Back to the Land

a) A Critique of Modern Industrialised Society

With In Darkest England and the Way Out Booth placed himself among those who sought a return to pre-industrial, rural forms of living as the most effective solution to the social problem. His text contained a critique of modern industrialised society which took up most of the core arguments put forward by supporters of the back to the land movement. Modern forms of living, Booth contended, damaged men’s health, physical, mental and moral, and counteracted their chances of salvation in the literal sense of the word. With regard to morality and social harmony, Booth specified, urbanisation had destroyed the natural set-up of society and disrupted healthy social intercourse between individuals as well as between the classes. He argued that the drift to the cities forced the multitudes to dwell in conditions which sapped them of bodily strength and mental vigour; the modern organisation of work in an industrialised economy reinforced the detrimental effects of urbanisation by disrupting the family and leaving the individual estranged from his or her God-given, natural habitat, the land.

Booth believed that urbanisation made people ill. The destitute neighbourhoods of Darkest England, like Darkest Africa, reeked with malaria. Booth wrote: ”The foul and tepid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African swamps.”³⁷⁶ Overcrowding constituted part of the problem, so did the unsolved issue of the London sewage system which “feculant and festering, swings heavily up and down the basin of the Thames with the ebb and flow of the tide”³⁷⁷. Booth found the streets of East London flooded with litter and detritus, as dirty and neglected as its inhabitants. He described with some horror how the buildings in such areas stood so close that no sunlight reached the ground, nor could fresh winds air the foul-smelling and disease-ridden streets.

No grass, trees or flowers brightened up the atmosphere of the neighbourhoods. Such surroundings, Booth asserted, proved positively detrimental to a person’s physical and emotional state.

In Booth's eyes, the slums of industrial areas constituted the “great Slough of Despond of our time”³⁷⁸, worse even than Dante’s Inferno and the cruelties of its torture chamber. Most alarming in his opinion were the effects of such conditions on the children born into and growing up in these destitute surroundings. The overcrowded homes of the poor compelled the young to witness everything: sickness, deaths and births, sexual intercourse, physical and verbal abuse. No wonder,

376 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.14

377 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.23

378 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.13

Booth stated, that they so often did not develop a sense of righteousness and morality. Booth believed that the fighting gangs of half-grown lads in Lisson Grove and the Scuttlers of Manchester, harbingers of modern youth gangs which terrorised and scandalised Victorian society, represented the ugly symptoms of a social situation which left large sections of the population to fight for themselves in the most abject conditions. He warned that the problem was one which concerned the entire nation and would only grow in urgency. “Children thus hungered, thus housed and thus left to grow up as best they can” without moral guidance and without hope for a better future, he pointed out, “are not, educate them as you will, exactly the most promising material for the making of the future citizens and rulers of the Empire.”³⁷⁹

But not only the nation's health, physical as well as moral, was at stake. The rural exodus threatened the very set-up and political stability of society. With the onset of urbanisation, the cities had expanded beyond the confines of manageability. “Our troubles in large towns”, Booth analysed,

“arise chiefly from the fact that the massing of population has caused the physical bulk of society to outgrow its intelligence.”³⁸⁰ In the compact social unit of the rural village, Booth argued, the community was alert to the needs and special circumstances of each and all, and help was close at hand; there, the honour of a family represented enough of a security for small sums to be forwarded or jobs offered³⁸¹. In the towns, the social body appeared to have grown new limbs not attached to its brain. In the slums of the great industrial centres, Booth criticized, men had ceased to be neighbourly and lived as a congested mass of population without any human ties connecting them and no communal intelligence directing their co-habitation. Multitudes of men and women found themselves deprived of the knowledge and intelligence of their social betters, he held. In a city neighbourhood, those troubled in mind or body often had no one to talk to about their difficulties and to ask for advice. Here, a man could die within a few doors of those who, had they known about his situation, could have helped and healed.

Booth felt most alarmed about the threat posed by modern life to the nuclear family. Industrial employment took the parents away from their homes for the major part of the day³⁸². A London omnibus driver who worked for up to sixteen hours a day, Booth explained, was, through the sheer force of circumstances, unavailable to his children as a father. Nor could the mothers who had had to exchange homework in their rural cottages for a day-long job in a city factory care for the children. Booth feared the loss of natural affections within the nuclear family and with it, a steep decline in morality, sympathy and community spirit among the younger generation. The modern

379 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.66

380 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.115

381 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.212

382 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.64ff.

form of work organisation also prevented children from learning in the traditional way skills and know-how suitable for their sexes and their future roles in the family. Booth lamented that too many girls nowadays went to work in the factories as soon as they left school without any knowledge of how to cook, do the laundry, rear the children and be good wives. In modern society, Booth postulated, provisions would have to be made for teaching the young their natural skills and instilling them with a sense of love and communal spirit in order to halt the demise of the family ideal.

Booth also pointed to the de-humanising effects of industrialised work. The present rage for machinery, he explained, had almost totally supplanted hand labour³⁸³. He detected a “rush from the human to the machine” which had left the individual deprived of a sense of the value of his or her personal labour. Handling soulless machines, Booth believed, was extremely demoralising for the workman who had previously entertained considerable pride in his manual skills and derived much of his personal worth from his trade. The general thus blamed industrialisation for much of the destitution to be found in the East End of London and similar neighbourhoods in industrial centres around England, not only by leaving multitudes without a job, but by robbing them of the self-respect, hope and sense of perspective which in Booth’s eyes were the first essential for a healthy, happy and respectable life.

Considering the detrimental effects of slum housing and the demoralising force of modern work, it took Booth no wonder that after leaving generation after generation to grow up underfed, dis-homed and uneducated, there should develop “a heredity of incapacity, and thousands of dull-witted people should be born into the world, disinherited before their birth of their share of the average intelligence of mankind”³⁸⁴. Modernity, Booth believed, enslaved the individual. Like Arab raiders in Darkest Africa, English capitalists exploited the inhabitants of destitute neighbourhoods. Too many laboured under conditions, in dangerous trades, without insurance against life’s contingencies and without the prospect of some kind of pension in old age, which left them totally devoid of personal rights and dignity³⁸⁵. The conditions in the slums and factories excluded large sections of the population from the “universal birthright of liberty”³⁸⁶. They lived in a prison made up of exploitation, poor health, drink and crime from which death seemed the only deliverer. England, he admonished his country, had freed her “negroes” sixty years ago – it was high time to also liberate her white slaves³⁸⁷.

383 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.273

384 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.44

385 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.13

386 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.205

387 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.23f

b) The Ideal of The Pre-Industrial Social Community

God, Booth said, had wisely and mercifully placed men in families, be it their immediate relations or the larger family of the village community where they could find others, wiser and more experienced than themselves to help them in times of trouble. The family idea appeared to Booth the most promising basis for a new social organisation. Like Headlam he drew on the idea of the Fatherhood of God to argue the brotherhood of men. “‘Our Father’ is the keynote”, he wrote. “One is the Father, then all we are brethren.”³⁸⁸ As brothers and sisters, all were responsible for the well-being of the weaker members of the family, catering for their bodies as well as their hearts. Society, Booth asserted, needed “a great deal of mothering”. It was the ideal the Salvation Army had set out to attain. “We cannot know better than God Almighty what will do good to men. We are content to follow on His lines”³⁸⁹ and to restore something of the family ideal to the many thousands who had no one to turn to in times of trouble.

By re-settling the urban poor in rural communities upon the land, first in farm colonies and later in small-holding schemes or cooperative farms, Booth hoped to restore to them the social network of which urbanisation had robbed them. With his plan of farm colonies and co-operatives, he believed to have found a solution to the social problem which was both practical and immediately implementable and would fend off what Booth perceived as the worst excesses of modern civilisation. With his scheme, Booth hoped to house the slum dwellers in surroundings fit for human habitation. He aimed at providing them all, adults as well as children, with an education suitable to their needs. He offered work to those capable of doing any; and above all, sought to restore to society a sense of brotherhood, mutual responsibility and civic duty which the unmanageable units of city neighbourhoods had largely destroyed. Booth believed in the “myth of the rural village”³⁹⁰, an idealised version of truly communal, healthy and harmonious life in the English hamlet³⁹¹. The country epitomised all that Booth found lacking in the slum districts of industrial centres: fresh air, good sanitary conditions, sufficient food, trees and pastures, friendly relations between the working classes and their social superiors, and most importantly, direct experience of God’s nature and a return to the land in the form of private gardens. In such an environment, Booth believed with many of his contemporaries, there would spring up almost automatically vigorous labourers, morally sound Christians and dutiful citizens of the British empire.

The countryside, Booth envisioned, would return to the enslaved and demoralised working man and

388 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.219

389 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.219

390 Meacham, Standish, Regaining paradise. Englishness and the early garden city movement, 1999, p.8

391 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.62

woman those elements of dignity and humanity which Booth considered essential for effective social work. All the above could be achieved at very low cost with the establishment of farm colonies in England and abroad along the lines of his scheme as outlined in In Darkest England and the Way Out. Booth defended his plan against objections that the poor were not fit to partake in his grand design. Contact with the land, their original and natural habitat, he believed, would set free self healing powers in the destitute: “Take a man or a woman out into the fresh air, give them proper exercise and substantial food. Supply them with a comfortable home, cheerful companions, and a fair prospect of reaching a position of independence in this or some other land, and a complete renewal of health and careful increase of vigour will, we expect, be one of the first great benefits that will ensue.”³⁹² Booth also supported the idea of model suburban villages for industrial city workers. Despite his critique of urbanisation, he was realistic enough to accept city life as a modern reality and thus set out to adapt his family ideal, the vision of mutual guidance and support, to the needs of urban neighbourhoods. He envisioned suburban communities for up to 2000 families providing tenements of three or four rooms with private gardens or vegetable patches at a distance of about twelve miles from the town³⁹³.

For those whom circumstances forced to remain in the crowded districts of the cities, Booth sought to create a “new nervous system for the body politic”³⁹⁴ to ensure swift and almost automatic communication between the community and its most needy member. With facilities suggested in his grand design such as the labour bureau or the poor man’s lawyer³⁹⁵ he hoped to restore to the city and the nation as a whole the sense of community which had, in Booth's understanding, prevailed in the pre-industrial village. No artificially installed institution, he conceded, could ever replace the personal bond of friendship. Yet, he planned to permeate the whole of society with “brotherly associations established for the purpose of mutual help and sympathising counsel”³⁹⁶ in an attempt to guard against the worst excesses of modern civilisation.

Lastly, Booth hoped that the countryside would also offer opportunities for re-organising the economy which the large production units of industrial cities could not provide. In his colonies, Booth proposed to return man to the workbench and restore some of the domestic occupations which steam had largely confined to the factories³⁹⁷. We have already seen that Booth favoured the establishment of communal farms along the lines of the Ralahine experiment. He also hoped to

392 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.264

393 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.210ff; the ideal of the Garden Suburb will be examined at greater detail in the next chapter of this thesis.

394 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.116

395 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.217

396 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.217

397 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.139

institute village workshops and small-scale industry which would operate along cooperative lines.

Booth detected in the principle of cooperation a „key of the solution of the Social Problem”³⁹⁸. Successful cooperation, he believed, took on the form of an applied association for purposes of distribution as well as production. Hitherto, much emphasis had been placed on the distribution angle of cooperative societies and the results obtained gave some credit to the approach. Yet, Booth reasoned, the real problem of industrialised society was the congestion of capital in the hands of too few producers, and the social question would never satisfactorily be solved until every labourer became his own capitalist moving into the role of producer himself. There was no need, Booth implied, for great schemes of state socialism: the whole idea of cooperation could be implemented simply, economically and speedily by uniting groups of workers into self-dependent cooperative units of production³⁹⁹.

However, Booth cautioned, the cooperative experiment would work only if the mistakes of past attempts were not repeated. For all his understanding for the situation of the destitute and for all his respect for their dignity and humanity, Booth did not believe in democracy, neither on the micro-level of business matters nor on the macro-micro-level of national politics. He believed that previous endeavours at cooperatives had often failed because, being based on the principles of equality and government by vote of the majority, the participants had sooner or later come to loggerheads over some issue of management and the whole enterprise had fallen to pieces over a clash of opinion.

Yet, management signified government and government implied authority, to be executed, in Booth’s eyes, by a single representative of the group equipped with powers of decision and freedom of action to match the like powers of the free capitalist. He argued that in cooperative enterprises one had to add the principle of subordination to the principle of consent. To the principle of consent, one had to super-add the principle of “subordination”. Booth’s farm colonies thus accepted only those who willing to submit to discipline and authority.

From his experience with the Salvation Army, Booth concluded that the people did not as a rule object to being governed. Only when stupidity and incapacity took possession of the seat of power did insurrections break out. The general reported how, at the foundation of the Salvation Army, he had been “constantly warned against the evils which this autocratic system would entail”. In a democratic age, his critics had pointed out, the people would never stand the establishment of his spiritual despotism. And yet, possibly even because of the discipline imposed upon its rank and file, Booth speculated, the Salvation Army had grown “from year to year with a rapidity to which nothing in modern Christendom affords any parallel.”⁴⁰⁰ Under the wise government and judicious

398 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.229

399 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.231

400 Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 1890, p.243

rule of a capable leader, Booth believed that the organisation of even the most disorganised, drink-sodden, hopeless and sweated denizens of Darkest England could be achieved.