Ruskin, he had been raised by Evangelical parents to be a minister. But in Headlam’s case, during last quarter of the century when he broke away from puritanical conﬁnes, F. D. Maurice’s faith in universal brotherhood was already extant and Ritualistic practices common enough that Headlam could merge these with a Ruskinian-Morrissean aesthetic to forge a new social theology. Headlam’s sermons borrow freely from Ruskin’s precepts. In accordance with Ruskin’s own deconversion from Evangelicalism and epiphanal recognition of the holiness of beauty as recorded in Praeterita (‘things done delightfully and rightly were always done by the help and in the Spirit of God’),19 Headlam asserts, All that is beautiful in this world brings to us a message from God, that indeed the work of the artist is asserted as sacred: and art becomes the handmaid of the Lord, not only when it is used, as were to God it were used far and wide, to represent the facts in the life of Christ and the Church on the walls of our Churches, but also when it represents and interprets the natural world elsewhere.20 Headlam’s regard for a healthful beauty is an attack on Dissenters, for he claims that by stripping the churches of meaningful ornament, they have taught people that a love of beauty is antithetical to a love of God. Ruskin, remembering the gloom of his parents’ chapel in London and of the Turin chapel in which he abandoned his mother’s sectarianism, would have agreed.21 But Headlam went on to translate this aesthetic-spiritual requirement into an advocacy of Anglo-Catholicism to which Ruskin never subscribed. Further, as a socialist, Headlam

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departed from Ruskin when he renounced the premise of individual salvation as elitist.22 While Headlam’s High Church Anglicanism would have offended Ruskin, Headlam’s insistence upon the inherent Christianity, High or Low, of a rightly ordered, beautiful world would have equally antagonized William Morris. As much as he echoes Ruskin, Headlam, as a socialist, writes whole pages evocative of Morris’s socialist lectures. Notice his attention to the materiality of daily life in his demand for a beautiful and healthy environment: ‘bad food, ugly clothes, dirty houses not only injure the body, but injure the soul; nay, more, they do great injury to God himself … it is possible to worship with the body as well as with the spirit.’23 To shut our eyes to the beauties, or the facts, of nature, to pretend to be ashamed of the human body, to go hankering after messages from disembodied spirits when there are men and women, excellent spirits, with marvellous bodily organization to express them, ready to hand – this may be very religious – but it is utterly in contradiction to the sacramental way in which God has made the world.24 Because of the value it places on simple bodily pleasures, one can trace an afﬁliation with Morris in this passage until the ﬁnal clause when Headlam describes order in Nature as ‘sacramental’ rather than simply ‘physical.’ Morris would have been dismayed at Headlam’s infusion of a Christian, not to mention Catholic, imperative into his socialist mission. Indeed, while Morris had sought to ‘kindle discontent’ among the poor, Headlam deliberately emended it, describing his own goal as ‘stirring up divine discontent.’25 Headlam’s reference to expressive ‘bodily organization’ hints at the personal lobby that was so fateful to his own disenfranchisement as a priest: his defense of the ballet. Headlam’s rationales in this case illuminate both the concord and the differences between himself and Morris. Like Morris, he recognized the coarsest music hall ballet as a badly needed source of joy among the poor, and he could have simply defended ‘low’ music hall as a respectable recreational pursuit or as honorable labor. But in concert with his incarnational theology, he perceived the dance as a sacrament, ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.’26 He encouraged parishioners to attend as an act of personal piety akin to church-going, writing, ‘I am constantly strengthened by the fact that so many regular and devout

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communicants, both here and elsewhere, enjoy heartily the drama, music and dancing.’27 Nowhere in his sermons is Headlam’s insistence on the integration of the sensory and the sacred more dramatic than in his afﬁrmation of the dance: Your Manichean Protestant and your superﬁne Rationalist reject the Dance as worldly, frivolous, sensual and so forth, and your dull, stupid sensualist sees legs and grunts with some satisfaction. But your sacramentalist knows something more than both of them. He knows what perhaps even the dancer herself may be unconscious of: that we live now by faith and not by sight, and that the poetry of motion is the expression of unseen spiritual grace.28 As historian John Richard Orens has argued, the Tractarians would have found Headlam’s easy equation of ‘natural with supernatural grace’ shocking.29 Headlam’s own creative appropriation of John Keble’s hymn, ‘Oh Lord our Lord, and spoiler of our foes / There is no light but thine, with Thee all beauty glows,’ in lectures supporting theaters and music halls is nothing less than subversive.30 Ironically, then, as much as Headlam’s Christian imperative may have offended Morris, Headlam’s appropriation of a Morrisean aesthetic outraged ecclesiastics. In a public lecture, Headlam defended the morals and the profession of ballet dancers (with whom he grew acquainted while serving as a curate in Drury Lane in 1872) and encouraged the young to cultivate an understanding of dramatic art and dance by attending the theater and the ballet. Shortly after, the Bishop of London, John Jackson, wrote to Headlam, scandalized, ‘I do pray earnestly that you may not have to meet before the Judgment Seat those whom your encouragement ﬁrst led to places where they lost the blush of shame and took the ﬁrst downward step towards vice and misery,’ and promptly revoked Headlam’s license to preach in the diocese of London.31 Jackson’s successor, Frederick Temple, denied Headlam’s later appeal for a license on the same grounds. So Headlam did not hold a permanent post in the Church from 1878 until his death in 1924.32 Ever the rebel, Headlam founded the Church and Stage Guild in 1879 to vindicate the popular performing arts and, through social teas and readings of papers, to promote the clergy’s respect for actors and dancers. (He had at ﬁrst planned to call it the ‘Guild of Christ at Cana.’)33 To determine again the perimeters of the sacred by asserting its presence at the Alhambra or the Gaiety necessarily redeﬁned those who

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were its agents. While assuring his audience that his was no ‘High Church Theatrical Mission’ that valued stage people over others, Headlam did describe the performers as following a vocation, a ‘calling’ that is not only ‘virtuous and honourable,’ but also ‘sacred.’34 ‘[T]hose who minister to the lighter needs of life are God’s servants.’35 Headlam claimed that a clerical mission to reform them would be impertinent and wrong-headed. Even if the bishops afﬁrmed the spirituality of the dance, they would hardly have chosen music hall as its venue. Headlam laboriously defended the virtues of shorter music hall pieces rather than take the easier route and simply remind anti-theater clerics of the morality in Shakespearean tragedy (though he did this, too). John Richard Orens identiﬁes a communitarianism in Headlam’s consecration of working-class forms rather than the elevating ones courtesy of the university settlements and other paternalistic ventures into culture-diffusion.36 Although he surpassed a great many of his fellow social reformers by not condemning the music hall altogether, Headlam did however echo their faith in a Ruskinian reﬁnement of the worker by distinguishing the good theater and dance from the bad.37 ‘While facing the fact that there are evils connected with theatres and music halls, [clergy should] use their inﬂuence to support what is good in them, and to rid them of those who misuse them.’38 Headlam thus adopts the improving rhetoric of missionary aestheticism with its emphasis on the laborer’s ‘refreshment,’ and the ‘brightening, educating’ potential of good recreations (4). He cautions, ‘we shall do well to discriminate,’ censuring silly pieces sung by music hall soloists that degrade the people and urging his audience to condemn ‘unhealthy’ gymnastics (8, 9–10). In contrast to these, good dancing is a skill (‘the dancers have learnt the art of moving their arms gracefully and harmoniously’) in which all citizens ought to be ‘trained’ (5, 6). ‘If … you want to understand the art of dancing you really must give some little attention to it,’ wrote Headlam.39 When, in 1888, he edited Carlo Blasis’s Code of Terpsichore (1828), a guide to the ballet, Headlam did just that.40 We see, then, in Headlam an amalgam of Christian Socialist and formalist aesthete. As a socialist, Headlam fought to abolish the laws that prohibited religious and political themes on the stage; as a connoisseur of the arts who fetishized the artist as seer, Headlam denounced the regulations that differentiated between music halls and theaters, because music hall performers, for whom stage plays were prohibited, had to break the law to act or dance a plot, and ‘be true to their calling.’41 He claimed that Drury Lane productions granted a true

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glimpse of Heaven by, among other qualities, their ‘harmonious blending of beautiful colors,’ this phrase evoking James Whistler’s and Oscar Wilde’s public defenses of formalist aesthetics.42 Headlam viewed the dancers and scenery as a discriminating painter before a canvas. It was this formalism that prevented the Fabians, with whom Headlam was tenuously associated, from taking him seriously when he extended their vision of state socialism to include municipal theaters, concerts, and music halls.43 Their resistance is ironic, because Headlam’s formal appreciation of the arts guided him into the paternalistic spirit characteristic of the Fabians themselves. We can detect this strain in his assertion that the theater, by enabling the working classes to contemplate beauty, ‘[takes them] a little out of themselves.’44 While this phrase might simply mean that the theater as a palliative provides them with short-term pleasure, Headlam inserts an ‘i.e.’ and the following line, ‘there the people have been educated.’45 The theater proffers joy, but explicitly, a lesson in distinction as well. Headlam enlisted High Church tenets in service of his aesthetic mission. Relying on the Cult of Mary cherished among many Anglo-Catholics, he endowed the Virgin with a Kyrle Society-like agenda, ending one sermon with this curious plea to the (presumably, middle-class) female congregants of St Mary’s: You are pledged … to do all you can for the people’s amusement, to encourage those who, if not perfectly, still in some degree, help to put brightness and colour and joy, in lives too dark and sad for moral health. I call upon you, because you reverence our Lady, not only to be discontented and utterly at variance with a state of things that allows your baptized fellow men and women to grow up in foul courts, underfed and overworked; but also with that which allows them to grow up without beauty and without culture. Try and do something, my sisters, it is your day, to add some beauty to the lives of the poor.46 We can most easily detect Headlam’s alliance with cultural paternalists in his practice of hosting ‘At Homes’ and conversaziones – terms, incidentally, which the cartoonist George Du Maurier and others had already satirized in the 1870s as tokens of popular aestheticism. As a locus for encounters between social reformers, socialists, and aesthetes, Headlam’s residence in Upper Bedford Place literally expressed this slum-priest’s own aestheticism.47 (Headlam incidentally had also lived as a settler in working-class housing in Waterlow Street in Bethnal

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Green.)48 Upon the advice of his friend, Selwyn Image, the former Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Headlam hired A. H. Mackmurdo, founder of the Century Guild, as a decorator. The result? Image enthusiastically describes ‘several exquisite pieces of mahogany furniture, upholstered with Morris cretonnes … the walls up to the frieze were covered with brown paper – this latter at the time an almost unheard-of decoration, which afterwards became fashionable enough …’49 Critics frequently allude to Headlam’s aestheticism in passing by noting how he stood bail for Oscar Wilde, whom he scarcely knew. We do know that in 1889 Wilde had attended a lecture by the playwright George Bernard Shaw which was sponsored by Headlam’s Church and Stage Guild and held in Headlam’s own home.50 Present that day, the female aesthete Elizabeth Robins Pennell recorded the setting in her diary: The meeting was in Stewart Headlam’s house on Upper Bedford Place, an old house with large rooms and panelled walls, and was held in the drawing room where Millet’s Angelus hung over the mantel piece and photographs after Rossetti. DeLarne’s Christmas cards – the little yellow-haired girls with the gauzy drapery – and copies of Pompein frescoes on the walls around. The company was made up of clergymen, ballet girls, Fabians and critics and a sprinkling of the outside world. Oscar Wilde was very much to the front, William Archer, solemn as ever, and Mrs Archer, Massingham in velvet coat … . Sparling, thinner and more like a poplar in the wind than ever, with May Morris in an impossible hat and cloak, Mrs Bell-Scott, Belfort Bax, a lot of women, some young and pretty, in shapeless dresses and cloaks, Henry VIII caps and frowsy hair who, I supposed were actresses but Mrs Archer put them all down as Fabians.51 It was here that working people could mix with (and presumably be inﬂuenced by) renowned aesthetic personalities. Signiﬁcantly, by sustaining a belief in a socially responsible, improving aestheticism, Headlam expressed contempt for self-consciously world-weary Decadents whose cynicism prevented them from social action. 52 Writers of the 1890s like Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, and Lionel Johnson attended meetings of the Church and Stage Guild at Headlam’s home, but Dowson’s eagerness to ‘sample Stuart [sic] Headlam’s ballet girls’ betrays a voyeurism that would have appalled Headlam.53

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The stirring up of divine discontent that Headlam desired among the people was predicated upon their exposure to beauty and their continued recognition of it. While not underestimating Headlam’s compassion for the poor, I would argue that his goal to teach them about beauty was rooted in paternalistic hopes for their embourgeoisement. Headlam at one point contrived to lure ‘rough lads’ to school by ﬁrst teaching boxing and gymnastics, and leading them ‘by degrees’ to Dickens, Shakespeare, and ‘higher education and general selfimprovement.’54 The culmination of this scheme would be the ﬁne arts exhibition at Bethnal Green, comprised of paintings by working men.55 Focusing on the site of the popular music and ballet halls, Headlam sought similar results. Extending the crucial sacramentalism of AngloCatholic doctrine there, he would sanctify the dance that acquiesced with Blasis’s code, and discourage that which satisﬁed everyone’s desire for fun, but not his own longing for form. There is no question that Headlam identiﬁed himself as a Ritualist. But his socialism, so central to his theology, precludes placing him in the center of the Anglo-Catholic tradition. His interrogation by religious authorities easily dramatizes both his afﬁnity with other Ritualists and its limits. Like the older slum-priests, Charles Lowder and Alexander Mackonochie, who had been prosecuted for administering Catholic rites, Headlam was called before the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline in 1904 for going beyond the rubric of the Prayer Book by genuﬂecting and kissing the Holy Table. Unlike his predecessors, however, he reproached the Commission for focusing on trivialities while so many poor parishioners were ill-housed, overworked, underpaid, and unemployed.56 Headlam remained isolated even from the fringes to which he allied himself, shunned by High Church associates for his socialism, and alienated by Fabian collectivists for insisting upon Christianity’s centrality to socialism. Whether in spite of or perhaps because of this marginalization, Headlam stood as a living culmination of the interdependence of the aesthetic and Ritualist movements. In the next section, I consider slum-priests of the Ritualist mainstream in the context of Headlam’s more obvious aesthetic mission.

Ritualism in the context of secular missionary aestheticism Ritualists did not adopt ornate ceremonial for the sake of grandeur alone; as Martin Wellings reﬂects, ‘Liturgical changes had doctrinal implications.’57 At stake in the revival of older rites was the Ritualists’

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belief in the centrality of Eucharistic worship and the doctrine of Real Presence (the Anglican term for transubstantiation). ‘We feel that a gorgeously conducted service ought to mean something,’ lectured the mission priest, Alexander Mackonochie of St Alban’s, Holborn, ‘… it means that the Holy Eucharist is the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood – “the Body and Blood of Christ under the Form of Bread and Wine.”’58 Ecclesiastical furnishings such as the credence table (holding bread, wine, and water for the Eucharist) and the piscina (the niche for washing sacred vessels) elicited criticism from Low Churchmen because they were used for commixture, and Father Robert Dolling’s controversial third altar at the new St Agatha’s in Portsmouth would have been used for saying Masses for the Dead had not his bishop forbidden it. Ritualists believed that sacramental worship conveyed the suffering of Christ with a focus, tangibility, and directness that the poor needed and appreciated. The mission priest Charles Lowder repeatedly claimed that through elaborate ritual, he was merely complying with the people’s natural wants, and further asserted that his poor parishioners had themselves contributed the altar cloths and vestments to his church, St Peter’s, in London Docks, with the implicit request that they be used. [The ritual] exactly meets the wants of those who have been taught to value their Lord’s sacramental Presence; they rejoice to see His Throne made glorious, His priests ordering themselves as His representatives, and the whole arrangement of the service typical of its heavenly counterpart. The poor and uneducated are thus taught by the eye and ear, as well as by the understanding … . Surely those who know the trials and hardships of the working classes – the dreariness of their homes, the dark and cheerless surroundings of their work, and the few innocent pleasures which are within their reach, cannot deny them the gratiﬁcation to be derived from the one bright spot in their neighborhood … . Festival seasons duly observed; vestments, processions, lights, incense, choral services, ﬂowers, pictures, music – grand, hearty, and inspiriting; the details of ceremonial carried out carefully and reverently; – these accessories of worship are the rightful claim of the clergy and people of such a church as St Peter’s. The people love and glory in their church…. They have found by experience that the whole system and teaching of the church meet the special wants of their spiritual life.59 Lowder does not merely afﬁrm Littledale’s trust in the externals of religion. Through his contrast between the tangible sensations available

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through High Church ceremonial and those present in the squalid neighborhood, Lowder adopts some of the rhetoric of secular missionary aestheticism, sympathizing with the poor for their ‘dark and dreary’ environment, and equating tactile order with morality and innocence. He even exploits the term ‘bright’ as Octavia Hill had, here to imply both the physical radiance and moral virtue of church rituals. Interestingly, while others exposed working people to bourgeois visions of beauty and culture through secular venues (art shows, gardens, lectures, day-trips into the country), Lowder, like Littledale, locates the aesthetic in the materials of the Mass itself. Bourgeois opponents of Littledale’s theory of practical aestheticism argued that a coarse personality might thoroughly enjoy ritual without ever being elevated by it, and might in fact debase it. In Mrs Humphry Ward’s The History of David Grieve (1892), the vulgar, mercenary Louie Grieve Montjoi has no real understanding of sacramental grace or faith in it, but an appreciation of the church’s ﬁnery: ‘It’s the churches I like, and the priests. Now there is something to see in the Paris churches, like the Madeleine – worth a dozen St Damian’s, – you may tell Dora that. The ﬂowers and the dresses and the music – they are something else.’60 (She imagines that Dora, an Anglican devotee who earns her keep by embroidering altar frontals, will be envious.) If Dora, naturally endowed with higher instincts, can adore God through her ‘coloured and scented church,’ these same externals only excite Louie’s physical senses.61 Perhaps because they were sensitive to gibes about excesses, many Ritualist priests feared that auxiliary schemes of cultivation might further obscure their primary evangelical mission for others. Some felt the need to check slum-workers’ encouragement of secular Beauty and Culture: ‘[Lay volunteers] want to give lectures, or to teach in night school or in Sunday School, or to get up debating societies, or cricket clubs, or to boss concerts; in fact, to do anything that means the assertion of their own cleverness or good disposition towards others. How hateful it is! I always kicked at this, sometimes kicked it,’ wrote the Portsmouth mission priest Robert Dolling.62 Charles Lowder too warned that despite the honor in schemes to ‘brighten the surface of society by plans of amusement or social recreation … by lectures, concerts and tea-meetings,’ ‘our great object must be to save souls.’63 As a practical means of gaining communicants and as a means of adequately celebrating the glory of God, aestheticism was integral to their mission, though not the mission itself. How implicated, though, were these mission priests in the greater Victorian philanthropic movement to instruct the masses in bourgeois

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standards of beauty? Slum-priests themselves found frequent ornamental services a relief from the harsh tenement world in which they were immersed.64 While their letters condescendingly and painfully report slummers whose ‘only object was curiosity’ and who receive Communion only to ‘get a closer view of the vestments,’ they themselves were not insensitive to the beauty of ritual.65 The same Father Dolling who boxed a young aesthete’s ears for whining about the way Dolling extended his hands during the Mass wrote appreciatively of the new St Agatha’s, ‘It is wonderful how the magniﬁcence of [the] mosaic work harmonises with the simplicity and beauty of Mr Summer’s sgrafﬁtto work.’66 When it came, however, to the actual rituals inside those walls, Dolling would not admire them without suggesting their doctrinal purport and pathos: ‘The Blessed Sacrament is reserved all day, and the poorest bring their ﬂowers to deck the altar. No spot in the world will ever be so beautiful to me as that little ﬂower-covered altar.’67 Lowder too insisted that his communicants understood Eucharistic ceremonial to be ‘not a mere aesthetic embellishment but the outward expression of a great reality.’68 While Dolling and Lowder found Ritualism’s alliance with popular secular aestheticism troubling, following his 1890 prosecution for ritualistic offenses under the Public Worship Regulation Act, Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, emphasized it, alleging Ritualism’s evangelical appeal as a means of justifying its practices. ‘We live in an age of decoration. Look at the working-boys in the streets, how elaborate are their Sunday button holes! It is in all matters, not merely ecclesiastical ones, that the spirit of adornment has caught hold of us, and unless there is positive wrong in any of these things, we have no call to repress them.’69 King defends ecclesiastical ornament as merely a healthy urge to beautify one’s environment, a manifestation of – and hence subordinate to – secular lifestyle aestheticism. Littledale too seems to argue that the worker’s susceptibility to Ritualism is contingent upon her receptivity to aestheticism in general. We can trace this logic in ‘The Missionary Aspect of Ritualism,’ where he argues that Ritualism excels as an evangelical faith because it satisﬁes ‘ordinary human passions and motives’ and appeals to ‘certain cravings for the beautiful common to both [rich and poor].’70 An Anglican text-centered service (using only the Prayer Book), or one that favors preaching over congregational participation, will bore the artisan, for ‘there is nothing to impress the eye, nothing to quicken the attention, nothing to make the breath come short, or the pulse beat quicker’ (41). Yet Littledale’s bourgeois subjectivity limits his

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assessment of how the laborer feels or what she might appreciate. He has already denied that this is a ‘religion for gentlemen,’ and has attributed this popular fallacy to Ritualism’s Oxford origins with ‘its pretty asceticisms, and its religious bric-a-brac in the shape of antique calf-bindings, velvet faldstools, and prie-Dieus …’ (35). Has Ritualism surpassed its former preoccupation with costly collectibles, and evolved into a true people’s religion? Littledale’s own metaphors undermine his claims to Ritualism’s democratic appeal. Consider how he suggests that an uneducated person will need externals (bowings, candle-lightings, co-mixture) to understand the Book of Common Prayer: ‘What an oratorio would be without instrumentation; what jewels uncut and unset are; what a handsome house in the country without hangings, curtains, carpets, mirrors, or pictures, that, and worse than that, is the Prayer Book without Ritual’ (42). Here he infers a connoisseur’s knowledge in the reader, evoking bourgeois standards of taste by imitating guides to interior decoration (his reference to jewels even reminds one of Pater’s imagery). The friction here between Littledale’s bourgeois subjectivity and that of his working-class subject is evident: would a poor man or woman need curtains, hangings, or pictures to recognize the grandeur of a country house? The awe-inspiring color and light that ought to draw the poor parishioner into the church remain enmeshed in a discourse of secular aestheticism. Littledale presumes the working person ought to value an oratorio in the ﬁrst place, and will further need an appreciation of ‘hangings, curtains, carpets, [and] mirrors’ to grasp the equivalent beauty and necessity of mitres, altar frontals, and vestments.

Ritualism as outreach Early hagiographic biographers of slum-priests perpetuated the myth that elaborate ceremonies particularly appealed to the working classes and that Ritualist slum churches were therefore more successful in attracting and serving the poor than their Low Church or Dissenting neighbors. By the end of the century, however, religious surveys edited by Charles Booth and Richard Mudie-Smith questioned the real effectiveness of practical aestheticism in gaining working-class parishioners.71 Booth’s observations of attendance at the Ritualistic St Augustine, Haggerston apply to Ritualism in all of London: ‘The inﬂuence of the church may be deep, but it is certainly restricted.’72 ‘It does indeed seem strange,’ pondered one of his investigators in a

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sub-chapter on Bethnal Green, ‘that the mere attraction of warmth, and light, and music should have so little effect; and one is at times almost driven towards the conclusion that there must be something actually repellant to the people in the pretensions of religion or in the associations of Christian worship.’73 Percy Alden suggested in 1904 that both a Gothic church’s grandeur and its share of middle-class patrons dissuaded the poor from attending: a worker lacking a Sunday suit felt even more self-conscious about it in this environment.74 Drawing on data about East End congregations in the Daily News religious census of 1902–1903, Alden concluded: So far as the working man is concerned, he seldom feels at home in a church with a highly ornate ritual, in which he takes little part … . Even the women are not attracted to the extent that we were led to expect. The working classes prefer a simpler form of worship, not too elaborate or symbolic; the priestly ceremonial strikes them as lacking in sincerity, though this may not be the case in the slightest degree …75 While numerous historians have used these surveys to document the failure of Ritualism, Alan Wilson has also unearthed Ritualist priests’ own despairing confessions in the newsletter of the Society of the Holy Cross, the bulletin of the mission priests’ association founded in 1855 by Charles Lowder. Wilson cites T. O. Marshall’s 1889 admission, ‘It was notorious that in the east end of London, with one or two exceptions, the Ritualist churches were nearly empty; the people were driven away by ritual they could not understand.’76 Logically, it is doubtful that a barely literate congregation would appreciate the introduction of plainsong in Latin, the province of the educated elite, into its church. Indeed, one of Charles Booth’s assistants noted sardonically, ‘one of the objects is evidently to be unintelligible. Even when intoned loud, the whole thing becomes a sort of gibberish.’77 According to social historian John Shelton Reed, rather than inspire parishioners to learn Christianity, ritual was welcomed only by those who already grasped its symbolism.78 Certainly, these exceptional parishioners, grown accustomed to sacramental rites, were committed to them.79 If working people felt a strong allegiance to a clergyman, they adopted his practices wholesale, and with them, a simpliﬁed doctrine. In 1902, G. A. Joy, a working man in St Michael’s, Shoreditch, aware that his priest, H. M. M. Evans, awaited prosecution for repeated invocation of the saints, claimed in a letter to the Bishop of London, Arthur

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Winnington Ingram, that prayers to God for a job had been of no avail until Joy had said the Rosary: ‘This I think is plain proof that our Blessed Lady hears and answers our prayers to her, by praying to Jesus for us, & if so, why should we not use the Rosary publicly?’80 A resident of the model dwellings across the street from the church and a member of the choir, Harry Vick, also wrote to Winnington Ingram to say that he and his companions were now consciously reciting the Rosary every Sunday evening as a gesture ‘to unite ourselves as much as possible in support of our vicar.’81 So then, given Ritualism’s nationwide persecution under the Public Worship Regulation Act, working-class adherents to it also gained a sense of ‘party’ from it.82 When Evans, convinced of the irreconcilability of his views with those of the Anglican authorities, converted to Roman Catholicism, his church ﬁrst underwent a destructive riot, presumably by his own congregants (‘pictures had been torn from the walls and windows broken, the latter actually with cruciﬁxes’), and notoriously, at least 79 parishioners followed Evans into the Roman Catholic Church, thereby fulﬁlling popular prejudices that Ritualism inevitably led to Rome.83 Signiﬁcantly, it was a slum-Ritualist’s personal charisma and his labor on behalf of the poor – including his social contributions such as the founding of working men’s clubs – that tended to draw poor nonchurchgoers more than the Eucharistic ceremonies he practiced within the church.84 Charles Lowder and the less-known slum-priest, George Rundle Prynne, gained their parishioners’ trust and affection as a result of their service during the cholera epidemics of 1866 in St George’sin-the-East and 1849 in Plymouth, respectively.85 Father Arthur Stanton founded the popular St Martin’s League, a club where notoriously overworked postmen could rest and socialize between runs. Their political afﬁliation was also a great strength in gaining followers. Father Alexander Mackonochie of St Alban’s, Holborn recognized the enemies of Ritualism as ‘[t]he Bishops and the Upper Middle Classes in church and state’; Stanton, serving as Mackonochie’s curate, identiﬁed Catholicism with the working-class movement as well.86 The social investigator Percy Alden declared, ‘If [the working man] does attend [High services], it is because he approves of the Socialist leanings of the parson and ﬁnds in him a real friend and brother.’87 Delegates from the Ritualist ‘Church of England Working Man’s Society,’ founded in 1876 to defend Mackonochie against prosecutions under the Public Worship Regulation Act, echoed their priest by deﬁning Ritualism as a working man’s question, threatening Archbishop Tait: ‘When the working classes of this country become aware of the

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way in which their heritage in Church matters is being attacked, they will rise up, and the Church of England, as an established Church, will fall.’88 In general, however, working men and women were indifferent to the political wars waged by the bourgeoisie over the legitimacy of surplices and altars. ‘Us can’t ‘spect to know nort about it … Tain’t no business o’ ours. May be as they says; may be not. It don’t matter that I sees. ‘Twill be all the same in a hundred years time when we’m a grinning up at the daisy roots,’ a Devon ﬁsherman remarked when interviewed in 1906.89 If any Christian ethic dominated slum life, it was a vaguely socialistic sense of ‘doing unto others.’ Working people relegated actual churchgoing to the status of ‘humbug’: the line of one working-class autobiographer’s mother, ‘I mean you can live a decent life without all that rigamarole, can’t you?’, sums up the attitude of many.90 In his essay in George Haw’s 1906 volume Christianity and the Working Classes, slum-priest James Adderly claims the sacraments’ effectiveness in comforting working people, yet the correspondents whom he cites are less sanguine, including one who writes, ‘I am sure no party in the Church is doing much more than touching the fringe of the masses of our working people.’91

Eclectic congregations and slumming aesthetes Those drawn to Ritualism for its aesthetic allure were not workingclass. If these mission churches had a small number of regular local communicants, they also attracted adherents and curious slummers from outside the parish. Using Charles Booth’s colored maps, John Shelton Reed has investigated the likelihood of upper-class attendance at churches like St Barnabus’, Pimlico, a socially heterogeneous neighborhood only three-quarters of a mile from Belgrave Square and Buckingham Palace.92 Church historians W. N. Yates and Alan Wilson each adopt Booth’s term ‘eclectic’ to describe Ritualistic congregations.93 In its day, some clergy suspected that Ritualism ‘may be [popular] among the higher and middle classes because it is showy, and therefore attractive and fashionable.’94 Ritualism was called the ‘Brighton and South Coast religion’ because stylish seaside towns like Brighton, Eastbourne, Folkestone, and Scarborough were middle-class, Ritualist strongholds; in the rural parishes of Yorkshire and the West Country, an inﬂuential landed gentry also subscribed to Anglo-Catholicism.95 But more than a penchant of the wealthy, Ritualism offered a particular

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refuge and subculture to those who could not (or would not) comply with Victorian ideological norms of marriage and manliness, namely, middle- and upper-class single women and aesthetic young men, respectively.96 Recent scholarship has traced the presence of a male homosexual sensibility in the Ritualist subculture, with an eye to the movement’s pageantry, its esteem for priestly celibacy, and its concern with proper ornament.97 One contemporary asserted that incense and altar lights attracted only ‘sentimental ladies and womanish men – youths of a lachrymose turn of mind.’98 St Ethelburga’s, Bishopsgate, with its mere 158 parishioners, was said to be ‘much beloved by a small section of aesthetic, medieval, Romanizing young men’ until the evangelical agitator John Kensit dramatically targeted it in 1897.99 When Kensit (who made it a practice to disrupt AngloCatholic church services) alluded to one such congregation in 1898 as ‘very poor specimens of men … . a peculiar sort of people, very peculiar indeed,’ he was merely perpetuating charges of foppery and effeminacy pursued by Punch as early as the 1860s, when it had mocked priests’ colored vestments as petticoats and their shaven faces as androgynous.100 Fastidious about the mechanics of ceremonial, male Ritualist devotees habitually tried to embellish or ‘spike’ services, advising priests on the practices they found most authentically Catholic – to the consternation of those priests.101 Viewing the gestures these young men had perfected, opponents charged that Ritualism encouraged hypocritical displays of piety instead of subjective soul-searching. ‘What we want in these days of “sham” in this Christian England of ours is not so much of the outward, but just a little more of the inward,’ wrote one parishioner to Father James Adderly in a letter she signed ‘An Honest Woman.’102 Walter Besant expressed as much in his novella, In Deacon’s Orders (1895), in which a young deacon indulges in expressions of reverence and penitence, but remains essentially heartless and exploitative. The complaint of the deacon’s forsaken lover, ‘Nothing is real, everything is acted,’ presumably applies not merely to the protagonist’s false repentance, but also to the genuﬂections of all sacriﬁcing Ritualist priests.103 While devotees defended the beautiﬁcation of churches through the maxim that ‘art was handmaid to religion,’ skeptics wondered if the opposite were true – if religion had become a mere excuse for art. 104 Biographers thus have gone to great lengths to distinguish slumpriests from their more frivolous followers. In her 1887 biography, Maria Trench described Charles Lowder as ‘not a Ritualist at all in the

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modern sense of the word, after the gushing, effeminate, sentimental manner of young shop-boys, or those who simply ape the ways of Rome.’105 Father Robert Dolling’s biographer, Charles Osborne, depicted Dolling in ﬁerce combat against ‘an exclusively feminine or even well-nigh hysterical type of piety’: ‘Dolling’s strong manliness of character … saved St Agatha’s.’106 When it came to Dolling’s own Ritualism, Osborne struggled to maintain this distinction. Following a description of Dolling’s Easter service, complete with altar boy in scarlet cassock and cotta, Dolling in an embroidered cope, and acolytes carrying processional lights, Osborne hastened to add, ‘Though it was a distinctly ceremonial service, yet there was really nothing ritualistic about it, in a frivolous or artiﬁcial sense, from beginning to end.’107 In 1910, E. T. Finch of the Society of the Holy Cross disparagingly recalled the ‘faddy fussy ceremonial’ beloved by the ﬁrst generation of Ritualists. Pointedly, he did not merely castigate the disciples, but the leading lights of the movement. While they may not have been as affected as their adherents, their rites had ‘evolved out of the private judgment of the individual, or what he thought he had seen abroad, and were defended on merely sentimental grounds. This was “so teaching” [sic, touching], that “so beautiful,” or “so reverent”, &tc. ad nauseam.’108 In other words, by freely appropriating sources like the Roman Missal, Ritualists unintentionally fragmented liturgical practice rather than standardize it, because each was exercising his own taste.109 By insisting upon their vocational obligation to act as sacriﬁcing priests for formal Eucharistic rites within church walls and to grant absolution for sin through auricular confessions, Ritualist priests redeﬁned the concept of priestly vocation.110 Many Ritualists were themselves liturgical scholars who published handbooks for integrating medieval English and modern Roman Catholic devotions into the Anglican Holy Communion.111 Their concentration on the details of these revisions must have struck contemporaries as frivolous and escapist, if not thoroughly misguided (presumably, with Rome as the deceiver). Some Anglo-Catholic slum-priests, especially SocialistRitualists of the 1880s and 1890s, performed a juggling act between private or ‘interior’ administering of sacraments and public political advocacy successfully, and in the case of a visionary like Headlam, integrated them into a coherent social theology. But the emphasis on the individual’s spiritual salvation could just as well subordinate issues of collective social equity, and in the particular case of the poor urban parish, the slum-priest’s potential as a champion for his people’s right to better conditions. While some of the Ritualist churches which

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Charles Booth visited provided the expected social services like guilds, Sunday Schools, and savings clubs, at one of the ‘most extreme’ churches, St Columba’s, bordering on the high-crime neighborhood of Hoxton, ‘the social agencies are unimportant; there is neither time nor accommodation for them; the work is deﬁnitely and exclusively religious.’112 At St Stephen’s in the same district, daily morning and evening services died out because no one ever attended them, and ‘this, the vicar points out, is the case in all poor districts, the clergy uselessly wearing themselves out in this way when time and energy are wanted for other things.’113 Freely exploiting popular stereotypes of the High Church giddy young men who attended services, novelists applied these stereotypes to the priests who ofﬁciated at them. In such ﬁction, Anglo-Catholic priests commonly neglect pastoral responsibilities and manipulate parishioners in service of an aesthetic mission. In F. W. Robinson’s Beyond the Church (1866), for instance, the young minister Edgar Purcell dreams of starting an Anglican monastery as a means of elevating the sensibilities of the poor from within the church. Like so many of the High Churchman in anti-Tractarian novels, Purcell is suspiciously effeminate and unsuited for the rigors of slum work: ‘small and delicately moulded,’ he is ‘a tasteful arranger of bouquets [a convenient skill if one’s church is High enough to require bouquets on its altar], an amateur with an alto voice, [and] a dabbler in water-colors.’114 ‘He looks made of lilies and roses, with rose water for blood’ (1: 7). Implicitly, Purcell, like his mentor, Marbecke, is suited only to a wealthy parish, whose few demands would enable him to devote his hours to ‘the cultivation of ritual and musical science,’ for the ‘enthusiastic and aesthetic tail of ladies and gentlemen [who] choose to play at Romanism’ (1: 194–5). In contrast to Purcell and others under the spell of ritual, the protagonist of Robinson’s novel, John Fordyce, shaken by the death of a friend, undergoes a profound religious awakening and ends up not merely a layman among the poor in a slum, but also a martyr there. (How surprising it is indeed when in volume 3 of a triple-decker, the reader ﬁnds that the protagonist has ventured beyond the protective walls of Oxford or of an equally sheltered country estate to East London or any industrial center.) John Fordyce’s selﬂess work is continuously balanced against the false contributions of priests who merely join cliquish guilds and brotherhoods ‘devoted to medieval observances and quasi-religious prattle’ (2: 155). John’s mentor in the slums, Maxwell, lectures on his methods: ‘I give my people two short,

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sharp sermons on the Sunday, practical, as far as I can make them, with allusions to passing events, and I make the Sunday services as short and simple as I can – no aestheticism or decorative upholstery’ (3: 68). Maxwell has stated his case in an earlier scene in which he derides the new theological schools – this is presumably a dig at Chichester (established in 1830), Wells (1840), Cuddesdon (1854), and Salisbury (1860), all of which were founded on High Church principles. There you will ﬁnd excellent dinners, a sufﬁciently comfortable and ornamental system of fasting, charming gothic architecture, diluted Romanism, sweet little cells, and dilettante parochial visiting, all cut and dry for you. But the system does not turn out good hard practical men, able to speak to men as fellow-men and not as wouldbe monks. The spirit of the age is against these semi-monastic institutions, and the spirit of the age is right; you can’t reform a man by illuminated texts, and singing Gregorians through your nose … (2: 18–19, original emphasis) Beyond the overt accusation, ‘dilettante,’ Maxwell indicts Tractarian training schools by appropriating those words with a precious aesthetic tinge: ‘ornamental,’ ‘charming,’ ‘sweet,’ ‘little.’ He counters these standards by electing new ones: practicality and manliness. Practical outreach culminates in programs like the Working-man’s Club, and non-parochial savings banks, coal and clothing clubs, night-schools, and refuges. John cannot afford to play at priesthood or academic superiority: he will fulﬁll the duties of a ‘doctor, lawyer, carpenter, builder, gardener, schoolmaster, chemist, and possess a good wholesome love for honest vagabondage’ (3: 70). Rejecting house-to-house visitation, John meets the working men socially through the club, and visits them at home when he feels they will accept him there. In addition to characterizing Anglo-Catholics as effeminate, and thus ineffectual, novelists of the 1850s and 1860s also depicted priests who willfully aestheticize the church, divesting it of its duties to the community. Through the blithe Philip Paternoster in the 1858 novel of that name, Charles Maurice Davies delineates the habits of a High Church dandy whose ecclesiastical predilections we detect later in Pater’s Florian (1878) and Marius (1885), Huysmans’s Des Esseintes (1884), and Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891). 115 Newly arrived in London, fresh from deserting his betrothed, Paternoster eagerly samples services in Pimlico, Brompton, and Marylebone, weighing the choir, the vestments and architecture of one against the other. By

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night, he exchanges his vestments for the ‘rig-out’ of a man about town, ‘stroll[ing] arm in arm up Piccadilly’ with his fellow Oxford graduate, only to end the evening in his ecclesiastical lodgings, where the two share grog and opium-laced cheroots.116 Davies implies that High Anglican authorities would not be concerned with Paternoster’s behavior; like him, they simply esteem beautiful services. It is they who have advertised for a priest to ofﬁciate at a London chapel of lay brethren in, Davies reminds us, ‘what the science of Cockneiology would denominate a “slum”’ with the enticing stipulation, ‘No parochial work,’ thus ensuring that Paternoster will have all day to preside over choral services and to attend secret meetings of the Society of Blessed Bones (1: 243, 2: 1). (Davies thus parodies the AngloCatholic mission priests’ fellowship, the Society of the Holy Cross, known by its Latin initials as the SSC.) Committed only to perpetuating daily ceremonial, Paternoster and his comrades are effectively blinded to the need for pastoral work in the neighborhood. Indeed, it is the thesis of the novel that the demands of high ritual will always lead to parochial neglect. In the rural parish of Flowerﬁeld, Paternoster, having ceased visiting his parishioners, ‘acquired a habit of entering people ‘in his notes’ thus; a process which was as much like never going near them, as rusticating a man sine die is like expelling him’ (1: 167). Although Paternoster ignores East Enders altogether in his quest for beauty within his insular London chapel, we have witnessed his active aesthetic mission during his employment in Flowerﬁeld. In this early stage of the novel, Davies sets up a correlative between High Church and High Art through his exhaustive ten page inventory of Philip’s aesthetic rooms, even using terms like ‘consummate taste’ to describe their carefully chosen statuettes, Mater Dolorosa, and ecclesiastically patterned wallpaper (1: 123). Philip’s best friend, Herbert, observes, ‘There would be little difﬁculty in judging your special predilections, Phil, when one was allowed an insight into this room.’ ‘Well, I suppose a person would be able to form a shrewd idea,’ Philip replies, ‘But the effect is good, is it not?’ (1: 126–7). Indeed, the good effect is what Philip spends his life pursuing. In an effort to rid his country parish of unsightly, dissonant and spontaneous worship, he expels the local ﬁddlers, veils the choir behind a stall, trains them in Gregorian chants, and sets charitable women to stitch surplices and ecclesiastical embroideries, where they might once have done plain-work for the poor. This priest’s love of paraphernalia has distracted him. The poor congregants are to be mere players in his liturgical drama.

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While Ritualist priests actually viewed Eucharistic ceremonial as an object lesson that clariﬁed the story of Christ for an illiterate congregation, Davies claims that ritualistic worship is antithetical to true religious teaching and pastoral care. Indeed, Paternoster fails at his ﬁrst sermon by insistently focusing on the abstract institution of the church rather than its services, and even more, referring to it as ‘she,’ so leaving his congregation in the dark (1: 96). After hearing the suggestion that Paternoster might be ‘too clever and unbending for our simple people,’ one femme devotee defends him to his face, ‘you are not unﬁt for your parishioners… we are too prosaic, too plodding – in a word, too ignorant for you’ (1: 108, 1: 166). Both Beyond the Church and Philip Paternoster refer to High Churchmen who adopt customs odious to their parishes, one preaching on points too obscure for the people’s comprehension, the other eventually yielding to his congregation when they boycott his services.117 Likewise, in Robinson’s High Church (1860), the climactic unveiling of the church at Easter only alienates the parish: ‘All the pomp and gewgaws of this kind, could only affect the morbidly sensitive, and startle and pain those brought up in a simpler fashion, and inclined to worship God with their hearts, instead of hanging up ﬂowers, and lace, and velvets, and calling that religion.’118 While the conditional tense and qualiﬁer in the phrase ‘could only affect’ roots the sensibilities of the two groups of worshippers in economic class, the phrase ‘morbidly sensitive’ anticipates Du Maurier’s caricatures of the aesthetic elite as they would appear in the early 1880s. Ideally, a Victorian novel defending slum ritualism would deny such accusations of frivolity and elitism by dramatizing R. F. Littledale’s earlier claim that ‘ceremonial observances … co-exist with active and parochial mission work.’119 Ordering the chapters of her 1961 study, Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age, the Catholic critic, Margaret Maison, nevertheless distinguished novels at the end of the century which advanced a ‘faith in beauty’ from those which advocated a ‘faith in goodness.’120 If a trust in practical aestheticism actually fueled High Anglican mission work, then Maison’s distinction would seem over-simplistic and inaccurate. Yet in the novel, if not in life, it holds. In the following two sections, I review two sets of novels. The ﬁrst, traditionally referred to by critics as Ritualist novels, are exercises in Paterian aesthetic subjectivity and style, which extol ritual for the sake of its mere elegance. The second, alternately, are realist novels that glorify practical slum work while disdaining the aesthetic as a capricious, unnecessary component of

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worship. In short, there is no such thing as late Victorian slum-Ritualist ﬁction, because no novelist committed himself to an equitable representation that united priests’ specialized aestheticism with their social service.121

The elision of the poor in Pater’s and Shorthouse’s ﬁction Margaret Maison has claimed J. H. Shorthouse’s John Inglesant (1880) and Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) as examples of a speciﬁc aesthetic-religious genre of novel; Robert Lee Wolff unhesitatingly labels them Ritualist novels.122 Certainly, the protagonists of both works experience glorious moments at the altar, and neither author spares us elaborate descriptions of the beauties of the church. Yet because each of these is an historical novel, Pater’s rooted in the second century AD, Shorthouse’s in the seventeenth, neither directly advocates the contemporary revival of older rites nor attempts to praise the social work of the late Victorian Ritualist priesthood. Neither novel works to justify the Anglo-Catholic clergy as practical contributors to the welfare of the urban, nineteenth-century poor. Of course, this was not their authors’ intention. As their literary styles indicate, both novelists sought to glorify the aesthete’s connoisseurial awareness as he savors the visual and aural comforts of his environment. An Anglican aesthete who had rejected his Quaker upbringing, Shorthouse deﬁantly composed John Inglesant ‘to exalt the unpopular doctrine that the end of existence is not the good of one’s neighbor but one’s own culture.’123 A tale of political intrigue set during the English Revolution, Inglesant concentrates on the inner circles of the English court and the religious elite within the Roman Catholic Church. Endowed with ‘the temperament of sensibility,’ Inglesant undergoes private crises and epiphanies, yet none of these effectively calls him away from his profession as an agent between the English court and Rome. 124 He is at one point tempted to join a Benedictine order where he would live not as a scholar, but as a visitor to the poor and a teacher of children (203). But Inglesant recognizes that his true allegiances are to the king and to his Jesuit mentor, who has instructed him in the art of diplomacy. Inglesant further excels at his career of envoy because he is a kind of Beau Brummel, splendidly attired in velvet and lace, and a master of social arts. At the novel’s conclusion, Inglesant encounters former villains of the court who have lost their fortunes to vice, one now a blind friar, the other a leper. Yet the daily lives of the working poor are largely

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absent, despite the dozens of unnamed servants threaded throughout the novel. Shorthouse only permits his protagonist to join the poor upon his arrival in Italy, when, seeking the blackguard who has killed his brother, Inglesant descends into the urban netherworld. He gains ‘much information respecting the habits of the people, and of their ideas of crime, and of lawful revenge’ (218), but the poor are allotted no dialogue here. In sum, Shorthouse only mentions them as a landmark on Inglesant’s quest. That journey and its product, Inglesant’s moral and sensory consciousness in Rome, dictate our focus as readers. In Inglesant’s eyes, [the peasants] only formed part (together with the strange quiet streets, the shady gardens, and the ever changing scenes of their journey) in that shifting phantasm of form and colour, meaningless to him except as it might suddenly and in some unexpected way, become a part and scene of the fatal drama that had seized upon and crippled his life. (257–8) More than mere local color, poor people are the objects of a distinctly Paterian gaze, as indicated by the very syntax and usages in this excerpt. It is not that Inglesant ignores the poor; indeed, he observes them at length. But they are simultaneously glimpsed, veiled and diminished in phrases like ‘quiet ﬁgures ﬂitted to and fro’ (283). Intoxicated by his subjective responses to the bustle of the streets, Inglesant reduces ordinary men and women to a living pantomime of types, their vices ‘part [of] the changing drama’ of a ‘brilliant fantasia of life’ (284–5). As a result of such abstractions, he never draws closer to them. Instead, ﬁltered through Inglesant’s lens, they remain secondary to his spiritual and professional journey. Certainly, one does not expect to ﬁnd a socialist hero in an historical novel set during the Bloodless Revolution. A Christian, but conﬁned by the conceits of historical romance, Inglesant feels obliged solely to serve and protect his family and his king. When Inglesant arrives in Naples near the end of the novel, the city is plague-ridden, its dead and dying piled high in streets and overﬂowing hospitals. Although people are needed to care for the living and bury the dead (whole orders of clergy have died while serving them), Inglesant does not stop to help. Like the mean streets of Rome and Venice, this sordid city is relegated to background for Inglesant’s new personal quest to ﬁnd his wife’s brother, the nobleman, Il Cavaliero di Guardino. A courtier par excellence, Inglesant sustains the class system that has shaped and beneﬁted him. A trust in class difference pervades his

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political and religious judgments. Indeed, in his only passage about the faith of the poor, Inglesant doubts their spiritual capabilities. Upon learning of peasants’ literal belief in Roman holy grounds, he wonders whether their failure to comprehend symbol might lead them to mere idol worship. Inglesant hence voices the concerns of all Victorian non-Catholics regarding slum Ritualism when he asks, ‘But do you not ﬁnd … that this devotion, which is so ephemeral, is rather given to the sensible object than to the unseen Christ?’ (264). The Rector answers, ‘It may be so … there is no good but what has its alloy; but it is a real devotion, and it reaches after Christ. Granted that it is dark; no doubt, in the darkness it ﬁnds Him though it cannot see His form’ (264). This answer satisﬁes Inglesant, even though it implies that ritual in itself does not prompt understanding. Is Shorthouse, then, proscribing Catholic ritual for the English working classes? The answer is not clear. In Rome, the corruption of ecclesiastics prompts Inglesant, later in the novel, to challenge the Roman Church to waive compulsory confession prior to receiving the Sacraments. He does so by asserting that the educated elite has a right to private devotions (444–5). It would seem, by Inglesant’s logic, that the poor do require a priest’s formal supervision as a confessor and the mechanical devotions he assigns them. Whether this translates into an advocacy of Victorian slum Ritualism is not quite certain, because beyond this passage, Shorthouse simply disregards the poor and their potential for salvation. Walter Pater’s afﬁnity for ritual is well known. In the mid-1870s through the 1880s, a Sunday visitor might have glimpsed him among the worshippers at St Alban’s, Brooke Street, a trailblazer in the reintroduction of high ritual.125 W. H. Mallock exploited Pater’s personal custom when he ruthlessly parodied Pater in The New Republic (1876) as the delicate Mr Rose who attends church for aesthetic sensations alone, and who proposes that the worshippers’ religious doubt makes the experience all the more suggestive, melancholic and appealing.126 Critics speculating on the earnestness of Pater’s belief in Christianity have turned to his historical novel/spiritual autobiography, Marius the Epicurean (1885) for answers. In this way, they have perpetuated the inquiry of the novel’s early reviewer, Mrs Humphry Ward, who perceived that Pater/Marius had embraced the ‘atmosphere of feeling and sensation’ of the Church, while remaining skeptical of its theology and doctrine.127 Only Robert Lee Wolff has considered Marius in the speciﬁc historical context of Ritualism. But given the expansive scope of his book, Wolff returns to the larger questions, ‘Can we claim

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Marius a Christian?’ and by extension, ‘Is Pater a believing Christian?’ without subjecting his premise of Marius as a Ritualist novel to greater scrutiny.128 One cannot ﬁnd a better defense in ﬁction of the historical validity of Ritualism than Pater’s account of the development of early Christianity at the conclusion of the chapter, ‘The Minor Peace of the Church.’129 Further, Pater seems to afﬁrm Littledale’s premise of the evangelical potential of ceremonial by portraying the Mass as a focused drama that Marius’ ‘duly initiated mind’ can follow easily (248). Even the ‘labouring humanity’ who observe the rites have absorbed the hope of heaven (278). Marius senses how the people practicing the rites are under the sway of a ‘power,’ a ‘mystic sense’ which transcends time (248). In accordance with his own temperament and aesthetic, Pater focuses on Marius as a sentient observer rather than on the Mass and its meaning.130 Pater never explains how that pervasive mystic spirit originates in Christian principles, values that include charity to the poor. Pater thus advocates a kind of shallow Ritualism. Were they patient enough to read its convoluted prose, prosecutors of Ritualists into the 1890s might have used Marius in court as evidence of the movement’s allegedly dandiacal intentions (just as Edward Carson, for the prosecution, had quoted lurid passages from The Picture of Dorian Gray in court in order to indict Wilde for committing acts of gross indecency with men). Persistently associated with Marius’ handsome friend, Cornelius, Pater’s celebration has much to do with romantic male friendships and Pater’s own adulation for gentlemanly graces, but nothing to do with redeeming or socially aiding the poor; it hence disregards the potential of Ritualism in the slums. Despite Pater’s intentions to use Marius as an apologia for the alleged hedonism of the Conclusion to Studies in the History of The Renaissance (1873), Marius the Epicurean reads as an essay in the aesthetic precepts Pater had introduced there. The classical Marius indeed burns with that hard, gem-like ﬂame of intense, conscientious observation; Pater has projected his long-held ideal into the second century. Notwithstanding its author’s knowledge of early Christianity, his periodic, almost Modernist adoption of historical narratives, and his conscious use of footnotes, the novel documents not so much the reign of Marcus Aurelius as the particular personality which Pater had previously assigned to the Renaissance (and to subsequent exceptional ﬁgures) and had delineated through portraits in The Renaissance and Appreciations (1889). Marius feels the pantheism, curiosity, and morbidity

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that Pater ascribed to Wordsworth, Leonardo, and Botticelli, respectively, but which are most of all characteristic of Pater himself, and of his autobiographical Child in the House (1894). Pater continually projects his peculiar ideal from one historical era to the next, resurrecting it, just like his Giaconda in The Renaissance resurrects herself. The Roman settings in Marius conveniently lend themselves to Pater’s design, enabling Marius to experience the same ‘desire of beauty quickened by a sense of death’ that Pater had so admired in Pre-Raphaelite poetry.131 Simply, Marius gravitates to Christianity because it offers him pleasant sensations. When Marius visits the home of the Christian Cecilia in the last quarter of the novel, various forces work together to charm him: the surprising spaciousness of the villa, twilight, children’s voices singing and the ‘quaint unreality’ of their faces, a crimson sky, white mist, and rich shadows.132 At the mercy of the sensuous, ‘unchangeable law of his temperament,’ Marius ﬁrst views Christian faith-inaction as if it were a class of landscape design, or by extension, a new culture (233). He observes it not through a moral lens, but by sampling the feelings it invokes for him as another ‘fresh order of experiences’ (231). The poignancy of the graves satisﬁes him for poignancy’s own sake: ‘Yes! the interest, the expression, of the entire neighborhood was instinct with [pathetic suffering], as with the savour of some precious incense’ (231). Even as Marius’ vague feeling of ‘tranquil hope’ reﬂects the Christian promise of an afterlife, Pater impressionistically subordinates any mention of Christ’s sacriﬁce to the intense materiality of the scene (232). Like John Inglesant, Pater’s Marius is on a quest. As readers, we travel a route of Marius’ perceptions in consecutive scenes towards his revelation of the sensual satisfaction of Christian worship. Part 4 especially has elements of a suspense story: from the moment that Marius arrives at Cecilia’s house, he is eager to uncover ‘the determining inﬂuences of [Cornelius’s] peculiar character’ (226), that is, the Christian faith that has made Cornelius appealing. But as a formalist, Pater enjoys secrets, and organizes the minutest details of each sentence to slow and hinder the reader’s process of assimilating a complete idea. Pater tantalizes the reader through sentences that steer her not towards concrete nouns, but into generalities like ‘varieties of facts,’ ‘effects,’ ‘afﬁnities,’ and ‘expressions,’ as well as etherealities like ‘intimations,’ ‘unfathomable motives,’ and ‘strange mystic essays after the unseen.’ In this way, Pater uses language to veil ideas rather than disclose them. Characteristically, his sentences begin with adverbial and dependent clauses,

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‘Here and there, mingling … and sometimes even …,’ compelling the reader to wait patiently for the central subject and verb, ‘were the signs of violent death …’ (231). Pater’s reliance on the passive voice appears designed to soothe and lull the reader into the serenity so prized by Marius and Pater himself. Through this deliberate magniﬁcation and slowing of the passage of time, Pater retaliates against the enemies that had antagonized him in the Conclusion to The Renaissance: the ﬂeeting moment and its bewildering ‘ﬂood of external objects.’133 Marius’ historical setting enables Pater to celebrate a slow, rural life, so that he can leisurely identify individual objects as Marius approaches then, and enumerate their parts to justify the impressions they inspire in him. Pater thus compels the reader to join Marius in the process of ‘disengag[ing] [the] virtue[s]’ that enrich each view.134 Marius, with its lack of dialogue and sparse plot, reads less as a novel than as a highly subjective travelogue, a Baedeker of yearning and reverie. Like his protagonist, Pater has an orderly disposition.135 It follows that the ‘congruity’ and ‘tact of selection’ that Marius appreciates in Cecilia’s house and in the ritual of the Mass are echoed in the syntax of Pater’s sentences.136 Here Pater performs the same act of selection that he prescribes in ‘Style,’ but rather than produce a Spartan, lean prose, he controls his complex, luxurious sentences through a careful allotment of images and ideas into distinct clauses, and particularly, through the artful welding of and symmetry between those clauses. If Pater conceived of good prose spatially as a kind of ‘literary architecture,’ the sentences in Marius are Baroque in style, with their ‘surplusage’ braced through syntactic structure.137 Consider the syntactic complexity of the sentences in this excerpt: And in connection with this circumstance again, as in the actual stones of the building so in the rite itself, what Marius observed was not so much new matter as a new spirit, moulding, informing, with a new intention, many observances not witnessed for the ﬁrst time, to-day. Men and women came to the altar successively, in perfect order, and deposited below the lattice-work on pierced white marble, their baskets of wheat and grapes, incense, oil for the sanctuary lamps; bread and wine especially – pure wheaten bread, the pure white wine of the Tusculan vineyards. There was here a veritable consecration, hopeful and animating, of the earth’s gifts, of old dead and dark matter itself, now in some way redeemed at last, of all that we can touch or see, in the midst of a jaded world that

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had lost the true sense of such things, and in strong contrast to the wise emperor’s renunciant and impassive attitude towards them.138 Marius does identify moral values in Cecelia’s Christians – chastity, maternity, family affection, and yes, sacriﬁce of the self for others – but Marius does not esteem these qualities per se as much as their ‘inﬂuence tending to beauty’ (238) – that is, the pleasant associations of grace, serenity, blitheness, and tact he can attach to them. Although Pater repeatedly refers to Marius’ ‘intellectual’ regard for the scenes before him, Marius’ insights are not analytical, but self-reﬂective and sensuous (245, 268, 273, 276). As readers, we are left with a strong sense of ‘the beauty of holiness,’ but no explanation of why the rites are holy; the description only hints at the story of Christ and his teachings (242). Pater often quotes a Latin phrase just when the reader expects clariﬁcation, lending a tone of awe, but even more obscurity, to the passage. One could stop there and claim that Marius and, by extension, Pater are merely self-absorbed, and that, excepting its horror at outright carnage (of animals or of martyrs), the novel has no bearing on communal ethics. But Pater tantalizingly ends the chapter on Cecilia’s house with an afterthought: ‘But, in his case, what was thus visible constituted a moral or spiritual inﬂuence’ (234). Pater then suggests that if Marius were to try to reconcile this inﬂuence with his characteristic habits of perception, ‘new responsibilities’ might be demanded of him (234). What I want to underline here is Pater’s reluctance to represent the lavish, joyous celebrations of the church simultaneously with the ‘new responsibilities’ of Christian conscience. Through a long, intermediary stretch of philosophical dialogue in Chapter 24, Pater keeps Chapters 22 and 23 – which defend the legitimacy of ritual and describe the Mass – distant from the Chapter 25, ‘Sunt Lacrimae Rerum,’ which urges a wider, more constant sympathy for others. In this last chapter Marius lists a number of pathetic tableaux that have pained him as an observer: a circus horse led to slaughter; a peasant woman similarly led to a home for the elderly; a laborer’s son anticipating a life of ﬁlthy drudgery like his father’s; and crippled children, who, despite their sweetness, burden poor families. Although we can assume that Marius is once again recalling these pitiful scenarios for his own morbid pleasure, here he chides himself for not caring enough: ‘I would that a stronger love might arise in my heart!’ (272). Despairing at the ineffectiveness of Stoic charity against death and mourning, yet still unwilling to accept Christianity and its promise of immortality, Marius at this point simply calls for practical human compassion (274).

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Like Shorthouse, Pater customarily calls on images of the poor for mere local color. As we have seen, the poor are also present in Marius as objects of pity. More complexly, however, vignettes about the poor serve a greater theoretical agenda about the necessity of aesthetic sensitivity as a means to greater conscience. As Wilde would later do in his letter from prison, ‘De Profundis’ (published posthumously in 1905), Pater fetishizes sorrow as a standard of sensibility. Confessing his own inconsistent compassion for others’ suffering, Marius nevertheless declares that he has suffered more intense sympathy than others. Because those with a greater power of insight into human conditions will have greater power of sympathy, he claims an advantage in an evolutional hierarchy among men. But we must remember that Pater’s frequent claims to Marius’ probing insight – often implied through the term ‘intellectual’ to describe Marius’ thoughts – are deceiving, since upon deeper scrutiny such thoughts are simply further examples of Marius’ self-reﬂective ruminations. Power of insight here does not require analytical distance from the object, but the ability to aestheticize it. Marius argues that people of a higher social class can learn how to feel more intensely and sympathetically by imitating laborers who have grown to appreciate the beauty of their children. I notice sometimes what I conceive to be the precise character of the fondness of the roughest working people for their young children, a ﬁne appreciation, not only of their serviceable affection, but of their visible graces: and indeed, in this country, the children are almost always worth looking at. I see daily, in ﬁne weather, a child like a delicate nosegay, running to meet the rudest of brick-makers as he comes home from work. She is not at all afraid to hang upon his rough hand: and through her, he reaches out to, he makes his own, something from that strange region, so distant from him yet so real, of the world’s reﬁnement. What is of ﬁner soul, or of ﬁner stuff in things, and demands delicate touching – to him the delicacy of the little child represents that: it initiates him into that. There, surely, is a touch of the secular gold, of a perpetual age of gold. But then again, think for a moment, with what a hard humor at the nature of things, his struggle for bare life will go on, if the child should happen to die. (273, original emphasis) Pater ends the tableau on this strange note, completing a route from family affection to aesthetic delight to cheerful faith in eternity (this is the meaning of ‘secular gold’ in the context of earlier passages in

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the chapter) and ﬁnally, to intense grief. The brief reference to the ‘perpetual age of gold’ alludes not merely to the past, simple optimism of pagan Numa, but to the Christian faith in an afterlife, which reprises some of Numa’s hope (272–3). Whether Pater intends this hinted Christianity as a step in his schema towards greater sympathy is unclear, because in the novel, Christian faith is generally characterized by the cheer and hopefulness of its practitioners, and in this passage Pater concentrates on grief, not hope, as an aesthetically informed virtue. In summary, Pater argues that one’s appreciation of the beautiful will heighten one’s moral sensibility. The future will be with those who have most of [the power of sympathy]; while for the present, as I persuade myself, those who have much of it, have something to hold by, even in the dissolution of a world, or in that dissolution of self, which is, for every one, not less than the dissolution of the world it represents for him. (274–5) If we read it in the context of the Victorian crisis of faith, this sentence seems an amalgam of Pater’s belief in subjective perception (‘the dissolution of self … is … the dissolution of the world it represents for him’), and of a faith in an expedient religion of brotherhood (‘something to hold by … in this dissolution of the world’). Yet a sentence that follows seems to undercut the urge towards sympathetic humanitarianism: ‘In the mere clinging of human creatures to one another, nay! in one’s own solitary self-pity, amid the effects even of what might appear irredeemable loss, I seem to touch the eternal’ (275). The emphatic phrase about ‘solitary self-pity’ diminishes the rest, leaving the reader aware of and alienated by Marius’ exploitative, reclusive consciousness. We recall a similar solitude in Marius’ reactions to the Mass, for there he only gleans raw materials for the extended subjective associations by which he pleases himself.

The elision of aestheticism in the realist mission novel The juncture at which those novels urging a religion of beauty and those pursuing a religion of goodness should have met, but did not, is what I have termed the mission novel of the 1890s, wherein clerical protagonists answer the call to tend the urban poor by founding slum

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settlements. Anti-Tractarian ﬁction of the 1850s and 1860s had trained readers to recognize the aesthetic as a poison undermining Christian worship and village harmony and impeding service to the poor. Later novelists of all religious agendas characteristically banished the aesthetic to unethical Others – the licentious theater, the effete dandy, or a false, modern, religious denomination – against whom the true church must battle. Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, a scholar of the historical Jesus, designs a Religion of Man which eschews sensation for reason; the aesthetic in this novel instead ﬁnds a place at artistic ‘At Homes,’ where bedraggled European émigrés and jaded aristocrats mingle with dilettante musicians.139 This practice of excluding the aesthetic from humanitarian visions carried over into novels about conscientious Ritualism. While realist novelists of the 1890s ﬁctionalized and praised the work of Anglo-Catholic mission priests, they scrupulously avoided assigning their priests clear-cut High Church afﬁliations. Rather, they depicted the way that Ritualist priests in real life had appropriated Low Church, evangelical methods in dealing with their parishioners. (The ambiguity of these practices has preoccupied modern historians of slum Ritualism.140) While writing his 1896 novel, A Child of the Jago, Arthur Morrison frequented Shoreditch for eighteen months, following the Rev. Arthur Osborne Jay on his rounds, so that he could achieve the most accurate picture of the life there.141 In his creation of Father Sturt, Morrison is faithful to Jay’s character and innovations – for instance, his awareness of the ‘clicks’ (robberies) of the parish, his protection of those enfeebled by their habits of respectability, his resistance to giving alms, and his founding of a working men’s club. But while Jay, a Ritualist, had also presided at daily Masses, Morrison’s Father Sturt shows no commitment to High Church ceremonial. In the single scene within Sturt’s church, Morrison emphasizes the secular nature of the Father’s simple sermon, and only mentions in passing a closing benediction and song. True, Josh Perrot and Kiddo Cook do attend because it promises a more attractive escape from the cold and wet than anywhere else: ‘there might be a ﬁre … at least there was a clean room, with pictures on the wall … there were often ﬂowers … there was always music …’142 Because Morrison conveys the service through the eyes of these Jago men, this moment, while suffused with aesthetic appreciation, is tantalizingly general, and might easily refer to Broad Church practices as well. Are the ﬂowers on the Cross itself? Is the music Gregorian? Has Father Sturt held a Mass? Because Morrison does not tell us, we assume not.

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Through this omission, Morrison circumvents Jay’s sacramentalism, and privileges his ﬁctional priest’s daily strolls throughout the Jago and negotiations within it as complete evangelicalism in themselves. Shallow society philanthropists, loathing Sturt’s friendships with poor parishioners, accuse him of religious transgression: ‘Father Sturt!—the name itself was sheer papistry’ (69). Beyond his formal use of ‘Father,’ they locate ‘papistry’ in Sturt’s friendliness with his poor neighbors (‘his tastes were vulgar and brutal’) (68). So, they ironically suspect him of Catholicism because of his alliances with ugliness rather than a penchant for lavish Eucharistic worship. (They do not even investigate his services.) Because Sturt’s enemies miss the mark in so many other ways, we as readers are not meant to take their accusation of his Roman Catholicism to heart. But the question is not fully resolved because Morrison never addresses and justiﬁes Sturt’s Anglo-Catholicism directly. Indeed, to emphasize Sturt’s iron-willed pragmatism and distance from churchly aestheticism, Morrison contrasts his work against the efforts of the East End Elevation Mission and Pansophical Institute and its brother quacksalver, which promises, at a discount price, the end of poverty and sin. These both attract the donations of the frivolously ‘Sentimental-Cocksure’ and please philanthropists through their ‘new gaudery’ (68). To maintain the dichotomy between practical, sensible work and aesthetic frivolity, Morrison evades the possibility of any aesthetic worship as part of Sturt’s program. Other novels at the end of the century downplay churchly aestheticism’s potential to engage and reform the poor. James Adderly’s Stephen Remarx (1893) and Hall Caine’s The Christian (1897) each feature a new kind of hero in the ﬁgure of the modern Christ who works tirelessly in the slums, but independently of an institutionalized clergy. Adderly, who later traced his own career as a Ritualist, socialist mission priest in his autobiography In Slums and Society (1916), here minimizes his own High Churchmanship to endow his protagonist with the simple mission of following the Gospel.143 Stephen’s concept of Christ as the ‘One True Liberator,’ of the Church as an inclusive society of all who are baptized, of the Creed as ‘a living thing, entering into all the details of every-day human life,’ and of Heaven as the achievement of Socialism on earth echo Stewart Headlam’s Christian Socialism, but the Eucharist is nearly absent from it.144 Downplaying Stephen’s administering of the sacraments, Adderly quotes reports of Stephen’s simple sermons condemning hypocritical, exploitative landowners and factory owners as false Christians (104).

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When Stephen’s Socialist congregant, John Oxenham, expresses the desire to bring the Church’s mission more directly to the people, and complains, ‘there is not in the world anyone that looks like Christ, or anything that looks like what we read of in the Gospels,’ Stephen exclaims in agreement: ‘They should see Christ … Great God, can it be done?’ (75–7). While a Ritualist hero might have found a solution in the rich symbolism of the church, Stephen takes this directive far more literally and founds a contained, cooperative society to live as Christ lived, in the process offending his uncle and forfeiting his inheritance. After literally giving a beggar the shirt off his back one Christmas night, he is hit in the eyes by the snowball of a playfully malicious aristocrat, and stumbling into the street, is crushed under the wheel of a cart, so dying a martyr’s death. Through his own example, then, he unintentionally fulﬁlls his desire of ‘show[ing] Christ to the world’ (76). Above all, Adderly seems determined to accentuate the Low Church methods that Anglo-Catholic priests had adopted, so that while Stephen does have some Ritualistic leanings, they are obscured and rendered ambiguous as the narrative unfolds. In an early confrontation with his rector, Dr Bloose, he refers to himself as a ‘priest,’ itself a term charged with Catholic connotations, and one which the Rector challenges (17). We learn that Stephen goes to a monastery in Malvern to plan next season’s sermons. The brotherhood he ultimately establishes is quasi-monastic (‘We have one [attic, former servant’s] room each, no carpet, no curtains, and a simple little bed’ [122]), and there is a lay sisterhood who live outside the house. In the same sentence that Stephen’s aristocratic aunt dishonestly denies that he is a Radical or Socialist, she also claims just as unconvincingly that ‘the reports about his being High Church were not well founded’ (42). The world outside imagines that Stephen’s men ‘ﬂog each other every morning’ (129), an assumption surely rooted in Victorian stereotypes about Roman Catholic monastic orders. Yet Stephen’s evangelical methods gain equal attention. Throughout the novel, Stephen adamantly focuses on the Gospel as a practical guide to life, not the Rubric as a practical guide to worship. Like a Low Churchman, he preaches extempore, ‘[holding] nothing but a New Testament in his hand’ (98). And to dilute his Catholicism even more, Adderly creates a foil to Stephen: a shallow ‘High Church young man,’ Mr Denholme, who is ‘a member of all sorts of Romish guilds and things’ (81). Adderly hints at Denholme’s effeminacy by drawing attention to his ‘childish voice’ and links him to the popular Aesthetic

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Movement when Denholme ‘[sinks] back behind a Japanese fan’ after no one has laughed at his puns (90). Denholme’s presence testiﬁes to the fact that that his hostess ‘dearly love[s] a fad’ (39). Denholme later apparently converts to Roman Catholicism (116). Adderly’s novel ran to twelve editions; he attributed its success to its topicality: ‘“Stephen Remarx” came out just when slumming was the fashion among religious people of the upper classes, and Socialism of a very mild type was beginning to be indulged in even by duchesses.’145 But it seems today that Stephen Remarx’s socialism is equally mild, hardly socialism at all. To Stephen’s followers, Christianity consists of the re-investment of their capital into humanitarian employment programs. The only real challenges to society in this scheme are each member’s voluntary tithe to the brotherhood’s central fund and the voluntary ostracism he or she undergoes in society as a result of that commitment: ‘[Christ] has told us not to be surprised if the world hates us.’146 Like the founders of university settlements, Stephen aims to ‘insert himself into the social life of [the East End],’ and to bring the rich and poor together in friendship (26). One has the sense that while workers come to parties and meet the rich on equal footing there, while they read in the mansion’s library and learn cookery and gymnastics in rooms newly designated for these purposes, this project is a gentlemen’s program consisting of limited acts of philanthropy. Funding a boy’s Oxford education may help that one boy to ascend the social ladder, but does not explode the economic distinctions that sustain the social exclusivity of Oxbridge (123). An enlightened employer may open his drawing room to his workers and enable them to ‘[make] real friends’ with his family, but he remains their social superior (135). Likewise, Lady Methyr’s inviting factory girls to her castle for a three-week holiday so they can enjoy the grounds seems a mere palliative – indeed, an aesthetically motivated one (123). Hall Caine’s The Christian (1897) also obscures Anglo-Catholicism in its representation of an ideal priest and his mission. Here Caine equates Ritualism with mere monasticism, so that when his protagonist John Storm initially tries to live as Christ did, he ﬁnds himself closeted in a monk’s cell, where his vows ironically prevent him from helping those outside. Upon leaving the Brotherhood, Storm regrets the time he has sacriﬁced in mere prayer, fasting, and penance, and he surveys London, ready to execute his new ideal: Christianity as social service. ‘Work was religion! Work was prayer! Work was praise! Work was the love of man and the glory of God!’147 John’s primary project will be establishment of a network to shelter fallen (or falling) women.

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How much of John Storm’s initial Anglo-Catholicism survives to infuse his new mission? Certainly, his opponents are quick to accuse him of ‘drawing the people into Roman obedience’ (365). Rather than fully sever his ties with the monastic brotherhood, he claims a Brother as an assistant. Further, once Storm has established his own shelter for young women and his own church in a slum, the Devil’s Acre, he proposes daily services at the church and ﬁnances its physical alteration (270). A celibate, he even seems to attract his share of femme devotees in the gentlewomen who form a sisterhood to aid fallen women. Yet while other novelists would take several pages to describe Storm’s choice of altar-cloth and surplice, Caine only depicts these obscurely: ‘The church was large and rectangular and plain, and looked a wellused ediﬁce, open every day and all day. The congregation was visibly excited, but the service appeared to calm them. The ritual was full, with procession and incense, but without vestments, and otherwise monastic in its severity’ (383). In practice, Storm further transgresses social, theological boundaries by subscribing to both High and Low church methods: he leads processions throughout the East End in a cassock, fronted by a banner with a white cross – but he hires a harmonium player as well, and preaches perdition like an evangelical (270). Assembling a number of clergymen together and appealing to them for funds to build his settlement, he claims that God ‘gives freely to High Churchmen, Low Churchmen and No Churchmen alike,’ and thus offends everyone in the room (301). The following social contributions take precedence over prayer in Storm’s settlement: the break-up of a baby-farming ring; the reform of an alcoholic who abuses his mother; and a social club to keep girls out of music halls, men’s clubs, and gambling houses. If there is any aesthetic excess in the novel, we ﬁnd it in the Broad Church service that so infuriates John Storm and in the institution of the theater. Storm’s initial employer, the Canon, hires professional singers for the choir and refers in his sermon to artistic and literary ﬁgures like Michelangelo and the Brownings. As Storm sees it, entertaining the wealthy in the church decoys them into complacency. The dandies in this novel are not Ritualists, but the Broad Churchmen who attend the Canon’s secularized services and the theater. When John Storm condemns the theatrical community for ‘[existing] on lies’ and ‘[doing] nothing … to help suffering humanity,’ his rival Drake answers, ‘If a profession is sinful … in proportion as it appeals to the senses, and lives on the emotions, and develops duplicity, then the profession of the Church is the most sinful in the world, for it

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offers the greatest temptations to lying, and produces the worst hypocrites and imposters!’ (310) Because Hall Caine does not elaborate on Storm’s Eucharistic observances enough to make them seem ornately Catholic, Drake’s accusation that Storm’s service ‘appeals to the senses and lives on the emotions’ seems unwarranted. In fact, it is Storm’s disregard for the materially beautiful and his willingness to live in squalor that prevent his great love Glory from joining him. However much Storm’s enemies accuse him of Romanizing (they later destroy his church in a No-Popery riot), they are not openly blaming him for political intrigue with Rome, or for harboring an aestheticizing, effeminizing mission. They are really charging him with propelling London into a millenarian uproar; ironically, then, they are condemning him for his evangelical methods. His eyes, for instance, ‘blaze as with Pentecostal ﬁre’ when he preaches in anticipation of Judgment Day (362). On the day they have reserved for the world’s end, parishioners respond to thunder by screaming and fainting as in a revival meeting (385). Arthur Morrison, James Adderly, and Hall Caine each have their protagonists adopt evangelical practices and integrate them with selected Anglo-Catholic rites. The effect is that their Ritualism appears somewhat diluted: as readers, we encounter mixed messages through contradictory images, such as the ‘full’ ritual with incense, banners, and procession, but no vestments, or the procession with banners and cassock, but with a harmonium, too. We overhear accusations of High Churchmanship that some of the evidence seems to support, but the novelists prevent us from believing these allegations by maligning their spokesmen as gossipy, malicious or misinformed. While the hybridization of Low Church methods with High Church doctrine had been practiced by real Anglo-Catholic mission priests, none of these novelists explains it. Readers, then, may be temporarily confused, but plot events encourage them to move on and focus on other themes in the novel. Father Sturt’s contempt for the self-deluded East End Elevation Mission and Pansophical Institute, Stephen Remarx’s dismissal of the effeminate Mr Denholme, and John Storm’s disdain for arty, theatrical services all convey the unsuitability of the aesthetic in the task of missionary outreach. In fact, even as they work in the world, John Storm and Stephen Remarx seem to fetishize the meagerness of the monastic life (much like the self-denying East End settlers I described in Chapter 3). Yet beauty does have a place in their schemes insofar as they recognize the value of healthy, secular entertainments for the

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poor. In Storm’s settlement, the young women converse and play piano and sing, their voices ‘ﬁll[ing] the air like the chirping of birds, and their faces … bright and happy’ (302). Signiﬁcantly, Storm does not endow the ceremonies of the church with the role of prompting this joy. Similarly, Stephen Remarx afﬁrms a more mainstream, unchurchlike, missionary aestheticism. Earlier in the novel, Adderly has parodied the present efforts of the aristocracy to elevate the people through entertainments, but only because these entertainments are so mediocre.148 Does this mean that quality Culture would actually beneﬁt the people? One of the core members of Stephen’s Brotherhood is a painter who gives up his potential fame as an ARA. ‘The work he is doing down in South London for churches and schools and the people’s homes is quite wonderful,’ vouches a settler there.149 This Christian variation on the Kyrle Man diffuses beauty by day and by familiar methods.150 In this respect, The Christian and Stephen Remarx ally themselves with non-Ritualist, non-Anglican mission novels like Robert Elsmere where social visionaries encourage dances and craft-clubs in order to establish the church as a community center. In contrast to Stewart Headlam, these novelists played it safe. Rather than sanction Anglican ceremonial as an aesthetically spiritualizing resource or attribute holiness to secular pursuits, they endorsed art as a source of health, but not as a means of achieving salvation.

6 George Gissing’s Hopes and Fears for a Popular British Aestheticism

We reached home about half-past six, & Mrs Gaussen met us in the hall. When we said that we had been at home at Kelmscott, she astonished us by replying that Mrs [Jane] Morris had just come to call, & was in the drawing room. I went after her with a mixture of doubt & trepidation, & saw a lady dressed in old-gold, with abundance of very black hair rise in a stately manner from the couch. The next moment a burst of laughter showed that it was Miss Gaussen; she had attired herself aesthetically. I told her it was a pity she ever dressed otherwise; the effect of the old-gold dress and the black hair was astonishing. Then we went in to dinner, where I delivered an extempore lecture on aesthetic attire, to the general entertainment.1 To the reader who pictures George Gissing in relentlessly pinched, isolated circumstances, the novelist’s representation of his own breezy temperament here may seem surprising. Although he had been born into a lower-middle-class family and had won a scholarship to Owens College (now the University of Manchester) and later London University, his relationship and disastrous marriage to Nell Harrison, a prostitute, drew him into a life of petty crime (he served one month’s hard labour in 1876 for theft) and for a time he lived a life of neardestitution. This is reﬂected in his early novels – among them, The Unclassed (1884), Thyrza (1887) and The Nether World (1889), the last one of the most graphic accounts of Victorian poverty written. So, this easy familiarity with the social, popular manifestations of the Aesthetic Movement seems unexpected from the premier, late Victorian novelist of East End working-class life. Among the less-known and less critically 174

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exploited aspects of Gissing’s artistic development is his predilection in the early 1880s for the Pre-Raphaelites and popular aestheticism. It was Gissing’s increase in earnings and introduction to upper-class social life under the guidance of his new acquaintance, the society hostess Mrs Elizabeth Sarah Gaussen, in the early 1880s that paved the way for his interest in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Upon Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s death in 1882, Gissing visited a commemorative exhibit at the Academy, where he viewed a portrait Rossetti had done of Gissing’s pupils, the daughters of Vernon Lushington.2 He consulted articles on Rossetti in the Contemporary Review and the Cornhill Review, and he paid a pilgrimage to Cheyne Walk where Rossetti had lived.3 ‘There is only one place in the world wherein to live, & that is Chelsea!’ he declared, and later attributed such sentiments to his character Ada in Isabel Clarendon (1886): she plans to move to Cheyne Walk upon achieving ﬁnancial independence.4 During this time, Gissing purchased an issue of the periodical The Portfolio containing plates by Rossetti and a volume of Rossetti’s poetry; his familiarity with Rossetti’s sonnets surfaces in The Unclassed (1884) when Maud Enderby subscribes to a Religion of Art after discovering the idealized, pure passion in them.5 Later, in the 1890s, Gissing’s loveletters to Gabrielle Fleury, with their references to an ‘absolute sympathy’ of souls and his anticipation of ‘heart … speak[ing] to heart,’ seem to draw upon Rossetti’s synthesis of spiritual and earthly longings.6 But Gissing adopted aesthetic style even more concretely. Mrs Gaussen had directed, and at least partially ﬁnanced, the decoration of Gissing’s rooms at 18 Rutland Street off Hampstead Road; there Gissing hung one of his newly framed Rossetti prints for view. By the end of 1884, Gissing had moved into better lodgings in order to entertain Mrs Gaussen.7 His early letters from 7K Cornwall Residences report the acquisition of a dado and the papering of a cabinet in a Japanese print.8 It was with Mrs Gaussen’s sons that Gissing glimpsed William Morris’s home, Kelmscott, a site he called ‘sacred ground’ because Rossetti had lived there.9 In a letter of January 1890 to his friend Eduard Bertz, Gissing recalled his introduction to Rossetti’s poems and paintings as ‘a dawn of beautiful imaginings’ and declared the inﬂuence of Rossetti’s work upon his own.10 The recent edition of The Collected Letters of George Gissing offers Gissing scholars a ﬁrst-hand access to Gissing’s early ‘aesthetic phase’ and his growing disdain throughout the 1880s and 1890s for aestheticism’s practical claims to social improvement. While Gissing subscribed to the teachings of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin

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ideologically and temperamentally, 11 he treated programs for the practical dissemination of culture and beauty ambivalently in his ﬁction, often designing narratives that punctured such programs’ optimism and conduct. Gissing not only doubted the capacity of the masses to acquire a bourgeois aesthetic sensibility, but also, even in novels most positive about art philanthropy, he dramatized the people’s willful resistance to acculturation. Gissing had only contempt for the average laborer, instead directing his empathy towards unclassed poets who must, like Gissing himself, endure a life of pinched means among the unskilled and uneducated. In his own life, he defensively refused to avail himself of the educational and recreational options offered to the working classes in the 1870s and 1880s, because this would imply an association between himself and the masses. Disdainful of workers, Gissing similarly shied away from those philanthropists who tried to effect their embourgeoisement. He judged art-philanthropy as an extension of older paternalistic institutions like the Charity Organization Society, and found art-philanthropists guilty of the C.O.S.’s customary arrogance and complacency. While missionary aesthetes had pledged themselves to social activism in order to make the joys of beauty more accessible to everyone, Gissing favored a retreat into an idealized exclusive clique of natural aristocrats bound by their love of art. While early novels like Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed (1884) provide glimpses of aesthetic education’s social beneﬁts for the poor, by the mid-1880s, Gissing hints that the poor are uneducable and deﬁnes aestheticism as the pursuit of an individual in conﬂict with social programs.12 Into the 1890s, entrenched in the pessimism that characterizes New Grub Street (1891), The Odd Women (1893), and his other novels of the middle class, Gissing recoils from practical aestheticism altogether. During this period, he turns and renounces the Aesthetic Movement proper with unforeseen rancor, borrowing from a body of anti-decadent literature to malign male aesthetes as dangerous seductive dandies. Gissing further claims that just as the poor are unknowing victims of their state-funded half-education, their independent aesthetic guides are equally unprepared to instruct them in matters of art. He censures female aesthetic missionaries to the poor as prigs and social climbers. So long as these teachers are subsumed by the ‘whirlpool’ of Society, their own testimonies to the glories of the aesthetic are destined to be shallow and corrupted. Gissing despairs at the way in which the mass culture of the 1890s renders Ruskinian ethical and aesthetic ideals of social responsibility and sympathy

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impracticable. Ultimately, as I will show, he retreats into a reclusive Paterian subjectivity where aesthetic appreciation is contingent on individual memory and fantasy and divorced from social exchange.

Gissing as bourgeois bohemian: the search for a literary brotherhood Despite his declared alliance with French and Russian naturalists and the English novelists Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, and despite his nightly sessions working on his Greek, Gissing read the writers and texts beloved of English aesthetes: Dante and Petrarch in the original, Georgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters (1550; 1568), Ernest Chesneau’s The English School of Painting (1884) edited by Ruskin, and Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–60). What are we to make of this unexpected allegiance to the aestheticism of the Pre-Raphaelites in the English naturalist, Gissing? One possible explanation is this: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was the recognized model of an artistic fraternity in Britain, and Gissing was forever in search of a sympathetic community. Perhaps admiring their cohesiveness, he adopted their style. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the critic Michael Collie attempted to rewrite Gissing’s biography and revise his criticism by emphasizing Gissing’s status as a bohemian and using this as a means of understanding the motives behind the novelist’s frequent relocations and his insistent (and Collie believes, unfair) expectations of his wives.13 I reconsider Gissing’s bohemianism not as a retreat from personal responsibility, but as a striving for creative fellowship.14 Collie is correct in stating that Gissing’s literary world was largely an interior one. Adept at French, Italian and German, Gissing avidly read authors like Alphonse Daudet, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Honoré de Balzac, Paul Bourget, Emile Zola, and Matilde Serao, as well as Russian realists, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Unfamiliar with Norwegian or Danish, he read the plays of Henrik Ibsen and realist novels of Jens Peter Jacobsen in German. Gissing aimed to teach himself Spanish; before he died, he was reading Miguel de Cervantes and Benito Pérez Galdós in the original. The obvious tragedy of his life was the isolation of that cosmopolitan subjectivity. Gissing understood the paradox of his situation, acknowledging that the nature of his work demanded solitude, but that loneliness was a misery.15 Gissing was drawn to contemporary European writers not only for their formal innovations as naturalists, but also for the possibilities they envisioned in their literary works of a loyal community of

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artists – a ’cenacle’ in Balzac’s terms. One of the texts that shaped Gissing from his early days as a student was Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème (1851) (he claimed in April 1890 to be reading it for the twentieth time).16 Gissing valued it for its depiction of a supportive artistic community whose men and women engaged in simple, honest relations: it promised an alternative to the restrictive social conventions he found in Britain. We see shades of Roberto and Mimi in the unconventional relationship between Osmond Waymark and Ida Starr in The Unclassed, which begins casually in the street and continues through unchaperoned meetings in Ida’s rooms where the two discuss the books he lends her. Where would Gissing ﬁnd his community? In his novels, the promises of a subversive bohemian London prove to be false when artistic and literary coteries consolidate bourgeois values and/or fortify his protagonists’ isolation as aliens. For sympathetic discourse, Gissing relied instead upon the correspondences of his friends, the German literary critic Eduard Bertz and the self-pronounced bohemian Morley Roberts. The two men each promised Gissing a concrete cenacle; so did the essayist Edith Sichel, whose culture and erudition made her a popular hostess of literati. Through the ﬂighty Roberts, Gissing gained a short-lived entry into an artistic coterie: the two, joined by the naturalist and novelist W. H. Hudson and the painter Alfred Hartley, formed ‘The Quadrilateral’ to meet a few nights each month in one another’s rooms for meals and informal exchanges. Roberts also introduced Gissing to a colony of artists with whom he lived in Chelsea, among them the sculptor Thomas Stirling Lee, whose works were exhibited at the Royal Academy, the painter and engraver A. D. McCormick, and the painter and engraver Frank Brangwyn, who had at one point worked for William Morris.17 Thus on 11 October 1889, Gissing could write with some pride to his sister Ellen, ‘I am making acquaintance with a lot of artists, all struggling men, but some of them well known,’ and report casually to his other sister Margaret, ‘Yesterday, I was in the studio of a sculptor at Chelsea; a number of artists were present.’18 On a short holiday to Italy and Greece in 1889, Gissing found evidence of his optimism about continental ease and artistic solidarity in open-air cafés, where women and children nightly joined the men to drink coffee, eat ices, and listen to music.19 Noting that he himself shed his customary shyness and stiffness in Italy, Gissing dreaded returning to England and solitude. Back in his family home in Wakeﬁeld, Yorkshire in 1890, he found the published diary of the late aristo-

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cratic Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff a source of both invigoration and despair: ‘the cosmopolitan atmosphere of it puts me into feverish unrest.’20 Beginning and abandoning many novels in 1890, he was again plunged into poverty and loneliness. He was desperate for companionship, yet despairing of ever marrying a woman of culture. (Prior to his trip the revelation of Edith Sichel’s vast inheritance had assured him of her unattainability.) Gissing embraced the ideal of marrying – for the second time since his disastrous ﬁrst marriage – an English working girl. During the months that he fatefully met and courted Edith Underwood, Gissing declined invitations to Sichel’s ‘At Homes,’ declaring in his diary, ‘I have sold my dress suit’ and fatalistically assuming that he would always be too poor for society, ‘I suppose I shall never again sit at a civilised table.’21 He moved to Exeter a month later and married Edith in February 1891. A mere two months after, Gissing wrote to Bertz of the dream of a community of scholars and artists: Surely there ought to be Colleges for unmarried intellectual men (or even for married of small means,) where we could dwell much as students do at the University … . The life of a Fellow at Oxford or Cambridge is, I should think, almost ideal. He has his man-servant, his meals either in private or at the public table, an atmosphere of culture & peace. Who will advocate ‘Literary Homes’? [Sir Walter] Besant is just founding an Author’s Club, but this of course does not meet the need. 22 Gissing had no illusions about Besant’s Society of Authors: he recognized it as a ‘society for mutual advertisement’ among lesser writers, including Besant himself and George Moore, whose work he scorned and whose receipts he envied.23 The Society of Authors did not fulﬁll the role of a bohemia because it manifested the consolidation of art with commercial interests and the concession to a reading public who valued the professional novelist for his celebrity.24 Dining at a Society of Authors function in November 1894, Gissing found its members uninspired ‘respectable shopkeepers’; these could not offer him the intense scholarly intimacy of a Reardon and Biffen in New Grub Street, or a Waymark and Casti in The Unclassed.25 But the spring of 1895 marked the opening of new social vistas for Gissing. In May 1895, he joined a Whitsuntide house party at the home of the folklorist, banker, and scientist Edward Clodd in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where he befriended the naturalist and novelist

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Grant Allen and the physician, essayist, and poet Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson. The holiday culminated in Gissing’s composing a poem to commemorate the occasion: seven copies were made, signed by all in the party, and each kept by a participant. But the presence there of his editor, Clement Shorter, shattered the vision of a carefree cenacle oblivious of the market. Shorter used the opportunity to contract Gissing into writing six short stories and 20 sketches before the year’s end, setting in motion a new cycle of anxieties.26 Ironically, it was Shorter who engineered Gissing’s invitation to the July dinner of the Omar Khayyám Club which was the high point of his social life in England. Interestingly, this long-awaited entry into an agreeable literary bohemia coincided with the demise of popular aestheticism. In the same weeks that Gissing had to turn away invitations to people’s homes, received ﬂowers at his home from near-strangers, and learned that fans were purchasing his photos, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to hard labor for committing gross indecencies with other men. Gissing had written the short story ‘The Foolish Virgin’ for The Yellow Book, but when it was published in January 1896, the journal was a transformed, tamer publication. Former contributors now sent their works elsewhere, appalled at the editors’ expulsion of the artist Aubrey Beardsley (who, to his own despair, had been associated in the popular mind with Wilde after illustrating Wilde’s play Salome).27

Gissing’s early Ruskinian aesthetics Gissing was a sympathizer to aestheticism whose career rose as the original Aesthetic Movement declined. He identiﬁed primarily with the ideals of this generation of aesthetes before the Decadence. Writing on 14 February 1884 in response to Ruskin’s lecture at the London Institution, ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,’ Gissing appears both admiring and amused: ‘I would make a chief point of the necessary union between beauty in life and social reform. Ruskin despairs of the latter, & so can only look on by-gone times … . Strange sight, the old fellow standing up … & rebuking his hearers like a Hebrew prophet!’28 ‘He is right in all he says about our civilization. I see that more & more clearly,’ Gissing wrote to his brother, even suggesting that Algernon, who was living in Yorkshire, join Ruskin’s experimental Guild of St George.29 At one point he advised Algernon to pursue the genre of the anti-industrial ‘Ruskin’ essay instead of ﬁction.30 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites had satisﬁed their mentor Ruskin through their meticulous representation of Nature

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and through their early focus on heroic and Christian themes. Just as Rossetti departed from Ruskinian artistic criteria through his choice of increasingly sensuous subjects, so did Gissing gradually gain a distance from a moral aesthetic – an evolution traceable in his correspondence on Ruskin. While reading Modern Painters, Gissing drew back from Ruskin’s ‘theological mode of regarding aesthetic questions.’31 By 1884, he set aestheticism against traditional tenets of Christianity through his account of Maud’s crisis in The Unclassed: ‘her soul in reality was that of an artist, and, whereas the artist should be free from everything like moral prepossession, Maud’s aesthetic sensibilities were in perpetual conﬂict with her moral convictions.’32 Upon encountering Unto This Last, he wrote, ‘His worship of Beauty I look upon as essentially valuable … . Only this I am growing to feel, that the only thing known to us of absolute value is artistic perfection. The ravings of fanaticism – justiﬁable or not – pass away; but the works of the artist, work in what material he will, remain, sources of health to the world.’33 This statement harbors more than one possible meaning. Are the ‘ravings of fanaticism’ supposed to be Ruskin’s? Gissing’s projection of a pure formalism onto Ruskin’s theories seems to imply that Gissing values Ruskin more for his beautiful prose than for the ideas that made Unto This Last a departure from artistic to social criticism. By 1898, Gissing denied Ruskinian artistic criteria altogether in his response to Tolstoy’s ‘What is Art?’: ‘it is conceivable that a great artist should work in a spirit of antagonism to the prevailing religion; to say nothing of the certainty that some forms of art are not concerned with the ethical spirit at all.’34 Gissing had voiced his strongest afﬁrmation of Ruskin’s social vision in his earliest published novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), and with it, his most hopeful assessment of aesthetic education for the laboring classes. Published a mere ﬁve years after the founding of the Kyrle Society for the Diffusion of Beauty among the People and the Sunday Society for extending gallery hours, the novel is saturated in the Ruskinian discourse appropriated and popularized by these institutions. Helen Norman assures Arthur Golding of the social service his paintings will perform: You say that a beautiful picture only pleases its painter and a few rich dilettanti. In appearance it may do no more, but in reality its spirit permeates every layer of society … . nothing in this world is more useful than the beautiful, nothing works so powerfully for the ultimate beneﬁt of mankind. 35

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Because he shuns Hogarthian representations of the poor, the value of Arthur’s work lies in the power of the beautiful to elevate those who see it. ‘No sooner do I take up a pencil,’ Arthur conﬁdes, ‘than I seem to taste all the delights of a higher and nobler existence, where the only food which is yearned after is that of the mind and the heart, and where the joys and sorrows are deeper and purer than those of the every-day world’ (2: 298). Gissing insistently returns to these moralistic terms ‘higher,’ ‘nobler,’ and ‘purer,’ deﬁning ‘true’ art by its delicate other-worldliness, just as he values Helen, its muse, for her ‘loftiness of soul’(1: 177). While Gissing characterizes Arthur’s initial compassion for Carrie in physical terms as ‘blood cours[ing] hot through his veins; his pulses throb[bing],’ in Helen’s presence Arthur feels only vague, disembodied obeisance, ‘a pure devotion of the spirit, a sentiment which called into play the highest energies of his intellect, the noblest impulses of his heart to the exclusion of all ignobler feeling’ (2: 58). Gissing’s vague references to a ‘higher life’ and his heavy-handed religiosity (culminating in Arthur’s rhapsodic entry into that ‘holy of holies,’ the artist Gresham’s studio) draw upon the rhetoric of Ruskinian missionary aestheticism. But Arthur, thwarted by his marriage, is pulled toward exile and suicide, and never puts his paintings to the test that Helen has proposed. Instead, we are left with two versions of cultural dissemination in the novel: Arthur’s attempted education of Carrie, and Helen’s classes for working girls. Their respective trials and triumphs leave the reader with mixed signals about the efﬁcacy of missionary aestheticism. On the one hand, Gissing doubts the potential of widespread aesthetic education when he shows that good pupils are a minority, a disciplined, self-selecting group. Helen succeeds because her students consciously seek bourgeois assimilation, just as Arthur had under Mr Gresham, and as Lucy Venning has under Helen. Arthur’s project obviously fails because Carrie, identifying strongly with her own class, resists the art he offers her. On the other hand, Gissing vouches for the sympathetic process touted by artphilanthropists when he demonstrates that Helen, while she enters the East End to teach literacy, not art appreciation, excels because her manners perform an aesthetic inﬂuence. Helen’s pupils grow ‘gentler,’ ‘more reﬁned,’ and ‘ashamed’ of former vice through her mere presence: ‘from the mere sound of her voice, the radiance of her beauty, [they] conceived ideas of a purer life’ (2: 404).36 Having grown up in a home steeped in ideals of self-improvement and having attended schools whose curricula articulated Arnoldian values, Gissing himself trusted that exposure to culture would produce a ‘purer

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life.’37 His father, a chemist and amateur botanist with cultural aspirations, had served as Honorary Librarian of the Wakeﬁeld Mechanics Institute, a position adopted years later by George Gissing’s brother, Algernon. When Algernon joined the new Wakeﬁeld Literary Society in 1881, Gissing pitied him for the ‘philistines’ with whom he had to deal.38 He urged him to become a man of standing and a benefactor in Wakeﬁeld, ‘For Heaven’s sake, try to show people something of what is meant by Culture,’ adding, ‘One cannot preach thereon like Matthew Arnold, but the force of a quiet example goes in the end very far.’39 If Gissing trusted the personal inﬂuence of cultured individuals, then did he extend this faith to that of free cultural institutions? During his exile into penury after being expelled from Owens College in 1876, Gissing seems to have largely steered clear of free entertainments for the poor. At his poorest and most pressed, Gissing claimed that he lived the life of a hermit, without the time to visit museums, and – in keeping with his aristocratic temperament – too offended by the company in the pit to attend the theater.40 True, upon moving near Regents’ Park in 1884 he did write appreciatively of penny Sunday evening band concerts.41 Yet as a tutor to the children of wealthy parents, Gissing gained access to their ‘At Homes’ as well as to spare money for concert tickets. He set aside the necessary money to view Millais’s work at the Grosvenor Gallery or Leighton’s at the Royal Academy. In 1886–87, while living apart from his ﬁrst wife, Nell, and maintaining her at £1 a week, he managed the occasional half-crown to attend concerts at the Albert Hall and St James Hall, a Wagner opera at Drury Lane, and a Gilbert and Sullivan vehicle at the Savoy. Because he needed to do research for his novels, the new Free Libraries earned more of his gratitude. During his exile in America, he had been impressed with the Boston Public Library; upon returning to England, he sneered that for all the showy zealous gifts to churches, ‘a city like London can’t raise enough money to furnish itself with one good Free Library!’42 In 1882, he nearly justiﬁed a move to Westminster for the sake of being near a newly built Free Library. He often skimped on other expenses in order to subscribe to private libraries like the Grosvenor Gallery Library in 1886, or to join societies like the Devon and Exeter Institution, which maintained its own reading room, and helped decide his move to Exeter in 1891. Early on, Gissing was conscious of literary societies like Frederick James Furnivall’s New Shakspere [sic] Society, and although he held aloof from their petty internal quarrels, special interest in an author like Robert Browning occasionally encouraged his attendance at a lecture.43

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Because he resisted identifying with the working classes, Gissing was not one to attend free art exhibitions such as the Barnetts’ at St Jude’s. Of the opening of the People’s Palace in the East End, Gissing merely observed that it held up trafﬁc on Oxford Street – implicitly stressing his literal place outside it.44 Better no art than the ignominy of receiving free art: Gissing’s responses to the Crystal Palace, memorialized in The Nether World (1889) and his short story ‘Lou and Liz’ (1893) reiterate a Ruskinian distaste at the crowded, noisy pleasures of the masses.45 Gissing’s attitude towards art-philanthropic efforts for the poor seems to have been well summed up by the essayist Edith Sichel. In her Murray’s Magazine article of April, 1888, Sichel, judging Gissing’s novels in the context of Walter Besant’s philanthropic romances, concluded that Gissing was a ‘pessimistic philanthropist’ who advocated bourgeois interventions for the poor only to undercut them as futile.46 When Sichel later solicited his opinion Gissing defended his books as formal works of art, denying that he wrote with a social purpose. ‘The philanthropic movements of the day are nothing to me save as artistic material, and I care not in the least whether my books promote or discourage these efforts.’47 He added, ‘You yourself are active for humane ends.’ Gissing identiﬁed Sichel’s own desire to claim Gissing as a charitable colleague. A member of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, an enthusiast for General Booth’s scheme of transporting the poor, and a visitor and teacher of female inmates at Holloway Gaol, the wealthy Sichel had indeed sought in the ﬁction of Gissing and Besant a conﬁrmation of her own calling. Yet, for all of Gissing’s blustering about art for its own sake, and for all of Sichel’s neglect of his style, she was accurate in spotting the paradoxes in Gissing’s treatment of bourgeois cultural philanthropy. As we see, in the novels that followed Workers in the Dawn, Gissing refused to sanction the tasks of the Helen Normans of the world.

The aesthetic capacity of the poor Paradoxically, Gissing proofread the manuscript of his most gritty and unforgiving novel of working-class life, The Nether World, during his exuberant ﬁrst visit to Italy. While in France en route to Naples, he had already declared himself at a distance from his former subject matter: I experience at present a profound dislike for everything that concerns the life of the people. Paris has even become distasteful to me because I am living in this quarter, in a house thronged with

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working people, and where, to get away, I must always pass through the dirty and swarming streets. All my interest in such things I have left behind in London.48 His next work, The Emancipated (1890), departed radically from the working-class novels through its depiction of an artistic milieu within a leisured middle class and through its location: two-thirds of the novel occurs in Italy. Its central plot documents the aesthetic awakening of a prim ﬁgure, Miriam Baske, who sheds her English puritanism under the inﬂuence of Italian art and nature. ‘Yes, she was beginning to feel the allurement of Italy. Instead of sitting turned away from her windows when musing, she often passed an hour with her eyes on the picture they framed, content to be idle, satisﬁed with form and colour, not thinking at all.’49 As Miriam capitulates to the gifts of her hosts, the temptations of music, books, rest, and fruit, the reader enjoys her newfound pleasures with her and appreciates her growing tolerance, epitomized when Miriam, who had chastened her cousin for playing piano on a Sunday, reads Dante on the Sabbath behind her closed doors. The Emancipated concludes with her pledging her commitment to a bohemian lifestyle in the (ironically domestic) act of laying out tea in her lover’s painting studio. Transﬁgured and improved by her exposure to beauty, Miriam is not alone among Gissing’s heroines: in The Unclassed, Maud Enderby, also a victim of a harsh Evangelical upbringing, undergoes a similar, though short-lived, aesthetic revelation; so does Adela Waltham in Demos (1886). Pointedly, these young women are all bourgeois. Through his novels, letters, and essays, Gissing expressed ambivalence about the potential of art-philanthropy to enact such changes upon the poor. Occasionally, he voiced a hopeful enthusiasm through vignettes within the novels. In Isabel Clarendon, Bernard Kingcote, surveying the work of his friend, realist painter Clement Gabriel, rejoices in a small painting: It was a little girl standing before a shop-window, and looking at an open illustrated paper which was exposed there. The subject was nothing, the pose and character of the child everything. Poor and ragged, she had lost for the moment sense of everything, but the rich and comfortable little maiden displayed in the coloured page; her look was envious, but had more of involuntary admiration.50 In this missionary aesthetic vision, the young girl achieves a short-term transcendence over her material limitations by her exposure to the

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beautiful. Rather than lash out at the comfort of the bourgeoisie, she admires it; she is transformed by an image of what she could be. We ﬁnd a more literal afﬁrmation of the aesthetic’s power to enhance the poor in the conclusion to the early novel, The Unclassed, where former prostitute Ida Starr posits the diffusion of aesthetic sensibility as a practical means towards tenement reform. Echoing the rationale of actual slum reformers, Ida claims an equity between hygienic improvement and aesthetic reﬁnement in her chronicle of the children’s deprivations: ‘No toys, no treats, no change of air; playing in the gutter, never seeing a beautiful thing, never hearing of the pleasures which rich people’s children would pine and die without.’51 As a solution, she hosts a garden party on her own suburban estate, where, in addition to receiving cake and bouquets and enjoying familiar organ music, the children are systematically bathed, provided with new shoes and stockings, and told: ‘I know you’ll feel uncomfortable for a little, dear … but the strangeness will wear off, and you’ll see how much nicer it is’ (274). Thus, ‘a transformed company sat down to tea’ (274). Gissing’s use of gifts in The Unclassed as means of abolishing the degradation of poverty echoes the reductive solutions suggested in philanthropic romances by Walter Besant. Ida acknowledges that there will always be people who resist improvement, but offers an easy answer: as a landlord, she simply pays the undeserving poor to move elsewhere (310). With his intense, almost neurasthenic, repulsion at working-class grammar, and at habits of improvidence, intemperance, and slovenliness (for which he blamed not individuals but whole districts), it is no surprise that Gissing adopted bourgeois reformers’ shortsighted fantasy of ‘cleaning up’ the working classes, so that at the very least, they might be less offensive to his own aesthetic sense. Yet even as she triumphs in tenement reform, Ida Starr shares the page with the pessimist Osmond Waymark, who says, ‘I have come out of [that zeal on behalf of the suffering masses] in proportion as my artistic selfconsciousness has developed’ (212). These mixed messages are signiﬁcant, for around 1885 Gissing appears to have outgrown his infatuation with popular aestheticism and to have questioned his faith in the social uses of aestheticism. Afﬁrmative instances of the aesthetic effecting a change of heart among the laboring classes are exceptions in Gissing. Gissing would not credit the average poor man or woman with the powers of discrimination which could lead to an aesthetic epiphany. In his essay, ‘On Battersea Bridge,’ Gissing despairs at the fact that working-class eyes cannot see what he sees. Standing before a stunning view of the lights

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reﬂected on the surface of the water, Gissing nods to a fellow bystander, a sharer of this moment, and the man turns to him, only to say, ‘Throws up an great deal o’ mud don’t she?’52 Gissing would rewrite this moment into Workers in the Dawn when Carrie, observing the sunset on the Heath, says to her husband, Arthur, to his cringing despair, ‘It’s almost as pretty as the theaytre, isn’t it?’53 Gissing asserted that working people have no love of poetry, that the few aspiring clerks who read it do so as if it were economics or history, with no attention to style.54 He typically wavers between blaming circumstance and biology, describing an afﬁnity for poetry as ‘an outcome of studious leisure’ and ‘a boon of nature, most sparingly bestowed.’55 His socalled reform novels are in fact ‘anti-reform’ novels, because they point to the impossibility of elevating an already blunted, if not brutalized, laboring class. By structuring his plots around a distinctive class of young men, ‘well educated, fairly bred, but without money,’56 Gissing sets them above and apart, insisting that others cannot be trained into wanting, let alone acquiring, culture. Gissing’s protagonists are either sentient exceptions within the working class, or more frequently, displaced intellectuals, fallen bourgeoisie struggling to reclaim their distinction.57 Against the man on Battersea Bridge stand Gissing’s elect ‘upward striving souls’: Gilbert Grail, Arthur Golding, Sidney Kirkwood, Edwin Reardon, Godwin Peak, Julian Casti, and Osmond Waymark. Against Carrie Mitchell, Gissing poses the delicate orphan Thyrza, who trembles at the beauties of nature, appreciates ‘mystery,’ draws a parallel between the way that music and the sea work on her senses, and possesses ‘latent genius’ and an ‘artist’s soul.’58 While Gissing shifts between eliciting our compassion for the poor and horror at their brutality, the reader is always made to commiserate with Gissing’s protagonists in their constant act of recoiling from the vicious antics and vulgarisms of spouses, family members and fellow lodgers. In Born in Exile (1892), Godwin Peak wanders the West End, longing to mix among the wealthy: ‘There were his equals; not in the mean streets where he dwelt. There were the men of culture and capacity, the women of exquisite person and exalted mind. Was he the inferior of such people? By heaven, no!’59 Peak’s assertion of equality is not a bid to upset the social order, but to join its elite as an acknowledged, however unmonied, ‘aristocrat of nature’s own making.’60 ‘Of mere wealth he thought not; might he only be recognised by the gentle of birth and breeding for what he really was, and be rescued from the promiscuity of the vulgar!’61 To claim that aristocracy of intellect

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always means renouncing one’s neighbors and actively afﬁrming one’s exile. In The Unclassed, Osmond Waymark gratefully adopts Julian Casti as a fellow comrade in discontent, and declares their weekly meetings a refuge from East End coarseness: ‘You know what it is to have to do exclusively with fools and brutes, to rave under the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings!’62 While the energetic Waymark raves, Gissing’s more passive protagonists, including Casti himself, respond to that propinquity to the poor through neurasthenic symptoms. In Isabel Clarendon, Kingcote, calling on his newly widowed sister, responds physiologically to the tasteless adornments of the parlor and the landlady who has put them there. Kingcote looked around him in despair. His nerves were so unstrung that he feared lest he should break into tears. Every sensitive chord of his frame was smitten into agony by the mingled sensations of this arrival; rage which put him beside himself still predominated, and the smell from the kitchen, the objects about him, the sound of the woman’s voice which would not leave his ears, stirred him to a passion of loathing. His very senses rebelled; he felt sick, faint. 63 In mere anticipation of the precious aesthetic refuge offered him through a librarianship, Gilbert Grail goes ‘hot and cold alternately, and tremble[s] as though a fever were coming upon him.’ 64 In Workers in the Dawn, Arthur Golding likewise reacts to the East End streets as a neurasthenic: ‘He became by degrees nervously sensitive to unusual noises; sometimes an unexpected touch when he was passing along the street would cause him to start violently.’65 Just as he does with Arthur, Gissing attributes Kingcote’s prejudices to his ‘intellect and temperament,’ the ‘reﬁnement and idealism of his nature.’66 If we consider this equation between ‘intellect’ and ‘temperament,’ then the assertion of a natural hierarchy of classes voiced by one of his protagonists may be Gissing’s own: ‘So long as nature doles out the gift of brains in different proportions, there must exist social subordination.’67 Just as Gissing renders Arthur Golding’s aesthetic astuteness, moral superiority and physical delicacy mutually contingent, he synthesizes his workers’ aesthetic bluntness with their moral and biological failings by using the same Ruskinian terms and constructions. When in Demos he unveils the working-class Richard Mutimer as ‘a man whose thought was devoid of delicacy, who had again and again proved

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himself without understanding of the principles of honour,’ Gissing assumes an equity between delicacy (reﬁned expression, form) and honour (intent, content). 68 Gissing argues that Richard Mutimer abuses Adela and Emma because nature has not biologically endowed him with sympathetic resources – at the same time, Gissing implies a better education might have curbed Mutimer’s viciousness. Gissing ascribes working-class brutality to a lack of imagination, which he ambiguously claims both as a ‘gift of nature and irrespective of circumstances’ and as a result of ‘intellectual training.’69 Walter Egremont, lecturing on literature and culture to the labor aristocracy in Thyrza, comprehends his obstacles: This reading [on the Elizabethan period] brought him face to face with his main difﬁculty: how to create in men a sense which they do not possess. The working man does not read, in the strict sense of the word; ﬁction has little interest for him, and of poetry he has no comprehension whatever; your artisan of brains can study, but he cannot read … . Was it possible to bestow this sense of intellectual beauty? With what earnestness he made the endeavour! He took sweet passages of prose and verse, and read them with all the feeling and skill he could command. ‘Do you yield to that?’ he said within himself as he looked from face to face. ‘Are your ears hopelessly sealed, your minds immutably earthen?’70 Egremont ascribes Gilbert Grail’s unusual aesthetic sensibility to Grail’s discipline, assuming that all people begin with the same materials. This conveys an idealism that all members of the working class can be taught. In contrast, Gissing does not attribute Thyrza’s superiority over the average working girl to her after-hours study, but to biology: her mother was a schoolteacher. Like Oliver Twist, Thyrza has a pre-history that has shielded her from acquiring working-class speech and manners. The various innate degrees of aesthetic capacity throughout the ranks of working people seem determined and unsurpassable, a point Gissing returns to through his recurring images of Gilbert and Thyrza as the elect. When Thyrza conﬁdes to Grail, ‘There was something she played, Gilbert, that told just what I felt when I ﬁrst saw the sea. Do you know what I mean? Does music ever seem to speak to you in that way?’ and Gissing conﬁrms it several pages later through Grail’s rapture during the concert, the implicit idea is that their friends do not, cannot, share their rareﬁed world of discernment.71

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The dangers of discontent In Thyrza, Egremont doubts the possibility of teaching culture to the blunt-minded; Gissing doubted the long-term psychological beneﬁts of it to the sharpest working-class pupil. He was witness to bourgeois paternalists and socialists who preached an education in discontent as a means of guiding the poor towards self-help and embourgeoisement, or toward class-consciousness and socialism, respectively. In Demos, when Hubert Eldon tells Adela, ‘I think it very unlikely that the majority will ever be ﬁt for anything else [but being fed, clothed and employed]. I know that at present they desire nothing else,’ she replies adamantly, ‘Then they must be taught to desire more.’72 Working from his own experience, Gissing found the bourgeoisie’s proposed education in discontent troubling, and he showed it by depicting sensitive, poor men who learn to perceive the ugliness of their surroundings, but who, helpless in the face of their penury, succumb to depression instead of self-motivation. A mood of futile discontent prevails in Gissing’s novels, and he calls it by name. Kingcote, desiring Mrs Clarendon, but thwarted by his poverty from achieving her, conﬁdes, ‘I dread discontent, I dread the ideal.’ 73 In Eve’s Ransom (1895), the young men of Mason College are said to learn ‘a variety of things, including discontent with a small income.’74 Of course, Gissing speaks of himself when he imagines a generation of ‘unhappy men and women whom unspeakable cruelty endows with intellectual needs whilst refusing them the sustenance they are taught to crave.’75 This is why Kingcote in Isabel Clarendon would not teach country children of progress: learning, he says, is a curse if you are born to labor.76 If bourgeois paradigms of educations-in-discontent paved the way for poor men’s despondency, then Gissing believed that socialist educations-in-discontent misled gullible workers into violence. In the early novel Workers in the Dawn, the character Will Noble echoes William Morris’s tenets when he exhorts his workingman’s club ‘We must get taught!’ to prompt the founding of its own lending library.77 But Gissing more often deﬁned socialism by the manifestations he witnessed of it – soapbox harangues in the park, crowds whom he perceived as mobs – and he distrusted where such lessons in discontent might lead working people.78 Following the demise of Mutimer’s socialist colony in Demos, the vicar Mr Wyvern regrets that it has taught the locals discontent. Gissing depicts this dissatisfaction not as productive agitation, but through the example of a son who deserts his unfortunate father

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to become the ‘revolutionary oracle of Belwick pothouses’ and to be imprisoned regularly for drunkenness and disorderliness.79

Culture for the cosmopolitan In Demos, Wyvern, a former slum-priest, justiﬁes deserting the task of social reform through the twin ideas that the poor are content with their lot and are incapable of sensitive feeling. Go along the poorest street in the East End of London and you will hear as much laughter, witness as much gaiety, as in any thoroughfare of the West. Laughter and gaiety of a miserable kind? I speak of it as relative to the habits and capabilities of the people. A being of superior intelligence regarding humanity with an eye of perfect understanding would discover that life was enjoyed every bit as much in the slum as in the palace.80 Through Wyvern, Gissing resorts to a specious logic as a means of denying the need for art-philanthropy or even more, the socialist education that would prompt economic restructuring. Gissing reasons that as a fellow victim of ‘progress,’ the educated, cultured man endures as much mental anguish as the poor man suffers physical pain: thus, ‘happiness is very evenly distributed among all classes and conditions.’81 Wyvern justiﬁes keeping the poor ignorant by sympathizing with the pain education would cause them. Curiously, Gissing attributes Wyvern’s passivity and distance from the masses to an epiphanal trip to Italy. ‘[D]uring those two years, I educated myself,’ says Wyvern.82 Wyvern’s previous aims to ameliorate the conditions of the poor appear incongruous with his acquisition of Culture. As early as the novel Workers in the Dawn, Gissing had contrasted the nobler art instincts of the protagonists Arthur Golding and Helen Norman against the narrowness and lack of imagination of professional reformers Will Noble and Mr Heatherly, implying that a person of true culture will ﬁnd social programs overwhelmingly constraining and prosaic.83 In this way, Gissing assumed a conﬂict between an authentic appreciation for beauty and reformers’ desires to improve the lot of the poor. In Demos, Gissing discredits the socialist Richard Mutimer, not merely by contriving Mutimer’s gross lust for personal power, but also by exploiting his aesthetic insensitivity. Mutimer fails to conceive of any value aside from practical material worth. When he weighs Adela’s graces against Emma’s, Gissing mocks him, ‘Metamorphosis! Richard

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Mutimer speculates on aesthetic problems’– for here Mutimer is not a disinterested spectator (in a Kantian sense), but compares the two women to see which as a spouse would better serve his public image.84 Mutimer and his socialism are tainted by their association with ugly industrialism, manifested through his model mining community, New Wanley. The great irony here is that, to serve his own purposes, Gissing ignores the fact that laissez faire capitalism, not cooperative socialism, was to blame for the despoilment of the British countryside.85 Mutimer’s bumbling, ultimately destructive social impulses are a foil against the triumph of Hubert Eldon’s private Renaissance. Given the obvious material advantages that New Wanley offers the average worker, how does Gissing reconcile Eldon’s defense of the pastoral estate on merely aesthetic grounds? At ﬁrst, Hubert Eldon extends his aesthetic appreciation of a vista into a discourse on ecological responsibility. But he later defends his stance on the grounds of personal feeling. I care little to make my position logically sound. The ruling motive in my life is the love of beautiful things; I ﬁght against ugliness because it’s the only work in which I can engage with all my heart. I have nothing of the enthusiasm of humanity … . I take the standpoint of the wholly unpractical man, and say that such efforts [at improving workers’ lives] do not concern me. From my point of view, no movement can be tolerated which begins with devastating the earth’s surface. You will clothe your workpeople better, you will give them better food and more leisure; in doing so, you will injure the class that has ﬁner sensibilities, and give power to the class which not only postpones everything to material wellbeing, but more and more regards intellectual reﬁnement as an obstacle in the way of progress.86 There is a hint of the dandy in Eldon’s unashamed impracticality, his disregard for others, and his defense of the conditions that gratify his own elite sensibility. (As a discriminating consumer he has said to Mutimer, ‘You are changing the appearance of the valley … . I prefer Nature’ (71).) While Mutimer shortsightedly values only the ‘essentials of life,’ Eldon the aristocrat subordinates these concerns as ‘the mere brute foundation of [his] artistic superstructure’ (70). Gissing uses the destruction of the valley and Eldon’s plea for it as metonymic means of illuminating Adela’s natural bond with him, her joint claim to that ‘artistic superstructure’ of taste and moral loftiness. Using the valley as

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a symbol, they refer to their innate love of the aesthetic in encoded, general terms. ‘I believe I understand your feeling. Indeed you explained it to me yesterday.’ ‘I explained it?’ ‘In what you said about the works in the valley.’ (94) Gissing celebrates the reclamation of the countryside by Eldon at the end of the novel through an unapologetic pastoralism, ‘The valley rest[s]’; ‘pollutions’ are ‘swept away’; thrushes sing; one can breathe deeply of ‘country air’ without the ‘desecration’ of ‘fumes’; there grows ‘green and ﬂowery life’ (375, 461). Underpinning Gissing’s veneration of an older Britain is a Disraeli-like ideological advocacy of Tory feudalism. Gissing has anticipated this faith in traditional hierarchies through Mutimer’s unintentional admiration of Hubert Eldon and his innate gentility (70). Gissing heightens the incompatibility of communitarianism and high culture through his account of Hubert Eldon’s private aesthetic education, one that echoes and magniﬁes that which we glimpse of Wyvern. Just as Gissing posits Hubert Eldon’s reﬁnement as the result of both a good English education and evolutionary biology, he also conﬁrms his identiﬁcation and sanction of Eldon through Eldon’s alliances with an older European culture. Once rejected by Adela, Eldon ﬂees to Rome, where in his despair he studies art. Eldon expresses his adoration of Adela by penning Dante-esque love-sonnets, these signifying a renunciation of his former earthly infatuations in favor of an ‘ecstasy of the spirit’ (170). Gissing uses this interlude once again to measure a character’s moral righteousness by his artistic endeavors. Hubert Eldon reads avidly on the arts, ‘because it was his nature to be in pursuit of some excellence’ (169). That ‘excellence’ is left deliberately vague, so as to allude to intellectual and moral aspirations in addition to artistic ones. Having renounced ﬂeshly love, Eldon still has an aesthete’s desire for fresh, original forms of life, for it is his nature as well to ‘scorn mere acquiescence in a life of everyday colour’ (169). When Eldon returns to England, he writes critical articles on art, allying himself with aesthetic circles when he reviews a Grosvenor Gallery exhibit (291). As we have seen, Gissing has granted this cosmopolitan subjectivity to the Rev. Wyvern as well and endows it as the basis for the men’s social vision, including their cynicism about social progress. While retaining a nostalgic model of Tory paternalism

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(socialism threatens to set ‘the vassal against his lord’), Gissing moves away from Ruskin to embrace an aesthetic independent of the commiseration that would abet social reform (386).

Middle-class female aesthetic education as decadence Like many of his contemporaries, Gissing associated practicing aesthetes with the manifestations of lifestyle aestheticism and was also well aware of a tradition of satirizing the aesthete. An enthusiast for Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas throughout his life, Gissing viewed their 1881 satire on aestheticism, Patience, twice in 1882. He approved his sister Margaret’s partiality to it, ‘[I] should like to hear to hear you play and sing it.’87 He also worked the opera into Isabel Clarendon by having the demi-aesthete Hilda Meres persuade Ada to join her in songs from it.88 Upon seeing Oscar Wilde at an art lecture in 1887, he regretted that Wilde had adopted more conventional clothes and had cut his hair.89 Gissing satirized the affectations of drawing room aesthetic poseurs like the untalented painter Clifford Marsh in The Emancipated (1890) and his companions, the Denyer daughters, who claim to adore Italy and show it through pretenses at study and through fatuous declarations in incorrect Italian. Gissing alludes to the aesthete’s devotion to Eastern exoticism as well through scattered hints. In The Odd Women, Everard Barfoot has lived ‘two or three years in Japan.’90 In Isabel Clarendon, Vincent Lacour proposes that he and his ﬁancée, Ada, settle in the East, envisioning himself among orange groves, hookah in hand, in the dreamy ease that he says best suits his temperament.91 The protagonist of Gissing’s novel Denzil Quarrier (1892), reﬂecting on a friend’s days ‘collecting pictures, playing the ﬁddle, [and] gazing at sunﬂowers,’ remarks, ‘Well, he’s rather womanish I suppose.’92 ‘Don’t imagine … that I am what is called an aesthete …’ ‘Oh … True, you don’t let your hair grow, and in general make an ass out of yourself; but there’s a good deal of preciosity about you, you know.’93 Gissing could and did laugh at aesthetes and their affectations, but he was also disturbed by them. Denzil Quarrier shifts from light satire when the precious aesthete casually sets about to ruin his best friend; the scheme was ‘something that his fancy had often played with,’ and he pursues it to gratify his aesthetic curiosity.94 Beginning with his 1886 novel Isabel Clarendon, Gissing rewrote nearly all practical teachers of beauty in his later novels on the middle class as scheming dandies who profess an immoral escapism.95 With

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this, Gissing resurrected his former Ruskinian criteria for a healthful art while undermining all art-schemes for mass improvement, reasoning that all practical aestheticism had given way to the Decadence.96 His determined renunciation of it was represented in miniature by Gissing’s few responses to Wilde. Gissing was amused by Wilde’s costume and mannerisms in the early 1880s, but upon the trials, horriﬁed by revelations of his homosexuality.97 While they are not sexual ‘inverts,’ the men in Gissing’s novels who voice Decadent precepts are nearly always morally reprehensible and dangerous to others. In The Whirlpool (1897), the millionaire aesthete Cyrus Redgrave urges the amateur violinist Alma Frothingham to opt for hedonism over the custom of stinting in a seedy Bohemian ﬂat. ‘[T]o be a great artist, one must have more than technical qualiﬁcations. It’s the soul that must be developed… through experience of life … . Experience means emotion; certainly, for a woman. Believe me, you haven’t begun to live yet … . Variety of life, travel, all sorts of joys and satisfactions – these are the things you need … . The springs of art are in the old world. Among the vines and the olives one hears a voice. I must really try to give you some idea of my little place at Riva.’ He began a playful description – long, but never tedious; alluring, yet without enthusiasm – a dreamy suggestion of reﬁned delights and luxuries. ‘I have another place in the Pyrenees, to suit another mood …’98 (Just as J. K. Huysmans’s Decadent hero, Des Esseintes, in A Rebours [1884] uses his pipe organ to produce manifold fragrances, Redgrave endows each of his Italian properties with attributes suiting different whims.) In terms echoing Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891), Gissing describes Alma’s passive responsiveness as a listener, ‘These phrases harmonised well enough with her own insubstantial thoughts and idly-gathered notions.’99 No wonder then that Alma’s declaration, ‘I should hate to die with the thought that I hadn’t really lived myself out,’ anticipates her over-giddy, neurasthenic life and suicide.100 The Odd Women and Isabel Clarendon each feature dandies marked by their languor and grace. Shunning a life of social usefulness, The Odd Women’s Everard Barfoot asks, ‘Isn’t the spectacle of existence quite enough to occupy one through a lifetime?’ and proposes in its stead ‘an inﬁnite series of modes of living. A ceaseless exercise of all one’s

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faculties of pleasure.’101 Vincent Lacour in Isabel Clarendon shares Barfoot’s avowed aimlessness and uselessness (‘I’m like a piece of seaweed; my condition is dependent on the weather’), as well as his life’s aim of discriminative consumption.102 Lacour tells Ada Warren upon meeting her: I’m something of an artist in my way. I can’t paint, and I can’t write, but I believe I have the artist’s way of looking at things. I live on reﬁnements of sensation – you know what I mean? There’s nothing good or valuable in me; I’ve no moral force; I’m just as selﬁsh as I can be; but I have a sort of delicacy of perception, I discriminate in my likings … . I haven’t lived a life of vulgar dissipation; I have not debased myself. My senses are ﬁner edged than they were, instead of being dulled and coarsened.103 If Everard Barfoot reminds us of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s seductive Lord Henry Wotton in his aim to beguile Rhoda Nunn, then his scheme is somewhat balanced by Rhoda’s counter-objective of bringing him to propose.104 Vincent Lacour conforms more to the stereotype of a dangerous dandy. In The Odd Women the jealous husband Edmund Widdowson mistakes Barfoot’s meeting with his wife Monica at the Academy for an assignation. In contrast, in Isabel Clarendon, Lacour spontaneously seduces Ada at the South Kensington, directly after guiding his all-but-betrothed Rhoda Meres on the same tour. Lacour is, as he says, ‘something of an artist’: his province is that of seduction. Just as he uses his art criticism as a means for self-advertisement, so he uses art education as a means of sexual conquest. [H]e spoke of the artistic instincts which made the basis of his nature, and went on to sketch a plan of aesthetic education, such as he hoped some day to carry into effect. The unction of his selfﬂattery was irresistible; to listen was to become insensibly as interested in him as he was in himself. The mere quality of his voice was insinuating, seductive and delicately sensual, and the necessity of speaking low when strangers were at hand gave him the advantage of intimate notes and cadences.105 Lacour breathes an allure into his critiques by a voice that dangerously ‘caresses the ear’ and by the vague suggestiveness of his comments (‘ambiguities which might or might not be intentional.’)106 When Rhoda Meres later confronts him with his inﬁdelity, Lacour, with all

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the consciousness of one who lives his life as art, chastises her for ‘mak[ing] a ﬂaw in what dramatists call the situation.’107

Half-educations In the previous section, I alluded to middle-class women who are seduced by the aesthetic rhetoric of scheming dandies. We cannot compare the acquiescence of these privileged women to that of the working classes subject to missionary aesthetic programs in Gissing’s novels. But the two groups do share a distinct vulnerability that Gissing believes prevents each from acquiring true aesthetic elevation: poor education. Middle-class women like Cecily Doran in The Emancipated and Alma Frothingham in The Whirlpool are debilitated before each novel’s action by trendy and inadequate schooling, which leaves them vulnerable to the wiles of aesthetic fortune-hunters and adventurers. ‘Miss Doran has no prejudices, and, in the vulgar sense of the word, no principles … . I am not sure that she knows much about Shakespeare, but her appreciation of Baudelaire is exquisite,’ Mallard says sardonically of his ward prior to her elopement.108 If we dismiss for a moment Gissing’s occasional assertion of the poor’s biological incapacity to acquire taste, then all hope of improving the poor lies in educating them. In an early Comtean phase, Gissing had trusted that Positivists could effect a popular improvement in this way.109 After breaking from Comte, his reﬂections grew inconsistent. Although Arthur Golding in Workers ﬁnds the savage Pettidunds irredeemable (‘To attempt to inﬂuence these people by any powers of example or persuasion, which an individual could exercise, he saw at once would be a waste of time’), he clutches at that last straw of the bourgeois: hope in generational education and ‘the agency of time.’110 In The Unclassed, Ida similarly grooms the children, because ‘the parents could not be reformed.’111 More fatalistically, Thyrza dramatizes the despair of a parent who glimpses ‘hereditary weakness and danger’ instead of promise in his son, and The Nether World offers a social Darwinistic vision of the Clem Peckovers of the future lording it over an ever-reproducing multitude of sickly Pennyloafs.112 Gissing denied that education could work extensive social improvements: in a letter of 1889, he wrote of the utopian writer, Edward Bellamy, ‘[Such] men postulate too great a change in human nature.’113 As Gissing saw it, the efforts of a few adherents to Ruskin could not compete against the temperament of the age. In anticipation of universal male suffrage, the 1870 Education Act had promised a free

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education to all British citizens. Gissing blamed the giddy, acquisitive spirit of the 1890s – everything from the cold pragmatism of conﬁdence men to the visual whirl of advertising to the noise and vulgarity of Bank Holiday crowds – on the inﬂuences of the state educational program. He also saw that insufﬁcient education had long existed in middle-class private schooling and in the older Anglican National Schools. Through such terms as ‘sham education,’ ‘half education,’ and ‘quarter education,’ Gissing addressed what he perceived as their omission, a grounding in ethical humanism. Repeatedly in his later novels and short stories, the crimes that characters commit have been determined by their ﬂawed education. In ‘A Son of the Soil,’ the rural laborer Jonas Clay abandons his mother for London, with the money that would have covered his rent and aided her livelihood. Upon learning of her death years later, he laughs. Of the teaching that led Clay to this barbarism, Gissing writes: His education, in the real sense, he owed to a powerful but unacknowledged instructor, the Spirit of the Age. Hence his discontent with everything about him, his thorough dishonesty, his blurred, gaslight vision of a remote world. Certain well-meaning persons had given him ‘religious teaching,’ that is to say, had laboriously brought him to the repetition of phrases he did not understand, to which he attached no particular signiﬁcance whatever. He could not name the ﬂowers by the wayside; no one had ever thought of teaching him that. He did not know – he did not hear – the bird that sang to him at his work; no one had ever spoken to him of such triﬂes. He was aware, by consequences, that the sun rose and set; but never had he consciously looked at its setting or its rising; for all that Jonas thought about it, the sky might have lowered in perpetual leadenness … . Old enough to do a man’s work, he had nothing of a man’s pride in it; no sense of a man’s duties and lawful claims, no impulse of manhood save the ﬂeshly.114 Gissing cites as integral parts of a humanistic education an appreciation and understanding of the beautiful, typiﬁed by botany, and recognition of other natural wonders: a bird singing, the sun rising and setting. Had Jonas’s education alerted him to these, he presumably would have seen the world and his place in it with a clearer moral vision: he would have respected himself, and in turn, have acted on his own ﬁlial responsibilities. Without a Ruskinian moral and aesthetic imperative, such education teaches brutality.

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Like Clay, the middle-class characters of In the Year of Jubilee (1894), fed on bywords and adages, are as arrogant as they are morally bankrupt. Ada Peachey and the French sisters ‘all declared – and believed – that they “knew French.” Beatrice had “done” Political Economy; Fanny had ‘been through’ Inorganic Chemistry and Botany. The truth was, of course, that their minds, characters, propensities, had remained absolutely proof against such educational inﬂuence as had been brought to bear upon them.’115 Indeed, Gissing, attributing the study of Political Economy to Beatrice, ironically anticipates the cooperative enterprise by which she defrauds her own friends. While no one in Jubilee is free from educational pretenses, these are epitomized in the ‘prophet’ Samuel Barmby, who is almost Dickensian in his pompousness. Gissing satirizes Barmby as a mouthpiece of disseminative ‘culture,’ even referring to Barmby’s membership in the Sunday League for rational recreations. Barmby tours the Jubilee with Nancy Lord: I’m afraid we haven’t made much progress in Art. – Now what would Ruskin say to this kind of thing? The popular taste wants educating. My idea is that we ought to get a few leading men – Burne-Jones and – and William Morris – and people of that kind, you know, Miss Lord, – to give lectures in a big hall on the elements of Art. (60) That ‘and … and’ before citing William Morris signiﬁes a hesitation; Barmby does not know the artists at all. Nor has he read Ruskin, since he gathers all of his information second-hand through newspapers. Barmby’s pride compounds the falsity of his learning. A fountain of trivial data, he lectures on hackneyed topics like ‘National Greatness: Its Obligations and Dangers’ and ‘The Age of Progress – in Relation to the Press’ before his club of equally shallow, self-consciously selfimproving young men. While Gissing had depicted the earnestness and intellectual capacity of artisan circles in Workers in the Dawn, he has nothing but contempt for this club (193). Barmby and his friends do not challenge the system, but recreate it in miniature by echoing the paternalistic, snobbish platitudes of the class that ‘taught’ them. Hence, Barmby can say to Nancy Lord, ‘we who enjoy advantages of education, of culture, ought not to allow [the people] to remain in darkness. It isn’t for our own interest, most decidedly it isn’t’ (60). This conservative desire to use art as a means of keeping the workers in line anticipates Barmby’s later politics of establishing authority over Nancy

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once he knows of her secret marriage and gratuitously humbling her through the pretense of protecting her. Near the conclusion to the 1897 novel, The Whirlpool, Gissing’s Harvey Rolfe ponders his options for his own son’s instruction, admitting that he would like nothing better than for his son to be out of the frays of commercial speculation and Society. ‘Anything old-fashioned, unadventurous, happily obscure; a country parson, perhaps, best of all … . If I followed my instincts, I should make the boy unﬁt for anything but the quietest, obscurest life. I should make him hate a street, and love the ﬁelds. I should teach him to despise every form of ambition; to shrink from any kind of pleasure, but the simplest and purest …’116 But then Rolfe reconsiders: The best kind of education would be that which hardened his skin and blunted his sympathies. What right have I to make him sensitive? The thing is, to get through life with as little suffering as possible. What monstrous folly to teach him to wince and cry out at the sufferings of other people! Won’t he have enough of his own before he has done? Yet that’s what we shall aim at – to cultivate his sympathetic emotions, so that the death of a bird shall make him sad, and the sight of human distress wring his heart. Real kindness would try to make of him a healthy rufﬁan, with just enough conscience to keep him from crime.117 As a sensitive father who has suffered the capriciousness of both Society and the commercial whirlpool Society thrives on, Rolfe is further encouraged to groom his son to meet the ‘brute savagery’ – the Jonas Clays – of the twentieth century, of whom Rolfe gains a prescience when he reads Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads (1892) at the novel’s conclusion. Rolfe idealistically sets up a Ruskinian equity between aesthetics and conscience, a love of the beautiful (again, in the form of pastoral ﬁelds) and a sympathy for the oppressed. Yet Rolfe cynically casts this traditional gentleman’s education aside on the grounds that it will render his boy ‘unﬁt’– an appropriate term in the context of 1890s jingoism and social Darwinism, as afﬁrmed by Kipling’s doctrine of aggressive bodily vigor. Rolfe might also serve here as a mouthpiece for Gissing’s own educational concerns for his sons, Walter and Alfred, whom he sought to rescue from the vulgarizing inﬂuence, and in Walter’s case, the physical cruelty of their mother Edith Underwood. On the one hand, he resolved in a letter to H. G. Wells, ‘I shall do my best to bring up my boys in a spirit of

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savage egotism’; on the other, Gissing nevertheless encouraged young Walter in the gentle pursuits of collecting ﬂowers and studying botany.118 One would not equate Gissing’s hope for his own sons with his own attitude towards the potential ‘improvement’ of the working classes. But the link between the two is Gissing’s reluctance to relinquish the Ruskinian values of aesthetic and moral cultivation, even as he admits their futility in the face of commercial competition and a widespread cheapening of ethical values. He asserts the impossibility of putting Ruskinian ideals into practice when he observes that because the middle and upper classes are reading the same trash as the masses, high culture itself has suffered a leveling down. As Gissing argues, those missionaries who self-consciously seek to teach culture to the poor, rather than having proﬁted intellectually from the advantages of leisure, have suffered social contamination by association with fashionable Society. In his ﬁnal novels, he further illustrates that self-proclaimed disciples of Ruskin in the 1890s are themselves half-educated. In the last pages of The Whirlpool, Harvey Rolfe reads of a proposal for ‘a series of lectures, specially adapted to such a [female, workingclass] audience, on subjects of literary and artistic interest’ and learns that ‘Mrs Hugh Carnaby … dwelt on the monotony of the lives of decent working-class women, and showed how much they would be beneﬁted by being brought into touch with the intellectual movements of the day.’119 Rolfe’s response, ‘Splendid idea,’ must be taken as sarcastic, because Gissing has already maligned Mrs Carnaby as adulterous and vengeful. When Rolfe adds of the new aesthetic program, ‘Any one who knows anything of the West End working-class woman will be sure to give it warm support,’ his allusion to the West End hints at Sybil Carnaby’s conceptual distance from and perhaps total ignorance of the suffering poor in the East End.120 All art in the novel, including this phase of charitable art, is tainted by its connection with treacherous fashionable society. Nowhere are the philanthropic ﬂaws of pride and inordinate zeal more vividly associated with the bourgeois cultural mission than in May Tomalin, Gissing’s razor-sharp parody of the Kyrle girl in the novel Our Friend the Charlatan (1901). An adherent of a society ‘for extending civilization among the ignorant and the neglected,’ and selfsatisﬁed following her stint at London University, she persuades a ‘shockingly poor’ family of four living in two rooms to give an hour a day to her gift-copy of the William Langland’s medieval poem Piers

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Plowman (1360–99).121 She is conﬁdent that the edition has ‘excellent notes,’ and she confesses her ultimate intention of ‘set[ing] them a little examination paper, very simple of course’ (154). Through Miss Tomalin, Gissing combines and ridicules the central tenets of Octavia Hill’s missions: the C.O.S.’s criminalization of indiscriminate philanthropy and the Kyrle Society’s faith in art’s inspiriting inﬂuence. The other day I went, on the business of our society, into a dreadfully poor home, where the people, I’m sure, often suffer from hunger. I couldn’t give money – for one thing I have very little, and then it’s so demoralizing, and one never knows whether the people will be offended – but I sat down and told the poor woman all about the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and you can’t think how interested she was, and how grateful! It quite brightened the day for her. One felt one had done some good. (154–5, original italics) It is clear whom this arrangement pleases, a point further supported by May’s determination to inﬂict classical music on the poor while knowing that it will bore them. ‘We want to train their intelligence,’ says Miss Tomalin, ‘We have to show them how bad and poor their taste is, that they may strive to develop a higher and nobler’ (155). Her statement, ‘We have no right whatever to live in enjoyment of our privileges and pay no heed to those less fortunate,’ seems plausible until one reads the self-aggrandizing, colonizing rhetoric with which she follows it: ‘Every educated person is really a missionary, whose duty it is to go forth and spread the light’ (154). For all her pedantry, May Tomalin is marked by her emotionalism and her tendency to babble. Growing out of two decades’ tension between Gissing’s Ruskinian ideal and the pragmatic pessimism that has undermined his faith in its practicability, May Tomalin embodies Gissing’s culminated bitterness towards the practitioners of missionary aestheticism. He seems to argue that their complacency and complicity with the degrading values of the 1890s have debased Ruskin’s humanistic aesthetic.

Conclusion: Gissing and the decadent epiphany Gissing echoed Ruskin’s belief that art could redeem one, but unlike Ruskin, he felt art offered one transcendence only so long as one refrained from trying to inﬂuence others with it or convert others to it. Ultimately, the act of ‘practicing’ aestheticism in public sullied it. What solution did Gissing embrace, then, knowing that aesthetic

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inﬂuence was itself manipulative? Gissing returned to the assumption that the beautiful occupies a pure place apart from social intercourse – and in this way, he opted for art as an escape from others. Though Pater as a subject does not pervade his letters or journal, Gissing had apparently responded enthusiastically to some aspects of Pater’s aesthetics in the mid-1880s. In one of many letters of 1885–86 urging his sisters to aspire to culture, he quoted from Marius the Epicurean, translating a descriptive passage on Marius’s progress into a didactic one.122 He encouraged his sisters (whose piety he found provincial and constraining) to use artistic discrimination to escape into a realm where they could ignore the ugly for the beautiful. Being a student of culture required more than rote study: ‘It is monstrous to go through the world blind amid such glorious things on every hand,’ he wrote to Ellen, adding some weeks later when she had lost a potential governess job, ‘try hard after the art of living in the Present.’123 To rouse Margaret from her melancholy, he urged her: ‘To lose oneself, is a great thing, – lose oneself in study of outward objects.’124 Admiring Pater’s literary style, he had copied the passage from Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) on the Mona Lisa (‘La Giaconda’) into his commonplace book in 1880. It is through his relation to Italy that Gissing best demonstrates strong leanings toward Pater over those towards Ruskin and Morris. For Gissing, an ardent classicist, the social ideals embodied in Ruskin’s Gothic (and admittedly, the luxuries and complex personalities of Pater’s Renaissance) paled in comparison to the austere mysteries of Magna Graecia.125 In his letters home during his ﬁrst trip to Italy in 1888–89, he claims his preference for the south of Italy. Although he toured Venice with Ruskin in mind (he had picked up cheap American reprints of Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence [1875] and St Mark’s Rest [1877–84] in Rome), he found Christian art ‘deadly uninteresting.’126 ‘I have been taught in these days how intensely classical are my sympathies,’ he concluded.127 On holiday in 1897, rather than return to Rome and Venice, Gissing visited Calabria – a choice that expressed his classical bent and fulﬁlled his inadvertent, one might say perverse, gravitation towards the marginalized. Nineteenth-century Calabria was considered the ‘heart of darkness’ of Italy, undeveloped, the home of an illiterate peasant populace, feared by Neapolitans for its fever, and lacking in decent accommodations for the stray visitor. On this holiday, Gissing slept in ﬁlthy hovels and suffered from the food and wine, which he deemed inedible and poisonous. Yet, despite its scattered critiques of modern industrialism and money-grubbing and matter-of-fact recordings of his

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foul lodgings, By the Ionian Sea (1901), Gissing’s travel book about his Calabrian journey, resembles Pater’s work both in intent and style. Just as Pater’s Child in the House pleases himself by reliving the sensations he has stored in memory, Gissing seeks a similar personal emotional fulﬁllment on this pilgrimage to ‘relive’ what he has read and pictured as a boy. He writes at the start of the journey: Every man has his intellectual desire; mine is to escape life as I know it and dream myself into that old world which was the imaginative delight of my childhood. The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others; they make me young again, and restore the keen impressions of that time when every new page of Greek or Latin was a new perception of things beautiful. The world of the Greeks and Romans is my land of romance; a quotation in either language thrills me strangely, and there are passages of Greek and Latin verse which I cannot read without a dimming of the eyes, which I cannot repeat out loud because my voice fails me. In Magna Graecia, the waters of two fountains mingle and ﬂow together; how exquisite will be the draught!128 The term ‘exquisite’ prepares us for the Paterian terminology, syntax and textures that follow: Vesuvius sends forth ‘vapours of a delicate rose-tint, ﬂoating far and breaking seaward into soft little ﬂeeces of cirrus.’129 Gissing agreeably yields himself to reverie, distancing himself through the passive voice and the characteristically Paterian impersonal pronoun, ‘one’: ‘[O]ne’s own being became lost to consciousness; the mind knew only the phantasmal forms it shaped, and was at peace in vision.’130 His delight at the obscurity of time resurfaces in a passage that he seems to have composed with ‘La Giaconda’ in mind: a ﬁsherman and a boy work with the nets, and he realizes that Plato and Hannibal too knew them. It was Gissing’s practice on this trip to seek out sites of former glory which had decayed into barren, dull landscapes. Habitually setting himself up for disappointment, he then played a game of redeeming each site by projecting his imaginative visions of the past onto it. Ironically, Gissing experienced the joyful climax of his journey when he came down with fever, and envisioned, in his delirium, robed citizenry in a colorful procession through a glorious ancient Greek city. What is remarkable about Gissing’s afﬁrmation of Pater is that it occurs in a vacuum. His self-searching associations are not designed to convert others, and do not bear the taint of an agenda: no Henry Wotton here. Through the genre of the journal,

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then, Gissing claims to redeem the aesthetic from the public sphere into a pure, private one – away from the grasp of socialist demagogues, decadent dandies, and equally manipulative, well-intentioned young ladies and into the select province of the discriminating consumer who knows only his object and his own past.

Conclusion: Missionary Aestheticism as Emancipatory Aesthetics?

Challenging the accounts we have inherited from late Victorian satirists, recent scholars have afﬁrmed the idea of an inherently politicized Aesthetic Movement. For instance, Jonathan Freedman has illustrated how middle-class parvenus claimed the role of arbiters of taste as a means for their own upward mobility and cultural enfranchisement.1 Regenia Gagnier has shown how dandiacal aesthetes of the 1890s rejected ‘Victorian utility, rationality, scientiﬁc factuality, and technological progress – in fact … the whole middle-class drive to conform.’2 Other scholars in queer studies and feminist studies have celebrated aestheticism for liberating aesthetes from conﬁning gender ideologies. Richard Dellamora has identiﬁed aestheticism as a locus for the expression of male homosexual desire.3 Feminist critic Talia Schaffer has traced the complex junctures between female aestheticism and the New Woman.4 Each of these scholars has located aestheticism’s emancipatory potential in the self-realization of aesthetes themselves. One may ask, then, what of the aesthetes who set out to free others from ignorance and ugliness? Can we call theirs an emancipatory aesthetics? As we pursue such questions, it helps if we apply precepts from Gagnier’s 1994 essay ‘A Critique of Practical Aesthetics.’5 According to Gagnier, the good aesthete acknowledges our mutual responsibility for one another’s wellbeing as a foundation for art (in her words, ‘distributive justice as a precondition of genuine individual development and social utility’) and works towards ‘art as a transformation of daily life’ (270, 266). In contrast, the decadent succumbs to a reclusiveness sustained by hierarchy and exploitation (‘art as escape from others’) (271). Gagnier examines the character Nicolas Crabbe from Frederick Rolfe’s novel The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1909) in order to exemplify 206

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the hysterical decadent personality who is self-interested, defensive of his autonomy, exploitative and paranoid of others, and fearfully resistant to change and risk (272). In deciding how they would spend their leisure and with whom, Victorian aesthetes ﬁxed their lives and values along this continuum, choosing between exploitation and equality, rigidity and adaptability, control and toleration, autonomy and mutuality. Missionary aesthetes complicate the equation. Through their efforts to improve the sensory experiences of the poor, they would appear to subscribe to a liberatory aesthetic rather than a decadent one. Yet when they were convinced of the superiority of their middle-class culture, they could be rigid and intolerant in their attitudes towards the poor and workingclass leisure. It is fair to say that as teachers disseminating Arnoldian sweetness and light they opposed risking their authority and relied on class divisions to sustain it. Unlike the dandies whom Gagnier celebrates in her earlier work Idylls of the Marketplace (1986), most missionary aesthetes were unashamedly and conformingly middle-class, and their goals and practices were far from revolutionary or even forward-looking. While the Barnetts and their associates were attempting to bridge the classes by forging friendships with the urban poor, these friendships tended to be inegalitarian in practice. Art-philanthropists rarely failed to see themselves as teachers and guides. Octavia Hill’s follower Ellen Chase may have sympathized with laborers’ underemployment, played with their children, and visited them in the hospital when they were ill, but as a lady visitor she was arguably complicit in an ideology of colonization that used poor people as means toward an end, the poor’s own embourgeoisement. Because they believed in their mission, cultural reformers expressed their goals in ethereal religious terms: one volunteer thus defended East End art exhibitions, ‘If the sense of beauty has been sometimes awakened, if here and there a window has been opened into the invisible and eternal, the efforts have not been in vain.’6 Yet for all its self-righteousness and paternalism, the lingering ‘midVictorian time-spirit’ that Beatrice Webb detected in her contemporaries was also characterized by genuine high-mindedness and generosity.7 It would be too easy to dismiss these cultural philanthropists as mere arrogant colonists. As Seth Koven has written of settlers in the slums, their motivations were ambiguous even to themselves. Koven forgoes canonizing middle-class slummers as saints or condemning them as hypocrites, choosing the far greater challenge of assessing ‘the altogether messier mingling of good intentions and blinkered prejudices that informed their vision of the poor and of themselves.’8

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Some philanthropists surpassed others in their willingness to learn from the poor and to confront their own customary dogmatism. And as we have seen, a complex ﬁgure like Stewart Headlam could buck bourgeois authority as a maverick socialist-Ritualist while reasserting it as a formalist aesthete. East End poverty did not just provoke different responses between Henry Nevinson and H. R. Haweis, but within Nevinson himself as he contradicted his incentives for slum settlement on different pages of his autobiography. Even Octavia Hill, who unapologetically ‘rule[d] [her] wild, lawless, desolate, little kingdom’ experienced moments of self-reﬂexivity and self-questioning.9 In a passage in her essay, ‘Space for the People,’ she reﬂects: Sometimes on such a hot summer evening when I am trying to calm excited women shouting their execrable language to one another, I have looked up suddenly and seen one of those bright gleams of light the summer sun sends out just before he sets, catching the top of a red chimney-pot and beautiful there, though too much directly above their heads for the crowd below to notice it much. But to me it brings sad thoughts of the fair and quiet places far away, where it is softly falling on tree, and hill, and cloud, and I feel as if that quiet, that beauty, that space, would be more powerful to calm the wild excess about me than all my frantic striving with it – Lowell’s words come into my mind, God’s passionless reformers – Inﬂuences that purify and heal and are not seen. The words reproach my own passionate efforts at reform, and set me asking myself whether we cannot ﬁnd remedies more thorough, and supply in some measure the healing gift of space.10 Presumably, this narrated moment was one with which Hill’s bourgeois readership could identify: they too would want Hill’s tenants to see what they were missing. As a middle-class woman who spent holidays in the country, Hill exploited her memories of the countryside as a referent, evoking all that is ‘fair, ‘quiet,’ and ‘soft’ through them. Hill sought to curb a working-class way of life that seemed to her unruly and ungodly. However, she also set up a parallel between the wildness of her tenants and her ‘passionate,’ ‘frantic striving’ to change their ways. This passage evokes the one at the beginning of this book where Janey Nassau Senior sings to a tenement court, except in this instance Hill admits her own need for composure. She still believes in the greater lobby for open spaces, but she momentarily doubts her superiority and implicitly, her authority over her tenants.

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Any conjecture about the mechanics of successful social control (as debated by historians in the 1970s and 1980s) is irrelevant here.11 More often than not, missionary aesthetes failed to gain popular support and even encountered direct resistance from the urban workers whose lives they sought to enhance: ‘“Tis all rot and I don’t care!” was the verdict I got from a boy of nine when I tried to awaken his admiration for a ﬂower,’ confessed Henrietta Barnett, ‘“Oh ain’t it beautiful!” and he mimicked my voice.’12 Just as Ruskin and the St George’s Guild found their newly-planted gardens by the Wandle River trampled on, Hill and her successors in the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association had mud thrown at them when they ﬁrst laid out garden plots in working-class neighborhoods.13 William Rossiter, founder of the South London Art Gallery, described being pelted with cabbage stumps each time he opened an exhibition in a new neighborhood.14 At least one Ritualist priest who attempted to aestheticize religious worship in his parish was hounded and driven out of town by his own congregation.15 In contrast to the testimonies of philanthropists, we have relatively few records of the voices of Victorian working people as they endured visitation or complied with the rules of social clubs managed by middle-class volunteers.16 In the cases such as those I list above, their actions speak for them. As regards the provision of entertainments, the roving slum journalist George Sims observed, ‘The well-meaning efforts of the societies which have endeavored to attract the poor to hear countesses play the ﬁddle, and baronets sing comic songs in temperance halls, have not been crowned with anything like success, for the simple reason that there is an air of charity and goody-goody about the scheme which the poor always regard with suspicion. They want their amusement as a right, not as a favour, and they decline to be patronized.’17 In addition to accusing them of complacency, modern readers might charge missionary aesthetes with a resistance, or at least blindness, to the need for economic restructuring to ease the lives of the poor. Certainly, there is evidence for this. In 1884, E. T. Cook, a Toynbee Hall resident who served as a ‘watcher’ guiding working people through the St Jude’s art exhibitions, edited the settlement’s journal, and would go on to edit the collected works of Ruskin, wrote an article defending gallery shows for laborers. There he summed up the aim of the missionary aesthete by quoting an apocryphal tale about the Romantic poet William Blake. Blake strokes the hair of a slum child, and tells her, ‘May God make this world to you, my child, as beautiful as it is to me.’18 The goal behind many missionary aesthetic programs was not to change the world, but to transform how it was seen (‘make this world to you’).

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In this vignette, Blake hopes that God will endow the child with a subjectivity that can grasp beauty others overlook. Rather than rectify the poverty of London’s working classes by instituting economic reforms, many art-philanthropists worried about the capacity of the poor to perceive the beautiful. Because they ostensibly bestowed art free of charge, many missionary aesthetes persuaded themselves that they were operating in a realm above everyday economic exchange. Through non-proﬁt associations (like Palaces of Art and free gallery sites in the East End) and non-proﬁt educational endeavors (classes for artisans at university settlements), they implied that they were transcending the market. Slum reformer Octavia Hill awkwardly reconciled the aesthetic instruction she offered workers with the low wages earned by them; she advised working people on home decoration without providing them the means for doing so.19 Into the twentieth century, missionary aesthetes tried, often doubtfully, to square their desire that workers live more aesthetically with their reluctance to tackle greater questions about economic equality. In 1904, Lucy Yates, in a review praising the International Society of Popular Art and Hygiene (which seems to be a French variation on the Kyrle Society and Hill’s lady visitors), asks, ‘Are sordid, depressing unwholesome surroundings inseparable from poverty? Can there be such a thing as “clean, wholesome, beautiful poverty”? as a writer has recently phrased it.’20 Yates does not answer her own question because the concept is unthinkable and somehow irreverent. A way of circumventing this question was simply to insist that the aesthetic life is affordable to even the poorest. As early as 1882, Walter Hamilton had defended the popular manifestations of the Aesthetic Movement on the grounds that ‘the poorest may have within their homes, at the cost of a few pence, cups and saucers and jugs and teapots, more artistic in form and design than were to be found twenty years ago in any homes but those of the cultured rich.’21 Yates continues in this vein when she avers, ‘A wholesome home can also be a beautiful home, though it contain but the barest necessities of life. To make a humble house beautiful is not, after all, costly and difﬁcult, for if we have nothing but plaster on our walls, it may be colored with Indian red or yellow ochre, or green or blue; curtains of the cheapest materials may be of true art colors; one shade of paint costs little more than another.’22 Similarly, always ﬁnancially pressed, Mrs Haweis decorated her family’s weekend country cottage inexpensively, using curtains of ﬁshing net, rush-matting, colored Japanese cotton rugs instead of costly carpets, and second-hand furniture, including a spinet that

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she converted into a dressing table for her bedroom.23 The article she wrote for The Lady’s Realm boasting of the cottage’s simplicity and charm earned her this jibe from Punch: Home cheap home Thine be a cot beside a hill, Hums Mrs Haweis in our ear. Such cots are in the market still At thirty pounds a year.24 Working people were not insensitive to beauty: in fact, their affection for precious, useless objects was a sore point for middle-class visitors who would have preferred they sell them for more practical items.25 We can see aesthetic longing and choice-making in working-class writings like Kathleen Woodward’s autobiographical Jipping Street (1928) where freedom is written as the narrator’s single rented room, fervently whitewashed and purged of clutter, with ‘[b]lue curtains at the windows matching the blue covering of the couch – a deep, rich, unfathomable blue.’26 As a child in Edwardian Wapping, in East London, Grace Oakes deﬁed her father by hanging pictures on the walls of her inﬁrm mother’s bedroom: ‘It made a world of difference to that drab room.’ On arriving home, her father quickly cut down the pictures with a knife: ‘he pointed out that it was better so, as the pictures would soon be infected with vermin, which would make matters worse than they were already.’27 Regardless of desire, in practice, decorative improvements were not so simple for the poor.

The socialist critique Victorian socialists and radicals chided bourgeois reformers for hoping to sharpen workers’ aesthetic sensibility (and implicitly, their social manners) without advocating an economic revolution that would dispel the mean surroundings presently degrading working men and women. William Morris refused to design a model workman’s cottage for the curator of the Manchester City Art Museum, explicitly asserting the material basis for a beautiful life, insisting on leisure as a precondition of beauty, and reminding aesthetic philanthropists of their dependence on the class system.28 ‘You can’t stop a water-wheel with a peacock’s feather,’ Morris warned fellow aesthetes, implying that the revolution must come, palliatives or no. 29 Oscar Wilde also rejected this brand of aestheticism in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ when

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he censured ‘a very advanced school’ who ‘try to solve the problem of poverty … by amusing the poor [through rational recreations] … . The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible … . Charity creates a multitude of sins.’30 In 1902, Jack London asserted that gifts of art were, if anything, unintentionally cruel for awakening East Enders to discontent over physical conditions that they could not overcome. I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, of begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and Good. Granting (what is not so) that the poor folk are thus taught to know and yearn after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of their existence and the social law that dooms one in three to a publiccharity death, demonstrates that this knowledge and yearning will be only so much of an added curse to them. They will have so much more to forget than if they had never known and yearned. Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the life of an East End slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny grant me but one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about the Beautiful and True and Good; that I might forget all I had learned from the open books, and forget the people I had known, the things I had heard, and the lands I had seen. And if Destiny didn’t grant it, I am pretty conﬁdent that I should get drunk and forget it as soon as possible.31 It does seem cruel, indeed, to cultivate a ‘yearning’ for beauty while not combating the ‘social law that dooms one in three to a publiccharity death.’ But were all missionary aesthetes content to ask people to savor art and then go home? I would like to use the rest of this Conclusion to complicate some of London’s (and our own) assumptions by demonstrating that aesthetic activists varied in their aims and methods. It seems necessary to emphasize that the same reformers could be parochial in some ways while generous in others. After presiding over trade union meetings at Toynbee Hall during the dockers’ strike of 1889 (a practice that he continued into the early twentieth century), Samuel Barnett broke from the Charity Organization Society to advance what he and Henrietta Barnett called ‘practicable socialism.’32 The Barnetts did concern themselves with workers’ livelihoods. In the particular realm of art, however, they continued to privilege laborers’ attendance at ﬁne art exhibitions over more participatory alternatives.

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We might ask, what would an emancipatory aesthetics free people from? The two following sections pose some answers. (i)

Freedom from exclusion and hierarchy

Missionary aesthetes conveyed two messages about the production of art. On the one hand, missionary aestheticism as it was practiced outside the gallery seems to have echoed the gospel preached by aesthetes like William Morris, C. R. Ashbee, and Walter Crane that crafts were as worthy as oil paintings. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Octavia Hill worked closely with ceramicist William De Morgan in order to provide ornamented pathways in public spaces, and she commissioned Walter Crane as a muralist for a community hall in workers’ housing. Friends of the Barnetts also commissioned a mosaic based on a painting by G. F. Watts for the church tower of St Jude’s. Kyrle Society volunteers painted church and hospital interiors, espousing a ‘do-it-yourself’ philosophy of decoration. On the other hand, gallery exhibits for the poor emphasized didactic oil paintings and hence perpetuated an elitism regarding that genre: these exhibits included the works of Royal Academicians and members of the Grosvenor Gallery set. The Barnetts were proud of the names they were able to include in their art catalogues.33 The selection process at St Jude’s Easter Free Art Exhibitions was a labored one, but one that automatically screened out two specimens of art: handicrafts and art by East End men and women.34 Although Toynbee Hall and other settlements offered classes and clubs focusing on crafts, laborers rarely had the opportunity to exhibit their craftwork.35 The Barnetts had initially featured decorative arts in their exhibitions, but not by working people: these were models on loan from the South Kensington Museum, displayed with the intent of introducing historical examples of quality design to aspiring craftsmen. (The curators ceased exhibiting these objects when they proved a burden on security resources.) It followed that the Barnetts’ annual Easter Free Art Exhibition at St Jude’s was explicitly a show of ﬁne art. It was also clearly an exhibition of imported art from the aesthetic enclaves of West London. For an artwork originating east of Holland Park to earn the Barnetts’ approval, it would have to come from Japan. And in fact, at a small Exhibition of Eastern Arts at the settlement in 1892, ‘various embroideries and hangings lent by other exhibitors gave an Eastern air to the Lecture Room, which was heightened by the burning at intervals of eastern perfumes.’36 Textiles were simply used to set the stage for other work, and crafts were exhibited on account of being ‘Foreign Curiosities.’37

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So, in summary, in their pursuit of the ‘highest art for the lowest people,’ the Barnetts excluded crafts by local amateurs and artisans. In contrast, the missionary aesthetic Home Arts and Industries Association invited the Old Northeyites, a club at Toynbee Hall, to contribute their woodcarving and bent ironwork to its exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall in 1893.38 The fact that this event was written up in the Toynbee Record shows that the settlement and the HAIA were on familiar terms. Yet it also attests to the difference in their methods and aims regarding the value of crafts, the purpose of exhibitions, and the poor as creative artists. Art socialism did not always translate into egalitarianism in the gallery setting. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (ACES) had been established in 1888 by gentlemen-craftsmen in response to the Royal Academy excluding their work from its annual shows.39 Like other missionary aesthetic programs, it sought to democratize good taste by introducing the public to ﬁne examples of craft. The ACES displayed works by craftsmen such as Osmund Weeks, who served as studio assistant to Walter Crane, the society’s president. But these workers were trained artisans employed by avant-garde guilds such as A. H. Mackmurdo and Selwyn Image’s Century Guild and C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft. Objects were initially listed in the exhibition catalogue under the name of the ﬁrms who sold them.40 The catalogue remained grounded in the names of famous leisured, middleclass craftspeople associated with William Morris, many of whom contributed essays on their specialties. On visiting the ﬁrst exhibition in 1888, Sydney Cockerell made the following record, ‘Beautiful collection of the work of men of education and reﬁnement – but very little contributed by ordinary craftsmen.41 Featuring products by established designers Ernest Gimson and William Lethaby, such shows could not fall under the classiﬁcation of craft exhibitions by laborers. The ACES never exhibited in recognized galleries for the poor like the Whitechapel Art Gallery or South London Art Gallery; instead, it rented the fashionable New Gallery on Bond Street. The ﬁnance subcommittee of the ACES agreed with the Sunday Society to issue free tickets but with the proviso that they be ‘issued as far as possible to members of the artisan class,’ speciﬁcally those in ‘recognised school[s] of art.’42 As the years continued, the membership of the Society grew, which in a way signiﬁed its success in disseminating good design. Yet, ironically, with increased submissions and acceptances, observers like Cockerell saw a falling-off in quality.43 The democratization of the gallery exhibition brought with it new com-

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plexities and perhaps new snobberies. The underlying message here was that the ACES disdained any work that conveyed amateurism, and without a tie to an established designer or ﬁrm, the self-taught or charity-taught carpenter or silversmith would not have gained entry. A reviewer of the 1896 Arts and Crafts Exhibition commented, ‘The Society must be disappointed at receiving so little work from workmen, that is, from the working classes.’44 (ii)

Freedom from poverty and domination

It is one thing to offer a laborer validation by exhibiting his work; it is another thing to pay him for it. Arguably, the most mindful of missionary aesthetes were those who trained working people in crafts and then created artisan jobs for them. C. R. Ashbee, whom I discussed in Chapter 3, founded not only a School of Handicraft in Whitechapel, but also a Guild through which he employed his students. (His Guild became a rural enterprise when he transplanted it and his workers with their families to Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds.) Recent scholarship reveals a complex, interdependent network of cottage craft societies organized by English women to aid impoverished rural laborers throughout Great Britain.45 Although my own interests are rooted in the personalities and programs of London’s East End, I turn brieﬂy to these philanthropic rural home arts programs because through them we can document aesthetes’ disparities as they determined the extent of their missions to the poor. Eglantyne Louisa Jebb, heading the Home Arts and Industries Association in 1884, had adopted Ruskin’s productivist aesthetic as a model, emphasizing the worker’s acquisition of artisan skills. Jebb and the association’s other founder, Charles W. Leland, were in fact in conﬂict over their mission.46 This confusion is betrayed in an 1888 article in Oscar Wilde’s The Woman’s World which begins by praising the HAIA for enabling Irish peasants to ‘add to their scanty earnings by carving,’ yet assures that the HAIA’s aim is ‘neither to train professionals nor to create a trade, but to awaken a love of beauty, to educate the hand and eye, and to provide a pleasant employment.’47 In contrast to this defense of rational recreations, regional spin-offs of the HAIA explicitly sought to train workers in order that they might gain a livelihood by selling their craftwork.48 Once the local workers in Mary Seton Watts’s Terra Cotta Home Arts Association had acquired sufﬁcient skills, she turned their collective into a paying venture, the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild.49 The Guild functioned as a business with Mary Seton Watts commissioning orders by exhibiting her workers’

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pottery at HAIA and trade exhibitions. Such exhibitions ultimately functioned as showrooms.50 There was never any question in the minds of Alice Hart and Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland that their respective programs to revive cottage industries would be remunerative. While they acted to beneﬁt the poor economically, they nevertheless sustained a complex and problematic relationship to England’s colonization of Ireland and Scotland. Alice Hart established her Donegal Industrial Fund speciﬁcally to relieve the poverty of the rural Irish, offering technical training so that people might work in factories or, in the case of woodworking, become carpenters. Hart also promoted Irish patriotism through the marketing of products like the Kells Art Embroideries (whose designs derived from the Book of Kells). All the same, Hart’s association was complicit in a greater colonialist economy and in a conservative feudal ideology, selling textiles as luxury items to wealthy society women in England, and advertising particular embroidered gowns commissioned by aristocratic women. It also propagated romantic mythologies about the rural Irish through model villages in exhibitions with authentic craftspeople at work, which art historian Janice Helland has described as ‘the voyeuristic display of bodies in a colonial setting.’51 As an Englishwoman, Hart had studied her country’s historical domination of Ireland, and felt ‘pain, shame, and indignation’ over it.52 Yet in her efforts at relieving economic distress in Ireland, she raised other ghosts of colonialism. Likewise, Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland founded her Highland Home Industries in 1888 to employ the descendents of Scottish crofters driven from their land, yet at the same time her program’s romantic use of ancient aristocratic patronage (including garden party exhibitions on the grounds of medieval castles) bypassed the crimes of the past and ignored the 1880s lobby for crofter’s rights.53 Such contradictions seem typical of the good intentions, but moral ambiguity of most aesthetic missions in practice.

Emancipatory possibilities Like William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and Jack London, we might generalize missionary aesthetes as conservative paternalists forcefully asserting the status quo. Yet as the satirical cartoons that I surveyed in Chapter 1 demonstrate, some middle-class contemporaries found aesthetic education for the masses potentially dangerous in the long term. The poor man, recognizing the rarity of beauty in his life, could respond in a number of ways. He might, like London, get drunk and

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forget as soon as possible, or he might succumb to depression like a Gissing protagonist, or suffer shame like the less conﬁdent among the Toynbee Travellers. He might optimistically embrace a program of self-improvement in the hope of upward social mobility like E. M. Forster’s Leonard Bast in Howards End (1910). Or he might respond with anger. For all that socialists like Morris held art exhibitions in contempt as mere palliatives, they depended on that anger – the ‘education in discontent’ was key to the people’s development as socialists.54 The rare exposure to art would presumably lead the poor to question their disenfranchisement. As we have seen, Punch writers and cartoonists retreated from such a prospect by belittling missionary aesthetic projects as ridiculous. Doggerel verses in Punch, rhetorical slights by Sabbatarians, and novelists’ parodies of priest-dandies and Kyrley-girls show how missionary aesthetes were a lightning rod for jokes about misguided philanthropy and arrogant, ﬂighty slummers among the poor. Yet as this study has illustrated, missionary aestheticism was also an indisputable historical entity and volunteering in the slums a central activity in the social world of aestheticism. Art philanthropists effectively lobbied for a variety of reforms, serving on major associations such as the Charity Organization Society and the London County Council as well as founding their own specialized societies. While these activists did not work as one centralized lobby, missionary aestheticism constituted more than a trend. It was an ethos, and ultimately a discourse, through which late Victorians attempted to articulate their ambition for social reform, their belief in duty, their compassion for the impoverished, their revulsion at squalor, and their faith in the beautiful.

Notes What is Missionary Aestheticism? An Introduction 1 Henrietta O. Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends (London: John Murray, 1921), 43. 2 Ian Fletcher, ‘Some Aspects of Aestheticism,’ in Twilight of Dawn: Studies of English Literature in Transition, ed. O. M. Brack (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), 25. 3 In 1977, the art historian Mark Girouard suggested a temperamental alliance between Victorian aesthetes and progressives, ‘The aesthete burning with the hard gem-like ﬂame, alone or with a friend in the seclusion of his exquisitely furnished rooms, might seem a long way removed from the do-gooder working himself to the bone for others in the dingy streets of the East End. But they were only different ends of the same Victorian loaf. In the 1870s and 1880s one constantly ﬁnds aestheticism and enlightenment next door to one another or mixed up together’ (Mark Girouard, Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement, 1860–1900 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977], 7.) He cites the mutual sympathies between the aesthete Walter Pater and the humanitarian Mrs Humphry Ward (7). Girouard goes on to name the artistic slum reformer Octavia Hill, the socialists William Morris and Walter Crane, and the Positivist Frederic Harrison as specimens of progressive-aesthetes (7–8). The seeds for my own study are here, though Girouard uses these examples to foreground a different, broader historical analysis. 4 Ruth Z. Temple, ‘Truth in Labelling: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence, Fin-de-Siècle,’ English Literature in Transition 17, no. 4 (1974): 201–22. 5 I adopt the phrase ‘lifestyle aestheticism’ from Kathy Psomiades’s excellent study Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 154. 6 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 5: 333. 7 Ruskin, Works, 20: 93. 8 John Ruskin, Unto this Last and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 211. 9 John Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961), 189. 10 Ruskin, Works, 30: xliii. 11 John Rosenberg cites good sales for the letters (Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass, 194, fn.7). These sales attest to Ruskin’s popularity, as Fors was somewhat expensive for workingmen and relatively inaccessible: it could only be purchased through the publisher George Allen. See Frederic Harrison, John Ruskin (London: Macmillan, 1902), 168, cited in Seth Koven, ‘Culture and Poverty: The London Settlement House Movement 1870–1914’ (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1987), 18, fn. 22. 218

Notes 219 12 This study looks beyond the institutional conﬁnes of museums for the working classes and university settlements to highlight the presence of missionary aestheticism in less obvious venues such as tenement- and church reform. However, because the Barnetts and Horsfall were central in the initial application of Ruskinian theory, I cite them here as representatives. The deﬁnitive critical history of late Victorian settlement work and its social implications is Seth Koven, ‘Culture and Poverty.’ 13 Ruskin, Works, 34: 251, original emphasis. 14 T. C. Horsfall, First Principles of Education. The Use of Pictures in Schools and Physical Training. Two Papers read to the Manchester Branch of the Teacher’s Guild (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1890), 6. 15 Frederic W. Maynard, Descriptive Notice of the Drawings and Publications of the Arundel Society from 1849 to 1868 inclusive; illustrated by Photographs of all the Publications, One-Fifth of their original Size, arranged in the order of their issue, by Frederic W. Maynard, (secretary to the Arundel Society) (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1869); W. H. Gregory, ‘The Arundel Society,’ Nineteenth Century 15 (April 1884): 610–25. The Fitzroy Picture Society, founded by the designer A. H. Mackmurdo, worked in collaboration with the Kyrle Society. Its contributing artists included Selwyn Image, Heywood Sumner and G. F. Watts (Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s and the Arts and Crafts [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985], 107). The artist Walter Crane established the Art for Schools Association with Samuel Barnett (Barnett, Canon Barnett, 285). The Medici Society is still extant and maintains its own website. 16 T. C. Horsfall, A Description of the Work of the Manchester Art Museum (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1891), 19–20. 17 Giles Waterﬁeld, ‘Art for the People,’ in Art for the People: Culture in the Slums of Late Victorian Britain (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994), 39. 18 Waterﬁeld, Art for the People, 39. 19 Horsfall, Description, 27. 20 For an overview of Horsfall’s project, see Michael Harrison, ‘Art and Philanthropy: T. C. Horsfall and the Manchester Art Museum,’ in City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester, eds Alan Kidd and K. W. Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 120–47. 21 Ruskin, Unto This Last, 222; T. C. Horsfall, The Need for Art in Manchester: an address given May 2nd, 1910 at the annual meeting of the governors of the Manchester Royal Institution (Manchester: Charles H. Barber, 1910), 14. 22 Horsfall, Description, 7–12. 23 Horsfall, First Principles, 7. 24 Horsfall, First Principles, 31. 25 Matthew Arnold, Selected Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 227; further page references appear in parentheses. 26 Horsfall, Need, 21. 27 Samuel Barnett, ‘University Settlements,’ in Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform, eds The Rev. and Mrs. Samuel A. Barnett (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895), 173; Barnett, Canon Barnett, 300. 28 George Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), 2: 269.

220 Notes 29 Kyrle Society, Kyrle Society Annual Report (1891), 17. 30 Pater may also have felt a sense of unease at Toynbee Hall, where many of the residents and associates had been Oxford protégés of Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol. Jowett had denied Pater the University Proctorship in 1874 following the revelation of Pater’s romance with an undergraduate Willam M. Hardinge. Balliol students Leonard Monteﬁore and Philip Lyttleton Gell were witness to the scandal; each became a Toynbee Hall resident in the 1880s. See Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge,’ in Pater in the 1990s, eds Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1991), 1–20. 31 Ian Fletcher, Walter Pater (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1959), 11. 32 Walter Pater, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 134–6. 33 As David DeLaura has illustrated, much of Pater’s essay is a précis on how doubt can be advantageous or dangerous to the disbeliever depending on his innate ‘class of mind’; it is autobiographical in that it expresses Pater’s persistent, self-reﬂective theme of the personality in development. See David DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1969), 287. 34 Walter Pater, Essays from ‘The Guardian’ (London: Macmillan, 1910), 69. 35 Pater, Selected Writings, 20–1. 36 Pater, Selected Writings, 61–2. 37 DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene, 179. 38 Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 199–200, 201. 39 Paul Tucker, ‘Pater as a “Moralist,”’ in Pater in the 1990s, eds Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1991), 108, 110–12. 40 Pater, Selected Writings, 61. 41 Pater, Selected Writings, 2. My reference to the Liberty showroom is rather an exaggeration, but Wilde’s admiration during his lectures for interiors that James McNeil Whistler had created as a commissioned decorator – and for a Chinese workman’s delicate porcelain cup – prove my point about Wilde’s consciousness and complicity in the marketability of aesthetic, often exotic, objects: see Oscar Wilde, ‘House Decoration,’ in Essays and Lectures (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1916), 166, 170. Later, in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), Wilde questioned the value of gifts of art by well-meaning philanthropists in the East End. Because they were mere palliatives, he argued, such remedies were ‘part of the disease’ of poverty (Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [New York: Harper and Row, 1989], 1079). I discuss Wilde’s relationship to missionary aestheticism at greater length in Chapter 3 and in my essay, ‘Wilde’s The Woman’s World and the Culture of Aesthetic Philanthropy,’ in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 185–211. 42 William Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 1: 192–205. 43 Margaret Harkness, George Eastmont: Wanderer (London: Burns and Oates, 1905), 88.

Notes 221 44 Mrs Humphry Ward, Marcella (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000), 48, 91, 96. 45 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 120. 46 Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 58–61, 67–8; Barnett, Canon Barnett, 34, 78. Harriete Harrison does sound a bit like the parodied aesthete in her account of an ‘At Home’ in a letter to Henrietta Barnett. She writes, ‘It was like Botticelli’s picture of the Nativity come true, with the pilgrims being received at the door by the angels with palms, and a loving kiss-like greeting, with a sort of mixed-up merry-go-round of the angels above. Do you remember the picture in the National Gallery?’ (Barnett, Canon Barnett, 218). 47 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 117. 48 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 285. 49 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 102. 50 Gissing, Workers, 1: 232. 51 For twentieth-century discussion of the labor aristocracy and models for classifying the working classes, see Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-Century England,’ in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 272–315, and José Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 8. 52 Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12. 53 Ross, Love and Toil, 12. 54 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 11. 55 Ross, Love and Toil; Koven, Slumming, 12–13; Ruth Livesey, ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London,’ Journal of Victorian Culture 9, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 43–68. 56 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 138–70.

Chapter 1 1 Henrietta O. Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends (London: John Murray, 1921), 225. 2 Helen Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870–1914 (London and Boston: Routledge & Paul, 1976), 76. 3 Ruth Z. Temple, ‘Truth in Labelling: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence, Fin De Siècle,’ English Literature in Transition 17, no. 4 (1974): 201–22; Ian Fletcher, ‘Some Aspects of Aestheticism,’ in Twilight of Dawn: Studies of English Literature in Transition, ed. O. M. Brack (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), 1–2. 4 Temple, ‘Truth in Labelling,’ 219. As recently as 1990, Elaine Showalter posited ‘aesthete’ and ‘decadent’ as interchangeable terms (Sexual Anarchy:

222 Notes

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle [New York: Viking, 1990], 169). Yet it would be erroneous to deﬁne British aestheticism by the Decadence. While all aesthetes may have aimed for the beautiﬁcation of everyday life, only some pursued the Wildean goal of perfect self-realization. Further, to think of ‘aestheticism’ and ‘Decadence’ as somehow consecutive is also simplistic. Algernon Swinburne’s and D. G. Rossetti’s works of the 1860s certainly anticipate the formal Decadent movement of the 1890s. Likewise, artphilanthropists such as Patrick Geddes and Samuel Barnett continued lobbying into the twentieth century for public galleries and open spaces as provisions under the imminent welfare state. Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 4. Regenia Gagnier, ‘A Critique of Practical Aesthetics,’ in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 266. Barnett, Canon Barnett, 31, 37. Talia Schaffer has similarly demonstrated how a Decadent-centered criticism obscured the work of female aesthetes (Schaffer, Forgotten Female Aesthetes, 6). Karl Beckson, Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981), xii, fn.3. Gagnier, ‘Critique,’ 271. Barnett, Canon Barnett, 108. Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, The Souls (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984); Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); Ian Fletcher, ‘Some Aspects,’ 32–3; Nancy W. Ellenberger, ‘The Souls and London “Society” at the End of the Nineteenth Century,’ Victorian Studies 25, no. (Winter 1982): 133–60. Caroline Dakers, Clouds: The Biography of a Country House (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 39–40. Dakers, Clouds, 40. The Times (8 July 1885): 9. Janice Helland, ‘Highland Home Industries and the Fashion for Tweed,’ Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History 9 (2004): 27–34. Margot Asquith, The Autobiography of Margot Asquith (London: Thornton Butterworth, Ltd., 1920), 53–8, 221–9. Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, Old Diaries, 1881–1901 (London: J. Murray, 1902), 5. Gower, Old Diaries, 67. Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds, a Biography (London: Longmans, Green, 1964), 266–7. Gower, Old Diaries, 268–9. Lady St Helier (Mary Jeune), Memories of Fifty Years (London: Edward Arnold, 1909), 188. Barnett, Canon Barnett, 304. Leonard A. Monteﬁore, Essays and Letters contributed to various periodicals between September, 1877 and August, 1879, together with some unpublished fragments (London: privately printed, 1881), xlii–iii. Monteﬁore, Essays and Letters, liii.

Notes 223 26 Leonard Monteﬁore is most recently familiar to Pater scholars for his role in alerting the Balliol don Richard Louis Nettleship to the existence of romantic letters between Walter Pater and the undergraduate William M. Hardinge. See Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge,’ in Pater in the 1990s, eds Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1991), 1–20. 27 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York and London: Longmans, Green, 1926), 176. 28 Noel Annan, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy,’ in Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan, ed. J. H. Plumb (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), 252. 29 Geoffrey Squire, ‘Clothed in Our Right Minds: Some Wearers of Aesthetic Dress,’ in Simply Stunning: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Dressing (Cheltenham: Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums, 1996), 42. 30 Wilfrid Blunt, England’s Michelangelo: A Biography of George Frederic Watts, O.M., R.A. (London: Hamilton, 1975), 159. 31 Walter Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 359. 32 The House Beautiful and the Home: A Journal for Those Who Design, Beautify, Furnish and Inhabit Houses, ed. Alice Hart (London, 1904), 1: 4. 33 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 155. Similarly, the Barnetts returned from a holiday in Egypt in 1880 to invite the locals in to view their exotic ﬁndings: the evening began with the entrance of Samuel Barnett in a turban (Barnett, Canon Barnett, 154). 34 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 148. 35 The Harts and Barnetts were not only in-laws, but also contributors to one another’s projects. Samuel Barnett composed an article on the healthy home which appears in the second issue of Alice Hart’s magazine; in the same vein, Henrietta Barnett wrote The Making of the Home: A Reading-Book on Domestic Economy, etc. (London: Cassell and Co., 1885); Alice Hart wrote for the Toynbee Journal in 1886, honoring the Popular Ballad Concert Committee, a Toynbee-afﬁliated club which performed Christmas concerts for the poor and whose members were working-class – she appears to have been the head. She also directed the Donegal Industrial Fund, a society that followed the missionary aesthetic Home Arts and Industries Association in revitalizing dying crafts. 36 Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 41. 37 Bea Howe, Arbiter of Elegance (London: Harville Press, 1967), 168, 172. 38 Beatrice Webb, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, eds Norman and Jean Mackenzie (London: Virago, 1982), 127. Beatrice Potter recorded in her diary in late 1884 a conﬂict between Catherine (Kate) Potter and A. G. Crowder, a founder of the East End Dwellings Company: ‘Crowder, cut and dried philanthropist, with little human nature, determined that the tenants should like nothing but what was useful. Paint and furnish all rooms alike. Kate mildly suggested that tenants have taste, are immensely inﬂuenced by small things ...’ (Webb, Diary, 127). 39 Webb, Diary, 139. 40 Fiona McCarthy, The Simple Life: C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds (London: Lund Humphries, 1981), 25. 41 A. M. McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the Webbs. A Study in British Social Policy 1890–1929 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 6.

224 Notes 42 The Grove Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (New York and London: Macmillan, 1996), 14: 680; Luke Fildes, Luke Fildes, R.A.: A Victorian Painter (London: Michael Joseph, 1968), 35. There are several excellent sources on aesthetic communities. Mark Girouard has a chapter on Bedford Park and Tite Street, Chelsea in his Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement, 1860–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 160–85. See also Ian Fletcher, ‘Bedford Park: Aesthetic Elysium?’ in Romantic Mythologies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 169–207. On Holland Park, see Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999). Primary sources by contemporaries include Walter Hamilton’s The Aesthetic Movement in England (London: Reeves and Turner, 1882) and Moncure Conway’s Travels in South Kensington (London: Trübner, 1882), which each end with a tribute to Bedford Park. 43 Dakers, The Holland Park Circle, 43–4. 44 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 167. 45 Conway, Travels, 218. 46 Conway, Travels, 228–9. 47 Edward Burne-Jones, Burne-Jones Talking: His Conversations 1895–1898, preserved by his studio assistant Thomas Rooke, ed. Mary Lago (London: John Murray, 1982). 48 Fletcher, ‘Bedford Park,’ 177. 49 This training anticipated Lily and her sister Elizabeth Yeats’s later establishment with Evelyn Gleeson of the Dun Emer Guild, a missionary aesthetic enterprise which provided the Irish poor employment through the revival of local handicrafts. See Joan Hardwick, The Yeats Sisters: A Biography of Susan and Elizabeth Yeats (London and San Francisco: Pandora, 1996), 61–7, 117–26, and Elaine Cheasley Paterson, ‘Crafting a National Identity: the Dun Emer Guild, 1902–1908,’ in The Irish Revival Reappraised, eds Betsey Taylor FitzSimon and James H. Murphy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 106–18. 50 Hamilton, Aesthetic Movement, 121. 51 Girouard, Sweetness and Light, 172; Fletcher, ‘Bedford Park,’ 203. 52 Seth Koven, ‘Culture and Poverty: The London Settlement House Movement 1870–1914,’ (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1987), 39. 53 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 158; Fletcher, ‘Bedford Park,’ 184. 54 Dictionary of National Biography [1912–21], 269. 55 Moncure Conway, Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifﬂin, 1904), 1: 388–9, 2: 193; Moncure Conway, ‘Civilizing the Sabbath,’ The Open Court 278 (22 December 1892): 3495–500. 56 Burne-Jones, Burne-Jones Talking, 118, 140. 57 Shelagh Wilson offers a gender analysis of the power dynamics between the ‘unworldly’ Watts and his ‘worshipping ladies’ in ‘Watts, Women, Philanthropy and the Home Arts,’ in Representations of G. F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, eds Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (Aldershot, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 169–83. 58 Dakers, Holland Park Circle, 262. 59 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 161.

Notes 225 60 Judith Flanders, A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin (London: Penguin, 2002), 278; Veronica Franklin Gould, Mary Seton Watts: Unsung Heroine of the Art Nouveau ([England]: Watts Gallery, 1998); Wilson, ‘Watts,’ 177–82. I further discuss female aesthetic missions in my Conclusion. 61 Stephen Jones, ‘Attic Attitudes: Leighton and Aesthetic Philosophy,’ History Today 37 (June 1987): 32–3, 36–7. 62 Leonée Ormond, ‘A Leighton Memorial: Frederic Leighton and the South London Art Gallery,’ in Art for the People: Culture in the Slums of Late Victorian Britain, ed. Giles Waterﬁeld (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994), 19. 63 Pope honored John Kyrle of Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire in his Epistle to Bathurst (1733) ‘as one who on limited means provided considerable service to the local poor’ with no thought of self-promotion. See Alexander Pope, ‘Moral Essays. iii Of the Use of Riches,’ in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen & Co., 1963), 582. 64 Rafael Cardoso Denis, ‘From Burlington House to the Peckham Road: Leighton and the Polarities of Victorian Art and Design Education,’ in Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity, eds Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Haven, CT and London: Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art and Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Press, 1998), 247–66. 65 Lee MacCormick Edwards, Herkomer: A Victorian Artist (Brookﬁeld, VT: Ashgate, 1999), 27. 66 Edwards, Herkomer, 110. 67 For instance, Toynbee Record 1, no. 9 (June 1889): 109 and Toynbee Record 2, no. 8 (May 1890): 93. 68 Anne Anderson, ‘Bringing Beauty Home to the People: Women’s Mission to Beautify the Home and the Metropolis in the “English Renaissance,”’ in Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950, eds Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005 [forthcoming]); Anne Anderson, ‘“No life can be wholly unhappy which is cheered by the power of playing an instrument, dancing, painting, carving, modelling, singing”: Recreative Learning and Voluntary Teaching in the Victorian Renaissance,’ a paper presented at the conference, Locating the Victorians, the Science Museum, London, 15 July 2001; Anne Anderson, ‘“Work itself is pleasure”: Mary, Lady Lovelace, the Kyrle Society, and the Home Arts and Industries Association,’ a paper presented at the conference, Women and Built Space, 1860–1960, Centre for Urban Culture, University of Nottingham, 1 June 2002; Elizabeth Cumming, ‘Patterns of Life: The Art and Design of Phoebe Anna Traquair and Mary Seton Watts,’ in Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880–1935, eds Bridget Elliot and Janice Helland (Aldershot, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 15–34; Janice Helland, ‘Rural Women and Urban Extravagance in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain,’ Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture 13, no. 2 (2002): 179–97; Janice Helland, ‘Working Bodies, Celtic Textiles and the Donegal Industrial Fund, 1883–1890,’ Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 2, no. 2 (July 2004): 134–55; Janice Helland, ‘Highland Home Industries,’ 27–34; Janice Helland, ‘Exhibiting Ireland: The Donegal

226 Notes

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70

71

72

73 74 75

76 77

Industrial Fund in London and Chicago,’ Revue D’Art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review 29, nos. 1–2 (2004): 28–47; Joseph McBrinn, ‘Reviving Peasant Arts and Industries in the North of Ireland, 1894–1914: Sophia Rosamond Praeger and the forgotten workshops of the Irish Decorative Arts Association and the Irish Peasant Home Industries,’ a paper presented at the conference, Art for Life’s Sake, Southampton Institute, 17 November 2002; Elaine Cheasley Paterson, ‘Crafting a National Identity,’ 106–18; Elaine Cheasley Paterson, ‘Decoration and Desire: Women of the Home Arts Movement, 1884–1915’ (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 2003); Elaine Cheasley Paterson, ‘Homemade Industry: Mary Seton Watts and the Potters’ Arts Guild,’ a paper presented at the conference, Art for Life’s Sake, Southampton Institute, 16 November 2002; Shelagh Wilson, ‘The Origins and Intentions of the Home Arts and Industries Association,’ a paper presented at the conference, Art for Life’s Sake, Southampton Institute, 16 November 2002; Shelagh Wilson, ‘Watts,’ 169–83. Joseph McBrinn also discusses women’s craft workshops in Ireland within a broader argument about the literary, ethnographic, and artistic representations of the Irish peasant in an international context. See Joseph McBrinn, ‘The Peasant and Folk Art Revival in Ireland, 1890–1920: With Special Reference to Ulster,’ Ulster Folklife 48 (2002): 14–69. There appears to have been some early division between home arts advocates about their aims to provide rational recreations or a livelihood. See my Conclusion. I take the phrase ‘fellow-workers’ from Octavia Hill’s annual ‘Letters to My Fellow-Workers,’ excerpts of which were later published in Octavia Hill, Extracts from Octavia Hill’s Letters to Fellow-Workers 1864 to 1911, ed. Elinor Southwood Ouvry (London: Adelphi, 1933). Several of these letters have been reprinted in Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate: Essays and Letters by Octavia Hill, ed. Robert Whelan (London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1998), 81–93. Cited in Michael Wolff and Celina Fox, ‘Pictures from the Magazines,’ in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, eds H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 2: 570. Seth Koven notes a similar panic in the incognito journalist William Greenwood’s response to a man singing a music-hall song about his desire to be a ‘swell’ as he entered the Lambeth Casual Ward. At ﬁrst simply comic, the impact of the song grew more horrible to Greenwood as other casuals joined in, forming a ‘bestial chorus’ (Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004], 76). Punch 86 (19 April 1884): 190. Charles Keene, ‘Mrs. M: “Oh you must see my cabinet of cur’osities. I’m awful partial to Bric-Bats,”’ Punch 84 (17 March 1883): 131. ‘Our Academy Guide, No. 163 – Private Frith’s View – Members of the Salvation Army, led by General Oscar Wilde, joining in a hymn,’ Punch 84 (12 May 1883): 220. George Du Maurier, ‘What It Has Come To,’ Punch 80 (16 April 1881): 177. George Du Maurier, ‘The Passion for Old China,’ Punch 66 (2 May 1874): 189; ‘The Six-Mark Tea-Pot,’ Punch 79 (30 October 1880): 194; ‘Reﬁnements of Modern Speech,’ Punch 76 (14 June 1879): 270.

Notes 227

Chapter 2 1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8

9

10

In his biography, Wilfrid Blunt represents Cockerell as more of a naturalist than a budding artist, and characterizes this crisis as a choice between attending the university and working for the family business (Wilfrid Blunt, Cockerell [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964], 29). In contrast, Jane Lewis uses Octavia Hill’s correspondence with Cockerell to highlight his preference for art over business (Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991], 27). Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 6 July 1889, in Octavia Hill, Life of Octavia Hill as Told in Her Letters, ed. C. Edmund Maurice (London: Macmillan, 1914), 495. Octavia Hill, Octavia Hill. Early Ideals from Letters, ed. Emily Southwood Maurice (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928), 235–6. Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 6 July 1889, in Hill, Life, 495. Hill, Early Ideals, 236. Letter to Emily Hill, 1 July 1857, in Hill, Life, 97. Hill had also met Edward Burne-Jones through Ruskin (Letter to Miss Baumgartner, 18 January 1863, in Hill, Life, 202). On the bohemian mix of socialists, poets, and painters teaching at the Working Men’s College, see Seth Koven, ‘How the Victorians Read Sesame and Lilies,’ in John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, ed. Deborah Epstein Nord (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 179. Octavia Hill, ‘Colour, Space and Music for the People,’ Nineteenth Century 15 (May 1884): 745. Anthony Wohl’s 1971 essay on Hill is an exception, as it highlights the shortcomings of Hill’s romantic stipulations as a house manager: see ‘Octavia Hill and the Homes of the London Poor,’ Journal of British Studies 10, no. 2 (1971): 124. The ethos of the Charity Organization Society is compelling, but, given my concentration on aesthetics, it will not be discussed here. Hill describes the demoralization that arises from ‘indiscriminate almsgiving’ in Our Common Land (and other short essays) (London: Macmillan, 1877), particularly the essay, ‘A Few Words to Volunteer Visitors Among the Poor,’ 46–62. One can read overviews and critiques of the C.O.S. in Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), and Robert Humphreys, Poor Relief and Charity, 1869–1945: The London Charity Organization Society (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001). Visitation then occurred most frequently between the lady rent-collector and the wife and mother of each household (Lewis, Women, 33). In The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900–1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), Lewis cites the anger directed by workingclass mothers at health inspectors in the early and mid-twentieth century (106–7). Although Lewis focuses on their responses to state-employed inspectors, her observations on visitation are relevant. They reafﬁrm Thane’s conclusion that working families did not necessarily resist state intervention or private philanthropy, but rather opposed the inquisitorial nature of assistance and the imposition of middle-class standards of

228 Notes

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

behavior when they occurred: see Pat Thane, ‘The Working Class and State Welfare in Britain, 1880–1914,’ Historical Journal 27, no. 2 (1984): 877–900. Carolyn Kay Steedman begins her working-class autobiography Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997) by recalling an insulting remark by a health visitor and uses this as a point of departure for exploring her mother’s desires and defenses (2). In Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Ellen Ross documents the growing pressures on the working-class mother to be a thrifty housewife as a result of national policymaking (24). Ross further illustrates the extent to which the C.O.S.’s program of self-help was at odds with women’s neighborhood exchange networks: see Ellen Ross, ‘Survival Networks: Women’s Neighborhood Sharing in London before World War I,’ History Workshop Journal 15 (1983): 18–19. More recent scholarship has worked to recover the voices of Victorian men and women subject to visitation by middle-class social workers: see Ruth Livesey, ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London,’ Journal of Victorian Culture 9, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 43–68, and Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 13. Historians can ﬁnd one such reaction against physical slum conditions in the white circles that housewives chalked in front of their doors (Ross, Love and Toil, 80). Francis M. Jones speculates on the individual defensive aesthetics of the poor in ‘The Aesthetic of the Nineteenth-Century Industrial Town,’ in The Study of Urban History, ed. H. J. Dyos (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968), 171–82. Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor (London: Macmillan, 1883), 89. Hill, Homes, 78. Octavia Hill, ‘More Air for London,’ Nineteenth Century 23 (February 1888): 188. Hill, Homes, 90. Hill, Homes, 90, 95. Hill, ‘Colour,’ 745; Hill, Homes, 89. Letter to Miss Baumgartner, 21 November 1859, in Hill, Life, 166; Letter to Miranda Hill, Christmas Day 1859, in Hill, Life, 172. It was in the context of the Working Men’s College that Hill ﬁrst met the Scottish poet and author of fairy-tales George MacDonald, who was arguably the most overtly bohemian of any of her friends. Mention in her letters of his country home and the famous MacDonald family theatricals attest to Octavia’s exposure to his world and participation in it. MacDonald opened his home to her tenants and his family performed plays in the garden for them. There is another possible, comparable aesthetic connection in the Hill family. An Emily Hill collaborated with popular elocutionist and Kensington personality Madame Jane Ronniger, accompanying her on the pianoforte during her recitations. This Emily Hill also contributed to Ronniger’s magazine, Aesthetic Review and Art Observer (London, 1876–79). It is not clear whether this writer was Octavia Hill’s sister Emily.

Notes 229 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

E. Moberly Bell wrote in his 1942 biography, ‘With what seems like a perverse curiosity she had set her heart on being an artist, entirely unaware that her creative gifts in that direction were small …. So completely had she mistaken her vocation!’ (Octavia Hill [London: Constable, 1942], 38). In contrast, see Jane Lewis, Women, 26–7. Gillian Darley also gives some space to Hill’s early training under Ruskin in the context of Hill’s other work: see Octavia Hill; A Life (London: Constable, 1990), 51–3, 60, 64–7, 74. Hill, Early Ideals, 130; further page references appear in parentheses. Letter to Miranda Hill, 10 October 1859, in Hill, Life, 160. Hill, Early Ideals, 127–8; further page references appear in parentheses. Here Hill quotes from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1864), a poem that dramatizes the tensions (and ultimately the interdependence) between social responsibility and artistic expression. At its climax, the protagonist, a poetess, claims that practical social schemes will fail if they lack the spirit of poetic imagination. Likewise, by glorifying the character, Marian Earle, who aids poor friends in the slums, Browning insists that poetry fails if it does not raise contemporary moral and social issues. Hill revered the poem, identifying with both heroines. One ﬁnds references to it in Hill, Early Ideals, 130, 192; Hill, Our Common Land, 103, and Octavia Hill, ‘The Relations between Rich and Poor as Bearing on Pauperism,’ The Charity Record 5, no. 2 [1881?]: 19. Letter to ‘A Friend Who is Giving up Art for Business,’ 13 January 1889, in Hill, Life, 485. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 77. Hill, Homes, 26–7, added emphasis. Darley, Octavia Hill, 230. Ellen Chase, Tenant Friends in Old Deptford (London: Williams and Norgate, 1929). Catherine Potter Courtney, Courtney Papers, LSE. Vol. III, folio 8: midnight, 18 May 1882. Cited in Darley, Octavia Hill, 215. E. S. Haldane, Edinburgh Social Union and Social and Sanitary Society, Report 1912: Memorial Address on Octavia Hill, Ouvry Papers. Cited in Darley, Octavia Hill, 248. Anne Summers, ‘A Home from Home: Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Fit Work for Women, ed. S. Burman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 45. Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends (London: John Murray, 1921), 133. Hill, Homes, 66. Hill, Our Common Land, 59–60. Hill, Homes, 37; further page references appear in parentheses. Hill, Our Common Land, 96. Martin S. Gaskell, ‘Gardens for the Working Class: Victorian Practical Pleasure,’ Victorian Studies 23, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 493. Darley, Octavia Hill, 174. ‘At ﬁrst,’ one memoirist writes, ‘the tenants’ outings were an anxiety; “rough” characters gave trouble, like the drunken man who, refused admission to the steamer taking the party

230 Notes

40 41

42

43 44 45

down the Thames, stood on the pier at London Bridge, tearing off his clothes and shouting he would “swim after them”’ (Amice Lee, ‘Recollections of Octavia Hill,’ Cornhill Magazine 154 [September 1936]: 319.) Hill arranged for horse-drawn carts to take the children and inﬁrm to the country, carefully steering the party past the local pubs. At the end of each outing, tenants were given tea and a bouquet. Octavia Hill, Letters to Fellow Workers, 1864–1911, ed. Elinor Southwood Ouvry (London: Alephi Book Shop, 1933), 17. Kyrle Society members included established painters Robert Hunter, Audley Mackworth, and Henry Holiday, watercolorist Mary Caroline Vyvyan, landscape painters Edith A. Paine, Ida Bidder, F. M. Cardwell, H. Marshall, and W. W. Fenn, painters of both landscapes and ﬁgures such as Mrs Julia A. Keatinge, W. Savage Cooper, and Thomas Ralph Spence, the sculptor Fred C. Mills, and architects Basil Champneys, C. Harrison Townshend, John D. Sedding, Arthur S. Haynes (who was also a landscape painter), and C. F. A. Voysey (who also pursued sculpture and design). Sources consulted here were the Dictionary of British Artists, 1880–1940, eds J. Johnson and A. Greutzner (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 1976), and the Artists’ Directory, 8th edn. (London: E. W. Hodge and Co., 1875). Anne Anderson documents the networks of aristocratic patronage that fortiﬁed both the Kyrle Society and the Home Arts and Industries Association in her essay ‘“Bringing beauty home to the people”: Women’s Mission to Beautify the Home and Metropolis in the “English Renaissance,” c. 1870–1917,’ in Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950, eds Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth (Ashgate, forthcoming). She further explores the aristocratic underpinnings of slum philanthropy in her articles ‘Queen Victoria’s Daughters and the “Tide of Fashionable Philanthropy,”’ Women’s History Magazine 41 (June 2002): 10–15, and ‘Octavia Hill’s “Fellow-Workers” Lady Ducie and Lady Brabazon: Wealth, Power and Vocational Philanthropy,’ Women’s History Review (forthcoming). Mrs A. C. White was possibly the spouse of landscape painter Arnold White who exhibited in 1884, and ‘Miss Leycester’ might have been a sister of R. Neville Leycester, the fruit and still life painter who exhibited in 1883. Kyrle Society, Kyrle Society Annual Report (1891): 13. Kyrle Society, Kyrle Society Annual Report (1891): 14. For example, ‘A Kyrley Tale,’ Punch 80 (26 February 1881): 84–5, and ‘Beauty Not at Home,’ Punch 80 (12 February 1881): 71. Margaret Tabor remarks on popular satires of the Kyrle Society in Octavia Hill (London: Shelden Press, 1927), 21. Ian Fletcher gives them great attention in ‘Some Aspects of Aestheticism,’ in Twilight of Dawn: Studies of English Literature in Transition, ed. O. M. Brack (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), 24–9. In the 1890 Kyrle Society Annual Report, it was remarked that ‘The idea has somehow gained ground that the branch decorates private dwellings gratuitously, and therefore to the detriment of members of [the architectural and artistic] professions’ (9). To some extent this ideal was internalized. The misleading phrase ‘bringing beauty home to the poor’ appears to have originated in 1875 with the society, although Miranda Hill’s

Notes 231

46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57

58 59 60 61

speech proposing it is no longer extant (Fletcher, ‘Some Aspects,’ 24). Octavia Hill used the phrase ‘bring some of this beauty home to the poor’ in her essay ‘The Kyrle Society,’ The Magazine of Arts (1880): 210. The Kyrle Society Annual Report of 1897 claimed the sympathies of ‘those who believe in bringing light and beauty into the homes of the poor’ (6) ‘Beauty Not at Home,’ 71. Hill, Our Common Land, 141. Hill, ‘Colour,’ 744; further page references appear in parentheses. According to the Kyrle Society Annual Report of 1901: ‘Cut ﬂowers had 67 recipients, 22 of whom were charitable workers who distributed them among the poor they visited, so that a very large number of individuals participated in the beneﬁt’ (22). Hill, ‘Colour,’ 745. Koven, Slumming, 5. Darley, Octavia Hill, 280. Chase, Tenant Friends, 203; further page references appear in parentheses. In her study of Victorian Bristol, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870–1914 (London: Routledge & Paul, 1976), Helen Meller documents the beginning of Home Encouragement Societies in the mid-1870s, which organized classes and competitions for tidy homes, best window gardening and best cultivated garden allotments. ‘At a Home Encouragement Society Exhibition in Hotwells in 1881, forty houses were entered for the neat and tidy home competition,’ Meller writes, adding parenthetically, ‘(there is no evidence though, of how many of these were being run by the young lady rent collectors on the Octavia Hill pattern)’ (172). Martin S. Gaskell comments on widespread small garden competitions at the end of the century in ‘Gardens for the Working Class,’ 495. Enid Gauldie, Cruel Habitations: A History of Working-Class Housing, 1780–1918 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), 98. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Grifﬁn, Bohn, and Company, 1861), 2: 110. Gauldie describes the spectrum of living standards among the working classes (Gauldie, Cruel Habitations, 92–100). Robert Roberts portrays the exhibited possessions on a family’s mantel and offers accounts of pawnbroking in The Classic Slum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), 17–25. A working-class family’s pride in maintaining standards of home decor and dress could ironically undermine middle-class efforts to get that family to save money in case of sickness or future unemployment: see Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and WorkingClass Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,’ Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 460–508. Ellen Ross surveys neighborhood participation in the routine pawning of goods in ‘Survival Networks,’ 4–27, and pawning as women’s work in ‘“Fierce Questions and Taunts”: Married Life in Working-Class London, 1870–1914,’ Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (1982): 588–90. Hill, Early Ideals, 192. Chase, Tenant Friends, 79. Hill, Homes, 31, 40. Wohl, ‘Octavia Hill,’ 110.

232 Notes 62

63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

See Jones, Outcast London, 172, 194; Wohl, ‘Octavia Hill,’ 110. Hill and her followers met with struggle in the 1880s, because casual laborers could not be sure of regular payment each week, and by extension, regular rent-money. As Hill’s rents were too high to attract the humblest worker, she tried to alleviate the problem by creating jobs on the court. The lady visitor constantly urged mothers to send their daughters out to service, where they might support themselves and ease the family budget, and even gave them contacts to speed the process. Both Anne Summers and Frank Prochaska have noted how volunteers met their own growing demand for domestic servants by collecting, cultivating and recruiting poor girls: see Summers, ‘A Home from Home,’ 39, and F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 148–55. The failure to meet the needs of the very poor was a familiar charge leveled against the Peabody Trust: see Wohl, ‘Octavia Hill,’ 108–9, and John Nelson Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas between 1840 and 1914 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 48. Chase, Tenant Friends, 136. See Hill, Homes, 35–6, and Wohl, ‘Octavia Hill,’ 125–30. In his letter of 8 June 1876, Ruskin declared Hill’s optimism dangerous and her ameliorative methods futile (Hill, Life, 341). Wohl, ‘Octavia Hill,’ 126–7. Paul Thompson, The Work of William Morris (London: William Heinemann, 1967), 62. Gauldie, Cruel Habitations, 215. Hill, Homes, 18. Gaskell, ‘Gardens for the Working Class,’ 494. Sir Lawrence Chubb, Nigel Bond, and Lionel Curtis, Octavia Hill and Open Spaces. Speeches delivered during a meeting held by the Association in the Hall of the Royal Society of Arts on June 13th, 1930 (London: Association of Women House Property Managers, [1930]), 9. Summers, ‘A Home from Home,’ 45. Jones, Outcast, 186; Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Model Houses for the Laboring Classes,’ Architectural Review 93 (1943): 127. Hill, ‘Colour,’ 745. For a summary of the origins of the myth of urban demoralization as it was framed by medical authorities, see Jones, Outcast London, 130, 286. Gaskell, ‘Gardens for the Working Class,’ 494; Hill, Our Common Land, 74. Gaskell, ‘Gardens for the Working Class,’ 480–4. Hill, Our Common Land, 111. Hill, Homes, 95. Hill, Our Common Land, 176, 178. Hill, Our Common Land, 111; Hill, Homes, 91. Hill, Our Common Land, 112. To Mr Cockerell, 26 October 1873, in Hill, Life, 295–6. Howard Malchow, ‘Public Gardens and Social Action in Late Victorian London,’ Victorian Studies 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 122–3. Ellen Chase cites vandalism of Hill’s gardens in an undated letter of 1884 or

Notes 233

84

85 86 87 88

89

90

91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102

1885 to Octavia Hill in Hill, Life, 458. Emma Cons claimed that the plants and ivy at the new Drury Lane churchyard were trampled on merely because of an unrestrained enthusiasm (Darley, Octavia Hill, 182). Hill also documents vandalism of the courts themselves (Hill, Homes, 45). Malchow, ‘Public Gardens,’ 122–3. Although Malchow is writing speciﬁcally about the founding of late Victorian public parks, his points about ownership and surveillance apply to Hill’s properties as well. Hill, Early Ideals, 197. Howard Malchow, ‘Free Water: The Public Drinking Fountain Movement and Victorian London,’ London Journal 4 (November 1978): 200. Malchow, ‘Public Gardens,’ 122. Malchow, ‘Public Gardens,’ 122–3. In ‘The Future of Our Commons,’ Hill makes an overt appeal for public gardens that would be merely ornamental: ‘Are we as a nation to have any ﬂower-garden at all? Can we afford it? Do we care to set aside ground for it, or will we have beet-root and cabbages only?’ (Hill, Our Common Land, 178). To give credit where it is due, however, Hill did defend the need for practical outdoor spaces such as laundry-spots (Chubb, Octavia Hill, 9). She also stresses the need for walking paths for the workingman’s leisure (Hill, ‘More Air,’ 184–5). William Thomson Hill, Octavia Hill: Pioneer of the National Trust and Housing Reformer (London: Hutchinson, 1956), 71; Malchow, ‘Public Gardens,’ 122. One allegorical poem painted in zinc by the Kyrle Society seems joyfully self-reﬂective as it appears to praise the work of the happy volunteer who unerringly visits the slums (Hill, Our Common Land, 143–5). Hill, Our Common Land, 146. Hill, Our Common Land, 147. Hill, Homes, 29; further page references appear in parentheses. Darley, Octavia Hill, 241. The layout of Red Cross Hall and Cottages is documented in Hill, Life, 454; Tabor, Octavia Hill, 26–8; Red Cross Hall and Garden, Southwark. Opened 1887 (London: Merser and Sons, Printers, 1896), 3–5. For an analysis of Walter Crane’s murals, see Morna O’Neill, ‘Everyday Heroic Deeds: Walter Crane and Octavia Hill at the Red Cross Hall,’ The Acorn: Journal of the Octavia Hill Society 2 (2003): 4–21. On further mural work by the Kyrle Society, see Joseph McBrinn, ‘“Decoration … should be a common joy”’: The Kyrle Society and Mural Painting,’ The Acorn: Journal of the Octavia Hill Society 3 (2005 [forthcoming]). Red Cross Hall, 10. Lee, ‘Recollections,’ 319. Red Cross Hall, 12. To Octavia Hill from her mother, probably May 1868, in Hill, Life, 244–5. Henry W. Nevinson, Changes and Chances (London: Nisbet and Co., 1923), 89. Deborah Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform in Late-Victorian London (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 172–4. Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture,’ 479. Emma Cons who collected rents for Hill had her own agenda and fought to enforce temperance in her courts. Like Hill, Cons was educated as an artist (under the mother of the

234 Notes

103 104 105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115

116

117 118

painter and stained-glass designer Henry Holiday) and had worked in the Ladies’ Cooperative Guild under Hill’s mother where she gained the same access to Ragged School children as Hill. Like Hill, in her teens she gained commissions as an artist under Ruskin. Cons was involved in missionary aesthetic schemes, particularly those focusing on workingclass leisure. She managed and then bought the Royal Victoria Theatre (later ‘Old Vic’) as an alternative teetotal music hall. A promoter of open spaces and founder of the Women’s Horticultural College in Kent, Cons also hosted working-class students and employees of the Old Vic at her country home. Her biographers describe her in ‘combat against social ugliness’ (Cicely Hamilton and Lilian Baylis, The Old Vic [London: Jonathan Cape, 1926], 264). Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy, 101. Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York and London: Longmans, Green, 1926), 268. Lewis, Women, 102–3. Darley, Octavia Hill, 153. Darley, Octavia Hill, 153. Morris was an ally of the Kyrle Society, and assisted its London Decorative branch, yet as Ian Fletcher has noted, in his lectures Morris redeﬁned the aims of the Kyrle to comply with his socialism (Fletcher, ‘Some Aspects,’ 26). See William Morris’s speeches to Kyrle Society branches in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 1: 192–205. The similarities and divergences of Morris’s and Hill’s programs are documented in her letters: she expresses enthusiasm for his poetry and his tapestry-work; her own ideas for decorative garden-cloisters echo his. Yet she objects to a ‘crooked way of looking at things’ in his essays (Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 21 August 1891, in Hill, Life, 517). Though she sympathizes with his ‘longing to better things,’ and reads News from Nowhere with delight at its beauty, she inevitably resists his wish for social and economic revolution (Hill, Life, 517, 519–20). Hill, ‘More Air,’ 181. William Morris, Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A. L. Morton (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 148. Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 31 March 1892, in Hill, Life, 520. Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship, 259, 268–9. For further criticism of Hill by her contemporaries, see Barnett, Canon Barnett, 30. Lewis, Women, 50. Hill, Homes, 90; Lewis, Women, 50; Darley, Octavia Hill, 285–6, 293–4. Parliamentary legislation included the Old Age Pensions Act of 1909, the Trade Boards Act of 1910 (to stop sweated labor and ﬁx a minimum wage), and the National Insurance Act of 1911. Malchow, ‘Public Gardens,’ 109. The 1901 Kyrle Society Annual Report reﬂected, ‘the very unobtrusiveness of [the Society’s] work to a certain degree militates against its interests by preventing its existence from coming prominently before the general public’ (5). Malchow, ‘Public Gardens,’ 109; Darley, Octavia Hill, 183. Malchow, ‘Public Gardens,’ 109–11. Lord Reginald Brabazon and Lady Mary Jane Brabazon, later the Earl and Countess of Meath, are

Notes 235

119 120 121 122 123

124

largely remembered for their work in preserving open spaces and founding small city gardens. Their extended philanthropy is recorded in Reginald Brabazon, 12th Earl of Meath, Memories of the Nineteenth Century (London: John Murray, 1923) and Memories of the Twentieth Century (London: John Murray, 1924). The Earl of Meath’s publication of The Diaries of Mary Countess of Meath (London: Hutchinson, 1928) remains an astonishingly detailed account of aristocratic philanthropy in practice. Anne Anderson has rightly pointed out that the Brabazons were in accord with many of Octavia Hill’s precepts, but arguably, they were also competitive with her, most clearly in supplanting her Kyrle Society with their MPGA. See Anne Anderson, ‘Octavia Hill’s “Fellow-Workers” Lady Ducie and Lady Brabazon: Wealth, Power and Vocational Philanthropy,’ Women’s History Review, forthcoming. Malchow, ‘Public Gardens,’ 115. Malchow, ‘Public Gardens,’ 116; Darley, Octavia Hill, 183. Darley, Octavia Hill, 184. Fletcher, ‘Some Aspects,’ 28. Darley, Octavia Hill, 183; Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: an Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (London: Williams and Norgate, 1915), 332–3. Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 74–5.

Chapter 3 1 Seth Koven, ‘Culture and Poverty: The London Settlement House Movement 1870–1914’ (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1987), 249. 2 There is a substantial body of work on Toynbee Hall including J. A. R. Pimlott, Toynbee Hall: Fifty Years of Social Progress 1884–1934 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1935), Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henleyon-Thames: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), and Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880–1914: The Search for Community (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Seth Koven’s Harvard dissertation, ‘Culture and Poverty,’ offers a close analysis of ‘pictures, parties, and pianos’ at Toynbee Hall and also examines other university settlements, including women’s settlements. 3 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 4 ‘From Oxford to Whitechapel,’ The Spectator (17 January 1885), cited in Briggs, Toynbee Hall, 21 and Pimlott, Toynbee Hall, 41. 5 Edward Cumming, ‘University Settlements,’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics (April 1892): 273, cited in Koven, Slumming, 250. 6 Walter Besant, The Alabaster Box (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899), 38. 7 Pimlott, Toynbee Hall, 74. 8 Pimlott, Toynbee Hall, 73–4 9 Henrietta O. Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends (London: John Murray, 1921), 153.

236 Notes 10 Koven, ‘Culture and Poverty,’ 313–14. 11 Alan Crawford, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 28. 12 Koven, Slumming, 265. Originally in C. R. Ashbee, Journal, 20 August 1887, Ashbee Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge. 13 Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, 29–30, 37. 14 Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, 30. 15 Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, 42, 71. 16 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 314. 17 Deborah Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform in Late-Victorian London (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 168. 18 Andrew Saint discusses Shaw and Bedford Park in Richard Norman Shaw (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 201–10. 19 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 346. 20 Toynbee Record 3, no. 2 (November 1890): 13. Pater’s lecture was attended not only by working people, but also by aesthete Lionel Johnson, who remarked on it the next day to his friends, the poets ‘Michael Field’ (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). See Michael Field, Works and Days, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933), 122. 21 Toynbee Record 1, no. 4 (January 1889): 42. 22 Toynbee Record 1, no. 4 (January 1889): 43. 23 Toynbee Record 1, no. 12 (September 1889): 128. 24 Toynbee Record 1, no. 7 (April 1889): 73; Toynbee Record 1, no. 8 (May 1889): 89. 25 Toynbee Record 4, no. 9 (June 1892): 103. 26 Toynbee Record 4, no. 7 (April 1892): 77. 27 William Rothenstein, Men and Memories (London: Faber and Faber, 1931), 29. 28 Elizabeth Cumming, ‘Patterns of Life: the Art and Design of Phoebe Anna Traquair and Mary Seton Watts,’ in Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880–1935, eds Bridget Elliot and Janice Helland (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 24. 29 Margaret Wynn Nevinson, Life’s Fitful Fever (London: A. and C. Black, 1926), 80. 30 Toynbee Review 1, no. 9 (June 1889): 107. 31 Toynbee Review 3, no. 2 (November 1890): 23. 32 Contemporary scholars have analyzed the social purpose of the Whitechapel exhibitions: Frances Borzello, Civilizing Caliban: The Misuse of Art, 1875–1980 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); Seth Koven, ‘The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing,’ in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, eds Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 22–48, and Shelagh Wilson, ‘“The Highest Art for the Lowest People”: The Whitechapel and Other Philanthropic Art Galleries, 1877–1901,’ in Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian London, eds Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 172–86. An excellent analysis of women’s journalism in regard to East End art exhibitions is in Meaghan Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain 1880–1905 (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005).

Notes 237 33 Henrietta Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People,’ in Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform, eds The Rev. and Mrs. Samuel A. Barnett (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1895), 175–87. 34 Koven, ‘Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions,’ 25. 35 Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People,’ 177. 36 E. T. Cook, ‘Fine Art in Whitechapel,’ The Magazine of Art 7 (1884): 347. 37 Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People,’ 175; further page references appear in parentheses. 38 This practice occurs in other published works by Henrietta Barnett such as the essay ‘The Uses of a Drawing Room’ in The Woman’s World 1 (1888): 290–2. I critique this essay in ‘Wilde’s The Woman’s World and the Culture of Aesthetic Philanthropy’ in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 189–90. 39 Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People,’ 185; further page references appear in parentheses. 40 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 5. 41 Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People,’ 181; further page references appear in parentheses. 42 Henrietta Barnett, ‘Passionless Reformers,’ in Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform, eds The Rev. and Mrs. Samuel A. Barnett (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1895), 97. 43 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 5: 333. 44 The only extended critique of the Toynbee Travellers’ Club is Joan D. Brown’s ‘The Toynbee Travellers’ Club,’ History of Education 15, no. 1 (1986): 11–17. Pimlott offers a detailed history of the Toynbee Travellers’ Club (Pimlott, Toynbee Hall, 155–61). Briggs and Macartney brieﬂy mention the Toynbee Travellers (Briggs and Macartney, Toynbee Hall, 31–2). Thomas Okey provides a ﬁrsthand account in his memoir, A Basketful of Memories: An Autobiographical Sketch (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930), 82–3. Henrietta Barnett describes the early journeys in Canon Barnett (359–65). 45 There is a chart of the Travellers’ occupations in Barnett, Canon Barnett, 361, which is also cited in Brown, ‘The Toynbee Travellers’ Club,’ 16. The Toynbee Travellers’ Club anticipated the Workmen’s Travel Club, founded in 1902 by Toynbee Hall resident R. A. Scott-James to ensure cheaper, shorter trips for genuine working men; this developed into the national Workman’s Travel Association after the war. 46 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 326. 47 Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Florence, March and April 1888, 102. This source is located in the London Metropolitan Archives, ﬁle A/TOY/12/1, HMC ref. 7; further page references appear in parentheses. 48 This image is reproduced in Barnett, Canon Barnett, 361. 49 In the galleries, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and her partner Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thompson physically mimed the shapes and formal tensions in art, and recorded the associative memories that these sensations evoked for them. Lee fervently believed this process of mimesis and reﬂection fostered good bodily health. I have discussed this method of

238 Notes

50

51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

art-criticism as an extension of Pater’s subjective aesthetics in ‘Engaging “Delicate Brains”: From Working-Class Enculturation to Upper-Class Lesbian Liberation in Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thompson’s Psychological Aesthetics,’ in Women and British Aestheticism, eds Kathy A. Psomiades and Talia Schaffer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 215–17. The Toynbee Travellers appear to have been resistant to Lee’s instructions and determined to use the historical method comfortable to them. As the editor writes, ‘a visit to Florence has done more to alter such a state of mind than we could have regarded possible, and this though we never had the privilege of hearing the addresses by Miss Paget or the other guides who expounded the mysteries of art criticism. But visiting the Galleries and Churches in which their works are preserved and the scenes in which they lived we acquired familiarity with their biographies and chronological succession and hence to form some idea of their relative positions and inﬂuence’ (Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Florence, 149–50). The phrases ‘this though we had never had the privilege of hearing the addresses...’ and ‘mysteries of art criticism’ cast doubt on the clarity and helpfulness of Lee’s guided tours. Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Siena, Perugia, Assisi, Easter 1890, 52. London Metropolitan Archives, ﬁle A/TOY/12/1, HMC ref. 6; further page references appear in parentheses. Following a group trip to Venice in 1889, one of the Travellers lecturing for the settlement joked, ‘Our Travellers neither “lisp nor wear strange suits,” nor affect any other established signs of “having swam in a gondola,”’ (Toynbee Record 1, no. 9 [June 1889]: 107). Clearly his companions would have understood his allusions to aesthetic effeminacy. Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Siena, Perugia, Assisi, 32. Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Florence, 16. Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Siena, Perugia, Assisi, 48. Toynbee Travellers’ Club, Log Book of the Expedition to Florence, 173. ‘On Wednesday we dined at the Harts’, met Mrs A–– A–– of Chicago – a beauty in jewels who took philanthropy in vain and “drew” me to tell her that her sort would never help the poor because of the beam which prevent them seeing the poor’ (Barnett, Canon Barnett, 325). Barnett, Canon Barnett, 436–7. Koven, ‘Culture and Poverty,’ 118. Alison Adburgham, A Punch History of Manners and Modes, 1841–1940 (London: Hutchinson, 1961), 143. Koven, Slumming, 37, 77, 82, 140. Beatrice Webb, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, eds Norman and Jean Mackenzie (London: Virago, 1982), 241–9. George Du Maurier, ‘The Very Latest Craze; Or, Overdoing It,’ Punch 85 (22 December 1883): 294. George Du Maurier, ‘In Slummibus,’ Punch 86 (3 May 1884): 210. This deﬁnition is from the Oxford English Dictionary. The year 1883 saw a series of masher jokes in Punch magazine: see, for example, Punch 84 (13 January 1883): 14; Punch 84 (10 February 1883): 65, and Punch 84 (24 February 1883): 88.

Notes 239 65 The journalist Thomas Wright characterizes Charley the lodger as a masher in Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, by a Journeyman Engineer (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967), 220, 233. 66 Alan Sinﬁeld, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 27, 34. 67 Walter Pater, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Signet, 1974), 61. 68 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1981), 15, 151. 69 While Samuel Barnett assumed a dichotomy between sensational journalists and his cultural philanthropists, it is clear that the two groups overlapped. For instance, according to the 1891 Kyrle Society Annual Report, the slum journalist G. A. Sala attended a meeting of the Kyrle Society’s Musical Branch, which sponsored free concerts in poor neighborhoods. As I show in this chapter, Henry Nevinson was both a settler and a slum journalist. 70 Henry W. Nevinson, Changes and Chances (London: Nisbet and Co., 1923), 192–4; further page references appear in parentheses. 71 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York and London: Longmans, Green, 1926), 176. 72 Nevinson, Life’s Fitful Fever, 80. 73 Stephen Hobhouse, Forty Years and an Epilogue: An Autobiography, 1881–1951 (London: James Clarke and Co., 1951), 67; further page references in parentheses. 74 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 312. 75 H. R. Haweis, My Musical Life (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1884), 115.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4

5

6

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1965), 185; further page references appear in parentheses. John Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 106. John Ruskin, Praeterita (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), 39. Analyses of Victorian working-class respectability and solidarity as expressed by leisure practices are provided in Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), and Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,’ Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 460–508. John Charleton, Speech of John Charleton, M.P., House of Commons. May 2, 1894. Lord’s Day Obligation: The Sabbath for Man – The Toiler’s Right to Sunday Rest (London, 1894), 1. This idea is also stated by the Society for Promoting the Due Observance of the Lord’s Day, Address #32. Evils of Saturday and Monday Markets and Fairs (London: LDOS, 1836), 1. The Society for Promoting the Due Observance of the Lord’s Day will hereafter be cited as LDOS. John Gritton, D.D., The Obligation to Observe the Lord’s Day for Rest and Worship. A Paper read at the Manchester Conference of the Evangelical Alliance, 1890, by John Gritton, D.D. (London: LDOS, [1890]), 7.

240 Notes 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22

23

24 25 26

27

28

Wigley discusses the class issues inherent in Sabbatarian literature in Rise and Fall, 71, 106. LDOS, Address #9 (London: LDOS, [1838]), 2. Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1982), 132. LDOS, Appeal on the Subject of the Due Observance of the Lord’s Day. No. 3 (London: LDOS, [n.d.]), 3. LDOS, Second Annual Report, June 1833 (London: LDOS, 1833), 4. Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, 133. As Harrison points out, however, the backbone of the LDRA’s ﬁnancial support came from larger subscriptions by the bourgeoisie (Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, 134). Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, 132. Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, 135. LDOS, Address #6. To the keepers of inns, taverns, coffee-houses, &c. &c. (London: LDOS, [n.d.]). LDOS, Address #8 (London: LDOS, [n.d.]), 2. Andrew Agnew, A Letter on the Responsibilities of Railway Directors and All Shareholder Members of Christian Churches, 4th edn. (Edinburgh and London: John Johnstone, 1848), 6. Charleton, Speech, 2, 15. LDOS, A Well-Spent Sabbath a Foretaste of Heaven. Tracts for Working Men and Their Firesides. No. 21 (London: LDOS, [1850s]), 2. LDOS, Address #1. To Masters and Heads of Families (London: LDOS, 1831), 1; LDOS, Address #32, 1. As Brian Harrison has noted, Sabbatarians’ insistence upon simultaneous rest-days for all citizens was increasingly anachronistic, given the demands of a new recreational mass market that required that suppliers of goods labor out of sync with recreational shoppers (Peaceable Kingdom, 141). John Gritton, D.D., The Continental Sunday: an examination (London: LDOS, 1884), 6–7; John Gritton, D.D., Sinless Sabbath-Breaking (London: LDOS, [n.d.]), 4. Wm. Arthur, The People’s Day, an appeal to the Right Hon. Lord Stanley, M.P., against his advocacy of a French Sunday (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1855), 13–14. Gritton, Continental, 4. Gritton, Continental, 5. Gritton, Obligation, 4. Ironically, defenders of rational recreations used the same rhetoric of antithesis and balance, but in order to juxtapose play and work as necessary, healthy complements of one another (Bailey, Leisure, 78–9). The phrase ‘the thin end of the wedge’ appears in John Kennedy, DD, The Sunday Society: How its projects concern the citizen and the Christian (London: S. W. Partridge and Co., 1880), 10–11, and Marvin R. Vincent, The Pleasure-Sunday a Labor Sunday, a Sermon (New York: Rufus Adams, [n.d.]), 7. The anti-Sabbatarian response is from B.M., ‘A Fellow Workman,’ The Races Defended as an Amusement (Newcastle, 1853), cited in Bailey, Leisure, 39. Harrison, Peaceable, 153. Some working men seeking self-education through museums and galleries sided with the Sunday Society against

Notes 241

29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53 54 55

Sabbatarians: the Sunday League was founded by London artisans (Harrison, Peaceable, 139). Stoddard Dewey, ‘The Triumph of Sunday Opening,’ Westminster Review 145 (1896): 479. Howard Malchow, Gentlemen Capitalists: The Social and Political World of the Victorian Businessman (London: Macmillan, 1991), 392. Dewey, ‘Triumph’, 482. Henrietta O. Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends (London: John Murray, 1921), 544. Dewey, ‘Triumph,’ 482. ‘The Present Situation of Sunday Opening,’ Westminster Review 146 (1896): 261. This source is a roundtable discussion of brief letters printed in volumes 145 and 146 of the Westminster Review following the passing of the Sunday Bill in 1896. The letters are here cited under the general title of the series, ‘The Present Situation of Sunday Opening,’ and abbreviated in citations as ‘Present.’ ‘Present,’ 145: 611. As late as 1905, the secretary of the LDOS continued to lobby for strict enforcement of ﬁnes for Sunday trading (Frederick Peake, ‘The Lord’s Day Observance: A Reply to Lord Aveling,’ Nineteenth Century 58 [1905]: 741). Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, 138. ‘Present,’ 145: 603. ‘Present,’ 145: 603. ‘Present,’ 146: 15. Alfred R. Wallace, ‘A Suggestion to Sabbath Keepers,’ Nineteenth Century 36 (1894): 606. John Dennis, Review of Sunday. Its Origin, History, and Present Obligations Considered in The Bampton Lectures by James Augustus Hessey, DCL and Sunday by E. H. Plumptre, M.A., Fortnightly Review 4 (1866): 764. G. D. Haughton, Review of The Literature of the Sabbath Question by R. Cox, FSA, Fortnightly Review 3 (1865) 374. James W. Davis, ‘The Sunday Opening of Public Libraries, Art Galleries and Museums,’ Westminster Review 134 (1890): 10. Davis, ‘Sunday Opening,’ 18. ‘Present,’ 145: 493; further page references appear in parentheses. Earl of Shaftesbury, The Right Hon. The Earl of Shaftesbury on the Sunday Question (London: Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association, 1882), 24. LDOS, Well-Spent, 16. LDOS, Well-Spent, 16. Joseph Kingsmill, The Sabbath the Working Man’s True Charter. Thoughts for the thinking men of the industrial classes on the Sabbath Question (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856), 23. Alexander M’Arthur, Sunday opening of museums, galleries, etc. A speech delivered in the House of Commons on Friday, May 19th, 1882 (Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association, 1882), 2. Gritton, Continental, 7–8. ‘Present,’ 146: 14. H. R. Haweis, Arrows in the Air (London: Kegan Paul, 1878), 422. ‘Present,’ 146: 12–13.

242 Notes 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76

‘Present,’ 146: 11. Davis, ‘Sunday Opening,’ 11. Henry Broadhurst, Mr Broadhurst on the Sunday Question (London: Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association, 1882), 3. Vincent, Pleasure-Sunday, 11. Shaftesbury similarly declares, ‘The enormous masses that are thus to be reclaimed, men addicted to the ginpalace and ardent spirits, could only by special miracle be suddenly diverted to arts and sciences’ (Sunday Question, 8). Alexander M’Arthur writes ‘my conviction is that not a single drunkard has been redeemed by such means,’ and points to the Continental Sunday in Germany as the day in which ‘drunkenness and riotousness celebrate their greatest triumph’ and when ‘most of the misdemeanors are committed ... or are intimately connected with the misuse of [Sunday]’ (Sunday Opening, 3, 7). Gritton traces a growth in inebriation among the people of those countries practicing a Continental Sunday, even extracting lines from Sunday Society literature about the popularity of beer gardens (Continental, 8, 10). Ellen C. Clayton, ‘A Sunday Afternoon in Cavendish House,’ Sunday Review 1, no. 1 (October 1876): 34. ‘Present,’ 146: 365. ‘Present,’ 146: 263. LDOS, Well-Spent, 7. Kingsmill, Sabbath, 11, 14. Kingsmill, Sabbath, 16–17, original emphasis. Kingsmill, Sabbath, 16. Arthur, People’s Day, 7. M’Arthur, Sunday Opening, 2; Vincent, Pleasure-Sunday, 9; Gritton, Continental, 12–13; Thomas Chambers, Should the National Museums Be Opened on the Lord’s Day? (London: Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association, [n.d.]), 5. Kennedy, Sunday Society, 12. Shaftesbury, Sunday Question, 23. ‘Present,’ 146: 263. ‘Present,’ 145: 478. ‘Present,’ 145: 598, 488. As necessary as they found it to redeﬁne ‘recreation,’ anti-Sabbatarians went to great lengths to clarify the meaning of ‘work’ by putting it in its proper context. Alfred R. Wallace explains that what is work to some may be leisure to others, depending on whether it offers variety to weekly pursuits. ‘To the summer tourist in the Alps the ascent of a mountain or the passage of a glacier is pleasure and health-giving recreation; to the guides who accompany him it is their work’ (‘Suggestion,’ 606). He goes on to cite cooking and gardening as similar labors that are pleasure to some, though weekday work to domestic servants and hired gardeners. Wallace’s suggestion for leisured householders to assume their servants’ duties on the Sabbath resembles the call for volunteerism at galleries, a parallel of which he is conscious (607–8). Vincent, Pleasure-Sunday, 8. Haweis, Arrows, 410; Vincent, Pleasure-Sunday, 12; M’Arthur, Sunday Opening, 3–4. M’Arthur, Sunday Opening, 3.

Notes 243 77 78 79 80 81

82

83 84

85

86

87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95

M’Arthur, Sunday Opening, 3. M’Arthur, Sunday Opening, 5. Bailey, Leisure, 114. Bailey, Leisure, 101. Thomas Wright, Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, by a Journeyman Engineer (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967), 204–48; further page references appear in parentheses. Peter Bailey questions scholarly assumptions about the consistency of working men’s respectability, proposing instead a performance that is more elastic, ambiguous, and unstable. He reviews ‘situational contexts of behavior, particularly in inter-class relationships’ in ‘“Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?” Towards a Role Analysis of MidVictorian Working-Class Respectability,’ Journal of Social History 12, no. 3 (1979): 348. Ellen Ross examines the domestic performance of respectability by working-class women in ‘“Not the Sort that Would Sit on the Doorstep”: Respectability in Pre-World War I London Neighborhoods,’ International Labor and Working-Class History 27 (1985): 39–59. ‘Present,’ 145: 607. Theodore Duret, ‘The Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery Exhibitions, 1881,’ Gazette des Beaux Arts 23 (June 1881): 554, cited in Colleen Denney, At the Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 106. Joseph Moore, ‘The Sunday Society and the Grosvenor Gallery,’ Sunday Review 3, no. 1 (October 1878): 21–5, cited in Denney, At the Temple of Art, 62–3; Paula Gillett, ‘Art Audiences at the Grosvenor Gallery,’ in The Grovesnor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, eds Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 57–8. Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Women and Society in Victorian England (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 1973), 77–8, cited in Denney, At the Temple of Art, 63. Charles Keene, ‘Shocking!’ Punch 82 (6 May 1882): 207. ‘Present,’ 145: 491. ‘Present,’ 145: 603. Moncure Conway, ‘Civilising the Sabbath,’ The Open Court 278 (22 December 1892): 3498; further page references appear in parentheses. ‘Present,’ 145: 608. ‘Present,’ 145: 604, 607, 608; ‘Present,’ 146: 359; Sunday Society, Report read and adopted at the annual meeting of the society ([London], 1878), 4; Conway, ‘Civilising the Sabbath,’ 3500. ‘Present,’ 145: 605. LDOS, Occasional Paper (March 1877): 562, cited in Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, 123. ‘Present,’ 146: 256. A Fortnightly Review critic writing on the Sunday League’s endorsement of Sunday bands conveys the same doubt more convincingly: ‘Sunday bands, like any other good music, may afford a pleasant amusement, but listening to waltzes and polkas is not particularly conducive to elevation or purity of thought; neither do picture-galleries lead

244 Notes

96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

men, as the League petitioners assert, to “reverence and love of the Deity.” A ﬁne taste has no necessary afﬁnity to a good heart, and intellectual culture is not spiritual life’ (Dennis, Review, 4: 766). Roundell Palmer, MP, A speech delivered in the House of Commons on Thursday, February 21, 1856, in opposition to Sir Joshua Walmsley’s motion for Opening the British Museum and the National Gallery on Sundays (London: John Henry and James Parker, [1856]), 11. Arthur, People’s Day, 28. Arthur, People’s Day, 28. Kennedy, Sunday Society, 15–16. Arthur, People’s Day, 29. Kingsmill, Sabbath, 21. Gritton, Continental, 14–15. Gritton, cited in Sunday Review 1, no. 3 (1877): 180. ‘Present’ 145: 614; M’Arthur, Sunday Opening, 14–15; Kingsmill, Sabbath, 12–13. M’Arthur, Sunday Opening, 14. Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London: Reeves and Turner, 1882), 46. Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 173, 201, 272, 300, 327. Haweis, Arrows, 172. Haweis, Arrows, 174. Bea Howe, Arbiter of Elegance (London: Harvill Press, 1967), 113. Howe, Arbiter of Elegance, 229. Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in LateVictorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 108–10. Howe, Arbiter of Elegance, 151, 193; further page references appear in parentheses. Cited in Sunday Review 2, no. 1 (July 1877): 4. Toynbee Record 2, no. 1 (October 1889): 9. Davis, ‘Sunday Opening,’ 18. ‘Present,’146: 14. Howe, Arbiter of Elegance, 54. Haweis, Arrows, 408; further page references appear in parentheses. David Paton, ‘The P.S.A. Movement. An Interview with Mr Abraham Park,’ Sunday Magazine 25 (1896): 377. Kenneth Stanley Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 81. Paton, ‘P.S.A. Movement,’ 379. Paton, ‘P.S.A. Movement,’ 377; Inglis, Churches, 81. Inglis, Churches, 83. Inglis, Churches, 83.

Chapter 5 1 2

Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 695–6. Mackenzie, Sinister Street, 695.

Notes 245 3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Richard Frederick Littledale, ‘The Missionary Aspect of Ritualism,’ in The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day in 1866, 3rd edn, Orby Shipley (London: Longmans, Green, Rider, and Dyer, 1867), 39. In this chapter, I use the terms Ritualist, High Anglican, High Church, and Anglo-Catholic interchangeably. Because not all High Churchmen were extreme Ritualists, I qualify the phrase with the term ‘moderate’ when necessary. My reference to particular novels as anti-Tractarian should remind the reader that these were published before 1869. John Richard Orens, ‘Christ, Communism, and Chorus Girls: A Reassessment of Stewart Headlam,’ Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 49, no. 3 (1980): 247. John Richard Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism: The Mass, the Masses and the Music Hall (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 10–11; further page references appear in parentheses. On Christian Socialists and masculinity, see Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Donald E. Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Headlam appears to have exhibited none of the anxieties about manliness manifested by Hughes and Kingsley. There is no ﬁrst-hand evidence of Headlam’s response to his wife’s discovery of her lesbianism and her separation from him in 1885. But it may have been an amicable parting: they had shared an intellectual life in common in the late 1870s; she had afﬁrmed Headlam’s theological ideas and love of the theater, even writing her own treatises on the ballet and the Gospels (Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism, 47, fn. 4). Headlam’s support of Oscar Wilde following Wilde’s indictment for gross indecencies with men is more concrete evidence of his tolerance of non-normative sexuality. F. G. Bettany, Stewart Headlam, a Biography (London: J. Murray, 1926), 76, 211. Stewart Duckworth Headlam, The Laws of Eternal Life (London: F. Verinder, 1888), 3. Stewart Duckworth Headlam, The Service of Humanity and Other Sermons (London: John Hodges, 1882), 46; Headlam, Laws, 25. Headlam, Laws, 97. Stewart Duckworth Headlam, Priestcraft and Progress; Being Sermons and Lectures (London: John Hodges, 1891), 47. Headlam, Service, 11. Kenneth Leech, ‘Stewart Headlam: 1897–1924 and the Guild of St Matthew,’ in For Christ and the People: Studies of Four Socialist Priests and Prophets of the Church of England between 1870 and 1930, ed. Maurice B. Reckitt (London: SPCK, 1968), 75. In ‘God’s Visitations’ in The Service of Humanity, Headlam urges the building of a swimming bath to commemorate 600 killed in a Thames accident: he is not only justifying God, but arguing that training in swimming is healthy (105). This seems to me also suggestive of William Morris’s aesthetics. Father Robert Dolling similarly defended gymnasia in his Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum (London: Masters and Co., Ltd., 1906), 31.

246 Notes 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42

Headlam, Laws, 81. Headlam, Service, 65. Through his interpretation of Scripture, Headlam argued that the Virgin also restored respect for women and called for economic equality between consumers and producers. Headlam’s Cult of Mary was especially deﬁant in the context of the widespread late Victorian antipathy to saint worship. Headlam, Service, 84, 86. Headlam, Service, 109. John Ruskin, Praeterita (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), 461. Headlam, Laws, 112. Ruskin, Praeterita, 121, 460. Headlam, Priestcraft, 15–16. Headlam, Priestcraft, 77. Headlam, Priestcraft, 78. Edward Norman, ‘Stewart Headlam and the Christian Socialists,’ History Today 37 (April 1987): 27. Headlam, Laws, 79. Stewart Duckworth Headlam, Theatres and Music Halls: a lecture given at the Commonwealth Club, Bethnal Green, on Sunday, October 7, 1877, 2nd edn. ([London]: Women’s Printing Society, Ltd., [1878?]), vi. Headlam, Laws, 46. Orens, ‘Christ,’ 239. Stewart Duckworth Headlam, The Function of the Stage. A Lecture by Stewart D. Headlam (London: F. Verinder, 1889), 8; Headlam, Theatres, 2; Headlam, Service, 17. Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 58. Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 70. Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 99. Headlam, Function, 9–10; Headlam, Theatres, vi, 2. Headlam, Theatres, 27. Orens, ‘Christ,’ 247. Ruskin conveyed his approval of the Church and Stage Guild to Headlam. An account of the relationship between Headlam and Ruskin is in Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 102. Headlam quotes an excerpt from one of Ruskin’s letters on stagecraft in The Function of the Stage, 17–18. Headlam, Theatres, vi; further page references appear in parentheses. Headlam, Function, 23. Published as Stewart D. Headlam, The Theory of Theatrical Dancing, With a Chapter on Pantomine, Edited from Carlos Blasis’ Code of Terpsichore, with the Original Plates, by Stewart D. Headlam (London: F. Verinder, 1888). Headlam, Function, 16–18, 28. Headlam, Service, 23. Whistler wrote, ‘Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful – as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony’ (J. A. M. Whistler, Ten o’Clock, a Lecture by James A. McNeill Whistler [Portland, ME: Thomas Bird Mosher, 1916], 12). Similarly, while lecturing in America, Wilde claimed, ‘For all beautiful colours are gradu-

Notes 247

43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69

ated colours, the colours that seem about to pass into one another’s realm – colour without tone being like music without harmony, mere discord’ (‘Art and the Handicraftsman,’ in Essays and Lectures [New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1916], 178). Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 138–9. Headlam, Service, 23. Headlam, Service, 23. Headlam, Service, 66. Further evidence of his participation in missionary aesthetic circles, Headlam started a clerical campaign to support the National Sunday League (Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 35). Headlam’s afﬁrmation of the ‘Continental Sunday’ is in agreement with his anti-Puritanism and his love of healthy amusements as evidenced in Headlam, Priestcraft, 57 and Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 86. Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism, 20. Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 128. Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 105. Lawrence Waltman, ‘The Early London Diaries of Elizabeth Robins Pennell,’ (PhD Diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1976), 372–3. Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism, 119. Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism, 119, 124. Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 184. Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 185. Bettany, Stewart Headlam, 213–14. Martin Wellings, ‘Aspects of Late Nineteenth-Century Anglican Evangelicalism: The Response to Ritualism, Darwinism and Theological Liberalism’ (PhD Diss., University of Oxford, 1989), 19. Frank Michael Reynolds, Martyr of Ritualism: Father Mackonochie of St Alban’s, Holborn (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 109. L. E. Ellsworth, Charles Lowder and the Ritualist Movement (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), 148–9. Mrs Humphry Ward, The History of David Grieve (New York and London: Macmillan and Co., 1892), 378. Ward, History, 415. Dolling, Ten Years, 97. Reynolds, Martyr, 65. John Shelton Reed, ‘“Ritualism Rampant in East London”: AngloCatholicism and the Urban Poor,’ Victorian Studies 31, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 379–80. Reynolds, Martyr, 104. Dolling, Ten Years, 90, 230–1. Dolling, Ten Years, 53. Ellsworth, Charles Lowder, 148. E. R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 120–1. As Norman has reﬂected, the Church Association must have found in King a perfect representative of dangerous Ritualism. Prior to his consecration as bishop, King had served as chaplain and principal of Cuddesdon, the High Church theological college notorious for the sentimental friendships and alleged effeminacy of its

248 Notes

70 71

72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

curates. As Bishop, he was prone to wearing a miter, celebrating Holy Communion daily, and practicing ceremonial popularly recognized to be Ritualist. Because bishops were empowered to veto prosecutions of Ritualists under the P.W.R. Act, and because a bishop with High Church leanings was certain to protect Ritualist vicars, the Church Association sought to make an example of Bishop King by pursuing a case against him. Littledale, ‘Missionary,’ 32, 37; further page references appear in parentheses. Historians have availed themselves of Booth’s and Mudie-Smith’s surveys: Alan Wilson, ‘The Authority of Church and Party among London Anglo-Catholics, 1880–1914, with special reference to the Church Crisis, 1898–1904,’ (PhD Diss., University of Oxford, 1988), 27, and W. N. Yates, ‘The Only True Friend: Ritualist Concepts of Priestly Vocation,’ Studies in Church History 15 (1978): 410, 414. Both Reed and Munson tabulate middle- and upper-class attendance at Ritualist churches: see Reed, ‘Ritualism Rampant,’ 382–3, 388–90, and J. E. B. Munson, ‘The Oxford Movement by the End of the Nineteenth Century: The Anglo-Catholic Clergy,’ Church History 44, no. 3 (September 1975): 391. For other denials of the extraordinary success of slum Ritualists among the poor, see Gerald Parsons, Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press in association with the Open University, 1988), 232; Kenneth Stanley Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 49; and David Brown McIlhiney, A Gentleman in Every Slum: Church of England Missions in East London, 1837–1914 (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1988), 21, 43–4. In this section, I am especially indebted to Reed’s ‘Ritualism Rampant.’ Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London. 3rd Series: Religious Inﬂuences (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1902), 2: 90. Booth, Life and Labour, 2: 79. Richard Mudie-Smith, The Religious Life of London (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1904), 30–1. Mudie-Smith, Religious Life, 37. Wilson, ‘Authority,’ 30. Founded in 1855 to defend High Church clergy against prosecutions, the Society of the Holy Cross evolved into a social, representational forum through which Ritualists deliberated and debated their unifying policies. Booth, Life and Labour, 3: 203. Reed, ‘Ritualism Rampant,’ 397. Reed, ‘Ritualism Rampant,’ 392; Leonard W. Cowie, Religion. Examining the Evidence (London: Methuen, 1973), 65. Wilson, ‘Authority,’ 160. Wilson, ‘Authority,’ 170. Reed also claims this using different evidence in ‘Ritualism Rampant,’ 396. Wilson, ‘Authority,’ 171–2. Inglis, Churches, 46; Munson, ‘Oxford Movement,’ 392; Reed, ‘Ritualism Rampant,’ 377, 398.

Notes 249 85

86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93

94

95 96

97

98

Ellsworth, Charles Lowder, 74–9; Desmond Bowen, The Idea of the Victorian Church: A Study of the Church of England, 1833–1889 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1968), 289. Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism, 26. Mudie-Smith, Religious Life, 37. Charles Masterman observed of South London: ‘The working man has no affection for elaborate ritual; he accepts with resignation, as part of an inexplicable activity, the ornaments, the processions and the ceremony. If [High Church clergymen] processed round their churches standing on their heads, he would accept it with the same acquiescence. But they have gone down and lived amongst the people; they have proclaimed an intelligible gospel of Christian Socialism; they have demanded not charity, but justice. The campaign has earned them a storm of obloquy from the world of orthodox religion; it has earned them the affection of the poor’ (Mudie-Smith, Religious Life, 216). Reynolds, Martyr, 190–1. Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974), 48. McLeod, Class and Religion, 50. George Haw, Christianity and the Working Classes (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1906), 253. Reed, ‘Ritualism Rampant,’ 382. Yates, ‘Only True Friend,’ 11; Wilson, ‘Authority,’ 30. Contrast Alan Wilson’s statement, ‘Anglo-Catholic churches did best where other churches did best – in the suburbs, where more parishioners were likely to have the skills and desire for voluntary organization’ (‘Authority,’ 30) or Parson’s that it was ‘more rural than urban’ (Religion, 233) to J. E. B. Munson’s argument that Ritualism was essentially ‘an urban phenomenon’ (‘Oxford Movement,’ 390–1). The term ‘suburb’ was used with great ﬂexibility: while Mudie-Smith concludes his survey with George Haw’s essay on evangelical neglect and failure in ‘Greater London,’ Charles Masterman, in his contribution on South London, calls districts like Dulwich and Streatham suburbs, and locates the progress of Ritualism among the middle classes there (Mudie-Smith, Religious Life, 205, 337–44). Is Ritualism in the Church of England Popular among the Masses? by ‘The Rector of Manaton’ (1894), 13. Cited in Munson, ‘Oxford Movement,’ 394. Munson, ‘Oxford Movement,’ 390; Nigel Yates, The Oxford Movement and Anglican Ritualism (London: The Historical Association, 1983), 27. John Shelton Reed, ‘“A Female Movement”: The Feminization of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Catholicism,’ Anglican and Episcopal History 57, no. 2 (1988): 199–238; John Shelton Reed, ‘“Giddy Young Men”: A Counter-Cultural Aspect of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism,’ Comparative Social Research 11 (1989): 209–26. Acknowledging, of course, the anachronism of the term ‘homosexual.’ See Reed, ‘Giddy Young Men,’ 221–3, and David Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,’ Victorian Studies 25, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 181–210. Reed, ‘Giddy,’ 211.

250 Notes 99 100

101

102 103 104

105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

116 117

Wilson, ‘Authority,’ 50. ‘The Protestant Alliance Verbatim Report of Speeches delivered at the Great Demonstration, Held in the Queen’s Hall, Langham Palace on May 3rd, 1898,’ 22–5, cited in Munson, ‘Oxford Movement,’ 387 and Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish,’ 189, 191. John Kensit’s own history is recounted in G. I. T. Machin, ‘The Last Victorian Anti-Ritualist Campaign, 1895–1906,’ Victorian Studies 25 (Spring 1982): 277–302. Reed, ‘Giddy,’ 214. James Adderly tentatively deﬁnes the term ‘spike’ in his autobiographical In Slums and Society (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1916), 82–3, and characters in Compton Mackenzie’s The Parson’s Progress also use it, as in ‘I hope you’ve spiked him up’ and ‘you think I am thirsting after spikey services’ (London: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1923), 57, 67. Adderly, In Slums, 130. Walter Besant, In Deacon’s Orders (New York and London: Garland, 1976), 82–3. This adage occurs in religious ﬁction: for instance, Mrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere (London: Smith, Elder, 1901), 186, and Compton Mackenzie, The Parson’s Progress, 127. Maria Trench, Charles Lowder: A Biography by the Author of ‘The Life of St Teresa,’ 12th edn. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1887), 284, cited in Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish,’ 190. Charles E. Osborne, The Life of Father Dolling (London: E. Arnold, 1903), 74. Osborne, Life, 47. Wilson, ‘Authority,’ 196. Wilson, ‘Authority,’ 195. Wilson, ‘Authority,’ 223; Yates, ‘Only True Friend,’ 413; Yates, Oxford Movement, 38. Yates, ‘Only True Friend,’ 411. Booth, Life and Labour, 2: 92. Booth, Life and Labour, 2: 92. F. W. Robinson, Beyond the Church (New York: Garland, 1977), 1: 6, 7; further page references appear in parentheses. Charles Maurice Davies was also the author of several volumes of articles describing his own dilettantesque, peripatetic travels throughout the religious houses of London: Unorthodox London (1871), Heterodox London (1872), Orthodox London (1873), and Mystic London (1878). In addition to his ﬁrst novel, Philip Paternoster (1858), Davies’s novel Verts or, The Three Creeds (1876) also pinpoints the junctures between religious aestheticism, Decadence and class difference: ‘Let us go … and lead a Bohemian life in London,’ says one character as she and her ever-vacillating husband embark on a career of journalism and low-life quarters in the midst of a Ritualist scare (New York: Garland, 1975), 1: 210. Charles Maurice Davies, Philip Paternoster (New York: Garland, 1975), 1: 220, 1: 237, 2: 87; further page references appear in parentheses. Robinson, Beyond the Church, 3: 80; Davies, Philip Paternoster, 1: 102. Novelists also commonly portrayed popular violence as a viable reaction to Ritualist innovations. In Robinson’s Beyond the Church, the nar-

Notes 251

118 119 120

121

122

123 124 125

rator remarks offhand that, had his hero gone in for Ritualism, he ‘might have been a thuribler, banner bearer, acolyte – what not, and suffered amateur martyrdom at the hands of irate and protesting mobs’ (2: 323). For representations of riots, see Robinson’s High Church and the conclusion to Hall Caine’s The Christian (1897). In Compton Mackenzie’s The Heavenly Ladder (1924), parishioners desecrate the village crèche to protest changes in the church ceremony; shortly after, a mob physically ousts the Ritualist priest and his possessions from the vicarage. Novelists were conscious of the 1859 riots in London’s St George’s-in-the-East as a referent. The upheaval at the church and desecrations within it were not solely due to popular discontent with the church’s formal ceremonial. John Shelton Reed attributes local dissatisfaction to the Rev. Bryan King’s obstinacy and personal unpopularity among communicants, and quotes from King’s autobiography as evidence of his pastoral style (Reed, ‘Ritualism Rampant,’ 400). Further, brothel-owners, threatened by the work of the mission priests, bribed young locals to wreak havoc (S. L. Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford Movement [London: Faith Press, 1963], 135). Philip T. Smith offers a comprehensive analysis of the St George’s-in-the-East riots in ‘The London Police and the Holy War: Ritualism and St George’s-in-the-East, London, 1859–60,’ Journal of the Church and State 21, no. 1 (1986): 107–19. F. W. Robinson, High Church (New York: Garland, 1975), 1: 121, original emphasis. Littledale, ‘Missionary,’ 31. Margaret Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age (London and New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 287, 289–90, 307. This tension continues into the twentieth century. In the 1920s, Compton Mackenzie offered an optimistic portrayal of slum Ritualism with its aesthetic worship intact through his laudatory ﬁctionalization of the Portsmouth mission priest Robert Dolling in the ﬁrst two novels of his Anglo-Catholic trilogy, The Altar Steps (1921) and The Parson’s Progress (1922). But his ﬁnal volume, The Heavenly Ladder (1924) contradicts these when its protagonist, Mark Lidderdale, aiming to convert his uneducated, rural parishioners to Anglo-Catholicism, priggishly alienates them. Mark also ultimately converts to Roman Catholicism. Maison, Search Your Soul, 292, 295–6; Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: Garland, 1977), 169, 189. Maison, Search Your Soul, 292. J. H. Shorthouse, John Inglesant (New York: Macmillan, 1882), 252; further page references appear in parentheses. Reed, ‘Giddy Young Men,’ 217. Erected in the infamous slum of Holborn, St Alban’s was one of those eclectic churches whose locale has undergone reinvestigation by John Shelton Reed. Reed concludes that allegations about the neighborhood’s poverty and criminality have been exaggerated, maintaining that it was socially heterogeneous and

252 Notes

126

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139

140

141 142 143

144 145 146

bordered on afﬂuent neighborhoods (Reed, ‘Ritualism Rampant,’ 383). In his census account of Holborn at the turn of the century, Walter Warren cited overcrowding, a high death rate, the displacement of locals through large-scale demolitions and the particular poverty of Drury Lane and its environs, and then went on to describe St Alban’s as ‘a fashionable church of every ritual and art’ (Mudie-Smith, Religious Life, 144–5). W. H. Mallock, The New Republic, or Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House, ed. J. Max Patrick (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1950), 172. Mrs Humphry Ward, ‘Marius the Epicurean,’ Macmillan’s Magazine 52 (June 1885): 132–9. Wolff, Gains and Losses, 180, 188–9. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 244; further page references appear in parentheses. Maison, Seach Your Soul, 305. Walter Pater, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 198. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 231; further page references appear in parentheses. Pater, Selected Writings, 59. Pater, Selected Writings, 18. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 228. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 228, 239. Pater, Selected Writings, 111, 113. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 249–50; further page references appear in parentheses. The exception is, of course, Elsmere’s passing defense of a Kyrle-like society that performs concerts for the poor; through this, he endorses the aspirations of the violinist and demi-aesthete Rose. Parsons, Religion, 226–33; Bowen, Idea, 288–89. The evangelical methods of Victorian Ritualist mission priests were ﬁrst theorized in Dieter Voll’s Catholic Evangelicalism: The Acceptance of Evangelical Traditions by the Oxford Movement during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century (London: Faith Press, 1963). Peter J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 177. Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995), 78; further page references appear in parentheses. Like Stewart Headlam, James Adderly also scandalized Victorian society through his support of Oscar Wilde following Wilde’s indictment in 1895 for acts of gross indecency with men. While Headlam had put up Wilde’s bail and accompanied him to the courtroom during the trials, Adderly visited Wilde in Reading Gaol shortly before his release in 1897 (Adderly, In Slums, 178–9; Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly,’ 199). James Adderly, Stephen Remarx (New York: Garland, 1975), 6, 24, 63, 69; further page references appear in parentheses. Adderly, In Slums, 170. Adderly, Stephen Remarx, 127; further page references appear in parentheses.

Notes 253 147 148 149 150

Hall Caine, The Christian (London: Garland, 1975), 225; further page references appear in parentheses. Adderly, Stephen Remarx, 47–50. Adderly, Stephen Remarx, 121. I am referring to the Kyrle Man in the satirical ballad, ‘Beauty Not at Home,’ Punch 80 (12 February1881): 71.

Chapter 6 1

2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12

Letter to Algernon Gissing, 1 September 1884, reprinted in The Collected Letters of George Gissing, eds Paul Mattheison, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 2: 249 (hereafter cited as Letters). Letter to Algernon Gissing, 3 February 1883, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 113. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 3 February 1883, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 113; Letter to Margaret Gissing, 27 February 1883, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 122. Letter to Margaret Gissing, 15 September 1883, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 159, original emphasis; George Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1969), 2: 122. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 3 February 1883, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 136–7; George Gissing, The Unclassed, ed. Jacob Korg (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1976), 217. Letter to Gabrielle Fleury, 9 August 1898, in Gissing, Letters, 7: 142, 143. Letter to Ellen Gissing, 26 September 1884, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 259. Letter to Ellen Gissing, 18 May 1885, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 308; Letter to Algernon Gissing, 14 March 1885, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 296. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 1 September 1884, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 249. Letter to Eduard Bertz, 8 January 1890, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 181. As much as he loathed having to support his writing through tutoring, Gissing was in fact a natural teacher. His pedantic temperament is clear in letters to his family. Gissing challenges the paradigms limiting his brother Algernon’s pastoral ﬁction by exposing Algernon to innovations in continental novels. In letters to his sisters Margaret and Ellen, Gissing sets a strict course for their self-improvement, particularly insisting that they master languages, and prescribing texts in French, German, Italian, and Latin. ‘Do your best to make every moment of your waking day serve towards the great end of your inward culture,’ he wrote to Margaret (18 June 1881, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 43). He prodded Ellen towards art appreciation as well (19 August 1882, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 97), and in anticipation of the sisters’ trip to London, he sent them Lucy Crane’s Art and the Formation of Taste (London: Macmillan, 1882) for study, ‘the very foundation you need’ for exploring London’s galleries (2 September 1885, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 345). This last directive reveals Gissing’s early aesthetic leanings. While Crane’s book begins by critiquing the ﬁgure of the fashionable aesthete, her later chapters nevertheless recommend the purchase of ebonized furniture, Japanese fans, and blue and white china. In Demos (1886) Gissing discredits political programs that would improve the material conditions of the laborer as both unnecessary and tasteless. Here Gissing rationalizes that true happiness is only ‘relative to the habits and capabilities of the people,’ thus asserting that workers do not know

254 Notes

13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

enough to be discontented with their lot and are best left alone: see Demos: A Story of English Socialism, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1972), 384. In Thyrza (1887) Gissing approves art socialism only because the aestheticism at its heart is escapist and incomprehensible to the masses: it ironically obfuscates political outreach. Both novels preach the ideal of a depoliticized art that transcends social commitment. Michael Collie, George Gissing, A Biography (Folkestone: Dawson, 1977), 115–16, 122–3, 129. In Gissing in Context (London: Macmillan, 1975), Adrian Poole suggests Gissing’s heartfelt alliance with ‘fellow skeptics and subversives’ in the context of Gissing’s self-conception as an exile of artistic integrity within the 1890s literary market (135). Poole, however, does not explore this imaginary community in terms of Gissing’s received images of bohemia. Letter to Eduard Bertz, 24 June 1894, in Gissing, Letters, 5: 212; Letter to Eduard Bertz, 23 June 1895, in Gissing, Letters, 5: 351. George Gissing, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1978), 214 (hereafter cited as Diary). Letter to Ellen Gissing, 11 October 1889, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 123, fn. 6. Letter to Ellen Gissing, 11 October 1889, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 122; Letter to Margaret Gissing, 11 October 1889, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 124. Letter to Catherine Gissing, 21 January 1889, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 25. Letter to Eduard Bertz, 22 June 1890, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 226. First published in 1877, and then in English translation in 1890, Marie Bashkirtseff’s diary, focusing on the author’s experiences in Paris ateliers and salons, saw phenomenal popularity in England. It was particularly a text claimed and promoted by aesthetes. Its translator, Mathilde Blind, critiqued the artist and her work in ‘Marie Bashkirtseff: the Russian Painter, Parts 1, 2,’ The Woman’s World 1 (1888): 351–6, 454–7. In her own memoir, the female aesthete Marion Hepworth Dixon, who had studied painting with Bashkirtseff in Paris, wrote of the diary, ‘She speaks to the artistic instinct of the world’ (‘Marie Bashkirtseff: A Personal Reminiscence,’ Fortnightly Review 53 [1890]: 276). Gissing, Diary, 5 December 1890, 231. Letter to Eduard Bertz, 26 April 1891, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 288. Letter to Eduard Bertz, 19 November 1893, in Gissing, Letters, 5: 163. Poole, Gissing in Context, 120–1, 123, 127. He did eventually join the Society of Authors association for business reasons: it provided him with a literary agent, W. M. Colles. Letter to Clara Collet, 6 June 1895, in Gissing, Letters, 5: 343. Stanley Weintraub (ed.), The Yellow Book: Quintessence of the Nineties (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1964), xix. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 14 February 1884, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 197. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 8 December 1884, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 274. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 7 September 1884, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 254. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 26 October 1884, in Gissing, Letters 2: 264. Gissing, The Unclassed, 150. Letter to Margaret Gissing, 12 May 1883, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 135. Letter to E. Halpérin-Kaminsky, 28 August 1898, in Gissing, Letters, 7: 164.

Notes 255 35

36

37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

47 48 49 50 51

George Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), 2: 269, original emphasis; further page references appear in parentheses. Since Jacob Korg’s inﬂuential essay on ‘Division of Purpose in George Gissing’ (PMLA 70, no. 3 [June 1955]: 323–36), critics have generally followed Korg’s reading of this as a Shelleyan speech. John Sloan observes that it is a legacy of Helen’s early education under her father in Arnoldian and Ruskinian values (George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989], 22–3). It is odd in the context of this line that Jacob Korg and, more recently, John Sloan would claim Helen’s project an absolute failure (Korg, George Gissing, a Critical Biography [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963], 36; Sloan, George Gissing, the Cultural Challenge, 24). David Grylls rightly notes that Helen’s teaching ends because of her consumption, not because her program is ineffective (The Paradox of Gissing [London: Allen and Unwin, 1986], 27). The climate of Gissing’s classical education and its false promise of social mobility are fully explored in Sloan’s introduction. Pierre Coustillas’s George Gissing at Alderley Edge (London: Enitharmon Press, 1969) offers an overview of his school’s late Victorian educational curriculum. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 16 January 1881, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 3. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 18 May 1882, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 84. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 20 August 1885, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 337. Letter to Margaret Gissing, 23 May 1884, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 220. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 19 June 1881, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 46. Letter to Margaret Gissing, 23 November 1881, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 65. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 15 May 1887, in Gissing, Letters, 3: 313. ‘Lou and Liz’ ﬁrst appeared in The English Illustrated Magazine (August 1893): 793–801, and has been reprinted in George Gissing, The Day of Silence and Other Stories, ed. Pierre Coustillas (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), 1–13. Edith Sichel, ‘Two Philanthropic Novelists: Mr Walter Besant and Mr George Gissing,’ Murray’s Magazine 3 (April 1888): 506–18. The most famous of Sir Walter Besant’s philanthropic romances, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), was the inspiration for the People’s Palace, founded in 1887. Besant edited the Palace Journal. Generally regarded as the source of more popular entertainments than those offered by university settlements, the People’s Palace did sponsor art exhibits and encourage working people’s exhibitions. Ironically, while Toynbee Hall’s founders never saw their settlement evolve into a workers’ university as they had hoped, the People’s Palace was eventually endowed as Queen Mary College, University of London. See From Palace to College: An Illustrated Account of Queen Mary College (University of London), eds G. P. Moss and M. V. Saville (London: The College, 1985). Pierre Coustillas, Brief Interlude: The Letters of George Gissing to Edith Sichel (Edinburgh: Tragara, 1987), 16. Gissing, Diary, 19 October 1888, 54. George Gissing, The Emancipated, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977), 205. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 2: 172. Gissing, The Unclassed, 271; further page references appear in parentheses.

256 Notes 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76

George Gissing, ‘On Battersea Bridge,’ Pall Mall Gazette (30 November 1883): 4. Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, 2: 390. Letter to Edmund Gosse, 20 March 1893, in Gissing, Letters, 5: 96–8. Gissing also states this idea in Thyrza in his estimation of the rarity of Gilbert Grail’s literary interests (London: Smith, Elder, and Co, 1907), 67–8. Letter to Edmund Gosse, 20 March 1893, in Gissing, Letters, 5: 98. This oft-repeated phrase is ﬁrst used in Morley Roberts, The Private Life of Henry Maitland (The Richards Press, 1958), 239. Peter J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 63. Gissing, Thyrza, 396, 399. George Gissing, Born in Exile (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), 128. Gissing, Born in Exile, 41. Gissing, Born in Exile, 129. Gissing, The Unclassed, 44. Gissing’s use of ‘Philistine’ here to denote the laboring classes obviously differs from that of Arnold. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 2: 95–6. Gissing, Thyrza, 111. Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, 2: 380. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 2: 111, 106. George Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, ed. John Halperin (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), 35. George Gissing, Demos, 368. Gissing, Demos, 136. Jacob Korg has observed Gissing’s indecision about the biological or environmental basis for vulgarity (George Gissing, a Critical Biography, 88–90). For another example of Gissing wavering and crediting both, see Gissing, Demos, 350. This ambivalence is also found in late Victorian scientiﬁc treatises about aesthetics and the working-class body, notably, Grant Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics (London: H. S. King, 1877). As early reviewers noted, Mutimer’s biological defects seem to have the last word, ensuring the permanency of class distinctions (unsigned review, New York Daily Tribune [9 May 1886]: 10, reprinted in Gissing, the Critical Heritage, eds Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge [London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968], 90–1.) John Sloan has noted this fatalism (George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge, 66–7). While Gissing deals gingerly with Jean Izoulet’s theory of bio-sociology in Our Friend the Charlatan, he relies on it – or a rendition if it – quite often as a means of consolidating distinctions of class and hence, of power. Gissing, Thyrza, 87. Gissing, Thyrza, 208, 225. Gissing, Demos, 339, original emphasis. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 316. George Gissing, Eve’s Ransom (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., 1915), 301. Gissing, Eve’s Ransom, 384. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 1: 185.

Notes 257 77 78

79 80 81

82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, 2: 19, original emphasis. Though ironically, in his horror of money-grubbing, Gissing voiced some very Morrisian ideas about work and rest. See, for example, The Nether World on ‘men who have multiplied toil for toil’s sake’ (George Gissing, The Nether World, ed. John Goode [Brighton: Harvester Press, 1974], 11). John Goode notes echoes of Morris’s rhetoric in Gissing’s prose in ‘Gissing, Morris and English Socialism,’ Victorian Studies 12, no. 2 (December 1968): 204–5. Gissing, Demos, 462. Gissing, Demos, 383–4. Gissing, Demos, 383. Morley Roberts questioned the logic of this equation in his correspondence with Gissing (1 August 1886, in Gissing, Letters, 3: 50–1). Gissing voiced this idea in passing in other ﬁctional works, including Workers in the Dawn, A Life’s Morning (1888), and the short story, ‘A Poor Gentleman’ (1899), reprinted in The Day of Silence, 126–38. Gissing, Demos, 383. Grylls, Paradox, 39. Gissing, Demos, 90. All characters in Demos are in fact measured by this moral-aesthetic yardstick: in Chapter 1, we see Mrs Waltham admitting that although the view is spoiled by the mining works, she ‘would never have thought of objecting to a scheme which would produce money at the cost of the merely beautiful’ (4). This aesthetic coarseness anticipates her moral coarseness in ‘selling’ Adela to Mutimer. Grylls, Paradox, 43; Goode, ‘Morris,’ 212, 214. Gissing, Demos, 339, added emphasis; further page references appear in parentheses. Letter to Margaret Gissing, 26 November 1882, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 107. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 2: 135. Letter to Ellen Gissing, 20 December 1887, in Gissing, Letters, 3: 171. George Gissing, The Odd Women, ed. Arlene Young (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1998), 100. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 2: 5. Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, 52. Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, 30. Gissing, Denzil Quarrier, 198. The novels in this section are all published after J. K. Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884). Gissing’s ambivalence with aestheticism is clear as late as The Crown of Life (1899), where aestheticism masculinizes Olga Hannaford and effeminizes Mr Kite, yet produces one of Gissing’s most spirited, cheering characters, Miss Bonnicastle, who is neither criminalized for her complicity in professional advertising nor for inhabiting a Chelsea attic-studio. The exception is Gissing’s representation of Mallard in The Emancipated. Here Gissing again undercuts Wildean tenets of formal artistic freedom, but in their place he advocates a restored Ruskinian practical aesthetic. Early in the novel, Mallard has shocked Miriam by insisting – in deﬁance of Ruskin – that art’s ‘usefulness’ consists merely of enabling the artist to live in harmony with himself: ‘Art may, or may not, serve [mankind];

258 Notes

97

98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

but be assured that the artist never thinks of his work in that way ... . this work gives me keener and more lasting pleasure than any other would ... The one object I have in life is to paint a bit of the world just as I see it .... I am right to persevere, I am right to go on pleasing myself’ (95–6). In the context of her brother Reuben’s languor and dissipation, such Wildean statements appear dangerous to Miriam. We have seen how Gissing softens Miriam’s character through her growing tolerance of beauty; but Mallard changes as well. Gissing gradually afﬁrms Mallard’s honor by illustrating Mallard’s own private renunciations and by designing a ﬁnal scene in which Mallard counsels Miriam to abandon her original endowment of an Evangelical chapel in her hometown. He advises that in its place she erect a public bath – whose attention to the joys of the body and the beauty of the human form deﬁne it as a species of art-philanthropy. Gissing found the Wilde scandal ‘frightfully depressing’ and a ‘catastrophe’ (Letter to Morley Roberts, 27 May 1895, in Gissing, Letters, 5: 339). At the nadir of his second marriage, Gissing complained that his wife Edith maligned him before her neighbors for ‘terrible, unspeakable things, such as no good woman has ever heard of’ (Letter to Gabrielle Fleury, 6 February 1899, in Gissing, Letters, 7: 288, original emphasis); he conﬁded to Morley Roberts that Edith had accused him of being a ‘disciple of Oscar Wilde’ (Letter to Morley Roberts, 6 February 1899, in Gissing, Letters, 7: 290, original emphasis). Gissing was dismayed when, after the trials, the wife of an acquaintance mentioned Wilde’s name in company (Letter to Clara Collet, 26 December 1897, in Gissing, Letters, 7: 23, fn. 6). George Gissing, The Whirlpool, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977), 82–4. Gissing, The Whirlpool, 82. Gissing, The Whirlpool, 40, original emphasis. William Greenslade judges The Whirlpool in the context of turn-of-the-century beliefs in eugenics, female neurasthenia and degenerative reproduction: see Greenslade, ‘Women and the Disease of Civilization: George Gissing’s The Whirlpool,’ Victorian Studies 32, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 507–23. Gissing, The Odd Women, 104–5. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 1: 90. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 1: 155. Gissing, The Odd Women, 159, 164. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 1: 221–2. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 1: 222. Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, 2: 9. Gissing, The Emancipated, 14. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 19 June 1881, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 47. Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, 2: 6. Gissing, The Unclassed, 293. Gissing, Thyrza, 409. Letter to Eduard Bertz, 4 November 1889, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 140. George Gissing, Human Odds and Ends: Stories and Sketches (New York: Garland, 1977), 297–8.

Notes 259 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

122 123 124 125

126 127 128 129 130

George Gissing, In the Year of Jubilee (New York: Dover Publications, 1982), 7; further page references appear in parentheses. Gissing, The Whirlpool, 341. Gissing, The Whirlpool, 342. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 26 March 1897, in Gissing, Letters, 6: 257. Gissing, The Whirlpool, 452. Gissing, The Whirlpool, 452. George Gissing, Our Friend the Charlatan, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 154; further page references appear in parentheses. Letter to Margaret Gissing, 7 October 1885, in Gissing, Letters, 2: 352. Letter to Ellen Gissing, 2 September 1885, in Gissing, Letters 2: 346; Letter to Ellen Gissing, 21 May 1886, in Gissing, Letters, 3: 38. Letter to Margaret Gissing, 15 April 1886, in Gissing, Letters, 3: 34, original emphasis. ‘Over there was fought the battle of Actium; over there lay the land of Hellas! And so it will always be. I cannot deeply interest myself in medieval history, & therefore Florence & Venice are not so much to me as they ought to be’ (Letter to Eduard Bertz, 13 February 1889, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 45). His comment, ‘To enjoy myself among buildings, I must be at Paestum’ again posits a disregard for Ruskin (Letter to Ellen Gissing, 5 February 1889, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 39). Letter to Eduard Bertz, 13 February 1889, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 46. Letter to Eduard Bertz, 3 January 1889, in Gissing, Letters, 4: 6. George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), 8. Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, 9. Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, 10.

Conclusion 1 Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 2 Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 3. 3 Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 4 Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in LateVictorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 20, 25. 5 Regenia Gagnier, ‘A Critique of Practical Aesthetics,’ in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 264–82; further page references appear in parentheses. 6 E. T. Cook, ‘Fine Art in Whitechapel,’ The Magazine of Art 7 (1884): 347. 7 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York and London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), 138. 8 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3. 9 Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor (London: Macmillan, 1883), 41. 10 Hill, Homes, 95.

260 Notes 11 Peter Bailey reviews these arguments in his introduction to the revised edition of Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London and New York: Methuen, 1987). 12 Henrietta Barnett, ‘Town Children and Country Interests,’ in Towards Social Reform, eds Canon and Mrs S. A. Barnett (London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1909), 326. 13 John Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961), 189; William Thompson Hill, Octavia Hill: Pioneer of the National Trust and Housing Reformer (London: Hutchinson, 1956), 71; Howard Malchow, ‘Public Gardens and Social Action in Late Victorian London,’ Victorian Studies 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 122. 14 Nicola Smith, ‘A Brief Account of the Origins of the South London Art Gallery,’ in Art for the People: Culture in the Slums of Late Victorian Britain, ed. Giles Waterﬁeld (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994), 13. 15 Philip T. Smith, ‘The London Police and the Holy War: Ritualists and St George’s-in-the-East, London, 1859-60,’ Journal of the Church and State 21, no. 1 (1986): 107–19. 16 A growing body of scholarship has uncovered instances of working-class people’s resistance to middle-class reform programs: Ruth Livesey, ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London,’ Journal of Victorian Culture 9, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 43–68; Seth Koven, Slumming, 12–13. Koven’s Harvard dissertation analyzes working-class demands for club leadership at the Oxford House university settlement: see Seth Koven, ‘Culture and Poverty: The London Settlement House Movement, 1870–1914’ (PhD Diss., Harvard University, 1987), 179–234. 17 George R. Sims, How the Poor Live and Horrible London (New York and London: Garland, 1984), 79. 18 Cook, ‘Fine Art,’ 345. 19 Octavia Hill, Our Common Land (and other short essays) (London: Macmillan, 1877), 141. 20 Lucy Yates, ‘Art for the People: an International Association,’ The House Beautiful and the Home: A Journal for Those Who Design, Beautify, Furnish and Inhabit Houses 1, no. 4 (1904) 141. 21 Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London: Reeves and Turner, 1882), 127. 22 Yates, ‘Art for the People,’ 141. 23 Bea Howe, Arbiter of Elegance (London: Harvill Press, 1967), 254–5. 24 Howe, Arbiter of Elegance, 255. 25 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,’ Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 474. 26 Kathleen Woodward, Jipping Street (London: Virago, 1983), 139. 27 Grace Foakes, My Part of the River (London: Futura, 1988), 34. 28 William Morris, The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 2: 12. 29 Cook, ‘Fine Art,’ 347. There were art-socialists who reconciled missionary aesthetic work with their politics, most notably Walter Crane and C. R. Ashbee, whose activities I have discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. To some

Notes 261

30

31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43

44

extent, Victorian socialist aesthetics in practice were implicated in a larger philanthropic, paternalistic ethos. See Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Prison Writings (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1–2. When Wilde toured America in 1882 as a missionary aesthete par excellence, he echoed John Ruskin and William Morris on the value of handicraft. However, while they had been concerned to enhance the worker’s quality of life through imaginative labor, Wilde shifted his focus to insist on an environment of beautiful things as a precondition for the worker’s (and anyone else’s) elevated consciousness. Jack London, People of the Abyss ([S. I. ]: Joseph Simon Publisher, 1980), 193. The Rev. and Mrs Samuel A. Barnett, eds, Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895); Henrietta O. Barnett, Canon Barnett, His Life, Work, and Friends (London: John Murray, 1921), 458–60. Barnett, Canon Barnett, 559–60. In 1987, following the collapse of the Arts Council in Britain, art critic Frances Borzello traced what she called the ‘misuse of art’ back to the cultural and philanthropic ethos of the Barnetts. Borzello set up a dichotomy between the Barnetts’ gift of ﬁne art to the poor and William Morris’s ideal of community liberation through craft. Borzello pressed her evidence into service for a diatribe against institutional values under Thatcher, but her suggestion that art is only as liberating as it is participatory seems a point worth considering. See Frances Borzello, Civilizing Caliban: The Misuse of Art, 1875–1980 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). Local industrial exhibitions traditionally displayed workers’ crafts, although Toynbee Hall did not (Borzello, Civilizing Caliban, 58). Toynbee Record 5, no. 2 (November 1892): 18. Toynbee Record 4, no. 1 (October 1891): 5. Toynbee Record 5, no. 10 (July 1893): 119. Walter Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 296–9. After some contestation in 1888, the names of speciﬁc artisans appeared on the catalogue in subsequent years (Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985], 205, 234). Socialists like Morris feared that the exhibits would appear a mere furniture showroom, and indeed, they ultimately did function that way. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 29 September 1888, British Library, 52, 625, f. 57, cited in Stansky, Redesigning the World, 249. Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Minutes of the Finance Subcommittee, 1893, 1896, Victoria & Albert Museum, Archive of Art and Design, Record # 1/45–1980. I am grateful to Morna O’Neill of Yale University for directing me to this resource. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 4 October 1890, British Library, 56, 627, f. 55, cited in Stansky, Redesigning the World, 249. Cockerell later served as secretary of the 1893 ACES exhibition. Mabel Cox, ‘The Arts and Crafts Exhibition,’ Artist 18 (October 1896): 15–16.

262 Notes 45 Janice Helland, ‘Working Bodies, Celtic Textiles and the Donegal Industrial Fund, 1883–1890,’ Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 2, no. 2 (July 2004): 134–55; Janice Helland, ‘Highland Home Industries and the Fashion for Tweed,’ Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History 9 (2004): 27–34; Janice Helland, ‘Exhibiting Ireland: The Donegal Industrial Fund in London and Chicago,’ Revue D’Art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review 29, nos. 1–2 (2004): forthcoming; Elaine Cheasley Paterson, ‘Decoration and Desire: Women of the Home Arts Movement, 1884–1915’ (PhD Diss., Queen’s University, 2003). 46 Anne Anderson, ‘Charles Leland and Practical Education: The Philosophy and Practice of the Handicrafts in the USA and England in the 1880s,’ unpublished essay in the possession of the author. 47 M. C. Wentworth, ‘The Home Arts and Industries Association,’ The Woman’s World 1 (1888): 418. 48 Helland, ‘Exhibiting Ireland’; Helland, ‘Highland Home Industries,’ 27–34; Elaine Cheasley Paterson, ‘Crafting a National Identity: The Dun Emer Guild, 1902–8,’ in The Irish Revival Reappraised, eds Betsey Taylor FitzSimon and James H. Murphy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 106. 49 Mary Seton Watts had initially met with resistance, though outside the central council of the HAIA. Her husband G. F. Watts (and his fellow members in the all-male Art Workers Guild, founded in 1884) feared that amateurs would ﬂood the market with inferior work. See Shelagh Wilson, ‘Watts, Women, Philanthropy, and the Home Arts,’ in Representations of G. F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, eds Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 178. 50 Elizabeth Cumming, ‘Patterns of Life: The Art and Design of Phoebe Anna Traquair and Mary Seton Watts,’ in Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880–1935, eds Bridget Elliot and Janice Helland (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 24–5. 51 Helland, ‘Exhibiting Ireland.’ 52 Mrs Ernest Abraham Hart, The Cottage Industries of Ireland, with an Account of the Work of the Donegal Industrial Fund (London, 1887), 3. 53 Janice Helland, ‘Rural Women and Urban Extravagance in Late NineteenthCentury Britain,’ Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture 13, no. 2 (2002): 188–9. 54 Waters, British Socialists, 47, 50.

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Index Note: All clergymen are listed as ‘Rev.’ regardless of the clerical office held. Adderly, Rev. James, 15–16, 151–2, 168–70, 172–3, 250n101, 252n143 Aesthetic Movement. See British aestheticism aesthetic neighborhoods: Bedford Park, Chiswick, 19, 29–30, 69; Chelsea, 27–8, 175, 178, 257n95; Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, 27–9, 128, 175; Hampstead, 28; Holland Park, Kensington, 25, 28, 31–2, 69, 213; Kelmscott, 174–5; Melbury Road, Kensington, 28, 69; ‘Peacock Room,’ South Kensington, 127; Tite Street, Chelsea, 27. See also popular lifestyle aestheticism aesthetic Ritualist novels, 135, 157–66 Aitchison, George, 22 Alden, Percy, 149–50 Alexander, George, 118 Alford, Marion, 22 Alighieri, Dante, 81, 84, 177, 193 Allen, Grant, 180 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 72, 107, 128 Anderson, Anne, 230n41, 235n118 Anglo-Catholicism. See Ritualism Annan, Noel, 24–5 Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina (Kit), 81, 237n49 anti-Catholicism, 82, 136. See also anti-Tractarian novels; Ritualism: accused of Roman Catholicism anti-sabbatarianism, 101, 106, 126–7, 129; as ramiﬁcation of aestheticism, 15, 126–7, 129. See also Continental Sunday; counterattractionists; rational recreations; Sunday League; Sunday Society

anti-Tractarian novels, 135, 154–7, 167 Arnold, Matthew, 3, 6–8, 12, 20, 175; values of, 52, 182, 207 Art for Schools Association, 6, 219n15 Arthur, William, 125 Artists’ Directory (1875), 53 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 214–5, 261n40 Arundel Society 5, 219n15 Ashbee, C. R., 28, 32, 68–70, 213–15; and Guild of Handicraft, 32, 68–9, 214–15; and School of Handicraft, 32, 68–9, 215 Asquith, Margot (née Tennant), 22 ‘At Homes’ and Conversaziones, 27, 29–30, 70, 127, 130, 142, 167, 179, 183 back-to-the-land movement, 33, 63 Bailey, Peter, 119, 243n82, 259n11 Bank Holidays, 100, 198 Barnett, Henrietta, 22–3, 25, 27, 29–31, 33, 63, 67–8, 96, 124, 184, 209; as missionary aesthete, 1–2, 5–6, 12, 14, 19–20, 70, 79, 213–14; and popular aestheticism, 12; ‘practicable socialism’ of, 212; on pupil teachers, 80, 84. See also ‘Pictures for the People’ Barnett, Rev. Samuel, 23, 25, 27, 30–1, 33, 63, 67, 69, 73, 96, 184; against asceticism, 96; against casual slumming, 88; as missionary aesthete, 5–7, 14, 19–21, 107, 111–12, 207, 213–14; ‘practicable socialism’ of, 212; on pupil teachers, 80; against sabbatarianism, 106–7, 111, 124

279

280 Index Barrington, Emilie, 25, 32 Bashkirtseff, Marie, 179, 254n20 Beale, Sophia, 109 Beardsley, Aubrey, 3, 180 Beckson, Karl, 21 Bellamy, Edward, 71, 197 Benson, A. C., 25 Bermondsey Settlement Guild of Play, 63 Bertz, Eduard, 175, 178 Besant, Walter: opposition to Ritualism of, 152; philanthropic romances by, 184, 186, 255n46; and Society of Authors, 179 Bethnal Green Museum, 102, 124 Blake, William, 209–10 Blasis, Carlo, 141, 144 Blouet, Paul, 118 Booth, Charles, 58, 64, 89, 148–9, 151, 154 Booth, William, 8, 22, 184 Borzello, Frances, 261n34 Bosanquet, Bernard, 25, 28 Bourdieu, Pierre, 74, 77 Brangwyn, Frank, 178 Bright, Jacob, 108, 121 British aestheticism, 41, 121, 126–7, 133, 174, 176, 206, 210; and ‘art for art’s sake,’ 3; female aesthetes in, 22, 31–3, 206; inherently politicized, 206; and modern assumptions about dandyism and decadence, 20–2; and Renaissance Italy, 37, 54, 72, 74, 81, 88, 162, 171, 177. See also missionary aesthetes; popular lifestyle aestheticism; religion of art British Museum, 32, 100, 116, 118, 123, 125 Broadhurst, Henry, 116 Brown, Ford Madox, 46 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 171, 229n24 Browning, Robert, 72, 80, 84, 171, 183 Brownlow, countess of (Adelaide Talbot Brownlow), 22 Brownlow, third earl of (Adelbert Wellington Brownlow Cust), 22

Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 106 Burne-Jones, Edward, 12, 22, 28, 30–1, 70, 73, 81, 121, 199 Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 31–2 Burnett, John, 18 Caine, Hall, 16, 168, 170–3, 250n117 Cambridge Camden Society, 134 Cardoso, Denis Rafael, 32 Carlisle, ninth earl of (George Howard), 70, 107 Carlyle, Thomas, 68 Carpenter, Edward, 68 Carr, J. Comyns, 29 Carr, Jonathan T., 29 Carson, Edward, 161 Century Guild, 143, 214 Chadwick, Edwin, 45 Charity Organization Society, 28, 30, 44, 176, 202, 212, 217 Chase, Ellen, 50, 56–8, 207 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 129, 202 Children’s Country Holiday Fund, 70 Christian Socialists, 42, 46, 135–6, 138 Clarke, Meaghan, 236n32 Clayton, Ellen C., 107 Clifford, Edward, 23 Clodd, Edward, 179 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 88 Cockerell, Sydney C., 41–2, 214 Collie, Michael, 177 commercialization of leisure, 100, 104, 113–14, 117–18, 130. See also working-class leisure Commons Preservation Society, 52 Compton Potters’ Arts Guild, 32–3, 215 concerts, 2, 16, 96, 104–5, 127, 183, 202, 243–95, 252n139 Cons, Emma, 32, 232–83, 233–4n102 Continental Sunday, 104, 114, 117, 125, 242n59 Conway, Rev. Moncure, 22, 29, 31, 107, 123–4 Cook, E. T., 209 cooperativism, 45–6, 71 counter-attractionists, 15, 106, 111, 113–14, 116, 130, 134 Courtney, Catherine (née Potter), 28, 50, 223n38

Index 281 Courtney, Leonard, 28 Craig, Gordon, 94 Crane, Lucy, 253n11 Crane, Walter, 11–12, 55, 62, 70, 128; at Red Cross Hall 25, 213 Crystal Palace, 99–100, 113–14, 117, 184 dandies, 12, 16, 20–3, 25, 41, 69, 91, 93, 158, 167, 176, 192, 194–7, 205–7; satires of Ritualist priests as, 15–16, 135, 155, 154–7, 161, 217 Davies, Charles Maurice, 153, 155–7, 250n115 Davis, James V., 114, 116 De Morgan, William, 14, 28, 30, 55, 60, 213 decadents, 3, 8, 10, 12–13, 15, 20–3, 41, 43, 143, 176, 180, 194–5, 202, 205; and decadent personality, 21–2, 206–7; and decadent slumming, 43, 88–9, 93–4. See also dandies; slummers DeLaura, David, 10, 220n33 Dellamora, Richard, 206 Devey, George, 69 Dickens, Charles, 45, 144 Dictionary of British Artists, 1880–1940, 53 Disraeli, Benjamin, 8 Dolling, Rev. Robert, 15, 145–7, 153, 245n14, 251n121 Donegal Industrial Fund, 33, 216 Dowson, Ernest, 143 Du Maurier, George, 20–1, 28, 33–4, 37–40, 70, 88–91, 93, 142, 157. See also missionary aesthetes: satire of; missionary aesthetes: satirized in Punch Dulwich Gallery, 46 Dun Emer Guild, 33, 224n49 Duret, Theodore, 121 Evans, Rev. H.M.M., 149–50 Fabian Society, 142–4 Farr, Florence, 30, 94 Fichte, J.G., 10

Fildes, Luke, 28–9 Finch, Rev. E.T., 153 Fitzroy Picture Society, 6, 219n15 Fletcher, Ian, 2, 20, 40 Fleury, Gabrielle, 175 Forster, E.M., 16, 217 Fraser, Hilary, 10 Freedman, Jonathan, 206 Frith, W.P., 34–6 Fry, Roger, 25 Furnivall, F.J., 46, 106, 183; New Shakspere Society of, 183 Gagnier, Regenia, 18, 21–2, 206–7 Gaskell, Martin, 58 Gaussen, Elizabeth Sarah, 174–5 Gautier, Theophile, 3 Geddes, Patrick, 66 Gilbert, W.S., and Arthur Sullivan, 21, 54, 62, 183, 194 Gimson, Ernest, 214 Girouard, Mark, 218n3 Gissing, Alfred, 200 Gissing, Algernon, 180, 183, 253n11 Gissing, Ellen, 178, 203, 253n11 Gissing, George, 7, 16, 89, 117, 174–95, 197–205, 217; aesthetic phase of, 175; alliance with naturalists of, 177; anti-Sabbatarianism of, 185; attitudes towards missionary aestheticism, 7, 175–6, 181–6, 191, 195, 201–2, 257–8n96; classicism of, 203–4, 259n125; Comtean Positivism of, 197; continental literary inﬂuences on, 177; dandies in works by, 16, 192, 194–7, 204; and desire for bohemian community, 177–80; exceptional sentient protagonists of, 187–90, 192–3; in Exeter, 179, 183; on female missionary aesthetes, 16, 176, 194, 201–2, 204; as a formalist writing social novels, 184; ‘half-educations’ in works of, 197–9, 201; idealization of aestheticism as reclusive, 16, 176–7, 194, 202–4, 253n12; on male missionary aesthetes as decadents, 16, 176, 194–6;

282 Index marriage to Edith Underwood, 179, 200; marriage to Nell Harrison, 174, 183; as a natural teacher, 253n11; neurasthenia in works of, 188; at Owens College, 174, 183; perception of freedom on the continent, 178, 184–5; responses to John Ruskin’s aesthetics, 175–6, 180–2, 194–5, 198, 200–2, 257n96; responses to Oscar Wilde, 194–5, 257n96, 258n97; and socialism, 190–2, 194, 205; on vulgarity of mass culture, 176, 197–8, 201; on Walter Pater’s aesthetics, 16, 177, 203–5; on working-class educations in discontent, 190; on working-class insensibility, 176, 182, 184–9, 191–2, 197; works of: Born in Exile, 187; By the Ionian Sea, 204; The Crown of Life, 257n95; Demos, 185, 188–94, 253n12, 257n84; The Emancipated, 185, 194, 197, 257n96; Eve’s Ransom, 190; ‘The Foolish Virgin,’ 180; In the Year of Jubilee, 117, 199; Isabel Clarendon, 175, 185, 188, 190, 194–6; ‘Lou and Liz,’ 184; The Nether World, 117, 174, 184, 197; New Grub Street, 176, 179; The Odd Women, 16, 176, 194–6; ‘On Battersea Bridge,’ 186; Our Friend the Charlatan, 16, 201–2, 256n69; ‘A Son of the Soil,’ 197; Thyrza, 174, 189–90, 197, 253n12, 256n54; The Unclassed, 174–6, 178–9, 181, 185–6, 188, 197; The Whirlpool, 16, 195, 197, 200–1; Workers in the Dawn, 7, 89, 176, 181–2, 184, 187–8, 190–1, 197, 199 Gissing, Margaret, 178, 194, 203, 253n11 Gissing, Walter, 200–1 Gleeson, Evelyn, 33, 224n49 Godwin, E. W., 27 Gosse, Edmund, 25, 71, 98–101, 114, 126–7 Gower, Ronald Sutherland, 23

Grafton Gallery, 107 Grant, Corrie, 30 Grant, Marion, 30 Green, Rev. John Richard, 127 Green, T. H., 8, 30 Greenslade, William, 258n100 Gritton, Rev. John, 107, 125–6 Grosvenor Gallery, 12, 19, 25, 107, 121, 183, 193, 213; Clergy Club of, 121; library of, 183 Haldane, Elizabeth, 50 Hamilton, Walter, 126, 210 Hampstead Garden City, 70 Hansard, Rev. Septimus, 106 Harkness, Margaret, 11 Harrison, Brian, 102, 240n12, 240n21, 240n28 Harrison, Emily, 12 Harrison, Harriete, 12, 53, 221n46 Harrison, Maria, 53 Hart, Alice, 27, 33, 216 Hart, Ernest, 27, 65 Hartley, Alfred, 178 Haw, George, 151, 249n93 Haweis, Rev. H. R., 15, 19, 22, 28, 96, 107, 114, 124, 127–30, 208 Haweis, Mary Eliza Joy, 15, 19, 28, 107, 127–9, 210–11 Headlam, Rev. Stewart, 7, 15, 22, 25, 107, 127, 134, 173, 208; aesthetic home of, 142–3; Church and Stage Guild of, 140–1, 143, 246n37; defense of the ballet and music hall, 135, 139–42, 144; formalist aesthetics of, 141–2; on the fringes of Ritualists and socialists, 135–6, 144; as fusion of aestheticism, socialism, and Anglo-Catholicism, 135; marriage of, 245n7; as paternalistic missionary aesthete, 141–4; relation to earlier Christian Socialists of, 135–6, 245n7; relation to Fabians of, 142–4; relation to John Ruskin and William Morris of, 138–9, 245n14, 246n37; reputation of, 135; sacramental socialism of,

Index 283 135–7, 141, 144, 153, 168; on the sacred and aesthetic as daily practice, 137–8, 140; as selfidentiﬁed Ritualist, 136, 144; and Single Tax, 136; support of Oscar Wilde by, 135, 142–3, 245n7; theology of, 135–42, 144 Helland, Janice, 216 Herkomer, Hubert, 14, 32, 72 Highland Home Industries, 22, 33, 216 Hill, Miranda, 52, 62–3 Hill, Octavia, 13, 18–20, 25, 28–30, 32–33, 41–66, 69, 96, 116, 202, 207–10, 213; administration as aesthetics, 42, 49; aesthetic education of, 42–7; attitude to and connections with aesthetes, 41–3, 55, 60, 62, 64, 66, 228n19, 229n24, 230n41; austerity of, 25, 42; childhood and family background of, 45–6; in contrast to William Morris’s aesthetics, 13, 64–5, 234n108; debates with John Ruskin on art by, 47; ethos of service of, 42–3, 46–7; and George MacDonald, 228n19; institutionalization of charity work by, 43, 49, 56; merging of sanitary and moral discourses by, 51, 116, 146; as a missionary aesthete, 13, 20–1, 43; nostalgia of, 13, 63; and open spaces, 43, 52, 56, 59–60; pastoralism of, 58–9, 66; and program of lady visitors, 13, 19, 28, 42–4, 49–52, 56, 61–2, 65, 210; program of lady visitors and aestheticism of, 13, 50–2, 56–8; relations with working classes, 13, 18, 42–5, 51–2, 56–7, 59–61, 208; resistance to state intervention by, 64–5; rhetorical approach to slumming by, 13, 43, 45–6; self-questioning of, 208; sensory response to slums of, 44–5; use of crafts by, 48, 60–1; variety of managed buildings by, 63; and workingclass leisure, 13, 59–61; works of:

‘Open Spaces,’ 61; ‘Space for the People,’ 45, 208. See also Kyrle Society for the Diffusion of Beauty among the People Hobhouse, Stephen, 95 Hogarth, William, 182 Holiday, Henry, 70–1, 233n102 Holl, Frank, 28 Holyoake, George Jacob, 121 Home Arts and Industries Association, 22, 31, 33, 214–16 home arts associations. See Compton Potters’ Arts Guild; Donegal Industrial Fund; Dun Emer Guild; Highland Home Industries; Home Arts and Industries Association; Irish Decorative Arts Association; Irish Peasant Home Industries; Terra Cotta Home Arts Association Hoole, Elijah, 62–3, 69 Horsfall, T. C., 5–6 Horsley, Rev. John W., 30 Howard, Ebenezer, 66 Hudson, W. H., 178 Hughes, Tom, 46, 136 Hunt, William Holman, 70, 73, 99, 107, 128 Huysmans, J. K., 22, 93, 128, 155, 195, 257n95 Image, Selwyn, 71, 143, 214 Inglis, Kenneth, 130 International Society of Popular Art and Hygiene, 210 Irish Decorative Arts Association, 226n68 Irish Peasant Home Industries, 226n68 Irving, Henry, 130 Jackson, Rev. John, 140 James, Henry, 127 Jay, Rev. Arthur Osborne, 167–8 Jebb, Eglantyne Louisa, 22, 33, 215 Jewish Board of Guardians, 23 Johnson, Lionel, 3, 94, 143, 236n20 Jowett, Benjamin, 88, 220n30 Joy, G. A., 149 Judge, Mark, 106–7, 111, 118, 129

284 Index Keble, Rev. John, 140 Keene, Charles, 34–5, 121–2. See also missionary aesthetes: satire of; missionary aesthetes: satirized in Punch Kennedy, Rev. John, 118, 125 Kensit, John, 152, 249n100 King, Bolton, 79, 81, 88 King, Rev. Edward, 15, 147, 247–8n69 Kingsley, Charles, 136 Kingsmill, Rev. Joseph, 113, 117 Kipling, Rudyard, 200 Koven, Seth, 18, 67, 72, 89, 207, 219n12, 226n72, 235n2, 260n16 Kyrle Society for the Diffusion of Beauty among the People, 2, 8, 13, 23, 43, 52–6, 61–2, 65–6, 142, 173, 181, 201–2, 210, 213, 217, 230n41, 230n45, 234n108; as potential slummers, 43, 56; satires of, 2, 13, 54, 252n150 Lee, Thomas Stirling, 178 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 72, 81, 237n49 Leech, Kenneth, 137 Lehmann, Rudolf, 107 Leighton, Frederic, 25, 32, 34, 70, 73, 107, 128, 183 Leland, Charles W., 215 Letchworth Garden City, 66 Lethaby, William, 214 Lewis, Jane, 43, 63, 227n1, 227n10 libraries, 119, 183, 190 Lindsay, Coutts, 107 Littledale, Rev. R. F., 133–4, 145–8, 157, 161 Livesey, Ruth, 18, 228n10, 260n16 Loch, Charles, 30 London County Council (LCC), 58, 67, 95, 217 London, Jack, 212, 216 London University, 174, 201 Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS), 15, 100–3, 107–8, 117, 124–5, 126; origin of, 100–2; popular constituency in, 102. See also sabbatarians

Lowder, Rev. Charles, 15, 144–7, 149–50, 152 Lushington, Vernon, 175 Mackenzie, Compton, 132–3, 250n101, 250–1n117, 251n121 Mackmurdo, A. H., 143, 214 Mackonochie, Rev. Alexander, 144–5, 150 Mackworth, Audley, 53 Maison, Margaret, 157–8 Malchow, Howard, 233n84 Mallock, W. H., 160 Manchester City Art Museum, 5–6, 211 Marius the Epicurean (Walter Pater, 1885), 15, 155, 158, 160, 203; aesthetic sensibility as a means to conscience in, 165–6; ethics and aesthetics in, 161–4; as an historical defense of Ritualism, 161; ideal aesthetic apprehension in, 161–3; poor people as models of sympathy in, 165; poor people as objects of pity in, 164–5; reclusive consciousness in, 166; romantic male friendships in, 161; sorrow as a standard of sensibility in, 165 M’Arthur, Alexander, 119, 126 Marshall, T. O., 149 mashers, 91. See also dandies Masterman, Charles, 248–9n87, 249n93 Maurice, Rev. Frederick Denison, 8, 31, 42, 46–7, 135–6, 138 Mayall, David, 18 Mayhew, Henry, 57 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 79 McBrinn, Joseph, 226n68, 233n95 McCormick, A. D., 178 Mearns, Rev. Andrew, 8 Meath, countess of (Mary Jane Maitland Brabazon), 234–5n118 Meath, twelfth earl of (Reginald Brabazon), 30, 65, 234–5n118 Medici Society, 6, 219n15 Meller, Helen, 231n54 Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (MABYS), 1, 12, 25, 184

Index 285 Metropolitan Building Act (1884), 45 Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, 60, 65, 209 Meynell, Alice, 94 Meynell, Wilfred, 94 Michelangelo, 82–3, 124, 171 Millais, John Everett, 34, 183 Millet, Jean-François, 143 Milner, Alfred, 23–4 mission novels: ambiguous adoption of evangelical methods in, 167–9, 171–2; asceticism in, 169, 172; Christian Socialism in, 168–70; churchly aestheticism as dandyism and decadence in, 168–73; churchly aestheticism as social negligence in, 135, 167; deﬁnition of, 166–7; obscuring of Ritualism in, 135, 157–8, 167–72; secular missionary aestheticism in, 172–3; social work in, 157, 168, 170–1 missionary aesthetes: asceticism as lifestyle choice of, 95–6, 172; commissioned ﬁne artists among, 31–2, 213; in contrast to decadents, 3; on crafts and ﬁne arts, 213–14; dandies among, 22–4; deﬁning, 1–3, 20, 43, 79; and emancipatory aesthetics, 16–18, 206–7, 213–17; inegalitarianism of, 207, 213–15; institutional programs of, 2–3; origin of term of, 2; and popular lifestyle aestheticism, 3, 11–12, 40; relation to Scottish and Irish colonialism and patriotism, 17, 33, 216; satire of, 21, 40, 194, 206; satirized in Punch, 20–1, 33–5, 37–40, 43, 54, 88–91, 97, 121–2, 211, 216–17; self-knowledge and motivations of, 18, 207–8; social networks of, 3, 12–13, 19–20, 25, 27; socialist critique of, 209–12, 217; theoretical foundations and historical origins of, 3–8, 48; variety of aims and methods among, 212, 214–15; and the Victorian intellectual aristocracy, 24; women’s role in, 13, 22–3, 31–3, 215–16; working-class

resistance to, 18, 209. See also anti-Sabbatarianism; rational recreations; Religion of Art; Ritualism; Ritualist slum priests; Sunday Society; Toynbee Hall Monteﬁore, Leonard, 23–4 Moore, George, 179 Morris, Jane, 174 Morris, May, 11, 30, 143 Morris, William, 12, 14, 21, 25, 28, 31, 41, 58, 63–4, 71–2, 175, 178, 199, 203, 211, 214, 216; alliances with missionary aesthetes, 11, 13, 22, 234n108; on class injustice, 10, 211; contempt for palliatives, 11, 211, 217; defense of crafts, 213; in relation to Stewart Headlam’s Christian Socialism, 137–40; self-representation of, 25; socialism of, 13, 25, 217; socialist aesthetics of, 64, 70, 137–40; wallpapers and textiles by, 28, 30, 68, 143 Morrison, Arthur, 15–16, 167–8, 172 Moscheles, Felix, 121 Mudie-Smith, Richard, 148, 249n93 Munson, J. E. B., 249n93 Murger, Henri, 178 Muscular Christianity, 136 Museum Sundays. See Sunday Opening Nassau Senior, Janey, 1, 25–6, 208 National Gallery, 32, 100, 108, 116, 118, 124–5 National Portrait Gallery, 32 Nesﬁeld, William Eden, 69 Nevinson, Henry, 71, 94–6, 208, 239n69 Nevinson, Margaret Wynn, 71, 95 New Gallery, Bond Street, 214 Newman, Rev. John Henry, 232 Oakes, Grace, 211 Okey, Thomas, 79, 88 Omar Khayyám Club, 180 O’Neill, Morna, 233n95 open spaces, 96, 110. See also Hill, Octavia: and open spaces Orchardson, W. Q., 91, 93 O’Rell, Max. See Blouet, Paul

286 Index Orens, John Richard, 140–1 Osborne, Charles, 153 Oxford House settlement, 96 Palace of Art, 210 Palmer, Roundell, 125 Parsons, Anna J., 114 Pater, Walter: aesthetic subjectivity of, 9, 81, 157, 159, 161, 166, 177, 203–4; afﬁnity for ritual of, 160; and Auguste Comte, 8, 10; autonomous personality of, 8–9; complicates missionary aestheticism, 3: disregard for class distinctions of, 10–11; and ethics, 10; literary style of, 16, 148, 162–4, 203–4; as missionary aesthete, 9; on self-realization through aesthetic choice, 41, 93; at Toynbee Hall, 8, 70, 220n30; works by: Appreciations, 161; ‘The Child in the House,’ 9–11, 155, 162, 204; Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 9–10, 93, 161–3, 203–4; ‘Style,’ 163; ‘Wordsworth,’ 8, 70. See also Marius the Epicurean Paterson, Elaine Cheasley, 224n49 Peabody Trust, 59 Peake, Rev. Frederick, 108, 117–18, 124 Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 70, 94, 143 Pennell, Joseph, 70, 94 People’s Palace, 184, 255n46 People’s Playground, 31 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 59 Picton, J. Allanson, 124 ‘Pictures for the People’ (Henrietta Barnett, 1895), 14, 72–8; critique of poverty in, 77; critique of workingclass customs in, 78; framing technique in, 72–7; paintings described in: Ariadne by W. B. Richmond, 75; The Canal Boat by Jozef Israe¨ls, 76; Dying Gladiator by Briton Riviere, 74; Forever by Herbert Gustave Schmalz, 78; The Lint Pickers by Mihály Munkácsy, 77; tone and irony in, 74–6; on working-class readers of art, 74–8 Pleasant Sunday Afternoon movement, 130. See also anti-

Sabbatarianism; rational recreations Plymouth Brethren, 98, 101 poor, the, and critical terminology, 17–18 popular lifestyle aestheticism, 40, 43, 96, 133–4, 180, 186; appropriated by lower middle class, 14, 72, 79, 97; commodities of, 3, 11–14, 20–2, 25, 27–8, 30, 34, 37, 40, 53–5, 60–1, 67–9, 91–3, 127–8, 133–4, 142–3, 146–8, 155–7, 170, 174–5, 180, 194, 210–16; eastern exoticism of, 170, 175, 194, 212–13; mannerisms and activities of, 14, 21, 24, 30, 34–5, 37–40, 69, 79–82, 84, 88, 97, 101, 121, 142, 147, 152, 154–7, 193–7; with regard to missionary aestheticism, 19, 21, 70. See also aesthetic neighborhoods; dandies Potter, Beatrice. See Webb, Beatrice (née Potter) Potter, Catherine. See Courtney, Catherine (née Potter) Poynter, Edward, 22 Praeger, Sophia Rosamond, 225n68 Pratt, Hodgson, 106, 111 Pre-Raphaelites, 12, 16, 24–5, 32, 42, 63, 162, 175, 177, 180 Prinsep, Val, 22, 28, 70 Prynne, Rev. George Rundle, 150 Psomiades, Kathy, 218n5 pub as a community center, 114 Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) and prosecutions of Ritualists, 134, 144, 147, 149–50, 161 Punch. See missionary aesthetes: satirized in Punch; ritualism: satirized in Punch Pusey, Rev. Edward Bouverie, 133 Radford, Ernest, 71 rational recreations, 16, 101, 104–6, 111–12, 114, 116, 118–20, 129–30, 199, 215 Red Cross Hall and Cottages, Southwark, 25, 42–3, 61–3 Reed, John Shelton, 149, 151, 248n71, 251n117, 251n125

Index 287 Religion of Art, 14, 99, 101, 121, 123–4, 127–8, 175, 207. Richardson, Benjamin Ward, 180 Richmond, W.B., 71, 75 Ritualism, 15, 136, 138–9, 142, 144–54, 161, 209; accused of effeminacy, 135, 152–5, 157, 169–70; accused of manipulative aesthetic mission, 154–7, 167, 209; accused of pastoral neglect, 153–7, 167; accused of Roman Catholicism, 134, 150, 153, 168–72; appeal to ‘giddy young men,’ 152–3; appeal to middle and upper classes, 151; classiﬁcation of, 133, 245n4; as a distinct social movement from Tractarianism, 133, 245n4; doctrinal purport of, 144–5, 147, 153, 157; eclectic congregations of, 151; homosexual sensibility in, 152; as missionary aestheticism, 132–4, 141–2, 144–8, 157, 173; prosecutions against, 134, 144, 147, 149–50, 161; question of appeal to working classes, 132–4, 145–51, 209; question of appeal to working classes in ﬁction, 151, 157; redeﬁnition of priestly vocation, 153; satire of, 135, 152, 154–7; satirized in Punch, 152; theological training schools of, 155; workingclass sense of party from, 150. See also aesthetic Ritualist novels; antiTractarian novels; mission novels; Ritualist parish churches; Ritualist slum priests Ritualist parish churches, 136, 145, 147–9, 151–4, 160 Ritualist slum priests, 15–16, 18, 133–5, 144–53, 156–8; alliances with secular missionary aestheticism, 134, 146–8; biographical treatments of, 148, 152–3; charisma of and labor for people by, 150, 153–4; as confessors, 153, 160; depicted in ﬁction as having popular support, 154–5, 167; idea of priestly vocation of, 153; political afﬁliations of, 150–1, 153; practical aesthetics of, 133, 157,

161; sensitivity to beauty of, 147, 153; troubled by afﬁliation with secular aestheticism, 134, 146–7 Roberts, Morley, 178 Robinson, A. Mary F., 127 Robinson, F. W., 154–5, 157, 250n117 Rolfe, Frederick, 206 Roman Catholicism, 133, 150 Ronniger, Jane, 107, 228n19 Rooke, T. M., 30 Rose, Jonathan, 18 Ross, Ellen, 17–18, 228n10–11, 231n57, 243n82 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 27–9, 31, 42, 84, 88, 127–8, 143, 175, 180 Rossiter, William, 5–6, 32, 209 Rothenstein, William, 71 Royal Academy, 175, 178, 183, 196, 213–14 Royal Albert Hall, 130, 183, 214 Royal Commission on Housing (1884), 49 Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, 107 Royal School of Art Needlework, 22 Royal Society of British Artists, 107 Ruskin, John, 10, 16, 21–2, 25, 40, 42, 44, 46–7, 49, 68, 79–80, 88, 93–4, 96, 100, 128, 139, 175, 177, 180–1, 194, 199, 203, 209, 215; deconversion from Evangelicalism, 138; at Ferry Hinksey, 5, 24; and Guild of St George and its projects, 4–5, 31, 68, 180, 209; inﬂuence on missionary aesthetes, 2–3, 5–6, 8, 14, 21, 32, 46, 68–9, 79, 101; paternalism towards working classes, 4–5; union of ethics and aesthetics in, 4, 7, 31, 40, 72, 176, 180–1, 188, 195, 198, 200–2; works by: Fors Clavigera, 5–6, 68; Modern Painters, 4, 46, 177, 181; Mornings in Florence, 203; ‘The Nature of Gothic,’ 4; ‘Of Queen’s Gardens,’ 49; Praeterita, 100, 138; St Mark’s Rest, 203; Stones of Venice, 128; ‘The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,’ 180; Time and Tide, 68; ‘The Two Boyhoods,’ 6; Unto This Last, 4, 6, 181

288 Index Sabbatarians, 14–15, 99–109, 111–14, 116–21, 123–7, 129, 217; and alcohol, 113–14, 116–17, 242n59; deﬁnition of rest by, 15, 101, 105, 242n73; idealization of family life by, 108, 112–13; on labor, 14–15, 101–5, 107–8, 112, 126, 130; legislation by, 100, 114, 116; questioning the ethical value of art, 125–6; rhetoric of class division and class rights by, 14, 103; on Sunday licensing of private, ‘low’ entertainments, 15, 104, 114, 117–18, 130. See also Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS); Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association (WMLDRA); Sunday rest associations St Helier, Lady (Mary Jeune), 23 St Jude’s art exhibitions, 12, 14, 25, 32, 70, 72–8, 124, 184, 209, 213; ‘watchers’ at, 73, 78, 209; working-class and bourgeois responses to art at, 74–8. See also ‘Pictures for the People’ St Jude’s, Whitechapel, 12, 19–20, 107, 124, 213 Sala, G. Augustus, 93, 239n69 Salisbury, third marquess of (Robert Cecil), 49 Saltaire, 66 Salvation Army, 22–3, 28, 37 Sarony, Napoleon, 92–3 Schaffer, Talia, 20, 206, 222n8 Schreiner, Olive, 95 Shaen, William, 29, 106 Shaftesbury, seventh earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 45, 102, 112, 118 Shakespeare, William, 7, 98, 141, 144, 197 Sharp, Evelyn, 94 Shaw, G. B., 143 Shaw, Norman, 19, 28, 69 Shaw-Lefevre, Emily, 53 Shelley, Percy, 84 Shorter, Clement, 180 Shorthouse, J. H., 15, 158–60, 165 Sichel, Edith, 178–9, 184 Sims, George, 209

Sinﬁeld, Alan, 91 slum journalists, 93–5, 209, 239n69 slum mission novel. See mission novel slummers, 43, 45, 49, 88–91, 93–4, 96–7, 147, 151, 217 Smith, Philip T., 251n117 Snell, Rev. Bernard J., 108 social control theory, 208 social Darwinism, 197, 200 socialist aesthetics, 63–4, 70, 139, 211. See also Morris, William: socialist aesthetics of socialist critique of missionary aestheticism. See missionary aesthetes: socialist critique of socialist education in desire and discontent, 7, 190, 217 Society for Promoting the Due Observance of the Lord’s Day. See Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS) Society of the Holy Cross, 149, 153, 156, 248n76 Souls, The, 22–3, 25, 107 South Kensington Museum, 32, 123–4, 196, 213 South London Art Gallery, 5–6, 31–2, 209, 214 South Place Chapel, 31, 123 Stanley, Rev. Arthur Penrhyn, 106, 125 Stanton, Rev. Arthur, 150 Steedman, Carolyn Kay, 227n10 Stephen, Caroline, 63 Stephen, Leslie, 63 Summers, Anne, 50, 54, 232n62 Sunday League, 105–6, 199 Sunday Opening, 2, 7, 14, 28, 31–2, 96, 104–14, 117–21, 123–7, 130; domino theory about, 103–5; legislation for, 100–1, 108, 121, 124; of public libraries, 119, 123, 130. See also Continental Sunday; rational recreations; Sabbatarians; Sunday Society Sunday religious observance, 98–9, 103–4, 108–9, 112–13, 115–16, 118–9, 123

Index 289 Sunday rest associations, 102, 112. See also Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS); Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association (WMLDRA) Sunday Society, 16, 100–1, 104–14, 116, 118–19, 121, 124, 128–30, 214; admiration for Continental Sunday, 104; aesthetic rhetoric of, 14, 101, 107–8, 110–12, 121, 123–4, 127, 129; Biblical exegesis by, 109–110, 129; as counter-attractionists, 15, 106, 114–16, 130; deﬁnition of rest by, 15, 101, 105, 110–11; and discomfort with popular amusements, 118; endorsement of rational recreations by, 101, 104–6, 111–12, 116, 118–20, 129; on haves and have-nots, 14, 108–9; on labor, proﬁt motive, and volunteerism, 107–8, 130; links to aesthetic milieu among, 107; membership and class constituencies in, 106; origins of, 105–6; socialists in, 106; subversion of Sabbatarian strategies by, 105, 118–19; on Sunday family relations, 108, 114–15, 129; and Sunday Review, 106–7, 116. See also anti-Sabbatarianism; Continental Sunday; counter-attractionists; rational recreations; Religion of Art Sunday theatre, 100, 104, 114, 118–19, 123, 130 Sutherland, fourth duchess of (Millicent Leveson-Gower), 22, 33, 216 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 84, 127 Symonds, John Addington, 14, 71–2 Symons, Arthur, 3, 127, 143 Taylor, Peter, 100 Temple, Rev. Frederick, 140 Temple, Ruth Z., 20 Tennant, Laura, 22 Tennant, Margot. See Asquith, Margot (née Tennant) Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 84, 128, 130 Terra Cotta Home Arts Association, 215

Terry, Ellen, 34, 94 Thornycroft, Hamo, 14, 69 Tolstoy, Leo, 177, 181 Toynbee Hall, 1, 8–9, 23, 31, 50, 63, 67–71, 79–80, 94–5, 106, 129, 209, 212–14, 255n46, 261n35; aestheticism as daily practice at, 14, 70; as a center for popular aestheticism, 12–14, 67–71; design of, 69; housing University Extension classes, 71; pupil teachers at, 80; socialist aesthetics at, 70; sympathy for strikers at, 70–1, 212; and visits by and to aesthetic ﬁgures, 70–2; and visits by casual slummers, 89; Wadham House at, 129; working-class clubs at, 70–1, 213–14 Toynbee Record, 32, 70, 72, 214 Toynbee Travellers’ Club, 18, 70, 72, 79–88, 96–7, 217; aesthetic attitudes among, 14, 72, 79–85, 88; Italian artistic destinations of, 80, 82; journals of, 80–8, 97; slummers in, 14, 88–9, 97 Tractarians, 133–4, 140. See also Ritualism Trench, Maria, 152 Tucker, Paul, 10 Turner, J. M. W., 124, 128 university settlements, 19–20, 88, 141, 170, 210. See also Toynbee Hall Unwin, Raymond, 66 Vick, Harry, 150 Victorian intellectual aristocracy, 24, 46 Villari, Pasquale, 88 Vincent, David, 18 Wakeﬁeld Literary Society, 183 Wakeﬁeld Mechanics Institute, 183 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 9; The History of David Grieve, 146; Marcella, 12; on Marius the Epicurean, 160; Robert Elsmere, 9, 167, 173, 252n139

290 Index Waters, Chris, 260n29 Watts, G. F., 14, 19, 25–6, 28, 31, 34, 73, 75–6, 107, 213 Wohl, Anthony, 57 Wolfe, Robert Lee, 158, 160–1 Woodward, Kathleen, 211 Working Men’s College, 4, 31, 42, 46, 228n19 Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association (WMLDRA), 15, 101–2 working-class clubs, 106, 130, 150, 155, 167, 190, 214. See also under Toynbee Hall working-class leisure, 59–61, 100, 108, 112–16, 119–20, 183–4, 197, 207 working-class London neighborhoods: Aldgate, 63; Bethnal Green, 96, 106, 127, 135, 142–4, 149; Drury Lane, 140, 183;

Hoxton, 95, 154; Marylebone, 44, 62, 127, 155; Shoreditch, 149, 167; Southwark, 42, 61–2; Stepney, 95, 97; Wapping, 22, 211; Whitechapel, 6, 19, 22–3, 28, 31, 32, 67, 69, 74, 76, 79, 93, 97, 107, 212, 215 working-class longing for beauty, 57, 211 working-class subjectivity, 17–18, 209, 211 Wright, Thomas, 119 Wyndham, Madeleine, 22 Yates, Lucy, 210 Yates, Rev. S. A. Thompson, 22 Yates, W. N., 151 Yeats, Susan (Lily), 30, 224n49 Yeats, W. B., 30, 94 Yellow Book, 180 Yorke, Harriot, 53

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