Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy by Daniel Siegel (review)

In Charity and Condescension, Daniel Siegel considers the Victorian period a high point for British charity. Torn between the desire to alleviate poverty and the fear of causing harm in trying to do good, he argues, Victorians took both charity and its limits seriously. Siegel uncovers the complexity of Victorian approaches to charity primarily by considering the fate of condescension in the period: though the act of “lowering oneself to the level of one’s inferiors” had previously been a positive act and a marker of charity’s success, by the Victorian period it came to jar with assumptions of “nominal equality between free social agents” (2, 3). In the face of the rise of liberalism and the erosion of paternalist sentiment, what was once considered a commendable renouncement of class privilege came to be associated with inauthentic performance; condescension was “an emblem of the limitations of charity, a ritual in which fantasies of help degenerated into visions of social collapse” (4).

Siegel is interested in the ways in which moral valuations of condescension in Britain changed “from one generation to the next” (28). Taking Charles Dickens as an example of this generational shift, he shows that in his early work Dickens assumes that charity could unite the rich and poor, and that in his middle novels personal benevolence allows for the exposure of past trauma and recovery in a world where the rich and poor “are always already related” (43). In his late period, however, effective charity can only exist outside of “the realm of authority,” where condescension is not an issue (74). Particularly in Little Dorrit (1855–57), later Dickens suggests that even at its most sincere, condescension works in the interest of privilege. And in this, Siegel claims, he forecasts the incipient socialism that toward the end of the century would convince Britons that charity was nothing more than “a palliative for the consciences of the rich” (39).

Other writers offered more conflicted approaches to condescension, even within the space of individual texts. In Adam Bede (1859), for instance, George Eliot supports a systematic approach to relief, while at the same time she “reinscribes the extraordinary potential of the interruptive [charitable] moment.” In the vein of groups such as the Charity Organization Society (COS), which advocated the regulation of charity work and relied on information and regularity rather than spontaneous condescension, Eliot’s novels assume that charity most often fails because of poor timing. At the same time, condescension sometimes works because it interrupts, creating a temporary space outside of “the mechanical clockwork of official welfare” (34). Eliot’s famous approach to sympathy is crucial to this space—it “creates an escape clause from the normative patterns of historical process” and in so doing allows characters to temporarily fulfill their deepest interpersonal needs (77). Sympathy, Siegel argues, changes nothing—sympathetic actors tend not to be intimate prior to moments of sympathy, and their meeting has little effect on the novels’ plots. But it is “profound” precisely because it is “not perpetual, not part of a revolutionary movement” (94). In this sense, “sympathy provides the same undercurrent against Eliotic realism that spontaneity provided against the regimentation of social work” (96).

Crucial to Siegel’s argument is the idea that Victorian approaches to charity were “in constant retreat from the material” (19). Wary of donation-based charity in the wake of the New Poor Law, Victorians hoped to “tear down the barriers between rich and poor,” from the London slum settlement experiments of Octavia Hill and Samuel Barnett to the work of the COS (35). In this context, condescension is of particular interest, for as Siegel writes—drawing from Marcel Mauss—it “has no aim other than the explicitly social one of bringing about a particular relationship between its agents” (19–20).

Thus Victorian assessments of charity and philanthropic condescension were concerned with their effectiveness in altering interpersonal relationships rather than their ability to better...