Charity & Condescension by Daniel Siegel

Author:Daniel Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780821444078
Publisher: Ohio University Press

Looking-Glass Oxford

The proponents of home visiting believed the practice would build personal bridges between rich and poor and that the ever-growing antagonism between classes would dwindle once the adversaries got to know each other better. But such knowledge is not easily obtained, and as the volunteer worker cast her eyes around the rooms of her less fortunate neighbors, both she and they must at times have wondered how to get from scrutiny to intimacy. Samuel Barnett, a charity administrator and the vicar of St. Jude’s parish in Whitechapel, became convinced that modern philanthropy was not a two-way street. In an essay entitled “Hospitalities,”Barnett argues that philanthropic practices typically allow the rich to give in a way that insulates them from the poor: “They give, but they will not share; they send their money, but keep themselves and their homes behind servants, conventionalities, and high walls.”16 While Barnett’s critique was in part directed against material assistance, the problem as he describes it extended to many forms of personal charity, including home visits. Even when a volunteer entered the homes of the poor, she kept her own home well protected and distant; even when she made personal contact, she was insulated by “conventionalities.”Barnett further explains the problem with reference to the charity-funded popular entertainments: “They are gifts which do not rise to the level of sharing; they do not make at one giver and receiver; they do not reveal the thoughts and manners of [the giver’s] home; they do not provoke a sense of common possession by interest in one another’s possessions” (59). If the visitor was unable to share, it was because she could never really reveal herself—even her thoughts and manners—in another’s home. In their effort to form a charity that could not be imposed upon, the visiting societies, in Barnett’s view, had driven the common humanity of the visitor out of sight.

In fact, Barnett begins his Oxford address on university settlements with a critical comment about exactly the kind of charity represented by the COS: “ ‘Scientific charity,’ or the system which aims at creating respectability by methods of relief, has come to the judgment, and has been found wanting.… [T]he outcome of scientific charity is the working man too thrifty to pet his children and too respectable to be happy.”17 In other words, the Poor Law’s strict criteria of respectability when combined with the visitor’s surveillance and prescriptions were enough to demoralize even the most deserving poor. But Barnett was also, even primarily, concerned with the demoralization of the volunteers who, as they took part in “the usual parochial machinery of district visiting, mothers’ meetings, clubs, &c.,” were frustrated in their desire to “themselves bear the burdens of the poor” (167–68). While the visitor may have been witness to a great variety of social problems and may have worked tirelessly to offer new remedies, he could never properly share the burdens of poverty. Of course, the relative exclusion of the visitor from the actual difficulties of the poor

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