The Basic Evil: Social Division

c) Economic Division

Barnett identified the basic evil of modern life as what one might call the fragmentation of society.

In her view, the division was threefold. One part was economic in cause and nature. Barnett denounced the fact that alongside an immense increase in the combined wealth of the British nation with industrialisation, the number of people living in dire poverty had also soared to unprecedented heights. While more than half the English people lived on the brink of destitution, Barnett would not believe in British supremacy and the country's greatness. “It is useless”, she explained, “to imagine that the nation is wealthier because in one column of the newspaper we read an account of a sumptuous ball or of the luxury of a city dinner, if in another column is a story of 'death by starvation'.”⁴⁶⁰

In an article first published in the National Review in the summer of 1886, she brought home to her readers the hard reality of life on an average wage of a pound a week. The provision even of basic necessaries for a healthy and decent life was impossible on so low an income, Barnett aimed to show. Food took up the major part of a working man's income. It was also the area where a poor

459 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.208

460 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.12

family could most easily cut down and save an extra penny. Barnett reckoned up for her readers that even a very drear and basic diet of bread, pulses, rice pudding and tea cost a family of maybe ten an average of 2s 5d a day⁴⁶¹ or a total of 16s 4d a week. With an income of a pound a week, the family was thus left with 3s 8d to pay rent, obtain schooling for the children, to buy coals, clothes and boots, to meet the doctor's bills, to join a club against sickness, death or unemployment and to cover for breakages and necessary replacements.

Impossible, Barnett held, considering that decent accommodation of two rooms in London could not be had for less than 5s 6d a week; and so this already insufficient diet was cut down even further. “The children have to put up with less than they need; the mother 'goes without sooner than let the children suffer', and thus the new baby is born weakly and but half-nourished”⁴⁶², Barnett explained. She detected a certain irony in the fact that even the workhouse at Whitechapel customarily served meat three times a week, supplementing the meals with bread and butter or lard, suede pudding or cocoa. The costs for the weekly rations of inmates ran to about 3s 11d per person, a figure far beyond the means of the average wage earner. Barnett considered it absurd and outrageous that a man in employment could not by his labour sustain his family as well as the pauper was kept under the Poor Law principle of Less Eligibility.⁴⁶³

Barnett felt sure that on so scanty a diet, robust health could not possibly be maintained. She attacked the philanthropic spirit of the age which prided itself on heavy subscriptions to hospitals, schools and sick-asylums while considering £1 a week for a working man and as little as 9s for an unskilled working woman a fair wage. On so low an income the working man must fail to replenish his resources, the unemployed soon became unemployable. Barnett pointed to the children who grew up physically weak and defective and teachers trying in vain to develop malnourished brains.

“By the door-way of semi-starvation disease is invited to enter and find a home among the masses of our wage-earning people”⁴⁶⁴, Barnett wrote. As long as wages remained at the present rate, she deduced, the large mass of the British people could not afford the food necessary to maintain them in robust health – and bodily health alone, she added, was here considered.

The body's needs were the most exacting and needed to be satisfied before all else, Barnett recognised. She held, however, that a fair wage must allow a man not only to adequately feed himself and his family, but also to provide the means of “mental cultivation and spiritual development”⁴⁶⁵. Economic hardship prevented the individual from developing to its fullest potential. She believed that the loss which resulted from thousands of stultified lives hit the nation

461 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.16

462 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.17

463 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.21

464 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.20

465 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.26

as a whole as much as it did the individual. “While more than half the English people are poor, weak and unable to live their best life or reach their true standard of humanity”, Barnett admonished her fellow-citizens, “it is useless to congratulate ourselves on our national supremacy or class our nation as wealthy and strong.”⁴⁶⁶

b) Geographical Division

Another part of the problem of poverty as Barnett saw it lay in the fact that parallel to the economic fragmentation of society ran a topographical fragmentation. “The inhabitants of London are no longer the inhabitants of one town”⁴⁶⁷, she noted. The metropolis and other industrial centres grew ceaselessly with new neighbourhoods reaching further and further into the surrounding countryside.

In these new suburbs, the classes were divided as definitely as in the towns themselves. While the poor lived in “miles of mean streets”⁴⁶⁸, without trees, open spaces and fresh air, those who could afford the higher rents moved to neighbourhoods where houses were surrounded by gardens, and where open spaces allowed for air and sunlight. Was that state of things a necessity of modern civilisation? Barnett asked. “Must we be content”, she demanded to know, “now that education is bringing all sorts of people nearer together in sympathy, to have classes topographically divided by an arbitrary division depending upon their rent-paying powers?”⁴⁶⁹

Barnett readily conceded that in matters of housing, progress was being made in the period between 1880 and 1914. She quoted private attempts such as the schemes of Octavia Hill or the Peabody Trust⁴⁷⁰ as well as public measures such as Part III of the 1890 Housing Act which allowed county councils to purchase land outside their borders in order to provide housing for the working classes.

All of these attempts, Barnett stressed, constituted a considerable improvement on the state of housing hitherto found. And yet, all of them fell into the same trap: the trap of providing for one class only. The new estate at Tottenham purchased and erected by the London County Council (LCC) housed 42.500 people all of which belonged to the industrial classes. The LCC estate at West Ham provided accommodation for as many as 300.000 persons, not 500 of whom could afford to keep a servant⁴⁷¹. This separation of classes into different districts carried, Barnett feared, social and

466 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.28

467 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.54

468 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.332

469 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.333

470 George Peabody (1795 – 1869) was a London-based American banker and philanthropist. In 1862, he established the Peabody Trust to provide affordable housing for the poor.

471 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.53

economic disadvantages. “The English system of government is based on the belief that there is in every district a leisured and cultivated class able to give time and thought to municipal and other public duties”, she believed, “and when such a class is absent the whole suffers both financially and ethically.”⁴⁷²

The loss to the community took several forms. Barnett lamented the great waste of money resulting from unqualified local councils or Boards of Guardians who, due to a lack of training, skill and experience, vacillated in their policies or entered upon undertakings for which they had not calculated the costs. Money was also lost to individuals. The workman who was employed on a building site in the West End had to travel four or five miles to his place of work spending time and money for which neither he nor the community got any return⁴⁷³. The topographical division also produced secondary costs to the community. The citizens of a neighbourhood such as Whitechapel or West Ham had no resources on which to draw so as to provide proper schools or decent health care facilities. The lack of either added to the mass of unemployed and unemployable and cost the tax-payer heavily in the form of poor relief.⁴⁷⁴ Barnett also pointed to the lack of beauty, light and air in the crowded poor neighbourhoods. Such living conditions, she believed, produced illness, dullness and unhappiness and thus tended towards economic inefficiency and the reduction of national wealth. “It pays to make the workpeople happy”⁴⁷⁵, she impressed upon her readers.

Barnett employed the economic argument purposely to shake into action those of her readers who had hitherto been inclined to think, as she put it, with their purses rather than with their hearts. Her husband's residential project at Toynbee Hall, Barnett's own home for more than ten years by the time of the article quoted, marked an artificial protest against the massing in one locality of the poor and an attempt to remedy the problem of the missing cultured class.

c) Cultural Division

There was a third, cultural facet to the social fragmentation which Barnett identified as the basic evil of modern Britain. The topographic division of classes into far-apart neighbourhoods led to mutual estrangement – which in turn tended to produce first ignorance of one another's ways, then distrust and finally resulted all too often in open hostility. Barnett considered mutual estrangement to be the most dangerous and harmful consequence of social fragmentation. With the example of the

472 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.338

473 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.55

474 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.54

475 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.55

Russian Revolution of 1905 before their eyes, Barnett warned her readers in 1906, Britain must recognise that the strength of a nation depended upon mutual trust, understanding and respect. “The soil of suspicion cannot produce the strong tree in whose branches its people rest in happy security, or whose leaves heal the waters of internal strife“⁴⁷⁶, she said.

The mention of the poor brought up in most wealthy people's minds scenes of wretchedness, suffering, want and degradation. To many, poverty meant dirty and unkempt children, drink and gambling, domestic violence, rough language and street fights. Barnett countered that the mental image did not mirror reality. She pointed to the vast number of working men and women “who, while poor in money, [were] rich in life's goods” and lived quiet, thoughtful and dignified lives.

“Riches are not necessary to refinement”, Barnett insisted; “(...) some of the finest characters are developed under the enforced self-control of an income of a pound or thirty shillings a week.”⁴⁷⁷ There were, Barnett conceded, significant differences in the life styles and the popular culture of rich and poor. Yet, she defended the working classes against allegations of moral inferiority. The lower strata of society, she explained, simply did not get the chance to acquire what the upper strata defied as refinement and culture⁴⁷⁸. Many of the poor had no time to spare for leisure activities between working, eating, sleeping and caring for the children. Even those with more restricted working hours often lacked the skills or resources necessary for wholesome recreation. Their lack of education left them unable to read the papers, their tight budget did not allow for the purchase of journals and books or a trip to galleries and museums⁴⁷⁹. The grey, narrow, uniform streets of destitute neighbourhoods failed to school the people's eye for beauty. To many of the poor, the most glorious sunrise constituted little more than an unwelcome intimation to get out of bed and to start another day of drudgery⁴⁸⁰.

Lacking the skill and energy for what Barnett considered character-forming, productive pastimes, the poor often resorted to the excitement of games of chance such as gambling, of street-fights and of drink. “The terrible and often deplored attraction of the public-house has its roots not so much in the love of strong drink as in the want of interest and desire for amusement felt by the lower classes of the poor”⁴⁸¹, Barnett believed. Their ignorance of art and beauty did not signify an absence of capacity, but a lack of opportunity. Barnett held that all individuals, men and women, rich and poor, bore within themselves the full gifts and capabilities which made for „true humanity“. The dock labourer, Barnett felt sure, could admire fine art and music if only it was brought within his reach.

476 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.54

477 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.88f.

478 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.208

479 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.149

480 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.209

481 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.149

The hooligan had powers of adventure and dreams of heroism. The drunkard often drank, she believed, because his thoughts were too big for his place in the world and the beggar had in him broken pieces of self-respect which appreciated courtesy and resented contempt⁴⁸². Barnett believed in the capacity of every one to rise to his or her highest self as long as the opportunities for self-enlargement and education were offered to them. The daily lessons of beauty and refinement, which the inhabitants of the English village received through their close communion with members of higher social classes, were lacking acutely in the metropolitan slums.

Barnett chided the upper social classes for their shortsightedness in ascribing character deficiencies to the poor without realising their own shortcomings. The rich, Barnett argued, had lost touch with aspects of life which could bring out in the people true virtue and strength of character. Barnett lamented the absence among the better-off of “the priceless habit of personal sacrifice”. Can a man live the highest life, she wanted to know, “from whom effort is undemanded – whose floors are padded should he chance to fall – whose walls, golden though they be, are dividing barriers, high and strong between him and his fellowmen?”⁴⁸³ Evil was wrought of ignorance as well as want of thought, Barnett argued, and the rich suffered from not knowing as much as the poor from not being known.⁴⁸⁴ She encouraged her readers to seek personal contact with members of the other classes.

Coming face to face with the poor, she promised her well-off listeners, they would see patience which put their restlessness to shame, endurance about which poems had yet to be written⁴⁸⁵, meekness, unselfconsciousness, self-sacrifice and great hopefulness⁴⁸⁶. The foundations of both palace and shack, Barnett argued, were of the same material. The common ground between the classes needed rediscovering in the interests of both, individual and society.

4. Towards Social Reform: The Magic Formula of Individuality in