Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy

Introduction: Charity and Condescension

1 Introduction Charity and Condescension She stands before us: scattering tracts, ordering the children about, peering into cupboards, tripping over the furniture, crowing lines of scripture, blocking the exit. She marshals the forces of sound doctrine, domestic economy, and hygienic science against whatever comforts the poor might have been able to salvage amid their penury and squalor. She condescends. It is this last offense we blame her for most. The lady visitor, along with her close associate the mincing curate, is a familiar figure of horror—a stock character in the Victorian charity gothic—and we are appalled by her unbearable condescension. This is not to say that there is any consensus onVictorian charity. Charity and Condescension 2 Generations of critics have debated whether Victorian philanthropy achieved its stated aims, whether those aims masked other political or social agendas, and whether the donors and recipients of charity were working in concert or at cross-purposes. Scholars ask how charity fit into the bigger picture, by which they alternately refer to the management of a new class of industrial urban poor, the creation of a liberal public sector, the emergence of the welfare state, the professionalization of social work, the public ambitions of middle-class women, or the distinctive cultural practices and survival strategies of workingclass communities. Still, alongside the broader social questions, the image of the lady visitor retains its vividness and evokes a divided response. To some critics she represents everything that was wrong withVictorian charity; to others she is a phantom, a decoy, constructed to deny the reality of a different kind of figure: a charity worker who was genuinely responsive to the needs of her neighbors.1 Our disagreements over the big picture sometimes cover a more visceral feeling about Victorian charity, a feeling that has much to do with this particular portrait of the condescending lady visitor. Some take it as axiomatic that Victorian philanthropists, despite their equivocal virtues, were fundamentally condescending.2 Others would have it that Victorian philanthropists, despite their inevitable faults, were driven by a sense of the dignity of the less fortunate and that when we assume otherwise, it is we who condescend.3 Given the economic and political complexities of Victorian charity,it may seem pointless to ask whether or not philanthropists were condescending. Such a question seems to confuse cause and effect, examining personalities rather than the deeper structural realities that stand behind them. But I am going to argue that it is a good question. More than we realize, it is a question the Victorians asked themselves.The charge of condescension has been freely leveled against Victorian missionaries, essayists, mistresses, husbands, clergymen , and social workers; nevertheless, we inherit our distaste for condescension from them, a distaste that appears especially acute when we notice that, just decades before, condescension had been considered a great social virtue. Condescension became a problem in the Victorian period, not because the Victorians were more or less condescending than those who came before but because the meaning of condescension was changing. The meaning of condescension itself is what changed, not the meaning of the word, which signifies today what it always has: lowering oneself to the level of one’s inferiors. Yet the aroma around condescension is utterly different from what it once was. Condescension is for us a sign of arrogance, of pettiness, of a narcissistic insensibility to the real feelings of others—so that when Joseph Introduction 3 Addison praises Ulysses for the “condescension which never dwells but in truly great minds,” or when Fanny Burney’s Lord Orville pays tribute to the sweet condescension of his beloved, we feel we are in the presence of something archaic .4 Whenever we come across the word in works by Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney, or Maria Edgeworth, we have to make a quick adjustment; we remind ourselves that we are looking at a world where condescending gestures and tones of voice solved problems rather than causing them. No history of condescension has been written, but we can imagine the outlines of such a history. Condescension originally denoted an act whereby an authority figure temporarily abdicated the privileges of his or her position for the benefit of a dependent. In this way, condescension was traditionally used as an argument for paternalism, a model of government in which the legitimacy of empowered groups rested on the ability and disposition of those groups to provide for...