In a street broad and clean, as many of those at the extreme East End of London are, but still in the heart of an unmistakably poor, often a squalid quarter, is a house which, resembling its fellows in architecture, presents even as to its exterior the appearance of being inhabited by persons of a better sort. On the pavement outside groups of men, women and boys are waiting for admission. The door is opened presently, not by a servant of either sex, but by a person, evidently a gentleman, in the prime of early and athletic manhood. The men and women are introduced into a room on the ground floor. Their host hears perhaps of a fever having broken out not a hundred yards off; of a home distrained upon for unpaid rent by an impatient landlord, or gutted of its furniture by the broker’s man, of a local inspector’s failure to order the demolition of dwellings unfit for human habitation, of a strike imminent near the Docks, and likely in its results to leave tens of households without clothing or food. If this be the tale poured into the ears of the young Oxford or Cambridge graduate, he at once hurries off to see whether his personal influence, strengthened as it is by some years of varied local experience, cannot move the landlord to give his tenants one more chance; or whether the tact, that is not likely to grow rusty from lack of practice, cannot promote a compromise between masters and men; or whether the knowledge of municipal law, acquired by many months of careful reading, with the help of local illustrations, cannot be so brought to bear upon the parochial officer as to induce him duly to execute the letter of the Sanitary Statute.
If none of these things have to be done the lads may be called into the chamber which serves the resident for the purpose of study and pupil-room. It is, in fact, just such another den as very likely may have been occupied by our graduate a couple of years ago when he was an Eton master and saw his private pupils at his quarters in Keate’s Lane. It by no means follows that the subject of his conversation with these East End lads is primarily scholastic or strictly educational. The University resident at the East End has brought with him the taste for athletics of all kinds which he acquired on the Isis or the Cam. He devotes as much time to teaching his East End pupils cricket or oarsmanship as to awakening and satisfying their interest in learning or letters. He and his party are therefore very likely to be seen taking the omnibus or rail if the afternoon be fine, to Putney or Hammersmith, where the spectators on the bank will soon be cheering a Bethnal Green four practising starts with a Leander or a University crew.
The building of whose interior a glance has been given is probably the hired house in which two or three members of the Academic or Public School settlement live. It may be one of the many clubs for adults, for boys or girls, which to-day are scarcely less common in the purlieus of Poplar than are clubs of a different sort in St James’s or Pall Mall. These institutions are among the chief instruments of civilization on which the new settlers rely. No one now doubts the service to the manners and the morals of the upper classes rendered by the joint-stock caravanserais of the West End. Three bottle men, as readers of Thackeray may see for themselves, lasted throughout the epoch of coffee houses. They very generally disappeared with the replacement of coffee houses by clubs, and with the early adjournment from the dinner table to the smoking room. A club-man in his cups was found to be a nuisance. A new public opinion was created against an old vice. Protracted potations rapidly became, as Hamlet desired, more honoured in the breach than in the observance, till a toper in St James’s became as rare as a bishop in a billiard room. An analogous reform in the East End as in the West has been worked by a like agency. The fittings and the environments of the institution differ in the two regions. Their moral influence is identical in both. In this matter, too, as in so many other modes of social improvement, the Metropolis followed the lead of the provinces. East End clubs, in contradistinction to boozing-dens, existed indeed long before University settlements were known, or before Edward Denison’s first visit to Whitechapel was paid; but not before at Lancaster in 1860, the Working Men’s Mutual Improvement and Recreation Society had flourished for some little time. In like manner, the University settlements now spoken of, had been preceded by the organized efforts of the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Thomas Hughes, and other representatives of what was then called Christian socialism, to establish by the college for working men in Great Ormond Street a living connection between University influence and industrial well being. Even working men’s colleges had existed in the country before F. D. Maurice made his London experiment. Sheffield witnessed the first of these during the early fifties. Oxford and Cambridge towns were not long behind. Thus the promoters of academic settlements were not without the benefit of the experience of their earlier predecessors as well as of the public spirited association of their contemporaries. The Working Men’s Club and Institute Union had been founded in 1862 by Lord Brougham and Lord Lyttelton. Much of the machinery, as well as a nucleus, for the endeavours of the settlers of a latter day was ready to their hands before they began their work. But the idea of the combination of gymnasium with club, and of the subordination of the roughest kind of physical exercise to the ends of social culture had not been illustrated on any extensive scale before institutions like the Repton or the Oxford House clubs were controlled by men who took this way of doing honour to the name of their University or their school.
Before this, ladies living in Belgravia, revering the memory and example of Maurice, were in the habit of inviting to their drawing rooms from the alleys and by-ways in which the fashionable district abounds poor boys who could not be tempted, even with the bait of magic lanterns, to the night school. The work was found to be rather too exacting. The chivalry of street boyhood did not, as might have been foreseen, prevent the urchins from gratifying their sense of fun at her expense in the drawing room of the amateur teacher. The joke of giving, as their names, those of the famous jockeys of the hour, Fordham, Archer, Cannon, as the case may be, proved too good to be resisted. Gravity, once disturbed, could not be restored. The pupils could do nothing but laugh at each other’s fun. Their would-be instructress had to acquiesce in their removal when the servant came to clear away the tea things. A public feeling in favour of order and even cleanliness has long since been generated in the boys’ clubs controlled by the University settlers. First the prejudice against collars as an article of attire goes out; then a feeling in favour of washed hands sets in. In the recreation rooms upstairs boxing gloves are provided as a safety valve for the escape of the superfluous humours of Arab animalism. Then by slow degrees comes the hour when bagatelle boards may be introduced without danger of their being used for the breaking of heads, or of the bagatelle cues being employed for the perforation of the lath-and-plaster walls instead of for the propulsion of the ivory balls.
The parents are provided with the same sort of accommodation as their children. The adult clubs are chiefly of two kinds. In some, the first purpose is political. In that case the society becomes an agency for the propagation of Radical ideas, and probably an outwork of Trades-Unionism. But from many of these foundations politics, which are generally synonymous with advanced Liberalism, are excluded. In the majority, if not in all, of the non-political clubs, intoxicating drinks, though under conditions they were sanctioned by the early founders, are by common agreement, prohibited also. The popularity of these clubs with the wives of their habitués is a sufficient proof of the sobering tendency of the new resorts. In all cases, the women gain scarcely less advantage from them than the men. Each club is an organization for social entertainments and hospitalities to which members are free to bring all their women-kind.
The dominant idea of the University settlement to which these clubs are subsidiary, is to give the poorest and most densely populated working class districts the benefit of a resident gentry such as, in the clergyman or the squire, is generally commanded in rural parishes. The local separation between employer and employed; the fact that the workers do not, as they used to do, dwell to-day within sight of their masters, but are segregated into colonies of their own in another quarter of the capital, and have no access to persons better informed than themselves in the troubles and perplexities, big or small, of everyday existence, first prompted those who realized the perils of this situation, to make, as far as might be, common lot with their less fortunate fellow creatures. In New York, where these societies seem to have been known longer than in England, the phrase employed is Neighbourhood Guild. To obtain the local knowledge which can alone enable the most wise or charitable to give effective help, habitual residence under conditions and in neighbourhoods identical with the class to be benefited is absolutely necessary. The University settler becomes in fact a sort of Delphic Oracle, consulted on all embarrassing contingencies by the entire neighbourhood. To vary the simile, the enquiries made of him are not less various than the questions which the editor of a popular print undertakes to answer in his Correspondence column. The doubts and complications arising out of the law of landlord and tenant, especially out of that enigmatic being, the compound householder who so long obstructed the path of Household Franchise, require a practical knowledge of often abstruse legal points and sometimes compel resort to a professional solicitor. The precise steps necessary to put in motion the Statute for the removal of hopelessly insanitary dwellings are not likely to be within the knowledge of the dwellers by the Docks. These are only a few of the knots which for the instruction of those he has chosen for neighbours, the University settler must be prepared to untie. And this is only one of the duties which he actually performs. He not only takes part in the municipal government of his neighbourhood; he helps others to take part in it, too. Already he has himself sat on School Boards and trained grown-up pupils to fill his place.
Nor is it always necessary to speak in the masculine gender. University settlements are no more limited to a single sex than the tripos work of the Cambridge Senate House, or of the Extension lecture rooms, which enjoy the patronage of the Oxford schools. Nor is it the Universities only that are represented by these feminine settlements. The Cheltenham Ladies’ College, one of the earliest, if not the first, of that kind of public schools for English girls, has already made a sensible difference in hundreds of lives in the extreme East of the town. Among the special works of which the Cheltonians have set an example is that of enabling poor mothers to procure for their children at seasons of need not merely the conventional ‘day in the country,’ but a sojourn of weeks, or even months, in a healthy cottage home on the seashore of Sussex or on the fragrant uplands of Kent. The machinery for accomplishing this has now been brought to a very high point of efficiency and indeed perfection. The Cheltenham ladies and their colleagues, associated under the respective matrons of the institutions, have a long list of simple honest folk within a few hours’ journey of London who can be trusted to look after their little charges during their stay beneath their roof, and to send back to their homes the small boys and girls visibly better than when the children were first received by their hosts. Sometimes the Guilds of the different sexes may combine their efforts for hospitalities and entertainments, a magic lantern and lecture, it may be, or during the winter season a Christmas tree followed by supper and a dance, or to speak more correctly a general, though not uncontrolled, romp.
Most, if not all, of these East End clubs, which the University settlers aim at teaching their members to run for themselves, rather than indefinitely to leave their management to outside friends, are federated to a central association, that the late Lord Lyttelton took a prominent part in organizing. This was the body which, as has been already said, decided that stronger drinks than water should not absolutely be forbidden; but that central supervision should be exercised closely over all the establishments, and that prompt action should be taken when any breach of order, corporate or individual, was reported. The average standard of order maintained has improved, and is still improving. Generally and individually the club members have realized that their material interest lies in checking the first beginnings of misconduct, and in dealing with the offenders not only as guilty individually of a breach of order, but as violating the first principles of collective fellowship. Such a conviction indicates the progress made towards the creation of a healthy opinion upon social matters with those who, a few years ago, would have been pronounced by experts to be invulnerably proof against any sentiment of the sort. East End boys are no doubt mischievous, and even destructive creatures. So, for that matter, are all boys. If their brethren of the upper class do not break out in the same way as the urchin East Enders, that is because the march of refinement through the West End has trodden out the old race of small boys and girls, and has replaced them by little men and women whose only childhood will be reached in their dotage. The very interesting experiences recorded in the volume entitled: The Universities and the Social Problem[32] do indeed include some rather alarming freaks of the East End waggishness. But to the small boy in rags the process of whose reclamation from Bethnal Green barbarism to Christian civilization had only begun a few weeks since, the trick of pouring a paraffin can over a sleeping foe, and then applying a match, did not seem more of an atrocity than to a West End boy of the same age might have appeared the joke, borrowed from the pantomime stage, of placing the baby on the floor by the door for the entering nurse to tumble over, or of putting a red hot poker too close to be pleasant or even safe to the nose of an unpopular housemaid. Men like Dr Barnardo or General Booth, who both know something of Whitechapel waifs and strays, have not thought that poor children in the East End inherit an exceptional amount of original sin. Nor have they, nor others, discovered that ragged boys, nurtured on fried fish and unspeakable pudding are incapable of being disciplined into habits of obedience, truthfulness, and humanity, even though their ideas of permissible humour be not bounded by the conventional limits of gentleness and good taste. The administrators of the People’s Palace, for some time after the fancy of Sir Walter Besant was translated into fact, were not always sanguine as to the feasibility of civilizing their young patrons, even through the agency of pictures or swimming baths, thick slices of bread and butter, buns, and fried haddock purchasable not much above, if not something below, cost price. To-day, though the social deportment in the pleasure grounds of Bethnal Green may lack the superficial polish, and the innate breeding, of the crowds at the Westminster Aquarium or the South Kensington Museum, a considerable advance is recorded on the part of the Harrys and the Harriets of Poplar and Whitechapel towards the carriage and conduct of the cynosures of less outlandish suburbs on Bank Holiday. There is no body of men who know unfashionable London better, or who deserve more honour for the service which they render to it than the members of the London City Mission. The work of these missioners, though undenominational, is religious rather than æsthetic. But they are shrewd observers of the social aspects of the neighbourhoods they visit. Their opinion of the practical results of the agencies that have here been described may be summed up in the words of a missioner to the present writer: ‘It marks an epoch in East End civilization of which ten years ago Christian charity would itself have despaired.’
The functions exercised by the controlling authority of the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union are educational as well as disciplinary. There is no reason now why any one of the affiliated societies, however impecunious it may be or however impoverished the district wherein it may exist, should be without as good a library as one of Mr Mudie’s subscribers, or should not know almost as much about the history and antiquities of the British capital as the late Dean Stanley himself. The controllers of the union often make liberal advances in money for the purchase of books by the local clubs. Should these funds not be forthcoming, book boxes with wisely chosen contents circulate among the members of a Home Readers’ Union. The volumes thus distributed are real literature. The subjects to which they relate are methodically mastered by the readers who themselves have selected them, and have not acted on the initiative of the more highly educated residents, Peripatetic encyclopædias like Mr Augustus Hare or Mr Percy Fitz-Gerald are ever ready to ‘take walks’ with them. Omniscient divines, such as Dean Bradley or Dean Farrar personally conduct them through their cathedrals into the heart of English history. Nor are the literary studies chosen merely because they are likely to help the student in his everyday work, and therefore improve his earnings. The biographies of the statesmen and soldiers of old Greece, the dramatic vicissitudes of the Republics of mediæval Italy, even the philosophy as well as the language of Dante or of Macchiavelli are taken up by men after a day’s manual work with an energy that would shame an undergraduate returning from a wine party to read for his Schools. This, too, seems to be the experience of American settlements as well, of Hull House, Chicago, or of Andover House, Boston. In their capacity of schools of citizenship, as well as of education, the American settlements have felt the immediate benefit of the Oxford influence and example, incarnated not only in Arnold Toynbee, but in the late T. H. Green, professor of mental and moral philosophy, whose pupil Toynbee was; while Green in his turn had been the disciple of Benjamin Jowett. Good citizenship was the ideal ever present to the late Master of Balliol in his dealings with his pupils, just as it had been present centuries earlier to Socrates in his discourses to Plato, or in his conversations with Alcibiades. Green probably made the most valuable of recent contributions to the speculative thought and science of his University, of his country, or of his generation. He was, also, a prominent and active member of the Oxford Town Council, and of other local bodies. By their lessons in the theory and practice of citizenship, taught more publicly than it fell to the lot of their master to teach, the Oxford settlers at the East End have improved upon Green’s example, with much of his zeal, and not a little of his success. More than twenty years ago the East End neighbourhoods now mentioned were first visited by the present writer, to inform himself for those portions of an earlier work, relating to that part of unfashionable London.[33] Thanks mainly to the influence and teaching of the Rev. S. A., since Canon, Barnett, great improvements in the domestic economy and material fittings of the humblest households had begun, even then to be visible. The later experiences and their social results, which have now been described, have made it possible for the writer to contrast the East End of the later eighties with that of the later nineties. The scale and the precise modes of manifestation are of course widely different, but if due allowance be made for the social disparity of Mayfair and Mile End, it is no exaggeration to say that the increased attention to the prettinesses of life shown in the boudoirs and drawing rooms of fashionable London is reflected in the parlours of those purlieus now spoken of. These though their civilization be still incomplete, have to a great extent under the agencies that have here been examined, ceased to be manifestly poverty-stricken or repulsively hideous. The discipline of character that the settlements provide for the settlers is at least as salutary as the consequences they involve for the district, whether it be in the East End, in Camberwell, or in Notting Hill, that the settlement is made. The social education for the West End club-man of his joint stock palace in Pall Mall is trivial in comparison with the training that will be administered to him by a few visits to the East End club, of which he may be made free, or of which perhaps he may himself have been a founder. The assistance of those in such a position as the University settlers is appreciated cordially by the working club-men. ‘We always need, to begin with, the help of some of you gentlemen of the Oxford Settlement. Afterwards if you look in upon us from time to time, we can keep things going pretty well for ourselves.’ Such is the common remark of the settler’s friends. Of its practical truth there seems little doubt. The University settler and his friends in his own station are not, however, on this account to suppose that within these clubs their society is courted as a favour or regarded as a compliment. On the contrary, the atmosphere and sentiment of the place are uncompromisingly democratic. If the West Ender, by his talk or manner contributes anything of pleasure or profit to the social pool, then he is welcomed just as he would be on the same terms in the coteries of Pall Mall, or at the dining tables of Hyde Park. If, on the other hand, there be, perhaps unconsciously to himself a suspicion of condescension in his bearing, or a too visible effort after edification in his talk, then as peremptorily as he could be among his own equals at the West End, he will be voted a bore, and shunned as a prig at the East End. The roughest specimens of Whitechapel or Ratcliffe require, not less, but rather more tact for their management, than other people need. If that be forthcoming, the youths, whose element is destruction, whose ambition is to be a professional pugilist or a champion strong man, but who seldom desert one to whom their loyalty has been given, and who are the raw material with which British officers win victories on the field against the heaviest odds, are perfectly manageable. The most aggressively republican of Arabs becomes the most gentle and gracious of fellow citizens. But if either of them detect signs of patronage among their politer visitors, their backs are at once up; metaphorically their bristles stand on end like hairs upon the fretful porcupine. Familiarity they neither expect nor wish. They would even resent it. Their view of the courtesies and proprieties of friendly intercourse do not in effect differ from those held by their superiors. They are abundantly content if these ideas are practically recognized. It is with those who are removed by a single degree in the social scale above these rough diamonds, but who consider themselves altogether their superiors, that the difficulty begins. No class of servants are so troublesome as the footman tribe. No section of the body politic proves more vexatious than the intermediate order between the lower and the very lowest division of the middle class. The genuine working man in the working man’s club causes none of those embarrassments which one encounters upon a level rather higher than that of the outcasts of Camberwell or Notting Hill, the waifs and strays of Whitechapel or Shoreditch. If the problem of association is practically to be solved to the satisfaction of all those concerned, there is one golden rule always to be followed. Postulating a common amount of tact and sense on the part of the University settler, or one who essays that position, let him begin by being natural, let him shun as the presage of failure any conscious effort to place his lowlier fellow creature at his ease. Above all, let him never offer his hand to shake. He himself may think the manual overture will gratify the person to whom it is made by showing that the maker ‘has no false pride.’ A greater mistake there could not be, as a well-born academic socialist found out when, to demonstrate his faith in the equality of all men, he shook hands with his brother’s footman on receiving his shaving water. These strained amenities are an effort to him who volunteers them, and an infliction to him who receives them, a failure and a mistake, in fact, all round. The secret of Edward Denison’s and of Arnold Toynbee’s influence for good with their inferiors was that they not only knew these truths, but always acted on them. Hence, by their own work, and by the generation of workers whom they raised up to follow them and at whose methods we have now glanced, so much was done to span the gulf separating ‘the two nations’ of the English people.