British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900: Beauty for the People (review)

While several scholars have examined British aestheticism, and others have focused on investigations of the "poor," or philanthropy and reform in late-nineteenth-century London, Diana Maltz works at the intersection of aestheticism, poverty, and reform, suggesting the importance of missionary aestheticism to any study of this period. Maltz's informative and thoroughly researched book shows the influence of aestheticism on the work of those whose goal was to improve the lives of the poor.

After providing information on the social networks that "bonded aesthetes to reformers" (3), in the first chapter, Maltz focuses on specific missionary aesthetes and organizations. Chapter 2 studies social reformer Octavia Hill and her middle-class lady rent collectors. Maltz comments that "Hill took as an ancillary part of her philanthropic mission the civilizing of the poor. She hoped that by 'raising the people' hygienically she might also raise their expectations, instilling in them a longing for more refined pleasures as well as a renunciation of the disorder that made the slum" (44). The third chapter focuses on Toynbee Hall and the St. Jude's Easter Free Art Exhibitions with their middle-class "watchers" who would "translate" the paintings to working-class patrons understood to be incapable of comprehending the "spiritual themes." This chapter also takes a look at the Toynbee Travellers' Club, which "rested on the premise that interested workers should have access to the cultural and artistic glories of Europe" (70), though as Maltz notes, "the men and women who constituted the Toynbee Travellers were not ultimately working-class, but lower-middle-class" (79), and, on one trip, actually went "slumming" in Italy. Other chapters examine the debate that swirled around the efforts of some to open museums and art galleries on Sundays in order to make them accessible to those who worked the other six days, and Ritualist priests and their "Anglo-Catholic churches in the slums as arenas for missionary aestheticism" (15).

The topic of missionary aestheticism is, of course, a vexed one and Maltz acknowledges this. For while it is easy to take a sardonic view of lady visitors bringing fresh flowers into poverty-stricken homes, and to smirk at the efforts of the ladies of the Kyrley Society who planted parks and laid mosaics in order to bring beauty to the people (people for whom steady work and regular meals were no doubt higher priorities), it is important to separate, as this book points out, popular aestheticism and "slumming" from the sincere efforts of do-gooders who were strongly influenced, for better or worse, by John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Yet sincere though those efforts were, and "characterized by high-mindedness and generosity," as Maltz shows, "most missionary aesthetes were unashamedly and conformingly middle-class, and their goals and practices were far from revolutionary or even forward-looking" (207). Instead, they took a paternalistic approach to the East Enders and others with whom they worked. Maltz astutely notes that contemporary parodies of missionary aesthetes in Punch and elsewhere (some wonderful examples of which are included in this volume) "demonstrate how aesthetic reforms provoked defensiveness among the middle-class public" (13).

A problem in such studies, and again a problem that Maltz acknowledges, is that of labeling and representing the working (and non-working) people whose lives the missionary aesthetes attempted to improve and beautify. As she points out, "[r]eferring to 'the poor' or 'the people' sets one up for an oversimplification that is anathema to any good social historian and uncannily evokes bourgeois Victorians' own generalizations about the working classes (with the exception of the sociologists in the fin de siècle who sought to classify them empirically)" (17). Maltz uses phrases such as "working people" or "working classes" to describe this group, though admitting that "[w]hen focusing on bourgeois Victorians' psychological and social motives for entering the slums, I have also adopted...