Abstract
This chapter concerns middle-class attitudes towards the urban poor. It considers whether the state of sections of the working classes was felt indicative of an inexorable threat that industrialized modernity posed to the collective health of the nation. It will argue that ulterior concerns, rooted primarily in debates about economic policy and the role of the state in public life, conspired to prevent worries about racial decline from becoming a prominent feature of English cultural life. Rather than a manifestation of a general malaise, forceful declarations about racial decline were instead a contingent outcome of certain national and local struggles, whereby the rhetoric of racial decline could be harnessed in a transitory fashion as a weapon for particular political purposes.
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Notes
Helen Bosanquet, Rich and Poor (1896; London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1898), p.6
E. J. Urwick, Studies of Boy Life in Our Cities (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1904), pp.316–8
Stedman Jones, ‘Working-class culture and working-class politics in London, 1870–1900: notes on the remaking of a working class’, Journal of Social History 7:4 (1974), pp.460–508.
However, even those who had directly experienced extreme poverty could find their sense of it amplified by cultural works such as Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903; Teddington: Echo Library, 2007); Arnold Paice to mother, 25 April 1920, Royal Commonwealth Society Library, Cambridge RCMS 178/5
On this issue, see Dwork, War Is Good for Babies, passim; Soloway, ‘Neo-Malthusians, Eugenists, and the declining birth-rate in England, 1900–1918’, Albion 10:3 (1978), pp.264–86
Martin Daunton, Wealth and Welfare: An Economic and Social History of Britain1851–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.324
Pat Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State (Harlow: Longman, 1982), p.56
R. E. Lauder, Annual Report on the Health of Southampton for the year 1904 (Southampton: Southampton Times Company, 1905), p.11;
Sydney G. Mostyn, County Borough of South Shields: Report on the Health of the Borough during 1910 (South Shields: R. Simpson and Sons, 1911), p.11
Stone, Breeding Superman, p.104; see also Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain 1900–1914 (Leyden: Noordhoff International, 1976), p.24
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Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.213
H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics1892–1914 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p.104
Booth was not a particularly political man. If anything, he was an individualist; Harold W. Pfautz, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Booth, On the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure: Selected Writings, Pfautz (ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp.3–46
Quoted in Searle, A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.203
James Cantlie, Physical Efficiency: A Review of the Deleterious Effects of Town Life upon the Population of Britain, with Suggestions for Their Arrest (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906), p.2; see also clippings in Cantlie papers, WLA Ms.7923
On the broader context, see Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity and the Politics of Land1880–1914 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008)
James Startt, ‘Good journalism in the era of the New Journalism: the British press, 1902–1914’, in Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914, Joel H. Wiener (ed.) (New York: Greenport Press, 1988), p.284;
Stephen Koss, Fleet Street Radical: A. G. Gardiner and the Daily News (London: Penguin, 1973), ch.4
John Gorst, The Children of the Nation (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1907), preface, see also pp.100–3, 215
Readman, ‘The Edwardian land question’, in The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950, Readman and Matthew Cragoe (eds) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp.190–4
James Whyte, The Socialist Propaganda and the Drink Difficulty (London: United Kingdom Alliance, 1894), p.17; Whyte to editor, Manchester Guardian, 17 October 1904, p.5
Samuel Couling, History of the Temperance Movement in Great Britain and Ireland (London: William Tweedie, 1862), p.10.
For the endurance of this imagery see, for example, Gerard Brown, William Hogarth (Newcastle: Walter Scott Publishing, 1905), pp.136–8
G. Herbert Bolland, The Actual Effects of Restricting the Sale of Intoxicants in Particular Areas (London: National Temperance League, 1896)
Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p.174
A. P. Wadsworth, ‘Newspaper circulations, 1800–1954’, Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society (1955), p.25;
the figure for the Daily Express is for 1910 and comes from Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c.1880–1922 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p.58; ‘Making an imperial race’, Daily Mail, 29 July 1904, p.4; ‘Making pygmies’, Daily Express, 29 July 1904, p.5
J Gorst, ‘Physical deterioration in Great Britain’, North American Review 181:584 (1905), p.10
Jean Chalaby, ‘Northcliffe: proprietor as journalist’, in Northcliffe’s Legacy: Aspects of the British Papers, 1896–1996, Peter Catterall, Colin Seymour-Ure and Adrian Smith (eds) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p.36
Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis (eds), Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007)
Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), p.129
Fred Botting, ‘“Monsters of the imagination”: gothic, science, fiction’, in A Companion to Science Fiction, David Seed (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.116–8
Bernhard Rieger, ‘“Modern wonders”: technological innovation and public ambivalence in Britain and Germany, 1890s to 1933’, History Workshop Journal 55 (2003), p.154
Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England1846–1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p.252
Sidney Dark, The Life of Sir Arthur Pearson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922), pp.94–100, quote at p.100
See, for example, Peter Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p.585
Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p.359
Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c.1880–1932 (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), p.72.
On Unionist Free Traders, see Richard Rempel, Unionists Divided: Arthur Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain and the Unionist Free Traders (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972)
T. Gibson Bowles, Free Trade, Taxation and Expenditure (Liverpool: Financial Reform Association, 1907), p.5
B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1901), ch.4
A. L. Bowley and A. R. Burnett-Hurst, Livelihood and Poverty: A Study in the Economic Conditions of Working-Class Households in Northampton, Warrington, Stanley and Reading (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1915), p.42
Jack London, ‘How I became a socialist’, in Jack London: American Rebel, Philip Foner (ed.) (New York: Citadel Press, 1947), pp.362–5
Andrew Sinclair, Jack: A Biography of Jack London (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), p.89
Henry Pelling, Social Geography of British Elections1885–1910 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1967), p.325
Lawrence, ‘Class and gender in the making of urban Toryism, 1880–1910’, English Historical Review 108:428 (1993), p.650
Andrew Marrison, British Business and Protection1903–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp.104–7
Richard Jay, Joseph Chamberlain: A Political Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p.6
Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (1963; London: Penguin, 1968), pp.233–4;
Robert Woods, ‘Mortality and sanitary conditions in the “Best governed city in the world” – Birmingham, 1870–1910’, Journal of Historical Geography 4:1 (1978), pp.35–56
Anne B. Rodrick, Self-Help and Civic Citizenship in Victorian Birmingham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp.176–7
Roger Ward, City-state and Nation: Birmingham’s Political History c.1830–1940 (Chichester: Phillimore, 2005), p.146
Ward, City-state, p.178. One must nevertheless avoid oversimplifying the electoral behaviour of suburb-dwelling voters; for an interesting case study, see Matthew Roberts, ‘“Villa Toryism” and popular Conservatism in Leeds, 1885–1902’, in Historical Journal 49:1 (2006), pp.217–46
Editorial, Birmingham Daily Post 22 February 1904, p.6; Koss, ‘1906: revival and revivalism’, in Edwardian Radicalism 1900–1914: Some Aspects of British Radicalism, A. J. A. Morris (ed.) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p.91
Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representations in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), p.80
M. J. Wise and P. O’N. Thorpe, ‘The growth of Birmingham 1800–1950’, in Birmingham and Its Regional Setting: A Scientific Survey (Birmingham: Local Executive Committee, 1950), p.225
Mayne, Imagined Slum, pp.59–60; Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain Since 1800 (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006), pp.120–1
Ruth Procter, ‘Infant mortality: a study of the impact of social intervention in Birmingham 1873 to 1938’ (MPhil dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2011)
A. R. Moncrieff (ed.), Black’s Guide to Hampshire (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1904), p.113; see also Southampton: An Historical Guide to the Places of Interest in the Town and Neighbourhood (Southampton: Guide Printing, 1896), p.12; Kelly’s Directory of Southampton and Neighbourhood for 1901 (London: Kelly’s Directories, 1901), p.2;
F. W. Camfield, ‘Municipal life’, in A Short History of Southampton in Two Parts, F. J. C. Hearnshaw and F. Clarke (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), p.140;
Martin Doughty, ‘Introduction’, in Dilapidated Housing and Housing Policy in Southampton 1890–1914 (Southampton: University of Southampton, 1986), p.xiv
Horsfall, The Government of Manchester (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1895), p.13
Horsfall, Handbook to the Manchester Art Museum (Manchester: A. Ireland and Co., 1880);
Horsfall, The Right Use of Sunday (Manchester: H. Rawson & Co., 1896)
Horsfall, The Improvement of the Dwellings and Surrounds of the People: The Example of Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1904), p.19; see also ‘Manchester’, British Medical Journal (18 June 1904), p.1461
Horsfall, The Relation of National Service to the Welfare of the Community (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1904), p.20
Margaret Railton and Marshall Barr, The Royal Berkshire Hospital1839–1989 (Oxford: Royal Berkshire Hospital, 1989), p.147
Michael Harrison, ‘Social reform in late Victorian and Edwardian Manchester with special reference to T. C. Horsfall’ (PhD thesis, Manchester University, 1987), p.126
Untitled article, Manchester Evening News, 28 January 1902, p.2; see also Horsfall, The Influence on the Nation of Our System of Physical Training (Macclesfield: Claye, Brown and Claye, 1900), p.15
For example, about Aimee Watt Smyth, who produced work for the British Medical Journal; Aimee Watt Smyth, Physical Deterioration: Its Causes and the Cure (London: John Murray, 1904); Dwork, War Is Good for Babies, p.20. Naturally, Smyth’s book was well received in the British Medical Journal, but where Smyth was known at all, it was for her work with the Women’s Aerial League; ‘Reviews’, British Medical Journal (4 June 1904), p.1317; ‘Correspondence’, Manchester Guardian, 9 August 1909, p.5
Michael Freeden, ‘Eugenics and progressive thought: a study in ideological affinity’, Historical Journal 22:3 (1979), p.645
The society had only 341 members in 1909, and 713 at its peak in 1913; Lyndsay Andrew Farrall, The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement1865–1925 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), p.211
Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p.184; Robert Rentoul, Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? (A Plea for the Unborn) (London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1906), p.6; see also ‘To check lunacy’, Daily Express, 5 January 1904, p.1; ‘Sin of suicide: Dr. Rentoul’s theory criticised’, Daily Express, 6 January 1904, p.5
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Prior, C. (2013). Health and Poverty in Urban England. In: Edwardian England and the Idea of Racial Decline: An Empire’s Future. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373410_3
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