Towards Social Reform: The Magic Formula of Individuality in Community

Henrietta Barnett's watchword in her approach to social reform read “community”. It was a maxim she shared with her husband and which she had seen implemented on a small scale in Toynbee

482 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.12

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

484 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.217

485 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.164

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

Hall⁴⁸⁷. By community, Barnett meant a sharing between members of all classes of one neighbourhood and one (broadly defined) culture. Most importantly, community for her entailed intimate knowledge of one another's character and ways brought about by personal contact and close individual friendships between members of all social strata. In her reform endeavours, Barnett pursued the dual aim of raising the poor from the confines of destitution and helping them to develop their personal capacity and at the same time furthering a sense of community and promoting contact between members of all classes based on a new sense of mutual sympathy and respect.

This dual strategy showed up particularly clearly in Barnett's work for and with the children of the poor. It may have been due to the traditional role of women and the fields of interest assigned to them in Victorian Britain, but also fits in with her keen interest in the individual, that Barnett took a particular interest in them, their living conditions and their chances in society. She felt particularly strongly about the child under state care – such as orphans, workhouse children, abandoned children, the criminal and the destitute. Her esteem for individuality and personal dignity led her to criticize severely the traditional institution of barrack schools, which received the brunt of state-supported children.

Barnett asserted for these children what she believed to be “every creature's inalienable right – the right to be treated as an individual”⁴⁸⁸. In the metropolitan area alone, Barnett estimated, there were approximately 10000 children under state care at the time of one article in 1886⁴⁸⁹. They were massed together in schools of 1000 inhabitants or more, regardless of the cause of their being under state care⁴⁹⁰. But the mentally and physically afflicted child, the morally depraved, children of respectable widows, the infant needing nursing and emotional care or the teenage boy and girl who required technical training, all had very different needs in terms of care and education. None of these needs, Barnett believed, could satisfactorily be taken care of in monster institutions such as the barrack schools at Sutton, Leavesden or Hanwell⁴⁹¹. She recommended a system of boarding out in order to absorb state supported children into the general population. Instead of letting them grow into outcasts, she wanted to place these children firmly within the social community from as early an age as possible.

Her idea, Barnett argued, would save the public purse considerable amounts of money: while barrack schools cost £29 per annum per child, boarding out among respectable working class

487 Briggs, Asa and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall: the first hundred years, 1984; see also Meacham, Standish, Toynbee Hall and social reform 1880 – 1914: the search for community, 1987

488 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.150

489 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.111

490 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.129

491 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.136

families would cost the rate payer but £13 per head per year. Scotland and Switzerland boarded out the great majority of their young dependants; in Germany, a system of boarding out had become compulsory in 1878. In England at present, only about two percent of state-supported children were found placements among industrial families⁴⁹². Barnett criticised the harm done to the nation's finances by the present system of barrack schooling.

But Barnett placed even greater emphasis than on the economic argument on the potential benefits accruing to the child from a system of boarding out. A place in a working class family, Barnett envisaged, would provide the destitute child with a stable environment, affection, play fellows and friends in higher classes of society. Barnett believed that as part of a family, a child would also necessarily be perceived as a person rather than a case and be allowed to develop a sense of self.

Barnett held that “children do in this way get a truer knowledge of social relations and domestic work, and live, as members of a family, a more natural and healthy life”⁴⁹³. She hoped that through boarding out the child would lose all connection with pauperism and be so absorbed into the industrial classes as to require no further assistance in later life.

Barnett's faith in the powers of family life may tie back in with her religious faith although she did not explicitly refer to it. She held fast to the belief common among religious circles that the family was a divine institution created by God for the good of man⁴⁹⁴. On its preservation and on the

“English love of home”⁴⁹⁵ depended, in Barnett's view, not only the future of the English nation, but of civilisation as a whole⁴⁹⁶. For Barnett, the family constituted a model of communal life to be emulated by society at large. She doted on the family dinner table as a moral training ground⁴⁹⁷. There, she enthused, the mother imparted to the children the little lessons of good manners and neat ways, and the large truths of unselfishness and thoughtfulness⁴⁹⁸. “Family life and affection is the foundation of all social welfare and morality”⁴⁹⁹, she quoted the child welfare campaigner Louisa Twining⁵⁰⁰. To obtain it for the homeless child, Barnett was convinced, would immeasurably improve the community's future good, financially as well as morally and culturally.

492 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.138

493 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.110

494 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.172

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

496 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Practicable socialism, 1894, p.123

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

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

499 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.144

500 Louisa Twining (1820 – 1911), was a social activist. Twining took a particular interest in women and children.