Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Author:Gertrude Himmelfarb [Himmelfarb, Gertrude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-15T08:00:00+00:00

TO A LATER GENERATION it may seem that Toynbee Hall served the interests of the residents better than those of the community, thus perverting its essential purpose. Yet from the beginning the residential function was given at least as much weight as the communal function; indeed the two were seen as integrally related. It was Barnett’s intention that the young men living among the poor would become better acquainted with them, move more easily among them, understand and sympathize with them, and serve them in whatever way they could—but not that they would live the life of the poor or lose themselves in the service of the poor. They were not to be latter-day St. Francises. On the contrary, they were to show the poor the possibility of a more elevated, more gracious, more fulfilling life, a life that the poor could not hope to emulate but that could, by its example, enrich and enlarge them.

Barnett described the residents, not ironically, as “clubmen,” but membership in that “club” carried more obligations than privileges. “Toynbee Hall,” he once wrote, “seems to its visitors to be a centre of education, a mission, a centre of social effort. It may be so; but the visitors miss the truth that the place is a club-house in Whitechapel, occupied by men who do citizens’ duty in the neighborhood.”14 When William Beveridge was sub warden of Toynbee Hall in 1904, he delivered a paper entitled “The Influence of University Settlements,” which was devoted entirely to their influence upon the residents. The paper, he confessed, was a “foolish leg-pull,” but “not wholly without point.” While Toynbee Hall was a center of educational and social activities, “these were a consequence rather than the essence of the settlement.” The essence lay in the “individual lives of the residents, as they are affected by the special experience of living in that particular place.”15*

Other residents testified to the same experience, the sense that Toynbee Hall had a dramatic and enduring effect upon their personal lives long after they left the house. But that personal effect had public consequences. It was no mere exercise, as we would now say, in “consciousness-raising.” For that consciousness was focused not on the self but on others. And not on others in the abstract—on the poor as the subject of legislation and administration or as members of a class or institution—but as individuals. “One by one,” Barnett wrote, “is the phrase which best expresses our method, and the ‘raising of the buried life’ is that which best expresses our end.”17 Many of the former residents went on to assume legislative and administrative positions that took them far from that method and that end. But they did so with a difference, conscious not only of their social mission but also of the limitations of political and institutional reforms in fulfilling that mission.

George Lansbury, the socialist and, for a time, leader of the Labour Party, took a dim view of Toynbee Hall and the settlement movement in general,

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