Notes What is Missionary Aestheticism? An Introduction 1Henrietta O. Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends (London: John Murray, 1921), 43. 2Ian Fletcher, ‘Some Aspects of Aestheticism,’ in Twilight of Dawn: Studies of English Literature in Transition, ed. O. M. Brack (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), 25. 3 In 1977, the art historian Mark Girouard suggested a temperamental alliance between Victorian aesthetes and progressives, ‘The aesthete burning with the hard gem-like flame, alone or with a friend in the seclusion of his exquisitely furnished rooms, might seem a long way removed from the do-gooder working himself to the bone for others in the dingy streets of the East End. But they were only different ends of the same Victorian loaf. In the 1870s and 1880s one constantly finds aestheticism and enlightenment next door to one another or mixed up together’ (Mark Girouard, Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement, 1860–1900 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977], 7.) He cites the mutual sympathies between the aesthete Walter Pater and the humanitar- ian Mrs Humphry Ward (7). Girouard goes on to name the artistic slum reformer Octavia Hill, the socialists William Morris and Walter Crane, and the Positivist Frederic Harrison as specimens of progressive-aesthetes (7–8). The seeds for my own study are here, though Girouard uses these examples to foreground a different, broader historical analysis. 4 Ruth Z. Temple, ‘Truth in Labelling: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence, Fin-de-Siècle,’ English Literature in Transition 17, no. 4 (1974): 201–22. 5I adopt the phrase ‘lifestyle aestheticism’ from Kathy Psomiades’s excellent study Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 154. 6John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 5: 333. 7 Ruskin, Works, 20: 93. 8 John Ruskin, Unto this Last and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 211. 9John Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961), 189. 10 Ruskin, Works, 30: xliii. 11 John Rosenberg cites good sales for the letters (Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass, 194, fn.7). These sales attest to Ruskin’s popularity, as Fors was some- what expensive for workingmen and relatively inaccessible: it could only be purchased through the publisher George Allen. See Frederic Harrison, John Ruskin (London: Macmillan, 1902), 168, cited in Seth Koven, ‘Culture and Poverty: The London Settlement House Movement 1870–1914’ (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1987), 18, fn. 22. 218 Notes 219 12 This study looks beyond the institutional confines of museums for the working classes and university settlements to highlight the presence of mis- sionary aestheticism in less obvious venues such as tenement- and church reform. However, because the Barnetts and Horsfall were central in the initial application of Ruskinian theory, I cite them here as representatives. The definitive critical history of late Victorian settlement work and its social implications is Seth Koven, ‘Culture and Poverty.’ 13 Ruskin, Works, 34: 251, original emphasis. 14 T. C. Horsfall, First Principles of Education. The Use of Pictures in Schools and Physical Training. Two Papers read to the Manchester Branch of the Teacher’s Guild (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1890), 6. 15 Frederic W. Maynard, Descriptive Notice of the Drawings and Publications of the Arundel Society from 1849 to 1868 inclusive; illustrated by Photographs of all the Publications, One-Fifth of their original Size, arranged in the order of their issue, by Frederic W. Maynard, (secretary to the Arundel Society) (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1869); W. H. Gregory, ‘The Arundel Society,’ Nineteenth Century 15 (April 1884): 610–25. The Fitzroy Picture Society, founded by the designer A. H. Mackmurdo, worked in collaboration with the Kyrle Society. Its contributing artists included Selwyn Image, Heywood Sumner and G. F. Watts (Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s and the Arts and Crafts [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985], 107). The artist Walter Crane established the Art for Schools Association with Samuel Barnett (Barnett, Canon Barnett, 285). The Medici Society is still extant and maintains its own website. 16 T. C. Horsfall, A Description of the Work of the Manchester Art Museum (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1891), 19–20. 17 Giles Waterfield, ‘Art for the People,’ in Art for the People: Culture in the Slums of Late Victorian Britain (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994), 39. 18Waterfield, Art for the People, 39. 19 Horsfall, Description, 27. 20 For an overview of Horsfall’s project, see Michael Harrison, ‘Art and Philanthropy: T. C. Horsfall and the Manchester Art Museum,’ in City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester, eds Alan Kidd and K. W. Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 120–47. 21 Ruskin, Unto This Last, 222; T. C. Horsfall, The Need for Art in Manchester: an address given May 2nd, 1910 at the annual meeting of the governors of the Manchester Royal Institution (Manchester: Charles H. Barber, 1910), 14. 22 Horsfall, Description, 7–12. 23 Horsfall, First Principles, 7. 24 Horsfall, First Principles, 31. 25 Matthew Arnold, Selected Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 227; further page references appear in parentheses. 26 Horsfall, Need, 21. 27 Samuel Barnett, ‘University Settlements,’ in Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform, eds The Rev. and Mrs. Samuel A. Barnett (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895), 173; Barnett, Canon Barnett, 300. 28 George Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), 2: 269. 220 Notes 29 Kyrle Society, Kyrle Society Annual Report (1891), 17. 30 Pater may also have felt a sense of unease at Toynbee Hall, where many of the residents and associates had been Oxford protégés of Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol. Jowett had denied Pater the University Proctorship in 1874 following the revelation of Pater’s romance with an undergraduate Willam M. Hardinge. Balliol students Leonard Montefiore and Philip Lyttleton Gell were witness to the scandal; each became a Toynbee Hall resident in the 1880s. See Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connec- tion: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge,’ in Pater in the 1990s, eds Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1991), 1–20. 31Ian Fletcher, Walter Pater (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1959), 11. 32 Walter Pater, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 134–6. 33 As David DeLaura has illustrated, much of Pater’s essay is a précis on how doubt can be advantageous or dangerous to the disbeliever depending on his innate ‘class of mind’; it is autobiographical in that it expresses Pater’s persistent, self-reflective theme of the personality in development. See David DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1969), 287. 34 Walter Pater, Essays from ‘The Guardian’ (London: Macmillan, 1910), 69. 35 Pater, Selected Writings, 20–1. 36 Pater, Selected Writings, 61–2. 37 DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene, 179. 38 Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 199–200, 201. 39 Paul Tucker, ‘Pater as a “Moralist,”’ in Pater in the 1990s, eds Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1991), 108, 110–12. 40 Pater, Selected Writings, 61. 41 Pater, Selected Writings, 2. My reference to the Liberty showroom is rather an exaggeration, but Wilde’s admiration during his lectures for interiors that James McNeil Whistler had created as a commissioned decorator – and for a Chinese workman’s delicate porcelain cup – prove my point about Wilde’s consciousness and complicity in the marketability of aesthetic, often exotic, objects: see Oscar Wilde, ‘House Decoration,’ in Essays and Lectures (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1916), 166, 170. Later, in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), Wilde questioned the value of gifts of art by well-meaning philanthropists in the East End. Because they were mere palliatives, he argued, such reme- dies were ‘part of the disease’ of poverty (Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [New York: Harper and Row, 1989], 1079). I discuss Wilde’s relationship to missionary aestheticism at greater length in Chapter 3 and in my essay, ‘Wilde’s The Woman’s World and the Culture of Aesthetic Philanthropy,’ in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 185–211. 42 William Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 1: 192–205. 43 Margaret Harkness, George Eastmont: Wanderer (London: Burns and Oates, 1905), 88. Notes 221 44 Mrs Humphry Ward, Marcella (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000), 48, 91, 96. 45 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 120. 46 Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 58–61, 67–8; Barnett, Canon Barnett, 34, 78. Harriete Harrison does sound a bit like the parodied aesthete in her account of an ‘At Home’ in a letter to Henrietta Barnett. She writes, ‘It was like Botticelli’s picture of the