Biographical Data: Henrietta Barnett

The first of the thinkers chosen for this study in the category of socialist Christians, men and women who were socialists as well as Christians but did not explicitly resort to their religious creed to justify their political stance, is Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, wife of Canon Samuel Augustus Barnett and co-founder of the first university settlement Toynbee Hall.

Compared with the majority of Victorian middle-class women who lived a quiet life as “angels in the house”, Henrietta had an unusual personal history. With the housing reformer Octavia Hill, Helen Bosanquet from the Charity Organisation Society and the Fabian Beatrice Webb, she was among the few women of her class to become a public figure and leave a discernible mark on social reform. Her life and work bear witness to the emerging movement of women's emancipation in late Victorian Britain. By contrast to the female reformers mentioned above, however, her contribution remained curiously unacknowledged until relatively recently. A recent study by Micky Watkins looks at Henrietta Barnett's first fifty years and her work at Whitechapel⁴¹⁷. Barnett received more or less cursory treatment in histories of her final project, Hampstead Garden Suburb. Two important appraisals of her work as the architect of the model settlement can be found in accounts of the enterprise by the historians Kathleen Slack and Brigid Grafton Green⁴¹⁸. But other accounts of the project minimise the impact of her visions or ridicule her intentions⁴¹⁹.

In a seminal article in 1994, the historian Seth Koven suggested that her virtual disappearance from

417 Watkins, Micky, Henrietta Barnett in Whitechapel, 2005

418 Slack, Kathleen M., Henrietta's dream: a chronicle of the Hampstead Garden Suburb 1905-1982, 1982; see also Grafton Green, Brigid, Hampstead Garden Suburb 1907-1977, 1977

419 e.g. Miller, Mervyn and A. Stuart Gray, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 1992; see also Eden, William Arthur, Hampstead Garden Suburb 1907-1957, 1957; see also Ikin, C. W. and Brigid Grafton Green, Hampstead Garden Suburb: dreams and realities, 1990; see also Creedon, Alison, A benevolent tyrant? The principles and practices of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936), social reformer and founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb, 2002, p.233

the history of social reform may be linked to her sex and to traditional gender assumptions⁴²⁰. Micky Watkins' research confirms that Henrietta depicted herself as a maternal friend to the poor of Whitechapel and thereby fulfilled Victorian gender expectations. At the centre of her social concern stood the under-aged, disadvantaged and dependent, those who in her eyes required „mothering“.

She took a particular interest in Poor Law children and became a “respected architect of state policies”⁴²¹ for their welfare. Her Children's Country Holiday Fund sponsored vacations in the country for pupils from metropolitan slums. With the formation of MABYS, the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, she offered personal, motherly guidance to girls entering domestic employment. In her husband's parish of Whitechapel, she sought out and assisted fallen women, overtaxed mothers of large families and habitual drunkards.

But her “social maternalism”⁴²², Seth Koven has argued, formed but one side of her character and social endeavour. As a young girl, Henrietta Barnett had decided on a life of spinsterhood in the service of the poor. Like Beatrice Webb two decades later who famously vacillated over her marriage to Sidney, she entered married life only hesitantly and only after she began to realise that marriage afforded to her opportunities in social reform difficult to attain for single women. She built up a partnership with her husband Samuel Barnett based upon the idea of complementarity and equality which contradicted the Victorian model of subservience and obedience thought proper in a wife.

In her book The Making of the Home⁴²³ she offered a lengthy exposition of her understanding of John Ruskin's gender models as laid down in his Sesame and Lilies⁴²⁴. Barnett agreed with Ruskin that women differed from men insofar as they had greater moral and emotional sensitivities. Their emotional superiority fitted them perfectly for a role as peacemakers, diplomats and mediators, as the social mortar in both family and society at large. But in Barnett's eyes, this difference between men and women positioned the two not in hierarchical relations, where the man's reason and intellect trumped the woman's sensitivity. She believed that their differing natures fitted them for a union of perfect complementarity⁴²⁵. Funnily, in the case of her own marriage, the Ruskinian model of gender roles appeared curiously reversed. A contemporary wrote of her union with Samuel:

“Though there was nothing in the least flabby or sentimental about him, the Canon was almost feminine in his gentleness and tenderness, whereas the inflexible will of his wife is almost

420 Koven, Seth, Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). The (auto-)biography of a late Victorian marriage, 1994

421 Koven, Seth, Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). The (auto-)biography of a late Victorian marriage, 1994, p.31

422 Koven, Seth, Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). The (auto-)biography of a late Victorian marriage, 1994, p.41

423 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, The Making of the Home. A reading-book of domestic economy, etc, 1885

424 Ruskin, John, Sesame and lilies, 1888

425 Koven, Seth, Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). The (auto-)biography of a late Victorian marriage, 1994, p.37

suggestive of the stronger sex. The one seemed born to persuade, the other to command.”⁴²⁶

Although largely ignored by histories of feminism, Barnett was an early advocate of women's rights. In one of her earlier articles under scrutiny in the present study, she openly attacked the long prejudice, inferior education, political and legal inferiority and injustice which had created a difference between the sexes. She demanded that the system of education for girls be radically altered in order to prepare them for a life of active citizenship. “If in the future”, she demanded,

“women are to take their proper places in the development of the race, men must find in them not merely comfort, but force, inspiration, the redoubling of moral and intellectual faculties.”⁴²⁷

Born in 1851, Henrietta Rowland started social work under the tutelage of Octavia Hill at St.

Mary's, Bryanston Square, in 1869. While involved with work for the Charity Organisation Society (COS), she met Canon Samuel Augustus Barnett, a founder member of the COS. The two were married in 1873. In the same year, they moved to St. Jude's, Whitechapel, a parish which the bishop of London described as the worst in his diocese, “inhabited mainly by a criminal population, and one which has (...) been much corrupted by doles”⁴²⁸. The poor streets of Whitechapel formed the field of action for Henrietta Barnett's social endeavours. As the vicar's wife, she gained access to the homes of the poor. Her early preaching of COS principles and her restrictive handing out of charity must initially have alienated and enraged many of her charges. But her experiences in the neighbourhood taught her to modify her principles and to take a more comprehensive, environmentalist approach to social reform. She learnt first-hand of the realities of a life in poverty and developed her admiration for the moral courage, solidarity, selflessness and mutual support among the working classes which she repeatedly voiced in her social writings.

In collaboration with her husband, Henrietta Barnett helped to develop the idea of university settlements. She hoped that by encouraging young privileged university graduates to live and work among the metropolitan poor she could help to bridge the gulf between the classes. She played a vital role in the foundation and early direction of Toynbee Hall, the first of many settlements to come, at Whitechapel. That her vision of partnership and complementarity impacted on her and her husband's work and that she left a distinctive mark also on their joint endeavours is evident from contemporary accounts. C. R. Ashbee, an early resident of Toynbee Hall, for instance, wrote of Henrietta's role and character: “Mrs. Barnett is [...] the Prior and the Prioress of this place – the worthy head. A fine, noble, bright-eyed, vigorous woman she appears; and one that will have her own way and not be sparing of her opinion.”⁴²⁹ In 1894, after twenty years among the poor in

426 Koven, Seth, Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). The (auto-)biography of a late Victorian marriage, 1994, p.42

427 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.131

428 Creedon, Alison, A benevolent tyrant? The principles and practices of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936), social reformer and founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb, 2002, p.239

429 Koven, Seth, Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). The (auto-)biography of a late Victorian marriage, 1994, p.41

Whitechapel, the Barnetts moved to Bristol and shortly afterwards, back to London, where Samuel Barnett became curate of Westminster. Samuel Barnett died in 1913. Henrietta Barnett remained active in their common cause of social reform. Her main project in later years became the building and extension of the garden suburb at Hampstead Heath in which she aimed to put into practice, as we shall see in the course of this chapter, many of her ideas on an ideal society. She died in 1936, twelve years after becoming Dame Henrietta Barnett, in her home at the periphery of Hampstead Garden Suburb.

2. Barnett's Ideological Position: Between Individual Growth and