"Making the Working Man Like Me": Charity, Pastorship, and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain; Thomas Chalmers and Dr. James Phillips Kay

Charity once extended an invisible chain of sympathy between the higher and lower ranks of society, which has been destroyed by the luckless pseudo- philanthropy of the [Old Poor Law]. Few aged or decrepid [sic] pensioners now gratefully receive the visits of the higher classes--few of the poor seek the counsel, the admonitions, and assistance of the rich in the period of the inevitable accidents of life. The bar of the overseer is however crowded with the sturdy applicants for a legalized relief, who regard the distributor of this bounty as their stern and merciless oppressor, instructed by the compassionless rich to reduce to the lowest possible amount the alms which the law wrings from their reluctant hands. This disruption of the natural ties has created a wide gulph between the higher and lower orders of the community, across which, the scowl of hatred banishes the smile of charity and love.

--Dr. James Phillips Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes (48-49)

ew questions were of greater moment to Britain's nineteenth- century middle classes than the condition of the poor and pauperized. For middle-class Britons, the new preoccupation with working-class morality was part of the quest to translate economic gains into cultural and political power. Campaigning in 1868, J. A. Roebuck, the prominent radical MP, claimed that his lifelong object had been "to make the working man as [. . .] civilized a creature as I could make him"; "I wanted to make the working man like me" (qtd. in Johnson, "Educating the Educators" 90). In so doing, Roebuck articulated a civilizing mission that had become a defining focus for many middle-class Britons, inside and out of radical circles. In the nineteenth century, middle-class identity became increasingly bound up in molding the urban working classes--in what Jerome Christensen has described as "the Enlightenment project of homogenizing mankind in the guise of the bourgeoisie" (28).

Studying the middle-class preoccupation with working-class morality involves two adjacent fields of social history: charity and the poor laws. This is not as simple as it sounds. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, or New Poor Law, is itself a complicated subject, demanding meticulous distinctions between Edwin Chadwick's Benthamite blueprint and Parliament's compromises; centralized edicts and local resistance; landed and commercial political interests; official propaganda, popular sentiment, and the empirical record. As described in the Royal Commission's report, the Act's intentions were wholly "negative" ("to remove the debasing influences" of the Old Poor Law), rather than "positive" ("to afford new means of prosperity and virtue") (qtd. in Loch 238-39). In the succinct phrase of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the law was designed to make paupers feel like "unwelcome guest[s]," and made no pretense to providing preventive or curative moral guidance (269). The chief recommendations of the Act were the "less eligibility" principle and the "workhouse test." The latter stipulated that no relief be administered outside the confines of the workhouse. This policy constituted a "test" of need by presuming that only the genuinely destitute would opt for deterrent provision. Meanwhile, the principle of "less eligibility" attempted to guarantee effective deterrence by stipulating that the situation of the dependent inmate "not be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class" (Chadwick, "New Poor Law" 499). Theory and practice widely diverged because the Poor Law Commission was not empowered to enforce the workhouse test. Moreover, even cooperative localities were often unable to reduce eligibility in the manner prescribed, since the condition of the lowliest independent laborer was typically beneath bare subsistence. In general, the Whigs and liberal Tories who supported the Act were banking on the salutary effects of rationalized local...