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

Chapter 3: Hannah More’s Heirs

Name /V2007/V2007_CH03 12/19/01 06:01AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 81 # 1 3 Hannah More’s Heirs Women Philanthropists and the Challenge of Political Economy In one of Harriet Martineau’s tales in her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832), a reform-minded surgeon remarks on ‘‘the failure of British benevolence.’’ What Mr. Burke characterizes as a ‘‘failure’’ of benevolence does not come from a lack of sympathy, devoted service, or substantial financial contributions; rather, the ‘‘failure’’ comes from too much of these things: despite ‘‘funds raised for the relief of pauperism in this country [that] exceed threefold the total revenues of Sweden and Denmark’’ and ‘‘exceed the whole revenue of Spain,’’ ‘‘distress is more prevalent than ever and goes on to increase every year.’’1 While Hannah More had argued that charity, properly administered by educated and religious women, would perform an important political function by contributing to social harmony and stability, laissez-faire political economists such as Martineau worried that philanthropy,combined with poor relief the state dispensed, would have the reverse effect; by attempting to subvert the so-called natural laws of political economy, relief to the poor, whether private or public, would convert ever-increasing numbers of independent laborers into paupers who would demand support as a right and refuse to work.2 Thus while thousands of Englishwomen followed the advice of Hannah More in the early decades of the nineteenth century and took up the practice of visiting the poor or joined Name /V2007/V2007_CH03 12/19/01 06:01AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 82 # 2 societies that sponsored charitable works, these philanthropic practices were being hotly debated. Although few would have denied the need for any philanthropy at all, many urged that philanthropic practice must be reconciled with the laws of political economy; others, such as More, saw it as a way to generalize paternalism so it could serve as a model for social relations in urban and industrialized, as well as traditional agricultural, settings. Adherents of both political economy and a revitalized paternalism , however, shared a growing concern about the effects of charity on its working-class recipients in what seemed a time of serious economic and social upheaval. With philanthropy under attack, of course, the role of women within it was also jeopardized; what direction philanthropic practice would take was thus of crucial import to women anxious to preserve —and extend—the usefulness and authority More’s writings had seemed to guarantee them. It is ironic that, despite a documented increase in the number of women performing charitable work, most of the women writers whose works were published in the decades immediately following the publication of More’s works were less confident about representing women doing philanthropic work. Although few literary or nonliterary works written between 1809 and the late 1830s portray women performing philanthropic works on the scale represented in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall or Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife, many novels aimed at a female readership do assume charitable activity as a natural feature of a wealthy woman’s life— especially if the woman belongs to the landed classes or is the wife or daughter of a clergyman. A brief but important scene in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), for instance, shows the heroine visiting the poor and exercising a benevolent understanding and influence that her less genteel friend Harriet cannot match (56). Emma’s aptitude for charity is one of the redeeming qualities that qualifies her to marry Mr. Knightley, the most notable paternal figure in the community; as his wife, she will exercise the traditional authority of a Lady Bountiful, a role that many saw as even more crucial in the nineteenth century than it had been in the eighteenth.3 Even the silver-fork novels popular in the 1820s presume that their aristocratic heroines will demonstrate their worthiness by the appropriate administration of charity.4 Although philanthropic work is assumed as part of a woman’s role in these works, however, none focus more than passing attention on it. 82 Hannah More’s Heirs Name /V2007/V2007_CH03 12/19/01 06:01AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 83 # 3 By the 1830s, however, three key women writers took up More’s strategy of using the discourse of philanthropy as a way to enter public debates about important economic and political issues. Although her opinions differed from More...