The Toynbee Travellers’ Club and the Transnational Education of Citizens, 1888–90

In the early years of Toynbee Hall – the university settlement founded by Samuel Barnett in 1884 in the East End of London – English admirers of the Italian republican exile, Giuseppe Mazzini, established a Mazzini Club.¹ It was at one of the Club’s meetings that a Mr Fergusson suggested that Toynbee Hall should organize ‘a pilgrimage to Mazzini’s tomb at Genoa’, the monument which Algernon Swinburne had famously celebrated in verse.² This initiative, a ‘daring idea’ as one traveller later referred to it, was to be the inspiration for the founding, in 1888, of the Toynbee Travellers’ Club, which by 1890 was one of the settlement’s most successful clubs. This article contends that the connection between Toynbee Hall Mazzinians and the establishment of the Toynbee Travellers’ Club significantly defined the encounters between the ‘East End pilgrims’ and Italy, for many decades previously the favoured destination of privileged travellers on the Grand Tour.

Recent studies collected by Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa and Paul Vita in The Victorians and Italy endeavoured to identify texts which ‘reformulated the picturesque’ beyond depictions in Grand Tour narratives of ‘chaotic roads, dirty inns, stinky slums, crime and deprivation’.³ The editors concluded that ‘only a few Victorian writers’ had tried to deconstruct and subvert stereotypes of the Italians – and these few had little success in challenging national prejudices. When conventional Grand Tour narratives are brought together with descriptions by Toynbee Hall travellers of their encounters, however, English nineteenth-century constructions of Italy and the Italians do acquire a more textured dimension.

Indeed, the main protagonists of this narrative – political progressives whose views on international policy often dovetailed with those of the ‘imperial sceptics’ recently identified by Gregory Claeys – being relatively unencumbered by a sense of English superiority were uniquely placed to explore Mazzini’s united Italy.⁴ It was Mazzini’s ‘vision of a

Fig. 1.

Group of Toynbee Hall Travellers, 1890.

Toynbee Hall Papers, London Metropolitan Archive, Corporation of London.

Fig. 2.

School Board Teacher on the Tuscan Tour, 1890.

Toynbee Hall Papers, London Metropolitan Archive, Corporation of London.

cosmopolitanism of nations’ which guided East End educationalists and adult learners on their travels.⁵ The two main guides who led the Italian tours were R. Bolton King and Thomas Okey. Bolton King, a ‘practical idealist’ involved with Toynbee Hall for many years, combined intellectual rigour with running a co-operative experiment in Warwickshire.⁶ Committed to social reform since his days as an Oxford student, he stood as Liberal candidate in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1901, but was defeated following his campaign against the Boer War.⁷ Okey was a self-educated republican basket-weaver who had contributed to The Republican (1870–2), the unofficial organ of the Land and Labour League. His love of Italy and knowledge of Italian later gained him the first appointment to the prestigious Serena Professorship of Italian in Cambridge in 1919.⁸

In the spring of 1888 Samuel and Henrietta Barnett (founders of Toynbee Hall), Bolton King (resident tutor), and Okey (Italian teacher), accompanied around eighty Whitechapel and East London students on a seventeen days’ tour to Florence. Many successful excursions would follow, and four of the first six tours, organized between 1888 and 1891, had Italy as their main destination. The other two headed to Switzerland – however, as the Pall Mall Gazette put it, ‘fewer mental treasures’ would be ‘brought back from a Swiss tour than from an Italian pilgrimage’.⁹ The Italian destinations were Florence (1888), Venice (1889), Siena, Perugia and Assisi (1890) and Florence again (1891). During these years the Toynbee Travellers’ Club grew steadily. In 1891 it had 200 members of both sexes, who included City clerks, Board School teachers and skilled artisans. The number of women on the tours increased: a minority in the first tour to Florence, they closely matched the number of male travellers on the following journey to Venice, and exceeded them during the 1890 tour around Tuscany (Fig. 1). As...