Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country

Before this, ladies living in Belgravia, revering the memory and example of Maurice, were in the habit of inviting to their drawing rooms from the alleys and by-ways in which the fashionable district abounds poor boys who could not be tempted, even with the bait of magic lanterns, to the night school. The work was found to be rather too exacting. The chivalry of street boyhood did not, as might have been foreseen, prevent the urchins from gratifying their sense of fun at her expense in the drawing room of the amateur teacher. The joke of giving, as their names, those of the famous jockeys of the hour, Fordham, Archer, Cannon, as the case may be, proved too good to be resisted. Gravity, once disturbed, could not be restored. The pupils could do nothing but laugh at each other’s fun. Their would-be instructress had to acquiesce in their removal when the servant came to clear away the tea things. A public feeling in favour of order and even cleanliness has long since been generated in the boys’ clubs controlled by the University settlers. First the prejudice against collars as an article of attire goes out; then a feeling in favour of washed hands sets in. In the recreation rooms upstairs boxing gloves are provided as a safety valve for the escape of the superfluous humours of Arab animalism. Then by slow degrees comes the hour when bagatelle boards may be introduced without danger of their being used for the breaking of heads, or of the bagatelle cues being employed for the perforation of the lath-and-plaster walls instead of for the propulsion of the ivory balls.

The parents are provided with the same sort of accommodation as their children. The adult clubs are chiefly of two kinds. In some, the first purpose is political. In that case the society becomes an agency for the propagation of Radical ideas, and probably an outwork of Trades-Unionism. But from many of these foundations politics, which are generally synonymous with advanced Liberalism, are excluded. In the majority, if not in all, of the non-political clubs, intoxicating drinks, though under conditions they were sanctioned by the early founders, are by common agreement, prohibited also. The popularity of these clubs with the wives of their habitués is a sufficient proof of the sobering tendency of the new resorts. In all cases, the women gain scarcely less advantage from them than the men. Each club is an organization for social entertainments and hospitalities to which members are free to bring all their women-kind.

The dominant idea of the University settlement to which these clubs are subsidiary, is to give the poorest and most densely populated working class districts the benefit of a resident gentry such as, in the clergyman or the squire, is generally commanded in rural parishes. The local separation between employer and employed; the fact that the workers do not, as they used to do, dwell to-day within sight of their masters, but are segregated into colonies of their own in another quarter of the capital, and have no access to persons better informed than themselves in the troubles and perplexities, big or small, of everyday existence, first prompted those who realized the perils of this situation, to make, as far as might be, common lot with their less fortunate fellow creatures. In New York, where these societies seem to have been known longer than in England, the phrase employed is Neighbourhood Guild. To obtain the local knowledge which can alone enable the most wise or charitable to give effective help, habitual residence under conditions and in neighbourhoods identical with the class to be benefited is absolutely necessary. The University settler becomes in fact a sort of Delphic Oracle, consulted on all embarrassing contingencies by the entire neighbourhood. To vary the simile, the enquiries made of him are not less various than the questions which the editor of a popular print undertakes to answer in his Correspondence column. The doubts and complications arising out of the law of landlord and tenant, especially out of that enigmatic being, the compound householder who so long obstructed the path of Household Franchise, require a practical knowledge of often abstruse legal points and sometimes compel resort to a professional solicitor. The precise steps necessary to put in motion the Statute for the removal of hopelessly insanitary dwellings are not likely to be within the knowledge of the dwellers by the Docks. These are only a few of the knots which for the instruction of those he has chosen for neighbours, the University settler must be prepared to untie. And this is only one of the duties which he actually performs. He not only takes part in the municipal government of his neighbourhood; he helps others to take part in it, too. Already he has himself sat on School Boards and trained grown-up pupils to fill his place.

Nor is it always necessary to speak in the masculine gender. University settlements are no more limited to a single sex than the tripos work of the Cambridge Senate House, or of the Extension lecture rooms, which enjoy the patronage of the Oxford schools. Nor is it the Universities only that are represented by these feminine settlements. The Cheltenham Ladies’ College, one of the earliest, if not the first, of that kind of public schools for English girls, has already made a sensible difference in hundreds of lives in the extreme East of the town. Among the special works of which the Cheltonians have set an example is that of enabling poor mothers to procure for their children at seasons of need not merely the conventional ‘day in the country,’ but a sojourn of weeks, or even months, in a healthy cottage home on the seashore of Sussex or on the fragrant uplands of Kent. The machinery for accomplishing this has now been brought to a very high point of efficiency and indeed perfection. The Cheltenham ladies and their colleagues, associated under the respective matrons of the institutions, have a long list of simple honest folk within a few hours’ journey of London who can be trusted to look after their little charges during their stay beneath their roof, and to send back to their homes the small boys and girls visibly better than when the children were first received by their hosts. Sometimes the Guilds of the different sexes may combine their efforts for hospitalities and entertainments, a magic lantern and lecture, it may be, or during the winter season a Christmas tree followed by supper and a dance, or to speak more correctly a general, though not uncontrolled, romp.

Most, if not all, of these East End clubs, which the University settlers aim at teaching their members to run for themselves, rather than indefinitely to leave their management to outside friends, are federated to a central association, that the late Lord Lyttelton took a prominent part in organizing. This was the body which, as has been already said, decided that stronger drinks than water should not absolutely be forbidden; but that central supervision should be exercised closely over all the establishments, and that prompt action should be taken when any breach of order, corporate or individual, was reported. The average standard of order maintained has improved, and is still improving. Generally and individually the club members have realized that their material interest lies in checking the first beginnings of misconduct, and in dealing with the offenders not only as guilty individually of a breach of order, but as violating the first principles of collective fellowship. Such a conviction indicates the progress made towards the creation of a healthy opinion upon social matters with those who, a few years ago, would have been pronounced by experts to be invulnerably proof against any sentiment of the sort. East End boys are no doubt mischievous, and even destructive creatures. So, for that matter, are all boys. If their brethren of the upper class do not break out in the same way as the urchin East Enders, that is because the march of refinement through the West End has trodden out the old race of small boys and girls, and has replaced them by little men and women whose only childhood will be reached in their dotage. The very interesting experiences recorded in the volume entitled: The Universities and the Social Problem32 do indeed include some rather alarming freaks of the East End waggishness. But to the small boy in rags the process of whose reclamation from Bethnal Green barbarism to Christian civilization had only begun a few weeks since, the trick of pouring a paraffin can over a sleeping foe, and then applying a match, did not seem more of an atrocity than to a West End boy of the same age might have appeared the joke, borrowed from the pantomime stage, of placing the baby on the floor by the door for the entering nurse to tumble over, or of putting a red hot poker too close to be pleasant or even safe to the nose of an unpopular housemaid. Men like Dr Barnardo or General Booth, who both know something of Whitechapel waifs and strays, have not thought that poor children in the East End inherit an exceptional amount of original sin. Nor have they, nor others, discovered that ragged boys, nurtured on fried fish and unspeakable pudding are incapable of being disciplined into habits of obedience, truthfulness, and humanity, even though their ideas of permissible humour be not bounded by the conventional limits of gentleness and good taste. The administrators of the People’s Palace, for some time after the fancy of Sir Walter Besant was translated into fact, were not always sanguine as to the feasibility of civilizing their young patrons, even through the agency of pictures or swimming baths, thick slices of bread and butter, buns, and fried haddock purchasable not much above, if not something below, cost price. To-day, though the social deportment in the pleasure grounds of Bethnal Green may lack the superficial polish, and the innate breeding, of the crowds at the Westminster Aquarium or the South Kensington Museum, a considerable advance is recorded on the part of the Harrys and the Harriets of Poplar and Whitechapel towards the carriage and conduct of the cynosures of less outlandish suburbs on Bank Holiday. There is no body of men who know unfashionable London better, or who deserve more honour for the service which they render to it than the members of the London City Mission. The work of these missioners, though undenominational, is religious rather than æsthetic. But they are shrewd observers of the social aspects of the neighbourhoods they visit. Their opinion of the practical results of the agencies that have here been described may be summed up in the words of a missioner to the present writer: ‘It marks an epoch in East End civilization of which ten years ago Christian charity would itself have despaired.’

The functions exercised by the controlling authority of the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union are educational as well as disciplinary. There is no reason now why any one of the affiliated societies, however impecunious it may be or however impoverished the district wherein it may exist, should be without as good a library as one of Mr Mudie’s subscribers, or should not know almost as much about the history and antiquities of the British capital as the late Dean Stanley himself. The controllers of the union often make liberal advances in money for the purchase of books by the local clubs. Should these funds not be forthcoming, book boxes with wisely chosen contents circulate among the members of a Home Readers’ Union. The volumes thus distributed are real literature. The subjects to which they relate are methodically mastered by the readers who themselves have selected them, and have not acted on the initiative of the more highly educated residents, Peripatetic encyclopædias like Mr Augustus Hare or Mr Percy Fitz-Gerald are ever ready to ‘take walks’ with them. Omniscient divines, such as Dean Bradley or Dean Farrar personally conduct them through their cathedrals into the heart of English history. Nor are the literary studies chosen merely because they are likely to help the student in his everyday work, and therefore improve his earnings. The biographies of the statesmen and soldiers of old Greece, the dramatic vicissitudes of the Republics of mediæval Italy, even the philosophy as well as the language of Dante or of Macchiavelli are taken up by men after a day’s manual work with an energy that would shame an undergraduate returning from a wine party to read for his Schools. This, too, seems to be the experience of American settlements as well, of Hull House, Chicago, or of Andover House, Boston. In their capacity of schools of citizenship, as well as of education, the American settlements have felt the immediate benefit of the Oxford influence and example, incarnated not only in Arnold Toynbee, but in the late T. H. Green, professor of mental and moral philosophy, whose pupil Toynbee was; while Green in his turn had been the disciple of Benjamin Jowett. Good citizenship was the ideal ever present to the late Master of Balliol in his dealings with his pupils, just as it had been present centuries earlier to Socrates in his discourses to Plato, or in his conversations with Alcibiades. Green probably made the most valuable of recent contributions to the speculative thought and science of his University, of his country, or of his generation. He was, also, a prominent and active member of the Oxford Town Council, and of other local bodies. By their lessons in the theory and practice of citizenship, taught more publicly than it fell to the lot of their master to teach, the Oxford settlers at the East End have improved upon Green’s example, with much of his zeal, and not a little of his success. More than twenty years ago the East End neighbourhoods now mentioned were first visited by the present writer, to inform himself for those portions of an earlier work, relating to that part of unfashionable London.33 Thanks mainly to the influence and teaching of the Rev. S. A., since Canon, Barnett, great improvements in the domestic economy and material fittings of the humblest households had begun, even then to be visible. The later experiences and their social results, which have now been described, have made it possible for the writer to contrast the East End of the later eighties with that of the later nineties. The scale and the precise modes of manifestation are of course widely different, but if due allowance be made for the social disparity of Mayfair and Mile End, it is no exaggeration to say that the increased attention to the prettinesses of life shown in the boudoirs and drawing rooms of fashionable London is reflected in the parlours of those purlieus now spoken of. These though their civilization be still incomplete, have to a great extent under the agencies that have here been examined, ceased to be manifestly poverty-stricken or repulsively hideous. The discipline of character that the settlements provide for the settlers is at least as salutary as the consequences they involve for the district, whether it be in the East End, in Camberwell, or in Notting Hill, that the settlement is made. The social education for the West End club-man of his joint stock palace in Pall Mall is trivial in comparison with the training that will be administered to him by a few visits to the East End club, of which he may be made free, or of which perhaps he may himself have been a founder. The assistance of those in such a position as the University settlers is appreciated cordially by the working club-men. ‘We always need, to begin with, the help of some of you gentlemen of the Oxford Settlement. Afterwards if you look in upon us from time to time, we can keep things going pretty well for ourselves.’ Such is the common remark of the settler’s friends. Of its practical truth there seems little doubt. The University settler and his friends in his own station are not, however, on this account to suppose that within these clubs their society is courted as a favour or regarded as a compliment. On the contrary, the atmosphere and sentiment of the place are uncompromisingly democratic. If the West Ender, by his talk or manner contributes anything of pleasure or profit to the social pool, then he is welcomed just as he would be on the same terms in the coteries of Pall Mall, or at the dining tables of Hyde Park. If, on the other hand, there be, perhaps unconsciously to himself a suspicion of condescension in his bearing, or a too visible effort after edification in his talk, then as peremptorily as he could be among his own equals at the West End, he will be voted a bore, and shunned as a prig at the East End. The roughest specimens of Whitechapel or Ratcliffe require, not less, but rather more tact for their management, than other people need. If that be forthcoming, the youths, whose element is destruction, whose ambition is to be a professional pugilist or a champion strong man, but who seldom desert one to whom their loyalty has been given, and who are the raw material with which British officers win victories on the field against the heaviest odds, are perfectly manageable. The most aggressively republican of Arabs becomes the most gentle and gracious of fellow citizens. But if either of them detect signs of patronage among their politer visitors, their backs are at once up; metaphorically their bristles stand on end like hairs upon the fretful porcupine. Familiarity they neither expect nor wish. They would even resent it. Their view of the courtesies and proprieties of friendly intercourse do not in effect differ from those held by their superiors. They are abundantly content if these ideas are practically recognized. It is with those who are removed by a single degree in the social scale above these rough diamonds, but who consider themselves altogether their superiors, that the difficulty begins. No class of servants are so troublesome as the footman tribe. No section of the body politic proves more vexatious than the intermediate order between the lower and the very lowest division of the middle class. The genuine working man in the working man’s club causes none of those embarrassments which one encounters upon a level rather higher than that of the outcasts of Camberwell or Notting Hill, the waifs and strays of Whitechapel or Shoreditch. If the problem of association is practically to be solved to the satisfaction of all those concerned, there is one golden rule always to be followed. Postulating a common amount of tact and sense on the part of the University settler, or one who essays that position, let him begin by being natural, let him shun as the presage of failure any conscious effort to place his lowlier fellow creature at his ease. Above all, let him never offer his hand to shake. He himself may think the manual overture will gratify the person to whom it is made by showing that the maker ‘has no false pride.’ A greater mistake there could not be, as a well-born academic socialist found out when, to demonstrate his faith in the equality of all men, he shook hands with his brother’s footman on receiving his shaving water. These strained amenities are an effort to him who volunteers them, and an infliction to him who receives them, a failure and a mistake, in fact, all round. The secret of Edward Denison’s and of Arnold Toynbee’s influence for good with their inferiors was that they not only knew these truths, but always acted on them. Hence, by their own work, and by the generation of workers whom they raised up to follow them and at whose methods we have now glanced, so much was done to span the gulf separating ‘the two nations’ of the English people.

CHAPTER XI

FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS

State irresponsibility for national education on, and after, the Queen’s accession. Summary of early movements towards educating the people. Lancaster and Bell as pioneers of educational systems. Samuel Whitbread’s faint foreshadowing of W. E. Forster’s Education Act. Brougham as educational pioneer. First State grant to Church and Nonconformist schools. Increased in 1839. Education Department completed on the principle of State aid to all schools, Protestant or Roman, satisfying State examiners. Mr Lowe at the Education Office and the grant stationary. National education the law of the land by the Forster Act of 1870. Free education under Lord Salisbury 1891. Elementary education now organized. External change in the English landscape. Secondary education waits. Details of progress recently made towards this.

Those processes of organization which seem in all departments of national activity the special features of English life during the last half of this century have nowhere been more visible than in the educational arrangements for the long neglected mass of the English people. Slowly, with occasional relapses, yet upon the whole with sure and steady progressiveness, there is being prepared, there now seems within measurable distance of completion, the ladder that will enable any English boy and many English girls to accomplish the ascent from the gutter to the highest teaching of the University, and so to gain a position from which merit and industry, favoured by fortune, will command the highest career open to either sex. All this has been accomplished within little more than half a century. Till 1833, the educational responsibilities of the State practically were ignored. In that year there was made for teaching purposes a grant of £20,000. The sum with annual increments was thenceforth dispensed annually by the Treasury to the National Society in Broad Sanctuary, as representing the Church of England, and for the Nonconformists to the British and Foreign School Society. Till a twelvemonth after the passing of the first Reform Act, the most active of organizations for teaching the people had been the Church of England and the great Dissenting bodies as in the case of the School Society just named. The Roman Church on both sides of St. George’s Channel never neglected its educational duties. The Sunday School system, to which, on the eve of the Queen’s accession, thousands of working men and women owed practically all the teaching they had received, were started towards the close of the eighteenth century by a Gloucester printer, Robert Raikes. In the last year of William IV. there had died a Nonconformist, a member of the Society of Friends, Joseph Lancaster. To him and to the English clergyman associated with him, Andrew Bell, founder also of the Bell Classical Scholarship at Cambridge, were due the first beginnings of a scheme of instruction for the whole English people.

Two or three decades earlier than the grant of 1833, Parliament fitfully recognized its educational responsibilities. In 1807 Samuel Whitbread, the son-in-law of Earl Grey, tentatively anticipated the spirit of Mr W. E. Forster’s reforms, three score and three years afterwards. By his proposal of parochial schools throughout the Kingdom, Whitbread ranks as the earliest education reformer of the nineteenth century. Within a decade, in the year 1816, Brougham took up the question, obtained a committee to enquire into the educational resources of London, and in 1820 himself brought forward an early Education scheme of the nineteenth century. The project perished amid the denominational tempest of religious rivalry which it evoked. Nothing after this was done till the date at which we have already arrived, 1833. Then, in faint forecast of the £7,000,000 now spent by the State on the teaching of its youthful subjects, a grant for that purpose of, £20,000 was for the first time made, distributed as we have seen between the Protestant Churches of the country. After an interval of six years, in 1839, Lord Melbourne’s Administration excited much obloquy, and raised the ‘No Popery’ cry against them, by allowing a share in a grant, now increased to £30,000, to Roman Catholic schools. The House of Lords, in an address to the Queen, condemned this new policy of religious emancipation. The vote was only carried in the Commons by a majority of two (the figures being 275 for, 273 against). Together with certain other changes that endure to this day, it became law. Hitherto, the State grant had been administered by the Treasury. Now for the first time an Education Department was organized under the Lord President of the Council, and four other members of the body. The Vice-President was appointed in 1856. During Lord Palmerston’s long term of office, in 1857, the Education grant rose to £451,000. It became more expressly understood that henceforth the specific duties of Education Minister were vested in the Vice-President.34 With the steady increase of the annual grant, its province of usefulness was extended also. Subject always to the principle of State inspection, where State aid was received, the grant was no longer limited to assist the erection of new schools. Even before 1857 it had been allotted in due proportion to help schools already in existence. Portions of it were also received by training colleges for teachers. The quality of the instruction supplied in the schools had not improved in proportion to the liberality shown by the State. In 1859-60, the grant was more than a million. A Commission reported most unfavourably as to the efficiency of the schools. Hence in 1862, the then Vice-President of the Council, Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, enforced the Education reforms which he had already drafted, and initiated the policy of payment by results; in other words, the regulation of the amount of the grant in schools by the success of the scholars in the yearly examination. The teachers grumbled, but the taxpayers were relieved. The rate of increase in the grant ceased automatically. In 1870 the Education Vote amounted to one and a quarter millions instead of, as, but for Mr Lowe’s drastic, if indirect, retrenchment, it would have done, to something like thrice that sum.