The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

The argument that philanthropy was the taproot of female emancipation in nineteenth- century Britain was not much admired when it was first put forward over twenty years ago. Most feminists sought to find their origins in radical movements such as Chartism or in trade unionism. The idea that women's charitable work might have played a major part in feminist history was unwelcome, if not anathema. Not uncommonly, scholars assumed that philanthropy was little more than a justification of patriarchal rule, a form of "social control" that kept the poor in their place. Today, however, historians and literary critics are more sensitive to the ironies and complexities in women's history and are more susceptible to the idea that Victorian women domesticated the public sphere through charitable work, and thereby opened up possibilities for themselves.

Dorice Elliot's study of literary representations of female philanthropists, The Angel Out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England, acknowledges that charitable activity was a lever that women used to open the doors closed to them in the spheres of social work, higher education, the paid professions, and elected office. But she has not departed from the "social control" school of scholarship. As she writes, charity opened up "new avenues for middle- and upper-class women," but it did so "at the expense of both men and women of the lower classes who were infantalized and kept in a subordinate position by philanthropic work" (11). In a book which otherwise is sensitive to the history of philanthropy, such a comment looks decidedly dated and problematic. Since 1989, the political value of intermediary civic institutions has been more widely appreciated, even among socialists, and the view that philanthropy is a form of social control has faded. Nor do the texts under discussion conform to the view that charity "infantalized" the poor. Indeed, they often describe female philanthropists as deeply caring and sensitive to class relations. In Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), for example, Margaret Hale shows great sympathy and understanding when entering the homes of the poor as a visitor. According to Elliot, she is "exemplary in her expert mediation between masters and men" (146).

With its concentration on the literature and philanthropy of the wealthier classes, Elliot's study has little to say about the powerful tradition of British working-class philanthropy, the charity of the poor to the poor, which, as the Edwardian cleric William Conybeare put it, stood between "civilization and revolution." The measures taken to address the reality of social distress, which was often more horrific than described in the up-market literature, may not much matter in a study that concentrates on the influence of "novelistic and philanthropic discourses" on domestic ideology and female representation. Still, the issue of working-class charity, or at least its representation in the writings of the time, begs to be addressed when the philanthropist who appears on the dust-jacket of the book, Sarah Martin, made her humble living as a needlewoman before taking up prison visitation. One wonders what Elliot would make of Selections of the Poetical Remains of the Late Sarah Martin (1872). Who read Martin apart from her middle-class promoters, and what message about women did they take away from her writings? Her own reading consisted largely of the scriptures.

There is much to recommend Elliot's handling of her selected texts, which includes Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762), Anna Jameson's Communion of Labour (1855), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). The chapter on female visitors and class relations in Gaskell's North and South is particularly fresh and informative. Hannah More comes across as a liberating force for women, which is quite a departure from the way she was once treated, as simply...