What Price the Poor? William Booth, Karl Marx and the London Residuum ANN M. WOODALL 2005 Contents List of Tables Acknowledgements Series Editor’s Preface 1 Introduction 2 The Pawnbroker’s Apprentice Introduction Industrialisation and Urbanisation Poverty Poverty in Nottingham Attitudes to Poverty Malthus Jeremy Bentham Influential Writers about Poverty Dickens Carlyle The Chartists John Wesley Chartism and Methodism in Nottingham The Old Woman of Nottingham Conclusion 3 The Reverend William Introduction The Size of the London Residuum Public Opinion of Poverty Changes in Religious Belief Natural Science Biblical Criticism Moral Feeling Evangelicalism Development of Booth’s Theology Finney and Caughey Calvinism Women’s Ministry Holiness The East End Booth’s East End Base Booth’s Early Co-workers An Organisation of the Residuum Community of Poverty Conclusion 4 The Revolutionary Philosopher Introduction Marx’s Early Concept of Poverty Paris London Learning from London Conclusion 5 The Philosopher as a Prophet? Introduction Marx and Religion Societal Redemption and the Individual The Chronology of Redemption Conclusion 6 The Making of a General Introduction Permanent Poverty in the East End Public Knowledge of Poverty Where was Religion? Diffusive Christianity and Secularism Christian Socialists The Churches and the Working Classes The Growth of the Salvation Army Failure in the East End? The Springboard for Darkest England Work with Prostitutes At the Prison Gate The ‘Maiden Tribute’ Case The Darkest England Scheme The Theology behind ‘Darkest England’ Saved from Poverty or from Sin? Conclusion 7 The Making of a General’s Mind Introduction Mallock Flint Salvationism and Socialism A Man with a Mind of his Own Conclusion 8 The General in Command Introduction Organisational Size The Charity Organisation Society Social Darwinists Social Imperialism Darkest England Scheme Results Atmosphere of the Times Conclusion 9 Fifty Years On Centrality and Dissemination Present and Future The Darkest England Scheme and Marxist Terminology The Salvation Army and Marx’s Criticisms of Religion Nature and Nurture Atonement and Incarnation Marx - Youth and Age Booth - Youth and Age What Price the Poor? Bibliography Index List of Tables 3.1 Overcrowding in the East End in 1851 3.2 Birthplaces of the Inhabitants of the East End – 1861 6.1 Overcrowding in the East End 1851-1891 6.2 Occupancy Rates in London and Whitechapel 1891 6.3 Salvation Army Corps 1878-95 6.4 Salvation Army Officers 1878-95 8.1 Elements of the Darkest England Scheme 8.2 Additional Social Work by 1906 Acknowledgements This book is the outcome of a personal obsession and the input and encouragement of many people over fifteen years. I am grateful to all who played a part in the project. My thanks are due to my supervisors at what was then London Guildhall University during the preparation of my Ph.D. thesis: William Dixon, Peter Mandler, Dave Wilson and the late Michael Cowen. I also owe a special debt to Sheila Hornsby for typing my early notes, to Adrian Wood for suggesting that I approach Ashgate about the possibility of publishing, and to Norman Murdoch for his support. Laurence Hay, Gordon Taylor and John and Heather Coutts were all painstaking in their efforts to render the manuscript readable and accurate. Lastly, this book is dedicated to my parents, Doris and Syd Woodall. They introduced me to The Salvation Army and gave me the confidence to follow my dreams. Series Editor’s Preface One reason often given for passing over the classical tradition in sociology is that there are, ‘limitations at source’, as Giddens once wrote. This is only partly accurate. Recent work in classical sociology which interrogates the tradition from emerging concerns with issues to do with death and dying, racism, auto/biography, culture, travel, ethics and commitment, children and private life and so on, leads one to draw a different inference: namely, that the ignorance and dismissal of the classical tradition is due more to the limitations of contemporary readers who presume to know the answers to questions without researching, and presume to know what classical authors wrote without actually reading their writings and engaging with an eye on their context and on ours. Of course, the blame for some of these limited views is to be lain at the feet of the history and teaching of sociology itself which has served to create an image of classical sociology as arcane or needlessly abstract or as being too firmly rooted in its own context rather than being richly connected to a human experience that often transcends boundaries of time and place. It is this very connection with lived human experience across the life-course that provides a strong motivation for consciously and energetically rethinking classical sociology. Within this rethinking of classical sociology it is necessary to critically consider how social policy and practice, the practical application of sociological values and insights, became divorced in the history and teaching of the discipline from what we might call, classical sociological theory. Given this differentiation we are unable to see the dialogues and continuities between classical thinkers themselves, and leads us to elevate certain writings at the expense of others within any one classical sociological oeuvre, thus only gaining a partial view of their sociological projects. For example, Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary sociology needs to be read alongside his own impassioned attempts to resist growing militarism at the end of the Victorian era; Max Weber’s studies of rural life in the Eastern German Empire and the impact of agrarian capitalism and nationalist policies on the German and Polish peasantries is as central to understanding his sociology as the unravelling of his conception vocabulary in Economy and Society. We need to critically consider classical substantive studies alongside classical conceptual, historical and theoretical legacies, and explain how substance, method and theory became separated from each other in the demarcation of classical sociology and constituted what we were meant to learn from it. It is also important in our re-thinking classical sociology to critically consider the history of the tradition and reception of these texts from the past. Recent developments in social and cultural studies have led to the realisation that the classical canon is a highly selective listing, not only of the works of classical sociologists that are not contested within the canon, but also of a range of many other fascinating and significant examples of writing from voices frequently left unheard or consciously ignored. For example, the works of William Dubois and of Charlotte Perkins Gilman readily come to mind as creative sociological thinkers whose work deserves to be much better known. So, it is time to re-consider the texts of a Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel or Parsons that have been overlooked, just as it is time to reconsider those whose status within the history of sociology has yet to be fully established for a number of reasons, not of all which are traceable to limitations in the originals. William Booth’s Darkest England is one such text that needs to be considered, alongside such other substantive classics, however normatively driven, such as Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Jack London’s The Abyss, and more social survey influenced studies produced by Charles Booth and Joseph Rowntree. These studies, and many others that are not remembered today of course formed part of the intellectual context for classical sociology as well as being important studies in their own right that we should not ignore. I am delighted that Ann Woodall’s volume is part of our series, since it directly addresses a number of the themes mentioned briefly above, and moreover, investigates two significant social thinkers from the late 19th century- Karl Marx and William Booth- who have never been considered side by side before. The sociological concerns of William Booth, given his character and normative commitments, took a radically different direction from those of Marx, and yet they both share a passionate value commitment and were responding, as Woodall demonstrates, to similar social conditions. Marx is often presented in the history of sociology as perhaps one of the few social thinkers who not only wanted to accurately describe the social world, but also to seek to change it. When such a social conscience is married with an evangelical religious spirit, as it was with William Booth, it is striking to realise that it is the latter that directly, if albeit at times dictatorially, immediately effected social change through the practical implementation of his version of the social gospel. Ann Woodall’s study is particularly apposite to our series’ concern with posing the question: What was the relationship between ways of thinking, writing and doing that we identify as sociological today, and ways of thinking, writing and acting that seemingly appertain to different pursuits and disciplines, such as literary and biological imaginations, and, especially pertinent to this study, theological approaches to ethics, society and social change? Woodall provides us with some answers to such questions through a concentration on the biography, contexts, theories and practical activities of two important figures from the time when sociology had yet to be fully institutionalised and in a climate in which theological and religious world views interacted, and often clashed with, sociological perspectives and socialist commitments. Classical sociologists sought to ‘live out’ their sociology, making public and private decisions in the light of their studies, hence suggesting that biography is indeed one of the tools to be utilised in rethinking classical sociology: we not only need to bring the text back in to consideration but the person who wrote those texts too. For some of these classical practitioners, the right career choice was not to enter institutionalised sociology but to remain as reformers, writers, journalists and so on.