THE LIMITS OF SYMPATHY: PROFESSIONAL PHILANTHROPY
AND DETACHMENT IN NARRATIVE, 1869-1914
By
Erin Elizabeth Beard

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
English—Doctor of Philosophy
2017

ABSTRACT
THE LIMITS OF SYMPATHY: PROFESSIONAL PHILANTHROPY
AND DETACHMENT IN NARRATIVE, 1869-1914
By
Erin Elizabeth Beard
The Limits of Sympathy intervenes in the scholarly conversation surrounding the
relationship between philanthropic reform and the novel as well as the role of women in
philanthropic work during late Victorian England. Importantly, this project brings archival texts,
such as the philanthropic case reports of the Charity Organisation Society, into the conversation
in order to demonstrate how the professionalization of philanthropy eliminated the role of
sympathy in philanthropic work and narrative. Where philanthropic texts created new narrative
forms to grapple with the New Poor Laws and the changing urban environment of late Victorian
London, novels by George Eliot, Walter Besant, H. G. Wells, Edith Johnstone, and Isabella Ford
considered how the adoption of professionalized, distanced discourse affected women’s
perception of and participation in philanthropic work. These novels demonstrate how our current
critical reliance on sympathy as a way to mediate the relationship between philanthropic and
poor characters, as well as between reader and novel, no longer works within the context of
professionalized philanthropy.

Copyright by
ERIN ELIZABETH BEARD
2017

To Scott

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to many people who have been alongside me during
this intense personal and academic journey. My life is richer and more interesting because of
this process.
Many thanks go to the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University for their
financial support through the Summer College Research Abroad Monies (SCRAM) grant, which
allowed me to spend a very enjoyable month in London in the archives, and the Dissertation
Completion Fellowship. Thanks also to the London Metropolitan Archives and the Salvation
Army International Heritage Centre for access to their archives, as well as Family Action for
permission to access the case reports of Charity Organisation Society.
A great deal of thanks goes to my dissertation committee. Dr. Judith Stoddart was
wonderfully supportive, and I enjoyed our discussions. I’m grateful for her constant guidance,
detailed reading, and understanding of my project. Dr. Natalie Phillips was enthusiastic and
incredibly generous with her time, and her advice was spot-on. Dr. Zarena Aslami and Dr.
Justus Nieland always offered helpful insight on my research and writing.
I am eternally grateful to Dr. Emily Walker Heady, who introduced me to Victorian
literature. Her profound academic and personal support inspired me to begin this process and
guided me through a transformative period in my life.
I will always fondly remember the encouragement and collegiality of the Victorian
Reading Group. Thank you, Shannon Sears and Stephen Grandchamp, for reading over many
drafts of this project in its early stages and for showing me the best parts of graduate school life.
I am grateful to my family for being supportive through the ups and downs. Mom, your

v

strength is inspirational. Dad, thanks for being there when I needed you. Brian and Rita, your
heartfelt positivity and encouragement was essential.
Finally, I am grateful for my partner, Scott, whose belief in me was invaluable. Thank
you for sharing this project with me and for encouraging me when I needed it the most. We did
it.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION…………………..…………………………………………………………….1
The Limits of Sympathy……………………………………………………………………….….1
CHAPTER ONE…………………………………………………………………………………42
Ethical Forms of Feeling: Eliot’s Rejection of Sympathy in Middlemarch……………………..42
CHAPTER TWO………………………………………………………………………………...75
“The Vice of Charity”: The Narrative Transformation of Sympathy in the Writing of the Charity
Organisation Society……………………………………………………………………..75
CHAPTER THREE…………………………………………………….………………………114
“I Sheltered Myself Behind Myself”: The Paradox of Feminist Philanthropy in The Wife of Sir
Isaac Harman and All Sorts and Conditions of Men…………………………………...114
CHAPTER FOUR………………………………………………………………………………153
“As far off as ever”: Female Sisterhood and Philanthropy in A Sunless Heart and On the
Threshold……………………………………………………………………………….153
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………177

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INTRODUCTION
The Limits of Sympathy

In the July-December 1897 edition of the Charity Organisation Review, one Hilda Mace
narrated her perspective on the methodology of philanthropy by telling a story about a benefactor
and helper of the poor who she did not at all admire:
In these latter days of enlightenment with regard to philanthropy we are apt to
look back with faces full of scorn towards those good old philanthropists who
lived in the darker ages, and to pass judgments stern and decisive upon them and
their methods. We pay a visit perchance to some country parish, and in an out-ofthe-way corner of the vicarage or vestry we find an old yellowish board covered
with black letters, before which we stand with hearts of wondering anger, and
read the sad tale those black letters have to tell us. Josiah Bell, we learn, was a
gentleman who, before dying, saw fit, like many another gentleman, to make a
last will and testament. In this last will and testament he ordered the yearly rent
of certain lands, which amounted to some forty shillings, to be distributed to poor
and impotent people in the parish, and the discretion of the minster and
churchwardens. We read it. We think of the numbers like it we have read. We
think of the numbers like it we have never read. And we cry aloud in our despair,
‘Oh foolish and short-sighted Josiah Bell! If you only knew of the evil
temptations you have brought to those said poor and impotent people. If you only
knew the hard words you have caused to be heaped upon that unfortunate
minister. If you only knew of the bitter feelings and jealousies which have arisen

1

in the hearts of those people not considered poor and impotent enough for a share
in your forty shillings!’” (22)
Remarkably, although Josiah Bell was caring enough to distribute some of his estate to the poor,
Hilda Mace can only heap scorn upon his legacy. Even more strangely, Mace imbues her
narrative in a report about the current world of philanthropy, not with gratitude and sentimental
stories of the poor who Josiah Bell helped, but with a tone of misery, jealousy, stupidity, and
even evil. Yet Mace’s narrative was deemed fit to publish in the important periodical of a major
philanthropic organization of the late nineteenth century. This periodical contained the latest
developments in the dominant field of professional philanthropy, of which Mace herself was a
proponent. She marks out the territory between old and new philanthropy by casting the local
parish as an inefficient and deeply dismaying waste of resources and calls it “apt.” Josiah Bell’s
shortsightedness did not help the poor but did the exact opposite: his gift made miserable the
lives of the minister and his parishioners. Bell’s major character flaw was his lack of
discernment, and the major problem with the method of distributing philanthropic gifts in this
way was its subjectivity: the injustice of choosing some poor over others to give to without
judgment caused a societal rift that affected each member of the parish.
Yet Mace’s outlook on philanthropy followed the trend of professionalized philanthropy
in the late nineteenth century, which from the founding of the Charity Organisation Society
(COS) in 1869, became the dominant mode of giving in Britain and expanded worldwide. The
problem that mace sets up in her narrative, that of old philanthropy’s indiscriminate giving,
required reforming. As philanthropy professionalized, philanthropists worked with the goal of
eliminating this subjective and indiscriminate giving by initiating an organized, objective system
for determining which poor would receive help. No longer would Josiah Bell write an

2

amendment on his will, these new philanthropists hoped, but would instead give his money to an
organization who could put it to good use and distribute it systematically. The Charity
Organisation Society aimed to move from one man giving his money to the minister, who would
then determine, using his own judgment, who would receive the money, to a highly mediated and
bureaucratic charitable machine that employed hundreds of agents and board members who
would use an elaborate schema to gather masses of information about each person who asked for
help, money, or material goods. Josiah Bell may have been moved to give to the poor based on
an emotional response, but the philanthropists of the COS could rest upon a much more scientific
way of determining who would receive its money. By introducing bureaucratic machinery into
the methodology of charitable giving, the Charity Organisation Society also changed the way
that philanthropic work mediated relationships between philanthropists and the poor, as well as
other philanthropists.
This dissertation compares the use of objectivity in philanthropic texts, such as annual
reports, case reports, and periodical publications, to that of the novels of George Eliot, Walter
Besant, H. G. Wells, Edith Johnstone, and Isabella Ford in order to examine how
professionalized methodologies changed the way that philanthropists understood their
relationships with the poor and with each other. The archives of the Charity Organisation
Society, of which Hilda Mace’s essay was a part, as well as those of other minor philanthropic
organizations, provide an extensive and detailed definition of the way that professionalism
changed the way that narratives about the poor were structured as well as a record of a
bureaucratic response to changing economic and social conditions with the ultimate goal of
solving poverty on a large scale. As philanthropy professionalized and moved away from an
emphasis on sympathy with the poor, relationships within the philanthropic encounter began to

3

take on a different form. The philanthropic texts and novels read in this dissertation illustrate
how sympathy was not the way by which philanthropic reformers trained readers how to relate to
the poor. Critically, each reading of the texts in this dissertation frames the relationships
between the poor and the rich as no longer characterized by subjective fellow-feeling or
sympathy. Importantly, philanthropists trained readers within the context of increasingly
professionalized and bureaucratic ways of mediating relationships; their motivations for the
rejection of sympathy arose out of the recognition that large-scale philanthropy could not be
accomplished via small-scale personal encounters and narratives about individual people.
Philanthropic reform in the mid- to late-nineteenth century became necessary because of
important cultural and economic changes. First, in order to understand why philanthropic
organizations wanted to reform philanthropic methodology, it is necessary to discuss the
changing economic and social conditions that necessitated philanthropic reform. Changes to the
Poor Laws1 in the early nineteenth century, increased urban anonymity, and the dissolution of the
parish system changed the ways that the poor interacted with the rich and the ways that
relationships could be described in narrative terms. As rural, close-knit communities were no
longer the primary way that the poor could seek help when they needed it, and as cities and large
industrial centers drew more and more people way from the country, it became more difficult for
philanthropists to know first-hand those that they intended to help. Friedrich Engels documents
such conditions in The Condition of the Working Class in England2: his impression of London

1

For more on the New Poor Law of 1834, particularly as it relates to the Charity Organisation Society, see: Robert
Humphreys, Poor Relief and Charity 1869-1945; Charles Loch Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society 18691913: Its Ideas and Work; Steve Hindle, On the Parish?: The Micro Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c.
1550-1750; Jane Lewis, The Voluntary Sector, the State and Social Work in Britain: The Charity Organisation
Society/Family Welfare Association since 1869; Helen Bosanquet, Social Work in London 1869-1912; Anthony
Brundage, The English Poor Laws, 1700-1930.
2
Particularly the chapter “The Great Towns.”

4

was that great masses of isolated people did not appear to care about anyone else, a condition
exacerbated by the hideous living and working conditions and the uncertainty of well being that
the working classes experienced each day and on a mass scale: “The brutal indifference, the
unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the
more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space” (24). For Engels, crowding
only served to amplify the urban individual’s indifference to those around him, making isolation
a “fundamental principle of our society” (24). Philanthropists, recognizing this troubling
condition, understood that sympathy could only succeed in reforming philanthropic practices if it
happened in the context of a close-knit social environment. Realizing this was no longer
possible under the urban conditions such as those that Engel describes, reformers sought to
alleviate poverty through philanthropy that focused on gathering information rather than
engendering sympathy, as this introduction will explain.
Additionally, as the Poor Laws changed and the state was no longer a major source of
funding for philanthropy, private charities had to step in to fill the deficit in funding. The Poor
Law Amendment Act of 1834, or the New Poor Law, completely changed the landscape by
which the poor received charity. Importantly, the New Poor Law made two major changes that
led to the philanthropic reform that this dissertation discusses. The law restructured the
administration of charity from the parish system of the Old Poor Law to Poor Law Unions,
which centered around workhouses. It also encouraged outdoor relief (donations of goods or
money) from private parties as the primary means of charitable giving by making indoor relief
(shelter and work at workhouses) under the New Poor Law only accessible to the most destitute
of the poor. These structural changes, meant to reduce the tax rate of land-owning parties in
Great Britain, led to a problem that philanthropic organizations were left to deal with on their

5

own: that of a large gap in resources for those who needed assistance but were not destitute
enough to qualify for assistance from the state. The old parish system, while sometimes lacking
enough resources to assist those under local purview, had the benefit of localized knowledge and
acquaintance with the poor within the parish. While each parish interpreted the Old Poor Law
differently, the Settlement Act of 1662 dictated that each parish was responsible for its residents
only. This meant that the details of poor residents could be better known by parishes, as they had
an established presence within the administrative area. Since residency was established by birth,
marriage, or apprenticeship, migrants were not eligible for help under the Old Poor Law. The
New Poor Law established larger administrative areas by grouping parishes together and making
those areas responsible for determining the eligibility of the poor for residence in a workhouse.
Eligibility standards were not necessarily based on residency but on willingness to endure the
conditions of a workhouse, which were criticized by reformers as demeaning and only for those
so destitute that they had no other options. This new, very low standard of eligibility for state
assistance was meant to encourage the poor not to seek help from the state, but it had the effect
of leaving a large portion of the population with no source of public assistance. Private
charitable organizations were left to step in to help the population of the poor who were not able
to work or who found themselves in difficulty but were not destitute enough for the workhouse.
These gaps in assistance created by the New Poor Law created an environment for the
reform of charitable practice. First, charities could no longer rely on personal knowledge of the
poor that was more likely in a small, local setting like the parish. As charities stepped in to help
the poor whom the state would not help, they needed to create systems that would allow them to
understand individual living conditions of the poor, their history, and their character. Second,
charities called for a move away from the outdoor relief that the New Poor Laws encouraged,

6

arguing that it created more dependence on help from either the state or from private parties. In
the era of self-help, charities began to focus on giving the poor the kind of assistance that would
set them up for prolonged future success rather than giving them material goods or monetary
assistance that would, in their view, only serve as a stop-gap for an immediate problem rather
than a solution to the larger problem of poverty.
In this spirit of reform, organizations such as the Charity Organisation Society (COS),
which is central to this dissertation, stepped in to help those who were not eligible for assistance
under the New Poor Law. They focused on solving the larger problem of poverty rather than
simply helping the poor in temporary ways. In order to use resources wisely and solve poverty
more efficiently, organizations such as the COS focused on helping only the poor who showed
potential to lift themselves out of poverty. They could demonstrate this potential by having good
character, thus proving that they were already responsible people who had only fallen on hard
times; they simply needed some guidance. They could also prove the ability to lift themselves
out of poverty with letters of recommendation from a trusted source who knew that the poor
individual in question was not simply asking for money or lying about her situation in order to
get help or resources that she did not necessarily need. In order to determine the character of a
poor individual, the COS created an elaborate system to gather and record information about the
individual and to organize resources by which the poor could be pulled out of poverty. The
organization’s primary goal was to quickly move the poor through the system in such a way that
they would never need its help again. The COS also avoided giving outdoor relief as much as
possible. Rather than giving money or goods to the poor, agents of the COS referred them to
work, insurance organizations, or other private parties. To the COS, this kind of help would not
create more poverty by making the poor reliant on assistance of any kind.

7

The Charity Organisation Society was a prominent example of the larger trend of
professionalized philanthropy. One of the largest such organizations of its kind in terms of
geographical reach and influence3, the COS had a strong influence on domestic policy and was
globally recognized as offering the best solution for increasing poverty.4 As implied by its name,
the COS intended to become a clearing house for all charities, which would expand its
philosophical scope as well. Philanthropies like the Charity Organisation Society were the result
of an increasingly professionalized, bureaucratic environment. Philanthropies were organized at
the same time that professionalism as a term was increasingly associated with bureaucracy, as
Magali Sarfatti Larson argues in The Rise of Professionalism. Larson argues that
professionalization is “the process by which producers of special services sought to constitute
and control a market for their expertise” (xvi). In this case, the “market” for the COS was
charity work, charitable agencies, and the public, as well as governmental policy: The COS
“hope[d] to bring about the improvement in the relations between the rich and the poor which
they aim at by obtaining the frank co-operation of the various relief agencies, and by enlisting
the [ . . . ] active help, in person as well as in money, or a large section of the public” (5,
emphasis original). In this way, the COS aimed to become an authority on the methodology of
solving poverty by disseminating its methods through the proliferation of chapters and by
influencing government policy.

3

The COS had chapters throughout England as well as in the United States, Europe, and the British Empire. By
1882, there were 125 Charity Organization Societies throughout the world, particularly in Europe and the greater
British Empire, and by 1896, there were 125 chapters in the United States. (familyaction.org.uk)
4
Robert Humphreys says that the COS “commanded a position of omnipotence on all social matters” (2) in Poor
Relief and Charity, 1869-1945. He also mentions that the COS’s influence was even more prominent in the United
States, where “No USA city was without a Society claiming to practice the principles originating from London
COS” (2). The COS kept a list of all organizations in Great Britain and the United States that operated using its
methodology.

8

The Charity Organisation Society’s professionalized methodology arose out of a
nineteenth-century trend towards empirical, fact-based knowledge production. In History of the
Modern Fact, Mary Poovey traces the tension in the way that “fact” creates knowledge. In
particular, this tension centers around the way that the fact represents its object: the
“epistemological unit of the fact has registered the tension between the richness and variety
embodied in concrete phenomena and the uniform, rule-governed order of humanly contrived
systems” (1). Fact represents its object as part of a predictable and observable system. By
relying on data gathering and recording information about the poor, the COS sought to make the
poor units in an observable system. Their interactions with the poor were thus mediated by factbased systemic knowledge rather than emotional knowledge or sympathy. She notes that this
tension results in two interpretations of fact: “incontrovertible data that simply demonstrate what
is true” and data that are “manufactured and informed by all the social and personal factors that
go into every act of human creation” (1). These two interpretations register particularly strongly
in the COS’s argument about numbers being representative of the complicated lives of the poor,
which is discussed in chapter two. The COS, in its desire to remove sympathy from
philanthropic work, recognized the tension between treating a person like a unit of data and
understanding the personal needs of that person. Poovey’s argument that the modern fact is a
“battleground” (2) for the production of knowledge, I argue, is one reason why the COS, even as
it sought to reform philanthropic methodology from sympathy to data gathering, still mentions
sympathy as a way to raise funds. This tension underlies the way that this introduction explains
how removing sympathy from philanthropic work was central to the professionalization of
philanthropy in the late nineteenth century. Emotionally based, relational ways of building
knowledge about the poor were replaced by empirical, fact-based ways of building knowledge.

9

The Charity Organisation Society’s reliance on fact and on data gathering meant that the
success of philanthropy would be heretofore measured by statistical data rather than
understanding the poor as individuals. Upon the establishment of the COS in 1869, sympathy,
that is, understanding the individual needs of the poor or cultivating sympathetic attachment in
philanthropists, was no longer the desired outcome of philanthropic work. While the COS used
the term “sympathy” frequently, it was a meaningless term as it did not have any bearing on the
COS’s practice of philanthropy. As philanthropic reform happened, data replaced relationships,
as chapter two will discuss in depth. But, as the word “reform” implies, the reshaping process is
never smooth, and tension between data and relationships remained. Philanthropic reform is a
concrete example of Poovey’s argument about the tension within the epistemological unit of the
fact. Even as philanthropists sought to create fact-based data about the poor, they had to contend
with the “richness and variety” of first-person accounts, the kind that could bend philanthropic
judgment away from a “rule-governed order of humanly contrived systems” (Poovey 1). Where
philanthropists strived to make fact-based, concrete claims about both poverty and the way that
the individual poor suffered, exercising sympathy could look too much like the older way of
doing philanthropy. At the same time, this reliance on fact-based knowledge required that the
COS call into question the usefulness of sympathy in the philanthropic encounter. Where once
sympathy might have seemed to be a necessary part of charitable work, in that one could
exercise sympathy in the parish system because of close personal contact with the poor,
sympathy was becoming beside the point in a new environment where gathering statistical
knowledge was the primary goal. Sympathy required a personal connection to the poor in an
environment where larger administrative areas and increasing poverty placed small-scale
sympathy at odds with large-scale problems. Even more importantly to the COS, sympathy

10

could be a distraction from solving the larger problem of poverty, because it encouraged small,
reactionary solutions, such as giving money to a beggar on the street when immediately
confronted with both the suffering of the poor and the emotional reaction that one would have in
response to such suffering. In short, sympathy could no longer be the standard of measurement
for the philanthropic encounter when collecting data about large-scale poverty was a more
pressing concern.
This shift away from sympathy can even be traced, not only through the way that
philanthropists desired to reform how they gathered knowledge about the poor, but through the
word “philanthropy” itself. “Philanthropy” underwent a notable connotative shift in the midnineteenth century. Where, prior to the 1850s “philanthropy” primarily connoted an emotional
attachment between the rich and the poor, based on its Latin roots (love for humanity), the term
became a more concrete noun in the latter half of the nineteenth century, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary, connoting an actual organization that gained authority from its empirical
methodology. This shift in usage of the term reflects the shift in methodology traced above. It
illustrates the way that philanthropy was redefined away from creating knowledge of the poor
through personal connections that sympathy enabled and towards a professionalized, organized
way of creating large-scale statistical knowledge through the schema of fact.
Philanthropic organizations played an important role in shaping the narrative style that
enabled them to train their agents to “read” the poor. As philanthropy moved towards the
professional and empirical, with the goal of solving large-scale poverty, and away from smallscale, sympathetic interactions with individuals, this shift had direct effects on the methods that
philanthropists could use to train its agents to relate to the poor. This training was based in
large-scale, systematized, literally “formal” narrative strategies that devalued personalized, first-

11

person, face-to-face encounters. Organizational methodology that prioritized statistical data was
the primary way that philanthropic organizations enacted reform by training “readers” of the
poor to imagine their relationships with them as data-gathering interactions or character
evaluations. Because of this, personal interactions based in emotional connection or reading
situations based in first-person narratives were no longer effective, because they operated with
the goal of creating sympathetic relationships rather than gathering verifiable information.
Training agents to read the poor was a way for the COS to counteract the dangers of too
many readers of the poor. The ubiquity of poverty made it so that one had opportunities to read
the poor on the street, in novels, and when making decisions about whether or not to make
philanthropic gifts, from giving money to a beggar on the street to subscribing to a charitable
organization. At first, the COS was called “Society for Organizing Charitable Relief and
Repressing Mendicity,” because its initial goal was to move beggars from the street and thus
remove the temptation for people on the street to pity the poor and give indiscriminately.
Therefore, it was necessary to train agents to read the poor in a way that was acceptable by the
COS, which considered itself better equipped to solve poverty than the general public. The
methodology of training, outlined in chapter two, revolved around changing conceptions of how
sympathy worked in narrative and between the public and the poor. Readers were trained to
distrust emotional reaction and to trust the scientific, factual methodology that the COS used.
On a more professional level, the COS trained philanthropic agents in its own method. These
agents worked for the organization, and they recorded information about the poor and made
judgments about who was deserving of help. These are the most obvious methods of training by
the organization, but this dissertation also argues that the COS’s creation of a new narrative style
reached beyond its own publications to novels. Philanthropies participated in a broader cultural

12

tradition of didacticism, and the narrative style of the COS influenced novels in their
representations of philanthropy. In this way, the training of philanthropic organizations extended
to the readers of novels about philanthropy.
As a result, this shift in the methodology of training readers bled over into representations
of philanthropy. The ways that philanthropic organizations used empirical techniques to train
readers to read the poor changed the way that novels thought about how characters related to
each other when they were giving or receiving philanthropy. Within professionalized
philanthropy, this encounter involved a variety of different mediators: relationships were
mediated through the organizational structure of professional philanthropy, with its forms and
personnel; through the values of professionalized philanthropy, which included an emphasis on
objectivity rather than sympathetic attachment; and through personal interactions between the
philanthropist or agent and the poor. The immediacy of an encounter with a poor character, such
as in a Dickens novel, and the way it encouraged an immediate response to the poor on their own
terms, was no longer an “efficient” way of thinking about solving the problems of poverty.
Narrative techniques, such as characterization and its engendering of sympathy, of the novels in
this dissertation, which are characterized by their willingness to grapple with the changing
methodology of philanthropy, became complicated in the wake of a philanthropic environment
where bureaucratic distance and efficiency was considered to be a better way of structuring the
philanthropist’s relationships with the poor. However, the critical conversation around the social
problem novel has not yet registered this shift, since its focus is upon sympathy as the way by
which the Victorian novel trained readers to interact with the poor. This dissertation argues that
much of our current criticism about the social problem novel hinges on sympathy as a way of
teaching its readers how to interact with the poor. However, as some novels dealt with changes

13

in philanthropic method, they also recognized the limits of sympathy to engender understanding
between characters, as well as between the characters and the reader.
Scholarship around Victorian literature has long noted the centrality of reading to
Victorian culture, personal development, and as a way to mediate experience. This dissertation
builds upon such work by recognizing the centrality of the relationship between text and reader
as a way to disseminate cultural values, or to “train” a reader using the protocols of narrative.
Rachel Ablow’s collection of essays, The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and
Victorian Literature, performs an important intervention in the way that we understand how
Victorians experienced reading. Beginning with the premise that “reading was commonly
regarded as at least as valuable as an affective experience as it was as a way to convey
information or increase understanding” (2), Ablow counters D. A. Miller’s assertion that readerly
absorption is “an insidious means by which we are interpellated into a social order” (1). Ablow
also notes that the nineteenth century was a time of “massive growth” in both literacy and
available texts (4), making the reading experience more central to the daily life of Victorians
generally. While the essay collection focuses on the “issues of physical and emotional feeling”
(4) in reading, it also acknowledges that protocols of reading can vary, that “feeling with” is not
always a given way of reading a text:
Like the Victorians, we are witnessing a vast shift in popular practices and
conceptions of reading. In an age of the Web, text-messaging, Twitter, and
Kindle, many have asked how changing protocols of reading will affect our
culture more generally. The essays in this collection [ . . . ] begin to suggest the
nature and the range of practices against which new developments need to be
evaluated. [ . . . ] Perhaps most important, they indicate how we might begin to

14

move beyond the rather limited range of terms in which reading all too often
described. In broadening our conceptual vocabulary, the essays in this collection
help us begin to reconceive the variety of ways in which texts work. Texts in
these essays serve not just as sources of information or even as objects of
identification. Instead, they function as barriers, windows, screens; [ . . . ]
Reading emerges from these essays as one of the most intriguing and mysterious
of practices not just because of its apparent privacy or individuality, but also
because of the significance of its consequences, and because those
consequences—affective, cognitive, social, and political—can never be fully
determined in advance. (9-10)
Ablow’s assertion here provides an interpretive opening for the work of this dissertation, which
is to examine how changing protocols of reading the poor affected the reader’s relationship with
the poor or how it affected their own understanding of their roles as philanthropist. “Feeling” is
a rather broad term that can certainly refer to sympathetic identification, but Ablow also draws
our attention to other forms of feeling and indeed calls for a look beyond the “rather limited
range of terms,” namely, sympathetic identification that scholars examine frequently. Indeed,
chapter two lays out the new protocols of reading for philanthropists, and the novels in this
dissertation are all examples of protocols other than sympathy. The protocols of reading in these
works are highly mediated, multi-layered, and even frustrating or alienating. Some of them
reject sympathy outright by showing its failures, and others institute a protocol of detachment by
using motifs of disguise, narrative claustrophobia, and professionalism. This dissertation aims to
look the protocols of philanthropic reading in a new way.

15

Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 is a touchstone text for understanding how
female readers were perceived in Victorian culture. It is also a good example of the reliance
upon sympathetic identification as the primary form of reading experience for Victorians, noting
as it does the “ability to venture with sympathetic identification into the lives of others, [which]
guaranteed that that women’s susceptibility to identificatory modes of reading was perceived to
be related to the inescapable facts about the way in which her biological make-up influenced the
operations of her mind” (31). Flint’s argument revolves around an evaluation of whether or not
this identification was dangerous for women or not. While Victorians believed that the passivity
and introspection of identificatory reading could be dangerous for women and negatively affect
their ability to perform the tasks necessary to running a household or being social, Flint argues
that such a reading method could create a space for resistance to the “pressure of liv[ing] up to
[feminine] values” (32) or could “[provide] a reader with vicarious means of experiencing
empowerment” (190) or that “acknowledging and regretting the effects on a fictional character is
the first step [ . . . ] in the readers’s [sic] own critical examination of their own position within
society” (297) or could provide a site for sociality and shared subjectivity between women (299).
On one hand, Flint’s argument accounts for the prevalence of the belief during the Victorian era
that sympathy as a reading method could be harmful for the functioning of society, something
that philanthropic reformers also believed and sought to eliminate from their reading protocol.
The historical belief in the danger of sympathy was phenomenon that led philanthropic reformers
to find new ways of training readers. In this way, Flint’s historical work provides context for the
reason why philanthropists would want to move away from sympathy as a reading protocol. On
the other hand, Flint’s argument also redeems the value of sympathetic identification for women
as a site of resistance to traditional femininity, an argument that parallels much of the scholarship

16

on female philanthropy, which also cites sympathy as the way by which female philanthropists
could both avoid the dangerous passivity of sympathetic identification (since philanthropy
provided a unique venue in which sympathy could become active) and could resist traditional
feminine gender roles by working in the public sphere. Chapters three and four, however,
demonstrate how using female philanthropy as both traditionally feminine and resistant to
traditional values became more complicated as a result of the professionalization of
philanthropy. This dissertation begins from the foundational work of these scholars on the
primacy of reading experience in Victorian culture and its influence on Victorians’ moral sense.
From there, it looks at the specific techniques used by philanthropists to influence the ethics of
sympathizing with the poor. Because novel reading was so central to Victorians’ affective
relationship with the poor and their understanding of what should be done about it,
philanthropists could easily use novelistic style and narrative sympathy to influence the public to
rally around their reformist methodologies.
However, this dissertation departs from the current conversation around didactic uses of
the novel where it focuses on sympathy as the way of training readers. The protocol for training
readers has long been based in sympathetic identification, but the training methods of the COS
are a prominent example of where sympathy had been rejected as a central training protocol. A
recent example of the dominant theme of sympathy in Victorian scholarship is in Rae Greiner’s
Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, which argues that the realist novel
and sympathy are nearly identical, or at the most, mutually structurally dependent: “By depicting
social reality as a product of fellow-feeling, the realist novel portrays the real as both fictive and
sympathetic” (10). For Greiner, sympathy is central to the way that the realist novel trains
readers, because sympathy’s protocols are found in both the realist novel and social interactions.

17

Greiner’s major intervention is focused around redefining sympathy from affective to cognitive
rather than questioning its viability, and as such she preserves sympathy as the primary training
protocol of the novel. This carries over into her reading of Dickens where she shows us a new
way of considering Dickensian sympathy, which “meant dwelling in [the poor’s] sentences
rather than in their skins” (89). Greiner’s reading identifies the way that Dickens used language
in order to confront the discord between individuals in an urban environment, a discord that both
Engels and the COS identified in their understanding of urban anonymity. Greiner’s reading of
Dickens follows with the traditional understanding of the way that a social problem novel trained
readers where she says that “we might say that estrangement is the underlying condition and
sympathy a way to combat it” (88). Dickens’s political idealism, as Greiner points out here,
relied on sympathy to solve the dystopia of mid nineteenth-century London. It was certainly
influential on mid-century understandings of ways of relating to the poor, yet even as the COS
recognized Dickens’s influence, the organization could not put it into practice. But in the case of
the COS, its organizational apparatus and large scale necessitated a different combat strategy.
The solution was not to create more individual interaction but to collect vast data sets that could
be used to solve the larger problem of poverty. As a result, we cannot rely on readings of
Dickensian sympathy, or the training techniques of the social problem novel, to understand how
the COS tried to relate to the poor. Where Greiner preserves sympathy as central to the reform
work of the social problem novel, she also overlooks a social context where sympathy was no
longer accepted as a way of facilitating reform work. This dissertation considers this social
context as central to an understanding of why some social problem novels do not fit the critical
mold of sympathy as a training readers to interact with the poor.

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This dissertation does not contest the centrality of didacticism as a mediator in the
reading experience of Victorians. Instead, this dissertation considers the ways that philanthropic
organizations adapted didacticism for their own use. Dickens was influential, and the COS used
his influence to gradually shift philanthropic methodology from that of the personal encounters
of the early century before the New Poor Law to that of data gathering and character verification
of later philanthropic reform. This dissertation does, however, question the centrality of
sympathy in contemporary criticism as a way understanding the reader’s relationship to the text
and as a way of constituting relationships between philanthropist and poor characters. The role of
sympathy in narrative in the social problem novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens are
good examples of the old way of structuring a philanthropist’s relationship with the poor. In
Dickens’s Bleak House and Gaskell’s Mary Barton, the conflict of the plot centers around the
ability of sympathy to correct the problems of philanthropy and to have a major role in creating
the kind of knowledge about the poor that leads to action on their behalf.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton makes it clear that the social problem novel’s anxiety
focused around the ability of sympathy and documentation, for which Gaskell is famous, to train
readers to feel for unlikable characters that they would otherwise dismiss as irresponsible. In
Mary Barton, the novel’s namesake working-class character and her father hold radical
viewpoints about the divide between factory workers and those who run the factories. Mary
becomes a woman of active conviction after she believes that Jem Wilson, another working-class
factory employee, has been wrongly accused of murder. At the same time, Mary believes that
she may have inadvertently caused the murder, for which she feels melodramatically guilty. In a
pivotal scene, Mary discusses her guilt with her prostitute aunt Esther, whose realistic
assessment of Mary’s good fortune corrects her tendency to overreact to misfortune. The scene

19

trains readers to sympathize with characters, even those who are misguided, by using Esther’s
realistic outlook on the world to correct Esther’s overreaction and by documenting the faces of
the characters in close detail.5 The novel’s ethical investment in the fellow-feeling of sympathy
is illustrated by its anxiety about the transparency of faces and the specific conditions under
which sympathy can occur: “The candle was placed right between them, and Esther moved it in
order to have a clearer view of Mary’s face, so that she might read her emotions, and ascertain
her interests” (Gaskell 307). The reading of emotions requires specific conditions for its success:
Esther must be able to see Mary’s face so that she can discover, and thereby know, the way that
Mary is feeling. Reading the emotions of another person first requires proximity; the scene of
sympathy here is an intimate conversation between two people. Furthermore, there are only two
people in the room, which removes distractions from the two women’s personal interaction that
large numbers of people might cause. The way that Mary “longed to open her wretched,
wretched heart” to Esther, even while she “refrained, from dread of the averted eye, the altered
voice, the internal loathing, which she feared such disclosure might create” (307), demonstrates
that the central anxiety of the scene centers around sympathy’s success. In other words, the
novel is invested in a character’s ability to use sympathy to reveal the emotions of another person
even while she demonstrates anxiety about its failure. Here, the moment of sympathy, because it
is based in a realistic outlook as well as realist description, illustrates the most ethical way of
feeling for the poor and acting on one’s feeling.
5

Catherine Gallagher, in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, also notices the ambivalence regarding
moral obligation to the poor other in Mary Barton. Recognizing that the social change that both Mary Barton and
her father desire “enter the narrative as the distorted literary viewpoints of a few characters” (68), Gallagher argues
that Gaskell aims to present these moral viewpoints as limited by the experience and circumstances of the character,
therefore training the reader to have sympathy even for wrong decisions in that they were “designed to keep the . . .
readers’ own opinions from interfering with their ability to follow Barton’s tragedy” (73). Gallagher focuses on the
scene between Mary and Esther because Esther’s realism allows readers to “get an entirely different perspective on
Mary’s reality” (80) at the same time that it shows readers that Esther’s realism is morally superior to Mary’s
melodrama as a motivator for her moral obligations to Jem and the working class more generally.

20

Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is a famous examination of the shortcomings of
philanthropic methodology in the mid-nineteenth century, where sympathy is offered as a
solution to the overly mechanical, cold, and distant ways that philanthropists in the novel
operate. Mrs. Jellyby’s and Mrs. Pardiggle’s disastrous attempts at philanthropy do not
necessarily equate to a full critique of philanthropy itself; instead these caricatures of
philanthropists demonstrate fixable flaws in philanthropic method while the sweet, sympathetic
examples of Esther and Ada offer an alternative way of performing philanthropy that is judged
by their focus on being sympathetic interlocutors with the poor. Mrs. Jellyby’s “telescopic
philanthropy” illustrates her inability to see the suffering of those immediately around her while
her gaze rests on far-off Borrioboola-Gha, which her constant letter-writing fails to improve.
Dickens offers up Esther and Ada as counterexamples to Mrs. Jellyby’s and Mrs. Pardiggle’s
hapless district visiting. While Mrs. Pardiggle is a “vortex” (Dickens 133) of tone-deafness,
Esther takes the time to observe and narrate the emotions and situations of each person in the
house she visits, even while feeling “intrusive and out of place” (132). The girls “approached the
woman sitting by the fire, to ask if her baby were ill” (133), demonstrating a gentle sympathy
that seeks to know more about the people whom Mrs. Pardiggle ignores by having a personal
conversation with them. They observe the situation and are moved by the suffering they see
(134), which inspires a proportionate response in them. Here, Ada’s and Esther’s sympathetic
observation offers a corrective to Mrs. Pardiggle’s “mechanical way of taking possession of
people” (133). If only philanthropists would not impose their own standards onto the poor,
Dickens asks, and would instead take the time to get to know individual poor through sympathy,
philanthropy might improve for the better.

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Further, Dickens illustrates the mediation of sympathy through the first-person narrative
of Esther. Throughout the novel, Esther narrates her observations of other characters in the
novel, and she is offered up as a careful reader of the poor and of other suffering characters. In
multiple chapters entitled “Esther’s Narrative,” Esther carefully observes other characters and
evaluates their motives. She also expresses wishes for their success and happiness. In this way,
Esther is held up as a model of sympathetic judgment and kindness, where her careful
observation guides the reader in evaluation of characters and events in the novel. Her firstperson narration is essential to the reader’s getting to know other characters in the novel and to
their training in being able to evaluate the characters. Her observant narrative voice is an
example of how direct observation and narration of that observation acts to solve problems of
insensitivity to other people; in this case, Esther’s observation creates understanding between
herself and other characters, thus illustrating the way that this narrative style can create fellowfeeling.
The goal of this dissertation is neither to argue with the general landscape of
contemporary interpretations of Dickens’ didacticism nor Greiner’s interpretation of Dickens’s
use of sympathy. Rather, the goal is to demonstrate how many other novels of the late-Victorian
era registered philanthropic reform and its effects on the methodology of training readers,
essentially opening up the canon to other understandings of the function of the novel in reform
work in the nineteenth century. As a result, this dissertation mostly examines novels that have
not dominated the critical discussion around sympathy and philanthropy in the nineteenth
century. Focusing on the social problem novels by Dickens and Gaskell has directed scholarship
around sympathy to discuss how such novels trained readers to become more altruistic, socially
active, or even to become philanthropists themselves. Additionally, the COS’s different

22

approach to sympathy and the problem of urban anonymity requires a different canon. The
novels that this dissertation examines register philanthropic reform in a different way than a
Dickens or Gaskell novel, and they become more legible in scholarship on Victorian literature
and culture when sympathy is not the primary critical lens by which they are viewed.
It is important to look away from Dickens’s and Gaskell’s social problem novels, because
their focus on sympathy, as the engine of social change or the solution to problems with
philanthropy, was increasingly irrelevant to the way that social reformers thought about their
work in the environment of professionalization. While the Charity Organization Society
borrowed from Dickens to make their professionalized methodology of reading the poor more
accessible to the public, the way that they structured their case reports demonstrates that
sympathy was more of a talking point; philanthropists of the COS were neither concerned with
using sympathy in their work nor interested in cultivating sympathy as part of their reformist
goals. Where the narratives of social problem novels created exceptional, individual characters
as objects of sympathy, in that the voice of the individual was a focal point, philanthropic
narratives mediated multiple voices of the poor, their referees, and organizational agents and
unify their voices into a coherent whole that did not contradict their own methodological goals.
In so doing, individual voices of the poor were erased and no longer provided readers with an
individualized object with whom to sympathize. The archives of philanthropic organizations
reveal a more complicated methodology in which philanthropists became increasingly distanced
from the poor they were observing. Direct observation and pure experience, reminiscent of
Mayhew, are not features of the case reports of organizations such as the Charity Organisation
Society. Instead, the COS puts a highly mediated and distanced methodology into place. There
is no single narrator or point of view that accounts for the poor through direct observation;

23

rather, each account of the poor is filtered through a highly bureaucratic system. Each agent of
the COS mediates multiple narratives from many sources and makes decisions that are not fully
based in his own observations. While this narrative is made to look directly observational, as if
only one agent observed the poor and reached conclusions based only on that observation, the
archives reveal a process of information gathering that is much different from pure investigation.
One of this dissertation’s major interventions is to unlink reform work from sympathy.
As discussed previously, the social problem novel has been framed as a social incubator for
sympathetic relationships between readers and the poor: this genre aimed to create the kind of
sympathetic relationships that would lead to better philanthropic methodologies. In other words,
we have framed the realist social problem novel and philanthropic methodologies as always
moving parallel to one another. An example of this way of framing the novel’s relationship to
philanthropy is Frank Christianson’s Philanthropy in British and American Fiction, which offers
an argument for how the mid-century realist novel and modern philanthropy emerged
congruently due to the way that each mediated class relations through a capitalistic version of
social sensibility. His model focuses on the ways that both the realist novel and philanthropic
methodology rely on observation and investigatory techniques to narrow the gap between the
rich and the poor. According to Christianson, the act of reading a realist novel was similar to the
act of performing philanthropy; one simply observed the lives of the poor and recorded what one
observed as a way to understand the experience of the poor. Such an argument relies on
causality: the investigatory techniques of philanthropy influenced the development of the realist
novel as a genre. However, as chapter two discusses in detail and as this introduction mentions
above, “investigatory” is not an accurate term to use to describe the bureaucratic methodology of
the COS, in that it was heavily mediated and synthesized multiple, competing voices.

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This dissertation’s understanding of sympathy’s role in philanthropic practice and reform
requires a new way of framing philanthropy, which this dissertation achieves by considering
philanthropic texts as narratives themselves. Importantly, these narratives were the texts by
which philanthropic agents were trained to read the poor systematically rather than
sympathetically. This new system of philanthropic observation, which is discussed in detail in
chapter two, is rather unlike other, more well-known models of observation and philanthropic
record-keeping. One such model, as used by Christianson, is that of Henry Mayhew.
Christianson argues that realist novels were modeled after a “Mayhew-like narrative mediation,”
which uses an investigative and taxonomic methodology “to delineate sharp boundaries for the
benefit of a middle-class readership for whom social assignation could be notoriously
indeterminate and unstable” (4). The difference between Christianson’s characterization of the
philanthropic imagination and that of the highly bureaucratic Charity Organization Society is
subtle but important. Where Christianson focuses on the single observer, who records and
classifies the poor, mediating them through his own point of view to make the poor suitable for
consumption by the middle class imagination, this dissertation’s reading of the archives of the
COS reveals a mediatory technique that cannot be characterized as filtered through the mind of a
single, distanced observer. The narrative mediation of the COS is increasingly distanced, and
through multiple points of view of members of all classes. In this way, Christianson bases his
argument that philanthropic reform and the novel evolved together on the foundation of a single
observer rather than the bureaucratic machinery that characterized the COS.
The records of the COS reveal the process by which its narrative is constructed, and what
appears to be a single, unified narrative coming from the organization and consumed by the
public is, finally, composed of an endless process of testimony, verification, observation, and

25

judgment calls. Classification breaks down into multi-voiced chaos. While Christianson argues
that “Mayhew-like narrative mediation” owes its existence to an increasingly professionalized
society, the pinnacle of professionalization and bureaucratization that the COS represents
actually creates a multi-layered and nearly baroque narrative that is ultimately unsuitable for
middle-class consumption. In this way, Christianson misses the qualities of professionalized
philanthropy. This narrative structure is not something the COS publicized, which is why it is so
important to examine the case reports and archives of the COS in order to understand its
narrative methodology. These archival materials offer a glimpse at the level where reform work
actually took place, as they give us a look at how agents were primarily trained in the COS’s
methodologies of data gathering rather than in learning to sympathize with the poor.
These archives, then, are key to understanding what a professionalized and
bureaucratized narrative looks like. This dissertation frames the archival records of the Charity
Organisation Society as a collection of narratives in its own right, one that trained readers in its
own techniques. Unlike Mayhew, the goal was not to imagine the poor in a suitable way for
middle-class consumption, but to convince the middle class that imagining the poor was a job
better suited for professional organizations such as the COS. These techniques are not easily
mapped onto novels in a causal way; the novels discussed in this dissertation both use these
techniques and draw out their flaws. In this way, this dissertation argues that these new
techniques require us to look at the relationship between philanthropy and the novel in a way that
does not focus on how novelistic sympathy creates more philanthropists or philanthropic action;
these narratives certainly trained readers to regard the poor differently, but they did not train
readers to act upon what they read or, for example, to become philanthropists themselves.
Rather, the new philanthropic methodology, developed in the case reports and other

26

organizational material of the COS, focuses on creating more readers who were sympathetic with
the organization’s strategies rather than the poor that were featured in its narratives.
Carolyn Betensky’s Feeling for the Poor offers just such a redefinition of what it meant
to feel along with a narrative. Answering the argument that social problem novels were meant to
inspire social action outside of themselves, Betensky instead argues that “Victorian social
problem novels volunteer the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts
that seem daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves,
reading becomes something to do about the pain of the other” (1). In this way, the event of
reading itself becomes the end goal of the social problem novel. Political action is beside the
point, since “Social problem novels teach us to read our own reading, know our own knowledge,
and feel our own feeling about the poor and working classes as important . . .” (6). Didacticism
is still a central feature, but the lesson has changed. Readers learn less about the world around
them or what the poor were “really” like and more about their own understanding of the poor.
This kind of training in reading directed action inward instead of outward.
This dissertation moves beyond Betensky by examining the implications of this shift in
didacticism. It makes two important moves in its critical understanding of how relationships
between philanthropists and the poor operated in professionalized philanthropy: first, it displaces
the centrality of sympathy as an interpretive lens in current scholarship on the Victorian social
problem novel; and second, it examines how other, lesser-known novels trained readers to read
their own relationships with the poor. Each chapter traces the ways that novels attempt to move
between objective and subjective modes of reading the poor along with the complications that
such oscillation creates. Characters in each text negotiate the boundaries between the self and
other within the context of philanthropic work to varying effect. The story of this dissertation is

27

not one of progressive social change brought about by a novel’s sympathetic characterization or
by representations of philanthropic ambition. Rather, its story is that representations of
philanthropy, by both philanthropists themselves and novelists, trained readers to doubt the
effectiveness of sympathy and its use in philanthropic endeavor as a vehicle of social change. It
begins with an examination of an old way of reading the poor with Middlemarch, a novel that
offers a retrospective understanding of sympathy at the beginning of the New Poor Law. It ends
with a look at how the absence of sympathy in philanthropic work caused progressive socialists
in the late nineteenth century to look outside of philanthropy for both alternative forms of
attachment and social change.
Chapter one begins with George Eliot’s Middlemarch in order to frame the way that we
talk about sympathy and the social problem novel now. While the rest of the dissertation focuses
on seldom-read Victorian novels and texts about philanthropy, chapter one sets the tone for the
rest of dissertation by offering a different perspective on a paradigmatic example of Victorian
sympathy and an old way of reading the poor. Several scholars have read Eliot through the
theoretical lens of Adam Smith and the way that he explains sympathetic relationships in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments. This chapter departs from Audrey Jaffe’s and Rae Greiner’s
readings of Eliot by arguing that Eliot formulated an alternative understanding of the novelreader relationship through a doubting narrative voice. As Eliot looked fifty years into the past,
she had the benefit of a perspective that came from the changes to sympathy and philanthropy as
a result of the New Poor Laws, the social context of which this introduction describes. In this
way, chapter one moves away from a model that treats Eliot as a guide for reading other
Victorian social problem novels. Instead, this different perspective on Eliot’s use of sympathy

28

opens up the dissertation to varied understandings of sympathy and the way that it was
destabilized in the novel as result of the professionalization of philanthropy.
This chapter offers a different model of understanding the relationship between sympathy
and philanthropy by demonstrating the ways that they did not operate parallel to each other.
Eliot herself was suspicious of the idea that training readers to be sympathetic could lead to
reform work, yet her use of omniscient narration has long been the focus for scholars who make
the argument that her novels were primarily concerned with creating sympathy. Her narrator’s
omniscient impartiality has been invoked as the method by which Eliot attempts to create
Smithian fellow-feeling between readers and characters because of the way that it structures the
novel’s realist impulses. Instead of interpreting Eliot’s efforts as a way of creating a reality
structured by sympathy, this chapter argues that Eliot understands the work of realism to be
structured by moments where sympathy cannot be achieved or when there are limits to the
exchange of feeling. This chapter provides a reading of “The Natural History of German Life”
as well as a reading of the contrast of feeling and knowing in Middlemarch and The Theory of
Moral Sentiments to support this argument. More specifically, Eliot focuses on the lack of
access to the emotional experiences of others and constructs scenes about sympathy that are
much different than the social problem novels of Dickens and Gaskell that are discussed earlier
in this introduction. Eliot’s narrator doubts her own omniscience rather than trusts its ability to
control the way that the reader perceives characters. Middlemarch, then, trains readers to
recognize these limits and question their own motives in understanding others before rushing out
to change the world, like Dorothea does throughout the novel. A deeper meditation on the limits
of sympathy’s claims to objectivity, rather than the ways that it works well, complicates a simple
idea that sympathy created better relationality between the philanthropist and the poor.

29

Chapter two highlights the ways that sympathy and philanthropy became detached as a
result of the professionalization of philanthropy. It focuses on the Charity Organisation Society
(COS), which was the leading philanthropic organization in London in the late nineteenth
century and influenced charitable methodology outside of Britain, especially in the United States.
The chapter focuses on close readings of archival materials such as case reports (including record
forms, letters, observational notes by agents, and other miscellaneous documents), annual
reports, and periodical publications, beginning with the assumption that these documents
participate in the revision of sympathy in narrative in the same way that the novels in this
dissertation do. The COS responded to increasing urban anonymity and a zeitgeist of
professionalization, explained earlier in the chapter, by creating new philanthropic
methodologies. The primary vehicle for their philanthropic reform was narrative; the COS
changed the way that they gathered and recorded information about the poor, focusing on facts
and multi-voiced observation rather than first-person narratives and first-hand encounters with
the poor.
Chapter two makes important interventions in our understanding of philanthropy and
philanthropic texts. It frames the archival texts of the COS as narratives with literary style and
features rather than documents that can be placed alongside novels as context to them. Because
of that, this dissertation does not map the methods and style of these documents onto novels in
order to create a line of causality between them. Instead, this dissertation understands both
philanthropic texts and novels as taking part of a larger tradition of didacticism in the nineteenth
century, and chapter two contributes to this approach by indicating the ways that philanthropic
texts trained readers in methods of objectivity, which for the COS amounted to a complicated
negotiation between attachment and detachment. This chapter departs from the idea that

30

philanthropy always involved sympathy for the poor, arguing that new techniques of training
readers in the ways of professionalized philanthropy resulted in the separation of sympathy from
philanthropic practice. As a result, sympathy was replaced with systems, and the narrative of the
COS was tightly regulated in a way that focused on filling out forms rather than on preserving
individuality through the creation of portraits of the poor constructed through first-person
narrative. This has important implications for the way that we critique the ethics of philanthropic
practice now. Individual agency of the poor was not affected by philanthropists’ tendency to
label the poor as deserving or undeserving; instead, philanthropists limited individual agency
because of the way that they tightly controlled their use of first-person narrative while claiming
that they preserved the first-hand stories of the poor. This argument in chapter two necessitates a
revision of the way that we think about the possibilities and limitations of philanthropy’s role in
social change, which is taken up in chapters three and four.
While sympathy with the poor remains a strong feature in the writing of the COS and is
often invoked to garner more subscriptions (donations), it is not linked to increased philanthropic
action. Instead, the COS vilified sympathy as merely a reaction to scenes of suffering;
importantly, for the COS, sympathy is actually harmful to philanthropic practice. This change in
understanding of the use of sympathy is demonstrated in the case reports of the COS, where firstperson accounts of the suffering of the poor are not to be trusted. Instead, the COS gathered
together many different voices during a highly bureaucratized process in order to verify the
claims of the poor and determine if they were deserving of help from the COS. When
philanthropic agents recorded case reports, they had to unify multiple and disparate voices, facts,
and opinions (from referees, the poor themselves, relatives, and public records) through their
own authority as agent-as-narrator. What resulted were narratives that appeared to preserve the

31

perspectives of the clients who were the subject of the case, but which actually narratively
structured their stories and effectively erased their perspective and ability to speak for
themselves. What resulted was a narrative that appeared to be sympathetic, observational, and
direct from the poor subject, but that did not rely on sympathy for its operation.
Chapter two operates as an important hinge in the dissertation, in that it describes the
displacement of sympathy in the practice of philanthropy. The archival materials of the Charity
Organisation Society provide a look at an important turning point in philanthropic practice in the
nineteenth century by providing a concrete understanding of one way that readers were trained to
understand the limits of sympathy. These materials served as actual manuals that trained
philanthropically-minded readers to understand the complications of sympathizing with the poor
and the ways that such sympathy was detrimental to successful philanthropy. They also
implicitly trained readers to distrust first-person narratives and trust the organization’s
methodology as a filtering process that did the work of sympathy for them. In this way, readers
no longer needed to sympathize with the poor to do philanthropic work. As the limits of
sympathy became more understood and changed readers’ perspectives about the poor, sympathy
and the way it could be deployed in the novel also changed. Chapters three and four examine the
implications of this shift when we focus on the female reader. Women were trained to be just as
objective as men were, yet literature aimed directly at female philanthropists addresses the
concern that women were more prone to sympathetic response to the poor since such a response
was a cultural expectation: women could comfortably interact with the poor as caregivers. Such
an anxiety about women is missing from the critical conversation surrounding female
philanthropists when critics argue that women could use their accepted gender role as
sympathetic in order to become professional philanthropists. By ignoring this crucial aspect of

32

female philanthropy, critics often reach a conclusion that this dissertation aims to challenge by
arguing that philanthropic reform in the late nineteenth century made it difficult for women to be
both femininely sympathetic and professional.
Chapter three considers the implications of increasingly professionalized philanthropic
practice on current critical expectations around the possibilities of philanthropy for women.
These conversations characterize female philanthropists as able to achieve professional status
while still being able to form sisterhoods where all women were equal to each other. To them,
philanthropy was a unique kind of vocation that allowed women to exercise the traditionally
“feminine” qualities of sympathy, altruism and sisterhood while working towards increased
rights for women at the same time. Through readings of Walter Besant’s All Sorts and
Conditions of Men and H. G. Well’s The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, this chapter argues against
the idea that philanthropic work provided a way for Victorian women to find agency in the
public sphere. The agency granted to the philanthropist agent-narrator, as found in the archival
records discussed in chapter two, was not extended to women. The protagonists of these novels
were relegated to performing philanthropy as data collectors and inevitably fell back into roles as
sympathetic readers of the poor. In this way, the ambiguity of their roles in Besant’s and Wells’s
novels, as well as their oscillation between sympathetic reader of the poor and benevolent
philanthropist, prevented female philanthropists from achieving the professionalism of the agentnarrator-bureaucrat that the COS valued so highly.
In this way, philanthropic work loses it ability to be a stable site of proto-feminist
professional development, which is how it is framed in current scholarship. This chapter aims to
push back against the redemption of philanthropy as a foundation of late-Victorian feminism,
particularly when it comes to the role of literature in its professionalization. Broadly, scholars

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such as Frank Christianson strongly link the professionalization of philanthropy with the novel’s
ability to create social change, where philanthropic ideology mirrors representations of
philanthropy in the novel. Dorice Williams Elliott also sees such causality between novels about
philanthropy and philanthropic practice within a female-centered context. Assuming that
philanthropy is inherently feminist work since it moves women’s labor from the private to the
public sphere, she argues that representations of female philanthropists created “ambitious
desire” that would cause women to become philanthropists. However, chapter three outlines two
important ways that professionalized philanthropy did not have the capacity to achieve feminist
redemption for women. First, it shows that the kind of training that was created for
philanthropists by professionalized philanthropic societies such as the COS, that of the agent-asnarrator, was not accessible to women. In this way, philanthropic work did not facilitate the
kinds of conditions for women that would allow it to be labeled inherently feminist work.
Second, even if that were possible, representations of philanthropy in the novels discussed in this
chapter did not create model female philanthropic characters who would facilitate the production
of the kind of vocational desire that Elliott discusses. Instead, their philanthropy is framed as a
means to an end, such as marriage, that precludes the development of an identity that prioritizes
vocation as the ultimate calling for women. In other words, there is a contrast between the
idealized philanthropic heroine, and the way she is depicted in novels, that precludes an
argument that links the novel with philanthropic work.
This chapter looks at philanthropic training materials targeted at a female audience in
order to contextualize how women, specifically, were trained to read the poor. “The Education
of Philanthropy,” a pamphlet written by a trainee of Octavia Hill, one of the most influential
female philanthropists of the nineteenth century, is notably similar to the methodology of the

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Charity Organisation Society. These materials emphasize the importance of emotional distance
from the poor in a way that revises the idea that the female philanthropists must be selfsacrificing in order to solve poverty and fulfill their roles as feminine caregivers. At first glance,
these materials appear to emphasize the professionalism of the female philanthropist so as to
support the argument that philanthropy provides a way for women to find a professional identity
in the public sphere. In “The Education of Philanthropy,” we find a philanthropic heroine who is
able to control her own emotional response to a scene of impoverished cacophony and ultimately
control the chaos by gathering information that results in an actionable to-do list. She is admired
and emulated by aspiring female philanthropists for her ability to maintain emotional distance
from the scene in front of her, much as an artful narrator would. Yet, All Sorts and Conditions of
Men and The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman offer a different perspective on the idealized
philanthropic heroine. In these novels, the professionalism of the well-trained female
philanthropist only serves to co-opt her efforts back into a bureaucratic, ultimately patriarchal,
system. Instead of achieving the narrative distance of the professionalized philanthropic agent
and gaining an identity for themselves as a professional, the female philanthropists in these
novels find that philanthropic data-gathering methods create the conditions that prevent women
from achieving autonomy.
Chapter three argues that Wells’s and Besant’s novels unravel the idealization of the
philanthropic heroine. The philanthropist protagonists, Angela (All Sorts and Conditions of
Men) and Lady Harman (The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman), turn out to be the opposite of the
professional philanthropist modeled by “The Education of Philanthropy.” When faced with the
cacophony of the conditions of poverty and the desires of the poor whom they seek to help,
Angela and Lady Harman respond in ways that would make the Charity Organisation Society

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strike them from their list of acceptable philanthropies. This is hardly out of ignorance, because
the two women certainly strive to distance their professional identities as philanthropists from
that of the poor whom they encounter. Instead, they dole out their philanthropy in personal ways
that do not follow the COS’s tenets of professionalism, as outlined in chapter two. Further, they
only gain distance in ways that harm their work and identities as philanthropists. Angela can
only accomplish her work by taking on a disguise, an act of gaining objectivity that precludes a
professional identity as the philanthropist with capital. Lady Harman, who at first gives in to the
demands of the women she is helping, gains distance from them at a cost to the purpose of her
philanthropic work in the first place: she is required to hand over the daily operations of her
philanthropic work to a manager who enacts assistance for women in a way with which Lady
Harman disagrees. Because of these complications, Angela and Lady Harman can neither
perform philanthropy in a professional, objective way, nor attain a public identity that comes
directly from their philanthropic work. In this way, both novels present professional
philanthropy and feminist autonomy as mutually exclusive.
The novels further undermine the creation of “ambitious desires” by treating philanthropy
as a mere means to an end rather than the main focus. By interpolating philanthropic work into
novels that function around conventional marriage plots, each novel treats philanthropy as the
training ground for becoming a good wife. The tone around the marriage plot is different for
each novel, as Besant seems to perform a sleight-of-hand trick that suddenly turns a novel about
philanthropy into a grand wedding finale, while Wells is openly disdainful of both marriage and
philanthropy, creating the impression that philanthropy is only for miserable, rich wives.
Importantly, each novel, in its own way, depicts public identities for women as only possible for
married women. Angela’s final revelation of herself as philanthropist happens at her wedding,

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where she subsequently hands off her enterprise to the people. Lady Harman’s philanthropy is
only possible because she is married to a wealthy man whose business provides the problem she
seeks to solve. Neither novel, then, presents a protagonist who is worthy of women’s ambitious
desires being modelled after her.
Because these novels illustrate the failure to create “ambitious desires” in their readers,
they certainly do not succeed in offering narratives that train readers to become philanthropists
themselves. Instead, they offer examples of how training readers to become more objective and
distanced in their philanthropic work, as the Charity Organisation Society does, does not
succeed. This is particularly true for women, whose professional identities are tied to their
ability to be autonomous, in control of their own work, and objective and distanced from the
poor with whom they work. These novels work against the training manuals in objectivity
offered by philanthropic organizations by presenting heroines who gain objectivity in a way that
bars them from accomplishing their work. Further, they preclude interpretations that
representations of philanthropy provide sites for female readers to train their own ambitious
desires. Where this dissertation is about the ways that philanthropic texts trained readers in
objectivity towards the poor, these novels demonstrate that there are additional obstacles to
social reform for female philanthropists, who often had to sacrifice their objectivity (and thus
their professional identities) for a public identity that was rooted in traditional marriage rather
than professionalism.
Chapter four is an examination of how attachment and the philanthropic discourse of
objectivity come into conflict with each other. This chapter extends chapter three’s discussion of
the effects of professionalization of philanthropy on women, but where chapter three examines
female philanthropists and their public relationships with the poor, chapter four examines

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women’s intimate relationships with each other within philanthropic work. This chapter also
examines how professionalization prevents philanthropy from becoming a platform for social
change, particularly because it did not provide a platform for women’s progress. In this chapter,
I argue that, because professionalized philanthropy centered around detachment, it did not create
the conditions where special kinds of equal relationships between women, such as sisterhood,
could thrive. Edith Johnstone’s A Sunless Heart and Isabella Ford’s On the Threshold train
readers to recognize the harms of professionalization, particularly when it limits personal desire
and the ability to cultivate attachments to others. These novels struggle to portray idealized and
equal female relationships because they are caught between the conflicting discourses of
sympathetic sisterhood as a model for female philanthropy and the professionalized
philanthropic discourse of the late nineteenth century.
Both A Sunless Heart and On the Threshold frame themselves as novels that represent
women differently than novels that have come before them. Johnstone aims to represent female
relationships as their own special category, separate from romantic relationships between men
and women, and she chooses to do so within the context of philanthropy in the late nineteenth
century. Ford argues in her essay “Women and Socialism” that Socialism could only succeed if
it was closely linked with the women’s movement and prioritized the transformation of gender
relations. On the Threshold demonstrates how philanthropy for women has changed: women
could no longer conform to the feminine expectations of sympathetic philanthropy if they were
to achieve socialist aims. In other words, philanthropy and the women’s movement were
mutually exclusive.
Yet even while A Sunless Heart aims to represent the special nature of female
relationships within philanthropic work, one of the major characters, Lotus, in the novel

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explicitly rejects sisterhood as a model for female philanthropists. Chapter four examines the
historical model for sisterhood in philanthropy and makes connections between its
characterization of female relationships, which were constituted by a sense of shared suffering,
and Lotus’s rejection of such rhetoric. Additionally, Lotus adopts the cool detachment of
professionalized philanthropy in her relationship with Gasparine, who receives her help. As
Gasparine tries to become closer to Lotus, she finds that her efforts are constantly thwarted by
Lotus’s determined detachment and that she is never satisfied with the level of her attachment to
Lotus. Gasparine is unable to find equality with Lotus, even while they exchange gifts with each
other. Where A Sunless Heart fails to live up to Johnstone’s ideals about female relationality, On
the Threshold also demonstrates the impossibilities for women to form relationships with each
other while performing sympathetic philanthropy. The protagonists of the novel, Lucretia and
Kitty, find that forming sympathetic attachment to their maid is impossible when she rejects their
help even when she falls on hard times. Additionally, Lucretia narrates the novel in a very
claustrophobic, first-person style, which becomes most acute when she speaks of her distress
about being unable to form a close relationship with Kitty. Each of these novels demonstrate the
difficulty of performing sympathetic philanthropy while at the same time forming attachments to
other women who are doing the same work.
The novels’ struggle to reconcile their female characters’ relationships as nonhierarchical and live up the ideals that they set forth calls into question our critical focus on
sympathetic altruism and sisterhood as models for relationships between female philanthropists,
especially when those ideals are touted as vehicles for feminist social change. Chapter four
interacts with the work of Sharon Marcus, who frames philanthropy as sympathetic and
altruistic, qualities that women are culturally well-suited for, and Jill Rappoport, who argues that

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philanthropic work allowed women to form “horizontal” attachments that resisted the problems
of hierarchical philanthropy. Yet each of these critics have not reckoned with the changes that
professionalism brought to philanthropy. Instead, this dissertation demonstrates how
professionalized detachment ultimately prevented philanthropic work among women in the late
nineteenth century to be framed as a special arena that could remain separate from capitalism.
By the late nineteenth century, detachment had to permeated philanthropic discourse as to make
it impossible for women to develop sympathetic, altruistic, or sisterly relationships that Marcus
and Rappoport argue for. Ultimately, these novels challenge critical views about the possibility
for philanthropy, particularly professionalized philanthropy, to enable women’s progress in the
late nineteenth century. Chapter four argues that professionalized philanthropy is inherently
unequal.
These chapters trace an important shift in philanthropic attachments and the role of
literature in shaping philanthropic ways of reading the poor. As a result of changing social
conditions that made traditional philanthropic methods of face-to-face interaction and
sympathetic attachment difficult, as well as a rise in professionalization and bureaucratic
systems, philanthropic reformers sought out new ways of distributing resources. As a result,
philanthropy began to look more like a system than “love for humanity” and was no longer
concerned with creating sweeping social change as it was with finding a more efficient way to do
philanthropy. Since philanthropists focused their efforts on such a shift by creating more
systematic narrative techniques, philanthropic reform also had a massive effect on the way that
texts oriented themselves toward philanthropic social change. The texts discussed in this
dissertation each shift away from the social problem novel in important ways. George Eliot, in
Middlemarch and “The Natural History of German Life,” was skeptical of using literature as a

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tool for social change and tried to think of ways to confront difficult emotion rather than to
create sympathetic characters who could be redeemed from their situation. The Charity
Organisation Society, through its case papers, annual reports, pamphlets, periodicals, and other
publications, trained readers to create increased distance between themselves and the poor,
entrusting contact with the poor to philanthropies and their professionalized systems of
verification of the poor’s stories about themselves. All Sorts and Conditions of Men and The
Wife of Sir Isaac Harman failed to train female readers and aspiring philanthropic heroines to go
after their ambitious desires, instead training them to see philanthropy as a means to retaining
traditional female identities in the private sphere, thus challenging a critical interpretation that
posits philanthropy is a central area of social change for women. On the Threshold and A
Sunless Heart trained readers to recognize that the detachment that characterized
professionalized philanthropy limited its primacy as a central site for progressivism. This
dissertation traces the effects of an increasing emphasis on professionalized detachment, both on
the protocols that trained readers, or philanthropic agents, and on the ability for novels to depict
developed female characters who attained professionalism or formed equal attachments with
other women. Philanthropic reform, based in training readers in objectivity and efficiency,
changed the way that Victorian readers understood attachment to the poor, and it also challenges
the scholarly emphasis on sympathy as a progressive or resistant reading protocol. The readings
of novels in the next four chapters aspire to open the critical conversation around sympathy and
philanthropy in a way that acknowledges that changes in reading protocols brought on by
professionalized philanthropy, and how that change was detrimental to women’s development.

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CHAPTER ONE
Ethical Forms of Feeling: Eliot’s Rejection of Sympathy in Middlemarch

As this dissertation tracks the varying ways that novels trained readers to understand the
limits of sympathy, I begin with Eliot’s use of a doubting narrative voice and her removal of
causality between sympathy and philanthropy. Dissatisfied with the idea that feeling had to be
taxonomized and known before it could be sympathized with, or that relating to someone else
sympathetically had to be limited by what we could know about her, Eliot did not use her
narrator to create knowledge or reproduce the experience of another person. Instead, she created
situations where the reader had to grapple with understanding another person even when their
emotions could not be fully known. In this way, my reading of Eliot challenges our
understanding of Smithian sympathy’s role in training readers of the Victorian novel. Rather
than propagating the kind of sympathy that Smith theorized in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
Eliot experiments with the structure of individual characters’ stories in order to cultivate new
forms of sympathetic relationality. Her revision of sympathy also has important implications for
the way that we understand sympathy’s connection to philanthropic action in the late nineteenth
century. This chapter aims to complicate the current conversation around sympathy and its role
in the Victorian novel. A reading of Middlemarch will offer a way of looking at how novels
trained their readers to be responsive to the characters and representations of suffering as an
alternative to dominant readings of sympathy in the novel by Amanda Claybaugh, Rae Greiner,
and Audrey Jaffe. This alternative reading takes place on two levels throughout the chapter.
The first level on which this chapter challenges our understanding of sympathy and its
role in narrative is a novelistic one, in that it considers how George Eliot’s use of novels to train

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readers to reorient themselves towards the other. This chapter seeks to challenge the idea that
readers were always trained to be more sympathetic, thus doing the “work of reform” as Amanda
Claybaugh calls it in The Novel of Purpose. While Claybaugh concedes that Eliot “chafed
against [the] role” (50) of the novelist as reformer, as this chapter does, she still relies upon
mimetic representation as the tool by which sympathy achieves the work of reform. Claybaugh
argues that realist representation allowed for recognition in readers that resulted in sympathy,
which in turn led to reform: “Once these individuals come to feel sympathy, the systems
themselves will whither away. [ . . . ] To feel sympathy with a slave or a worker is to recognize
that he or she is a person in some way like oneself, and this makes his or her sufferings
unacceptable (24). As discussed in the introduction, current conversation around sympathy tends
to rely on such a model of causality to talk about how novels do social work. In other words, the
only discussion we have about how novels trained readers to be responsive to the poor is also a
discussion about sympathy and how it creates commonality. This chapter argues that George
Eliot is an example of an alternative model, since she is suspicious that narrating the emotional
experiences of others can successfully train readers to sympathize with them, much less to act
upon that training. This chapter offers a different model for training readers by complicating the
motives behind Eliot’s omniscient narrator.
The second level on which this chapter challenges our understanding of sympathy and its
role in narrative is a critical conversational one, in that it takes up the issue of how prominent
scholars of Victorian sympathy, namely Rae Greiner and Audrey Jaffe, use Smith to make the
argument that realist representation is the primary way that readers are trained to be more
sympathetic. Rather than to offer an alternative way of reading Smith, this chapter complicates
Greiner’s and Jaffe’s use of Smith to create protocols for how novels train readers to be more

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sympathetic. Smith tends to be the final authority for the operation of sympathy in the Victorian
novel. Instead, this chapter argues that the specificities of sympathy’s protocol—its way of
organizing emotion, taxonomizing emotion, and imagining emotion—were being continually
contested and revised by novelists and philanthropists in the nineteenth century. Rather than
mapping Smith onto Eliot via Greiner or Jaffe’s reading of him, this chapter considers how Eliot
was grappling with the question of creating sympathy on her own terms. Additionally, this
chapter complicates the way that we read Smithian sympathy vis-à-vis the novel. Where Greiner
and Jaffe seek to trace sympathy’s influence on the Victorian novel, using Eliot as a centerpiece
for their argument, this chapter points out where Eliot departs from Smithian sympathy and
posits a different way to mediate social relationships between novels and readers, rich and poor.
The first way that this chapter intervenes in the critical discussion surrounding sympathy
is to consider how novelists and philanthropists accounted for the failure of sympathy. Indeed,
this dissertation, as the introduction lays out, looks at how novelists and philanthropists dealt
with a changing social climate in which sympathy was increasingly difficult to use to mediate
relationships between the rich and the poor. This social context contradicts what Rae Greiner
argues about the centrality of sympathy in Sympathetic Realism in the Nineteenth Century: “By
depicting social reality as a product of fellow-feeling, the realist novel portrays the real as both
fictive and sympathetic” (10). This chapter focuses on the moments when Eliot considered
fellow-feeling to be an artificial construction that could not be used to portray reality in the most
accurate way possible. In the section about “The Natural History of German Life,” I argue that
Eliot considered the drive towards uniformity of feeling, or fellow-feeling, to be more
detrimental to the creation of reality than how Greiner formulates such a connection above.
Further, Middlemarch was written as a novel about the sea change in social relations brought

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about by the New Poor Laws, using the insight gained by almost fifty years of experience with
these new social conditions. In other words, Middlemarch was written by the time that
philanthropists had already rejected sympathy as the organizing protocol for social relations;
with this insight, Eliot could produce a more skeptical retrospective on the time when sympathy
was just beginning to be questioned. From here, this chapter is more interested in Eliot’s
thinking about sympathy as something that could no longer structure reality.
Further, something that is implicit in both Greiner’s understanding of sympathy and her
reading of Smithian sympathy is the idea that sympathy should be prioritized as a way of
overcoming the problem of accessing another’s emotional experience. Greiner elevates
sympathy as the structuring agent of the novel by arguing that “These writings form a tradition
that portrays sympathy as a mental action involving the creation and exchange of imagined
feeling, a way of sharing attitudes and modes of thought independent of the need to verify
another’s feeling . . .” (4). Here, I do not take issue with Greiner’s redefinition of sympathy as
“cognitive exercise” (1). Rather, Greiner implies in this quote that sympathy can be a way of
sharing feeling successfully, that access to the emotions of others can be created, even
imaginatively, in realist writing. She argues that novels can and do “employ forms designed to
enact sympathetic habits of mind in readers” (15), a phrase that is indicative of sympathy’s
connection to training readers of novels. For Greiner, the way that a novel is formed around
sympathy is the mechanism that trains readers (“enact[s . . . ] habits of mind”) to bridge the gap
of difference between themselves and the novel, and in turn, between themselves and other
people. Eliot is incredibly important to this conversation, since her body of work is a sustained
conversation about the possibility of affinities between different people and the novel’s role in
creating such connections. However, this chapter seeks to do something different with Eliot’s

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writing: instead of establishing Eliot’s work as entirely sympathetic or not, it looks for moments
in Eliot’s work when she entertains skepticism about this possibility. I approach Eliot’s work
from the premise that she imagines what social relations look like when we can’t exchange or
imagine the feelings of others successfully, whether positive or negative. As such, I look for
failure of communication in Eliot’s work, either in her narrative voice or when she imagines that
Smithian sympathy is an inadequate vehicle for relating to others. Greiner attempts to reframe
the problem of accessing the emotional experience of others (and the criticism of Smith that his
formulation of sympathy is too much about categories) by arguing that Smith does not focus on
the need to verify feeling. Eliot also takes issue with the idea that we must know emotion in
order to access another person’s emotion, as the discussion of Lydgate’s microscope in this
chapter demonstrates, but she does not overcome this problem in the same way that Greiner
claims the novel does, by using realism as a vehicle to imaginatively exchange feeling. For
Eliot, this is not a problem to be solved but to be dwelled upon. Eliot imagines another way of
relating to people that accounts for conditions that prevent the exchange of feeling or for
moments when we do not desire to exchange feeling. The issue at stake for Eliot is not just
defining sympathy as feeling or knowing, but taking into account situations where finding
affinity with other people is at an extreme level of difficulty. The goal of narrative can be to
create affinity, but it also needs to account for discord and lack of connection, a condition that
was an intensely real problem for philanthropists and novelists alike.
The idea that lack of access to the emotional experience of another person cannot always
be overcome by reading a novel, or the idea that narrating experience does not necessarily enable
full access, is best illustrated by the character of Dorothea in Middlemarch. Toward the end of
the novel, Dorothea and Celia have a conversation about Dorothea’s decision to marry Will

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Ladislaw. Celia cannot understand why Dorothea would give up her philanthropic plans, her
estate, and her wealth. To Celia, Dorothea is making another wrong decision, and the two can’t
seem to come to an agreement, either in their temperaments or in terms of the decision itself.
Celia’s anxious demeanor is in stark contrast with Dorothea’s calm lightheartedness.
Considering Dorothea’s track record with marriage up until this point, it is tempting to agree
with Celia’s practical petitions to Dorothea’s common sense. In the last portion of the
conversation, Eliot denies the possibility for Dorothea to bring Celia into complete
understanding of how this marriage came to be at all:
Dorothea smiled, and Celia looked rather meditative. Presently she said, “I
cannot think how it all came about.” Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear
the story.
“I daresay not,” said Dorothea, pinching her sister’s chin. “If you knew how it
came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.”
“Can’t you tell me?” said Celia, settling her arms cozily.
“No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.” (629)
Here, Eliot opens Middlemarch to questions about the relationship between feeling and knowing,
particularly in the context of sympathetic exchange. While the conditions are right for sympathy,
Dorothea refuses to give Celia the knowledge she asks for. At this point, the two sisters aren’t in
any more agreement about Dorothea’s decision to marry Will than they were at the beginning of
the conversation, and, as the chapter ends with Dorothea’s response, we are left with Dorothea’s
refusal to tell her story, a rather ironic way to close a long novel about Dorothea’s decisionmaking process. While the conversation seems to highlight how little Celia knows about
Dorothea in comparison to the reader, it does not suggest that knowing more about Dorothea’s

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decision will allow Celia and Dorothea to reach sympathetic understanding of each other; nor
does it privilege Dorothea’s nod toward the emotional process she (and the readers, perhaps)
have gone through to get to this moment. Dorothea’s refusal to accept the conditions of
sympathy have a similar effect on the reader, who might see Celia’s desire to know as a similar
situation to their own reading of Middlemarch and Dorothea’s story itself. The point of this
scene, then, is to train readers to look beyond sympathy as a form of knowledge that can solve
problems of difference.
Eliot also undercuts Dorothea’s understanding of narrative sympathy by the way that she
frames the conversation. Dorothea’s hesitation centers around the conflict between feeling and
knowing in the sympathetic encounter. In the conversation with Celia, Dorothea struggles with
the differences between the two. She starts by privileging emotion over knowledge, saying that
‘“If you knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.’” Dorothea prefers that
Celia share in her happiness rather than dissect the reasons behind it. She goes on to elaborate
upon that idea in her next statement, suggesting that one cannot simply know without first
feeling something similar to the person one is trying to get to know better. For Dorothea,
emotion is the foundation of knowledge. The problem with Dorothea’s thesis is that she denies
Celia the opportunity for either feeling or knowledge at all; she seems to think that Celia should
simply match her emotional tenor without motivation or reason. Throughout the novel,
Dorothea’s flaw is not only that she assumes her particular kind of emotional response is
universal, but also that she experiences the world through her own narrow emotional sphere.
When Dorothea says that Celia would need to feel with her in order to know, she seems to
acknowledge the basic requirement for fellow-feeling in the sympathetic encounter. But,

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ironically, this is Dorothea’s reason for ending the story rather than beginning it, thus denying
any chance for Celia to sympathize.
On the surface, Dorothea’s definition of narrative experience is a textbook definition of
sympathy itself. Sympathy is “feeling with” the other, as Greiner has persuasively argued in
Sympathetic Realism. At the same time that Dorothea invites sympathy from Celia, she denies
the possibility for creating it. Through the process of storytelling, Dorothea could enable Celia
to imagine her own point of view so that Celia might not be so troubled about the marriage; she
might be able to displace her own feelings of anxiousness about her sister living so far away with
Dorothea’s calm trust in her own love for Will. Telling her story to Celia would offer a neat
ending to a chapter with such uncertainty. Dorothea’s response, though, does not suggest that
telling her story would engender such sympathy. Instead, Dorothea suggests that Celia would
actually need to experience Dorothea’s emotions up until this point to reach complete
understanding. In other words, Celia would need to be Dorothea. Of course, telling a story
would never be able to achieve this end. Dorothea’s ambivalence here suggests that storytelling
neither satisfies Celia’s need to know nor relates Dorothea’s depth of feeling; Dorothea does not
tell her story because doing so would never be able to achieve what Dorothea wants it to achieve.
Because Eliot focuses on this conflict in her mapping of sympathetic exchange, the reader is able
to understand this conversation as a complication of traditional sympathy rather than a promotion
of it. This conversation between Dorothea and Celia further opens the conflict between feeling
and knowing, between experience and imagination; it suggests that experience is something that
narrative cannot quite achieve. In this chapter, I will argue that, as Eliot experiments with
narrative, she highlights the need for a kind of relationality that gets beyond recreating or
knowing the emotional experience of another and does not rely on fellow-feeling as the outcome.

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In Middlemarch, characters continually mistake feeling as something that can be known
and categorized, or they consider knowing and feeling to be mutually exclusive ways of relating
to other people, as Dorothea does in her conversation with Celia. Lydgate is a prime example of
the desire to know the mysterious inner workings of another’s emotions:
He for his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself
able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very
eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and
more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute
processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares
which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise
and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.
(Eliot 155)
Lydgate considers it the great work of his life to make others’ lives better by understanding the
emotional motivation behind a person’s state of being. Eschewing the “diseased dream” of the
anatomically incorrect drawing of old medicine, Lydgate favors the microscope because it is
“capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space” (155). These secrets
of science no longer hold mysterious, god-like power over anyone; instead, the new inventions
make even the smallest and most mysterious substance known to the human eye. With such
tools and vision at his disposal, Lydgate thinks that he could even see past the obscurity of
consciousness itself, finally understanding what makes other people happy or miserable. With
tragic irony, though, Lydgate cannot seem to understand his own wife; “Each lived in a world of
which the other knew nothing” (155). Lydgate focuses on knowing emotion, yet he cannot grasp
Rosamond’s emotional life, further driving the two apart from each other. Lydgate fails to

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recognize that the microscope, for all its powers of light and magnification, is incapable of
extending his range of vision to that which is beyond the observable. He puts his faith in a tool
that, by its very nature, is incapable of seeing anything beyond what can be framed by its lens.
While Lydgate desires to remove mysterious power from emotional consciousness by
examining and codifying it, Dorothea gives her own emotional experiences so much power that
she limits her vision to what is immediately in front of her. Dorothea knows almost entirely by
feeling: “She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she could know
nothing except through that medium: all her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of
struggle, of despondency, and then again in visions of more complete renunciation, transforming
all hard conditions into duty” (Eliot, Middlemarch 184). In response to being a victim of feeling,
Dorothea overreacts by renouncing it altogether; she thinks that her failure to act stems from her
inability to channel her emotion into a more stream-lined duty. We can’t entirely fault Dorothea
for her desire to create a more purposeful direction for herself out of her complicated emotional
life, but she chooses the wrong course of action. In other words, the problem is not emotion
itself; the problem is that Dorothea targets emotion as the source of her trouble. Dorothea
interprets her diffuse (yet rich) emotional life as agitation that is lacking direction, where
elsewhere in the novel we can see that emotional life as such is not quite the problem.
Middlemarch hardly rejects feeling entirely as a mode of experiencing the world and
relating to others. After all, both Lydgate’s and Casaubon’s greatest flaw is their inability to be
responsive to the feelings of others, and the narrator tells us that “Our good depends on the
quality and breadth of our emotion” (Eliot 431). Where Dorothea interprets her emotional life as
the problem and attempts to channel it into dutiful action, the narrator tells us that she is lacking
the breadth of emotion upon which her good depends. After Casaubon’s death, when Dorothea

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is trying to decide what to do with her newly acquired fortune, she sorts through papers to help
her make this decision:
One morning, about eleven, Dorothea was seated in her boudoir with a map of the
land attached to the manor and other papers before her, which were to help her in
making an exact statement for herself of her income and affairs. She had not yet
applied herself to her work, but was seated with her hands folded on her lap,
looking out along the avenue of limes to the distant fields. Every leaf was at rest
in the sunshine, the familiar scene was changeless, and seemed to represent the
prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease—motiveless, if her own energy could
not seek out reasons for ardent action. (431)
This scene is striking because it shows us the reason why Dorothea is unable to act. It is not
because she is too emotional; it is because she gets too caught up in the details. Dorothea
essentially has the tools she needs right in front of her in order to act: she has control of the
estate, and she has the information she needs to make a plan. But instead of noticing the larger
scheme of her life that is represented by the map of her property, she concentrates her energy on
each individual leaf on the trees outside. When Dorothea does channel her consciousness in a
particular direction, she chooses the wrong one, making her action unproductive and futile.
Dorothea thinks she sees the big picture when she looks out onto her property, but she chooses to
expend her energy on too many small things, failing to gain distance from her situation, which is
provided by the map sitting directly in front of her.
Both Lydgate’s and Dorothea’s myopic, detail-oriented vision limit the way that they
experience the world around them. Dorothea’s exhortation to Celia is finally a problem within
the context of Middlemarch because she asks Celia to sympathetically enter into the world of her

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experience, dominated by her own myopic vision, in order to understand the way that Dorothea
knows and builds her own knowledge base. In this way, sympathy’s traditional relationship
between the categories of feeling and knowing become the primary categories that Eliot explores
in her departure from sympathy itself. Where Dorothea seems more certain about how one can
know how another person feels and thus sympathize with them, Eliot takes a more cautious
approach to sympathy and the way that it attempts to place emotional experience into knowledge
categories.
The conflict that Eliot sees between feeling and knowing is central to her understanding
of traditional sympathy and her departure from it. Importantly, Eliot set the terms for the shift in
sympathy that took place over the nineteenth century. Many of the conflicts between feeling and
knowing that she highlights in Middlemarch and “The Natural History of German Life” arise
again and again in the discourse surrounding sympathy and how it should be deployed
narratively. In addition, her discussion of the limits of sympathy takes place in the context of a
discussion around philanthropic action, with which Dorothea struggles throughout Middlemarch.
Eliot is asking, essentially, as many philanthropists in the nineteenth century did, what is key to
creating ethical action, feeling an emotional connection and creating sympathy through
imagination, or knowing about the other and thus having a solid foundation on which to judge
them?
The methodology of traditional sympathy that Middlemarch quibbles with comes from
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, a text that very much concerns itself with the
taxonomy of various emotions and their suitability for idealized sympathy. For Greiner, this
protocol comes from Adam Smith, with his focus on the imagination and the impartial spectator.
Indeed, “Such a sympathy is grounded in the pursuit of narrative effects rather than

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epistemological certainty. It rests entirely on our ability to reconstruct imaginatively another’s
‘situation,’ to simulate his point of view”, and sympathy does this so effectively that the other
needn’t feel anything at all in order for us to sympathize with her or him (Greiner 17). Yet
George Eliot, in her concern with confronting the most difficult feelings, has another goal in
mind for her own realist project. Rather than mimetically simulate another’s point of view, she
is concerned with creating forms of feeling when the perspective that comes from emotional
experience cannot be replicated through narrative or when sympathy is not as successful at
mediating repulsive emotions or people. Art, when it “amplifies experience” does not substitute
one point of view for another. Most importantly, in the words of Eliot, it “extend[s] our contact
with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot” (“Natural History” 110). We come
in contact with the Other, but, where a new point of view suggests an embodied experience
replacing our current one, Eliot’s emphasis on going “beyond the bounds of our personal lot”
suggests that art stretches the limits of point of view and forces us to reflect upon the emotions of
another even when we can’t quite imaginatively approximate them. For both Smith and Eliot,
sympathy begins with a problem: the reader or observer does not have access to the emotional
experiences of the other. Dorothea and Lydgate seek to access the emotional experiences of
others by building new knowledge, as if more of it will push out the problems of adequately
relating to others. The problem though, is that neither Lydgate nor Dorothea sees the costs of
building this knowledge, as it makes them less able to relate to others by limiting their sphere of
experience even further.
Yet, where Eliot is skeptical about the methodology of taxonomizing one’s emotions,
Smith values it as a method of creating sympathy. The problem with feeling and knowing
becomes acute when one person tries to relate to another person: of course we cannot actually

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mirror the feelings of another person perfectly, so sympathy attempts to build a knowledge base
for relating to another person in order to solve this problem somewhat. In this way, Smith
creates conflict between feeling and knowing: feeling is the problem, since we cannot directly
experience it, so it is necessary to create a knowledge base in order to overcome this problem.
As I work through Eliot’s narrative methodology in this chapter, I will draw out the ways that
Eliot resisted sympathy (as defined by Smith) as a way of creating ethical relationships between
people.
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is based upon a problem: how can we properly judge
the emotional conduct of another person if we can’t actually experience that emotion for
ourselves? This is a problem that traditional sympathy attempts to overcome by creating fellowfeeling. This becomes even more of a problem when the emotion expressed by another person is
inherently difficult to sympathize with:
Upon some occasions sympathy may seem to arise merely from the view of a
certain emotion in another person. The passions, upon some occasions, may seem
to be transfused from one man to another, instantaneously, and antecedent to any
knowledge of what excited them in the person principally concerned. Grief and
joy, for example, strongly expressed in the look and gestures of any one, at once
affect the spectator with some degree of a like painful or agreeable emotion. [. . .]
This, however, does not hold universally, or with regard to every passion. There
are some passions of which the expressions excite no sort of sympathy, but before
we are acquainted with what gave occasion to them, serve rather to disgust and
provoke us against them. (11)

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Smith points out that the “passions . . . seem to be transfused,” but that other passions can just as
easily be misunderstood, causing confusion or disgust rather than sympathetic understanding.
Because not all emotions can be easily visually transferred, Smith relies upon constructing a
narrative around the emotion, rather than the viewing of emotion, in order to create sympathy:
“Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the
situation which excites it” (12). Traditional sympathy, then, is the creation of knowledge of
emotion by explaining the situation that caused the emotion in the first place. This
understanding of the workings of sympathy creates a justification for what follows in Theory of
Moral Sentiments: the careful categorizing of various emotions and how easily one can
sympathize with them. Where experience is impossible, knowledge of the experience is a
reasonable stand-in. This basis for sympathy, however, in its emphasis on knowledge of the
motivations for another person’s emotion, makes sympathy nearly impossible if one knows
nothing about the other person’s situation. Smith attempts to solve this problem by conceding
that sympathy is almost always an ideal that we strive for. Even if we cannot quite reach it, we
can work hard to reach something that comes close. Smith calls this “concord.”
The ideal outcome of sympathy is “fellow-feeling”, or “concord.” More than just judging
the emotional conduct of the Other or even just responding to it properly (by giving the Other
something, for example), sympathy involves judging how we orient ourselves toward the Other,
and, even more importantly, cultivating a relationship that reins in or adjusts our own response to
the appropriate level, thus reaching a certain level of self-control, or limiting the self. Basically,
even though Smith concedes that we can never achieve exact similarity between ourselves and
the Other down to actually experiencing what the Other experiences, he does advocate that the
most ethical forms of sympathy come close.

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Importantly, fellow-feeling is based in the imagination: “As we have no immediate
experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected,
but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (Smith 9). While our
senses “never can carry us beyond our own person”, the imagination allows us to “form some
idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether
unlike them” (9). From the start, imagination is not, nor ever can be, an actual experience of the
Other, and the imagination can’t simply copy the feelings or experiences of the Other in the same
way. What is more, the imaginative instance of sympathy prevents us from merely transferring
our own experience onto what we imagine the Other to be feeling. Rather, it performs an
important role in modulating our own conduct and experience:
We begin, upon this account, to examine our own passion and conduct, and to
consider how these must appear to them, by considering how they would appear
to us if in their situation. We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own
behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce
upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with
the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct. (112)
That is, when we identify, or consider “how they would appear to us if in their situation,” with
the Other, we are, at the same time, modulating our own behavior and emotions (what Smith
calls “proportion”). Merely projecting our own experience onto the other would deny the
Other’s role as “looking-glass”, and so sympathy would not occur.
In this way, Smith’s modulation of the self means that the looking-glass of relationality is
not a mimetic reproduction of the Other’s experience. Mimesis, in this case, is impossible since
even the spectator who identifies with the other only reaches concord, not similarity with the

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Other’s feelings. Smith says: “These two sentiments, however, may, it is evident, have such a
correspondence with one another, as is sufficient for the harmony of society. Though they will
never be unisons, they may be concords, and that is all that is wanted or required” (Smith 22).
Importantly, Smith’s formulation of concord implies that even the most ideal form of sympathy
is not perfect fellow-feeling, as it still maintains difference. Even the spectator and agent within
the self never reach complete alignment and always maintain a certain difference in feeling.
Further, complete similarity is not the standard by which Smith judges the success of sympathy.
In order for relationality to be ethical (proportionate, harmonious), we always need to entertain
the imaginative possibility of sympathy, and we need to be open to the ways that the Other
requires a modulation of our own “passions” and experiences. The primary work of sympathy,
then, is to modulate our own experiences so that they can begin to align with the experiences of
the other. Despite his acknowledgement of the impossibility of experiencing another’s emotions
in their original form, Smith’s idea of sympathy still centers on creating a simulated experience
of that emotion, albeit an imperfect one. Sympathy is still about what we can know about
another’s emotion and how we can know it. Sympathy doesn’t mimetically replace experience
with imagination; it creates experience with an imaginative entrance into another person’s
experience. Because of this, it becomes difficult to train readers to reach complete fellow-feeling
with the characters in novels, let alone train them to transfer this standard to the poor outside of
the novel.
Where Smith taxonomizes emotion in order to instruct his readers on how to approximate
another’s experience, Audrey Jaffe argues that the Victorian novel takes up this project by
representing emotion:

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For feeling, of course, depends upon representation: in order to be known it must
appear; insofar as it is known, it is constituted by representation. And though the
ideological power of feeling relies on the idea of an essence or truth to which
language and representation are said to remain inadequate, the specific nature of
that power becomes visible in the terms of its representation. Feeling is
inseparable from the scenes that may seem merely to provoke it and the signs by
means of which it becomes known. (14-5)
For Jaffe, sympathy requires that emotion become knowledge for it to occur at all. In the scene
of sympathy, feeling is knowledge; feeling “depends” on knowledge, because in order for feeling
to exist at all, it must first be known. The image of a feeling, whether it occurs on the face or on
the page, makes emotion identifiable and thus fit for sympathy, an argument that greatly
simplifies Smith’s notion of the imagination. For Jaffe, sympathy involves replacing the sufferer
and the emotion of that sufferer with the “spectator’s image of him or herself” (2). Thus,
sympathy simply is the imagination, not Smith’s more complicated process of a mediative,
emotional oscillation between two people. For Smith, we must imagine the situation that caused
the emotion, where for Jaffe, that emotion is just mirrored in the spectator’s mind. Jaffe’s
understanding of the sympathetic imagination makes the signification of emotional states the
occasion of sympathy itself and ignores Smith’s argument that, because sympathy can now
mediate any emotional state of being, we must also know the cause of the emotion in order to
sympathize with it at all.
Because Jaffe simplifies Smith’s notion of the imagination, she mistakenly expands
Smith’s idea of imagination to experience. Smith constructs a reality where it is possible to
come to close to knowing the emotional experience of another person via the imagination; but

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Jaffe takes the concept of imagination to the extreme by arguing that the only kind of knowledge
sympathy creates is about our own experience: imagination is about self, not other. George
Eliot, in a much different mode of inquiry from either Smith or Jaffe, takes up sympathy’s
problem of experience from a different angle by asking, not how we begin to approximate the
other’s experience by working hard to modulate our own feelings to reach concord with the other
(particularly when it comes to the most difficult emotions), but instead asking how we are to coexist, in practical terms, with another whose emotions we cannot begin to comprehend.

In this

case, the narrator does not work to create authoritative knowledge about emotional experiences
but instead highlights incomprehension. In Middlemarch in particular, Eliot, with her narrative
voice, formalizes the uncertainty that Smith attempted to theorize away; what results are forms
of feeling that look very much different from sympathy. Because Middlemarch is suspicious of
the idea that we can come close to knowing another’s emotional experience, Eliot does not
organize her mode of relationality around sympathy’s goal of reaching concord with the other.
Despite the narrative doubt that permeates Middlemarch, Eliot does not conclude that there is
some kind of mystical barrier that prevents us from relating to the other; instead, she focuses her
narrative energy on building new patterns of relationality without comprehension of emotion as a
foundation for this relationality. In what follows, I will show how Eliot begins to move realism
away from sympathy as a structuring mode of relationality because she refuses to make emotion
comprehensible in a way that would lay the foundation for our own sympathy with it. Eliot’s
primary narrative experiment in Middlemarch is to ask how we can ethically relate to the other
when sympathy is removed as a structuring agent.
In Eliot’s “The Natural History of German Life,” the essay in which she lays out her own
theory of realism, it is clear that our own experience should not enter into the sympathetic

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equation: “Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a
moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give,
surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves,
which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment” (Eliot, “Natural History” 110). Here,
Eliot distinguishes between “ready-made” sympathy, which relies on what we already know, and
another kind of sympathy, which calls attention to difference. Most importantly, Eliot calls this
alternative picture of human life the “raw material” of moral sentiment, which suggests that we
must begin from a place that is altogether different from our own experiences. Because Eliot
begins her discussion of moral sentiments by denying our own experiences as having currency in
a realist mode of relating to others, she begins to move away from a traditional definition of
sympathy. While Eliot uses the term sympathy, along with the Smithian “fellow feeling”
throughout this essay, she also experiments with the way she uses these terms. At times,
sympathy parallels knowing a certain group of people, as when Eliot says “Only a total absence
of acquaintance and sympathy with our peasantry could give a moment’s popularity to such a
picture as ‘Cross Purposes,’” (108), which she later contrasts with “cockney sentimentality,” and
then she quickly follows up that comparison by paralleling “sympathy” with “taste” (108). Eliot
parallels sympathy with other terms as she experiments with sympathy’s moral associations, but
her use of modifiers is the most telling indication of how she begins to distinguish traditional
sympathy from her own aesthetically mediated way of relating to other people. When Eliot uses
the term “social sympathies” (111), she indicates that sympathy on its own is not an adequate
mode of relating to other people, as it relies too much on our own experience; sympathy itself is
not adequate for moving us beyond ourselves.

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Eliot begins to elaborate on her move away from sympathy when she most clearly lays
out the goal of realist writing: “The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and
influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what are the
motives and influences which do act on him. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic
artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in
all his suspicious selfishness” (“Natural History” 111). The difference between “ought” and
“do” here is key to understanding the methodology behind Eliot’s move away from traditional
sympathy to “the awakening of the social sympathies” that she tries to achieve with her own
fiction. Ready-made sympathy relies upon the “ought”: if a work of fiction represents emotion
that is motivated by what the reader considers to be correct, then sympathy comes more easily.
This is also Smith’s way of relating to other people, where once we know the motive behind
emotion, it is easier to put ourselves in their place if we find it agreeable. In other words, the
taxonomies of emotion that Smith outlines also rely upon the ought, in that emotions ought to be
felt, classified, and understood in such a way as to create the conditions for sympathy. In this
way, ready-made sympathy appeals to what the reader thinks ought to be that motive. When the
reader is presented with what does motivate a certain emotion, however, it may not be one that
he or she finds agreeable or that exactly corresponds to previously established classifications. In
contrast, the “social sympathies” remove us from our own experiences that are the foundation for
what we think ought to motivate an emotion.
Rather than using art to cultivate sympathy, a mode of relationality that Eliot is not quite
sure about, “The Natural History of German Life” is remarkable for positing a theory of realism
that distinguishes itself from Smithian sympathy. As George Eliot relies less upon sympathy to
mediate emotional relationality, she places primacy on the methods that art uses to create

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distance from ourselves rather than relying on experience to create sympathy. If sympathy is
founded mostly on one’s own experience, then art offers us a different way of relating through its
ability to take us beyond our own experience.
Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and
extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal
lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the
life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more
artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas
about evanescent fashions—about the manners and conversation of beaux and
duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and
struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humor in the life of our more heavily laden
fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned toward a false object instead of the
true one. (Eliot, “Natural History” 110-1)
Eliot argues that art doesn’t simply replace our own experience with another, better one or add
more experiences to our own. If that were true, then Eliot would not push so heavily upon a
movement away from traditional sympathy. She instead claims that art “amplifies” experience;
it extends or augments our own experience, making it larger and moving us beyond ourselves. In
it, we encounter not only what is familiar to us but also what is strange, even unknowable.
Realism, in its effort to move us beyond ourselves, should not simply reflect what we already see
or think we ought to see. Traditional sympathy, in its reliance on the “ought”, often falsifies the
motivations behind the Other’s emotion.
Defining sympathy as that which replaces our point of view, with its emphasis on
experience, means that sympathy also risks becoming too limited or solipsistic; Eliot recognized

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that mediating another’s emotions through Smithian protocols of sympathy meant that our own
experience could become all there is. It is no wonder then, that in grasping for a new term to
describe the method by which realism could break these limitations, Eliot turns to the modifier
“social.” George Levine, in The Realistic Imagination, recognizes that realism was not
structured around existing sympathetic protocols, but always strived to create a new way of
mediating social feeling:
Realism, as a literary method, can in these terms be defined as a self-conscious
effort, usually in the name of some moral enterprise of truth telling and extending
the limits of human sympathy, to make literature appear to be describing directly
not some other language but reality itself (whatever that may be taken to be); in
this effort, the writer must self-contradictorily dismiss previous conventions of
representation while, in effect, establishing new ones. No major Victorian
novelists were deluded into believing that they were in fact offering an
unmediated reality; but all of them struggled to make contact with the world out
there, and, even with their knowledge of their own subjectivity, to break from the
threatening limits of solipsism, of convention, and of language. (8)
Considering the influence that Levine has had on how we understand realism, it is surprising that
he has not had a similar influence on the way that we understand sympathy and its relationship to
the realist novel. As George Eliot takes up this aesthetic experiment in her own writing by
attempting to move beyond sympathy as an organizing paradigm for mediating the Other’s
feeling, we can see how, as Levine argues, Eliot did not have a simple faith in her ability as a
narrator to just convey feeling in a different way than she could using the protocol of sympathy.
After all, as Levine argues elsewhere, this experimentation always involves a certain amount of

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doubt (20). As I move ahead with a discussion of Middlemarch’s particular experimentation with
realist form, I hope to show how its narrator, rather than being the omniscient guide of the
reader’s sympathies as we often consider her to be, instead uses doubt to structure a narrative
move away from sympathy.
Middlemarch’s narrative voice most forcibly demonstrates Eliot’s move away from
sympathy. In what follows, I will demonstrate that the narrator’s own doubt in her ability to
successfully help the reader come to definite conclusions about characters in the novel, in
addition to her own commentary on what it means to take on the point of view of another person
(and whether or not it is possible), is the main mechanism by which George Eliot challenges the
primacy of sympathy as a way of relating to another person, particularly in the context of reading
about or imagining what that person is feeling. Many critics have interpreted Eliot’s ability to
achieve multiple points of view throughout the novel as evidence of her omniscience or a naïve
desire to make the realist novel do something that could not be done in life. J. Hillis Miller notes
that “The clairvoyance of the narrator, according to this alternative model of the human
condition, can be obtained only because he, she, or it is able to share the points of view of all the
characters, thereby transcending the limited vision of any single person” (Reading for our Time
63). Yet, there are multiple examples of the narrator’s hesitation in making conclusive
judgments at all in Middlemarch. In fact, when the narrator is telling us something about a
character, it is often that everything we know about him or her should indicate to us that we
know less than we think we do. In one example of this, the narrator directly calls into question
the idea that multiple points of view give us the necessary information to make judgments about
a character:

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If to Dorothea Mr Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set alight the
fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow that he was
fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned personages who have
hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him? I protest against any absolute
conclusion, any prejudice derived from Mrs Cadwallader’s contempt for a
neighbouring clergyman’s alleged greatness of soul, or Sir James Chettam’s poor
opinion of his rival’s legs,—from Mr Brooke’s failure to elicit a companion’s
ideas, or from Celia’s criticism of a middle-aged scholar’s personal appearance.
(Eliot, Middlemarch 93)
The most obvious way that narrative doubt manifests itself in this passage is through the way that
the narrator asks us not to come to any conclusions about Mr. Casaubon. But more subtly, the
narrator also calls into question the multiple points of view we have benefitted from so far as a
reader. Here, she rounds up different opinions from different characters, a seeming
transcendence of the “limited vision of any single person”, as J. Hillis Miller puts it, and tells us
to ignore any influence they’ve had on our opinion of Mr. Casaubon. All of these points of view
do not add up to omniscience; rather, having many different points of view calls into question the
validity of any conclusions we can come to based on them.
Elsewhere, the narrator reveals her own partiality:
For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call
highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and
never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully
possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously
transformed into the vividness of a thought, and ardour of a passion, the energy to

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an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid,
scrupulous and dim-sighted. (Eliot, Middlemarch 243-4)
Here, the narrator is hardly the impartial spectator by which we should judge our own sympathy
towards different characters in the novel; she is just as rooted in her own perspective as everyone
else. At the very least, by proclaiming her own pity for Casaubon, she shows readers that they
should recognize their own partiality; at the very most, the narrator is dismissing her own
authority as the final arbiter of all Middlemarch’s characters. Even more so, the narrative voice
reveals its partiality when it tells us things about a character that even the character herself
doesn’t know:
She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly, as in a
dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings—that it was Love
to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the
blameless rigour of irresistible day. She only felt that there was something
irrevocably amiss and lost in her lot, and her thoughts about the future were the
more readily sharpen into resolve. Ardent souls, ready to construct their coming
lives, are apt to commit themselves to the fulfillment of their own visions. (436)
The narrator seems omniscient when she tells us something that even Dorothea herself does not
know, but in doing so, the narrator also reveals that she is interpreting Dorothea’s feelings the
same as any other character in the novel. We should be careful to take the narrator’s
proclamations with a grain of salt, the same way we would with something Mrs. Cadwallader
would say.
More importantly, the narrative voice is the main mechanism by which the novel itself
questions its own methods of revealing the feelings of its characters. The narrative voice is self-

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reflective in its meta-commentary on the way that the novel magnifies certain characters at the
expense of others, on its success at zooming back out and gaining a more “impartial”
perspective, and most especially on what is at stake in this project. At the same time it magnifies
a certain character, it also discusses the limitations of doing so, as in this example of introducing
Lydgate: “I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they
were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this
particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe”
(Eliot 137). Far from being able to see all and know all, Middlemarch’s narrator can only focus
on one thing at a time. Inherent in realism’s worlding, then, are several problems: scope and
focus. While she narrates the “universe” of Middlemarch, she cannot see all at once, and so she
has to focus on one character long and intensely enough in order to get the reader to feel with the
character. While she is doing this, she leaves out everyone else. In this moment, I would like to
refocus our attention on how George Eliot is experimenting with the idea of “omniscience” in
her narration and what that really means for realism and sympathy themselves. As J. Hillis
Miller and others mention, omniscient narration is characterized by the ability of the narrator to
be able to see and understand the inner feelings and motives of all the characters in a novel.
What Miller and others do not mention, however, is that this rarely happens all at once.
Narrative constrains the narrator into telling one story at a time. She might have the powers of
insight, but she does not have the powers of infinite scope—she is constrained by time and by
narrative itself. The aesthetic frame describes at the expense of everything else. Realism is not a
sprawling expanse of description; it is a focused narration that necessarily erases everything
outside of itself. The truly omniscient narrator does not exist; “all the light [she] can command”
must be spent on one person at a time, rendering the narrator powerless in the face of the rest of

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the universe, especially when the narrator does what she does best: engender the reader’s feeling
with a character. In other words, when the narrator is the most powerful in her ability to frame a
scene, she also acknowledges her weak scope. Further, the narrator of Middlemarch, by her own
admission, is hardly able to manage us. The narrator has to “make the new settler Lydgate better
known to any one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the
most of him” (137), indicating the difficult job of narration itself, one which could fail at any
time.
Indeed, the narrative voice in Middlemarch calls into question its own methods of
creating point of view:
Was there any ingenious split, any hide-and-seek course of action, which might be
detected by a careful telescopic watch? Not at all: a telescope might have swept
the parishes of Tipton and Freshitt, the whole area visited by Mrs Cadwallader in
her phaeton, without witnessing any interview that could excite suspicion, or any
scene from which she did not return with the same unperturbed keenness of eye
and the same high natural colour. In fact, if that convenient vehicle had existed in
the days of the Seven Sages, one of them would doubtless have remarked that you
can know little of women by following them about in their pony-phaetons. Even
with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making
interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens
you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other
smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a
stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these
victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way,

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metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applies to Mrs Cadwallader’s matchmaking will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought
and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed. (Eliot 74-5)
In this passage, the narrative voice evaluates each metaphoric tool it uses to examine the lives of
those in Middlemarch, and each tool has its own limitations as to what it reveals about the
motives behind Mrs. Cadwallader’s match making. Each tool, based on the kind of lens it
provides, reveals a different story about the scene at hand; the telescope’s lens, far removed from
the situation, would not be able to tell us much about it, while the different lenses of the
microscope can make Mrs. Cadwallader seem either like she is harmlessly playing at match
making or like the director of a more complicated and destructive game. The narrator tries on
different lenses in an experimental effort to think more self-consciously about the consequences
of each choice and how her narrative choices could affect the judgment of the characters of
Middlemarch.
These examples of the narrative voice of Middlemarch show not only that the narrator
hardly considers herself to be an omniscient, impartial spectator that is able to guide the reader’s
sympathies, but it also shows that it is important for the reader to be aware of different narrative
choices in the novel and how they affect the way that the character is read. Far from reaching
any conclusions about each character that in turn would guide our sympathies as readers, the
narrator relinquishes control over the characters in a way that requires the reader to reflect upon
the narrative choices of Middlemarch. This trains the reader to understand that sympathy cannot
account for the way that she relates to characters in a novel. The reader is instead trained to
reflect upon their own narrative choices when they explain the emotional experience of another
person or try to understand the situation that caused another person’s emotional state.

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Yet the narrative experimentation in Middlemarch is not simply a self-reflexive aesthetic
exercise; Eliot is just as concerned with the results of her experimentation and its effects on the
world that she strives to convey. Her rejection of sympathy as a standard for mediating
relationships in the novel comes from a deep concern with the implications of how she conveys
that world. This is something that she also makes clear in “The Natural History of German
Life,” where she argues that the lens of “ought” often distorts class relations and creates
unrealistic expectations:
But for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to reproduce external
traits that serve in some degree as a corrective to his frequently false psychology,
his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen
and courtesans, would be as obnoxious as Eugène Sue’s idealized proletaires, in
encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can
grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the workingclasses are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism,
wherein every one is caring for everyone else, and no one for himself. (111).
Altruism, for Eliot, is the outcome of untruthful art, and it is her goal, particularly in
Middlemarch, to train the reader to be able to discern between different kinds of lenses and to
banish the expectation that art must result in altruism. This theme of discernment is especially
important in philanthropic relationships, since the way that a philanthropist explains the situation
of the poor can have immediate consequences on them. Eliot is suspicious of altruism because it
not an explanation that arises naturally from harsh social conditions.
This need for discernment manifests itself in Middlemarch when Dorothea has a
discussion about art with Will Ladislaw. In this conversation, Dorothea finally gets to explain

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the seeming snobby terseness in her initial encounter with Will, where he asked her what she
thought of the art she has been seeing in Rome. In this conversation, Dorothea reveals that she
does not quite know how to evaluate art because of her lack of education, but there is another
reason as well:
“You seem not to care about cameos,” said Will, seating himself at some distance
from her, and observing her while she closed the cases.
“No, frankly, I don’t think them a great object in life,” said Dorothea.
“I fear you are a heretic about art generally. How is that? I should have expected
you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere.”
“I suppose I am dull about many things,” said Dorothea, simply. “I should like to
make life beautiful—I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense
of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world,
pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most
people are shut out from it.”
“I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,” said Will, impetuously. “You might say
the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought
to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no
advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy—when you can. You are doing
the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment
radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken
care of when you feel delight—in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the
youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery? I

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suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make
your life a martyrdom.” (Eliot 199-200)
By labeling Dorothea’s hesitation to enjoy the “fanaticism of sympathy,” Will comments on the
ways that Dorothea’s limitless sympathy, her martyr-like passion for the other, has no room for
self-modulation. Her philanthropic desire to make everyone’s life beautiful highlights
Dorothea’s own slightly egotistical overreach, a desire to do good that, ironically, makes her
unable to act upon her desires. At this point in the novel, Dorothea is still unable to see beyond
her own world; she is described as a “young ardent creature” (183) and “a mere victim of
feeling” (184) who is “alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy” (188).
but who does not quite know how to wield that sympathy yet. It is evident that Dorothea’s
sympathy is conventional where her desire to “do good” through philanthropic endeavor is the
strongest. Because Dorothea is unable to gain distance from her own marriage troubles and
because she frequently allows her own feelings to overwhelm her, Dorothea cannot gain
aesthetic distance from the art she views, either. In much the same way that Dorothea is unable
to gain distance from her widowed state when she concentrates on each of the individual leaves
on the trees of her estate, Dorothea is unable to reflect upon the lens she is using to look at art. If
Middlemarch’s doubting narrative voice is successful, the reader should be able to recognize
Dorothea’s idealism as problematic. It is not ethically responsible philanthropic ambition, but an
understanding of aesthetics that is distorted by two character flaws: an inability to gain distance
from both art and herself and an unfortunate reliance on immediate experience to direct her
interpretation of the situations she finds herself in. Where Ladislaw might be correct in pointing
out the fanaticism of Dorothea’s sympathy by reframing her attachment in aesthetic terms, he
also misses the point by completely removing altruism from the equation. Will entreats

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Dorothea to simply enjoy the beauty of what she sees, but this understanding of aesthetics also
fails to be reflective on the methods by which a piece of art achieves certain ends or on how he is
able to enjoy art at all. Instead, Eliot advocates a middle ground between aesthetic enjoyment
and the kind of sympathy that must always be altruistic.
George Eliot’s recognition of the limits of sympathy in favor of a more aesthetically
influenced mediation of the Other’s emotion is a critique of the way that novels are employed in
philanthropic endeavor. Philanthropy, then, becomes an important theme that focuses a
discussion of how to explain the poor. Eliot begins a conversation about the realist novel, and
about genre’s relation to sympathy more generally, that questions the causality between
sympathy and philanthropy and that continues to be experimented with in novels through the end
of the century. As I continue with this dissertation, I will more closely examine the relationship
between several novels’ techniques of training readers and philanthropic endeavor. In the next
chapter, I focus on a different revision of sympathy, where philanthropy took up the problem of
being able to know another person through emotional experience. Where Eliot cultivates a
doubting narrative voice to train readers to focus on what they cannot or do not know about
another person, philanthropic organizations develop an authoritative narrator who determines
what is known or is worth knowing about other people, specifically the poor.

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CHAPTER TWO
“The Vice of Charity”: The Narrative Transformation of Sympathy in the Writing of the Charity
Organisation Society

George Eliot’s skepticism towards the possibility that sympathy in the novel could create
social change opens up critical possibilities for our own understanding of how sympathy was
revised outside of the social problem novel. Middlemarch trained readers to recognize multiple
ways of seeing other people and to entertain about sympathy’s possibilities outside of the novel.
Where the first chapter asks us to turn our critical attention elsewhere from sympathy as social
change, the second chapter provides important contemporary context for how this shift happened
in the late nineteenth century. As George Eliot was imagining possibilities for the novel in the
wake of a shift in a nineteenth understanding of the purpose of sympathy, the Charity
Organisation Society was creating a new narrative style to train readers to trust in its own
professionalized mediation between themselves and the poor. The Charity Organisation Society
played a central role in the professionalization of philanthropy in the late-nineteenth century and
relied on a formalized narrative style as the catalyst for changing understandings of the role of
sympathy in philanthropic work. Philanthropists in the late-nineteenth century, shifted the
outcome of their work from the creation of understanding of the poor through face-to-face
encounters to the development of factual data about the poor. The narrative techniques of the
COS can be found in their records, publications, and case reports, which are now contained in
the London Metropolitan Archives. These archives have never been explored within the context
of literature, yet they are uniquely suited for study alongside the novels of the late-nineteenth
century. The writings of the Charity Organisation Society, in that they created their own

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narrative style that changed sympathy’s possibilities in the context of the novel, had a fearreaching effect on novels that represented philanthropy in the late nineteenth century. These
archives record a groundbreaking shift in the representation of the poor, demonstrating a
different relationship between philanthropic labor and the novel in the Victorian era. They
provide clear evidence that philanthropists went about their business as narrators and active
readers of the poor. Novels may have influenced philanthropists; but, even more evidently,
philanthropic narrative contributed to the separation of sympathy and benevolent action.
The scholarly discourse surrounding literature and philanthropy, as described in the
introduction, focuses on the way that realism mimicked philanthropic investigatory techniques,
or it focuses on the way that literature created new philanthropists by teaching them how to
sympathize, as in the social problem novel. Yet, as the archive of the COS demonstrates,
philanthropists shifted novelistic discourse around sympathy and philanthropy by inventing a
new narrative style that added more layers of mediation between the public and the poor and
attempted to train readers to use sympathy less in their relationships with the poor. This
emotional management belies an understanding of representations of philanthropy in the novel as
simple mimetic observations of social work. Frank Christianson, in Philanthropy in British and
American Fiction, argues for a close relationship between literature and philanthropy in that the
investigative methods of philanthropists, such as Henry Mayhew, mirror the representational
methods of nineteenth-century realism:
The investigatory apparatus which provides London Labour’s specific kind of
social knowledge also structures many of the novels written during this period.
[…] These authors understood their own professional literary enterprise in terms
parallel to those which Mayhew employs to define his project; that is, they narrate

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philanthropic investigation and do so in a way that highlights the limits and
potentialities of a Mayhew-like narrative mediation. (4)
While I don’t argue with the idea that the investigatory methodology of philanthropy permeates
the philanthropic writing that I look at, I argue that novelists weren’t merely imitating
philanthropic methods; rather, philanthropists saw themselves as narrators who mediated
benevolent relationships and used novelistic techniques to train the public to accept statistics as
abstract representations of the poor and to become comfortable with narratives about the poor
that are missing their first-person perspectives. In what follows, this chapter will examine the
various writings of philanthropic organizations to describe these narrative strategies and to
understand why traditional methods of sympathetic identification in the social problem novel
were inadequate for philanthropists in a changing urban environment.
In 1901, Helen Bosanquet, a key figure in the organization and professionalization of
philanthropic work in the late nineteenth century, asserted that “there is always something of the
artist about the true philanthropist” (“Methods of Training” 7). In elevating the role of the
philanthropist to that of the artist, Bosanquet defines both as “developing both the part and the
whole without sacrificing either, in order to attain harmony” (7) and argues that a
philanthropist’s training should be along the same lines as that of the artist. In doing so,
Bosanquet frames the central conflict between sympathy and philanthropy that was inherent
within philanthropic practice as it professionalized, a conflict that is the focus of this chapter. If
a philanthropist is an artist, the artistic process involves balancing individual portraits (the part)
and the more abstract statistical information (the whole) to which the individual contributes.
This “artistic” process was guided and managed by philanthropy’s professionalized protocols:
the case report and its standardized form. Bosanquet’s vision of the “true philanthropist”

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involves preserving harmony over contradiction, noting that “it is a difficulty which all artists
have to solve” (7), a difficulty that was solved by the creation of a form that could, apparently,
record individual voices while channeling their voices into standardized information that could
then be easily converted into statistical information. Bosanquet’s use of a metaphor of artistry is
a significant perspective on the professionalization of philanthropy: rather than being influenced
by representations of philanthropy in art, the philanthropist is creating a kind of art in which the
form is central to a new vision of social interaction.
Bosanquet’s statement also sheds new light on the literature of philanthropists: the
writing, from case papers to publications, of philanthropic organizations took part in this creation
of a new vision of the relationships between the rich and poor. The archives of the Charity
Organisation Society6 represent the mediation of a bureaucratic apparatus more than they do of
an individual investigator such as Mayhew. Each case starts with the form that is filled out by
multiple agents. Each agent would gather basic information (name, age, work history, family
members, names of references) about the subject of the case along with a recorded narrative of
the subject. The agent would then correspond with references through letters and sometimes inperson contact. Then, the agent would discuss further action with his district board based on his
judgment after he had been able to confirm each story and synthesize these disparate narratives
6

The archives of the Charity Organisation Society are contained in the London Metropolitan Archives in Islington.
I spent June 2014 examining the collection for this chapter. The COS is also known by three other names: its
founding name, The Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity, The Family Welfare
Association (1946-2008), and its current name, Family Action. The collection covers a time span of 1612 to 2006,
the physical extent of which is 67.8 linear meters. The majority of the collection is dated after 1869, the year the
COS was founded. Most records are also handwritten, with the exception of some printed publications from the
organization. The collection is split into series, where each series contains the records of the central office and six
of the original districts. Not all districts’ records still exist. The majority of the research contained in this chapter
comes from the Hammersmith and Fulham district records, which has the most extensive collection of case reports.
Case reports are rare, because they were destroyed if the case was closed for more than 20 years. The archives also
contain administrative records, such as minutes and budget reports. Not all district archives have minute reports,
since much of the COS archive was destroyed by German bombing during World War Two. Annual reports are also
contained in most district records. The London Metropolitan Archives restricts access to cases that are younger than
sixty years. For more information on the history of the archives and their condition, see lma.gov.uk.

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into a single narrative. In this way, the philanthropic agent is not so much an individual as he is
a part of the apparatus, including the forms and publications. There was no single agent on each
case; instead, multiple agents worked on a case and identified themselves in the case reports with
their initials. As each interaction between the COS and the subject occurred, the agent would log
it on a list following the form and initial his entry. The district board would also contribute to
the evaluation through correspondence with district agents. The agents are almost anonymous,
with initials only to serve the purpose of identifying themselves within the bureaucratic
apparatus. In this way, the literally formal narrative method of the COS trains the case worker to
focus on filling in the blanks. It also interpolates other readers into its pattern, training the reader
to trust the scientific and authoritative form that has been approved by professional standards.
This professionalization of philanthropy moves authority from the individual face-to-face
encounter to the highly mediated form of the case report, so that the public and “amateur”
philanthropists who read the COS’s publications recognize that they lack training in such
methods and therefore trust the professional authority of the COS to tell them how their money
should be spent to help the poor. While several scholars of Victorian philanthropy in literature
have focused on literature’s influence on philanthropic practice, Bosanquet’s understanding of
philanthropic work allows an understanding of its writing as participatory in narrative tradition
and practice on the same level as that of novelists. This chapter will argue for a deeper
connection between philanthropy and literature than just representational influence; once we
consider philanthropic writing to have its own self-conscious, literally formal style, the
professionalized practices of philanthropic organizations becomes key to understanding the
narrative transformation of sympathy in the late nineteenth century.
Philanthropists were also aware of the way that they participated in literary tradition.

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They deliberately drew on a popular understanding of the social problem novel to garner
attention for their work.7 The organization of philanthropy was accompanied by stronger efforts
to associate acts of imagination with the labor of philanthropy. Dickens seemed the most
obvious choice for making a connection between artistry and philanthropy; in addition to the
figure of Dickens himself, philanthropists frequently cited his novels as an inspiration for the
improvement of philanthropy and the establishment of specific charities and housing. This
connection between philanthropy and Dickens novels underscores the ways that philanthropists
relied upon the narrative of the social problem novel for a culturally recognized way of relating
their work to the public. In her essay “Working Guilds and Work Societies,” Mrs. George
Augustus Sala mentions holding a “Dickens Bazaar,” in which Dickens novels’ familiarity
enabled public acceptance of charity work: “The first bazaar of any note was held long ago at
York; and, if I mistake not, the ladies who took part in it were rather bitterly reproached for
turning themselves into temporary shopkeepers, even for sweet charity’s sake, and met with a
good deal of opposition. A little time after, there was a Dickens Bazaar in London, at which all
the fair stall-holders dressed as some Dickens’ character; and from that time to this bazaars have
7

Elsewhere, philanthropists turned to the literary tradition to bolster their own identities as philanthropists. The
Countess Burdett-Coutts, an important figure in late-century philanthropy, prefaces her anthology of essays about
philanthropy, Woman’s Mission, by centralizing the role of language arts and literature in philanthropic work:
One language unites us; one Bible, one literature. The poetry and prose of past centuries, and the
first achievements of Englishmen in the dim twilight of scientific discovery, are a common
heritage of both nations. In the past fifty years the genius of both, sometimes divided, sometimes
intermingled, has kept the light burning. To the sacred lamp of literature American authors have
added a peculiar radiance of their own, and the field of discovery and invention has been
illuminated by the splendid achievements of American research. And as in these two great
branches of progress we are at once coinheritors and fellow-workers, so the philanthropic work of
English women, commingled by practice and example with the work of American women, must, I
feel, have an absorbing interest for those who, like ourselves, have drawn their national being from
the Anglo-Saxon race. (Burdett-Coutts xxi)
Here, Burdett-Coutts centralizes the role of literature by defining it as the language of philanthropy. As she explains
that literature is the “common heritage” of both England and America, Burdett-Coutts extends this commonality out
to all speakers of the language of literature other than just the philanthropists themselves. By naming literature as
the language of philanthropy, she also adds an imperative, saying that philanthropy “must […] have an absorbing
interest” for all others who identify with this literary heritage.

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always held their own” (78). Initially, philanthropists were criticized for identifying themselves
with a different class when they were acting as shopkeepers to raise money, but Dickens’s novels
provided a short hand for philanthropic work that was acceptable to the public. Performing as
Dickens characters made charity work recognizable and relatable. In this way, philanthropists’
performance of fiction made the association of philanthropy and the literary imagination
commonplace and made the sympathetic identification popularized by Dickens a way of
performing one’s relationship to the poor in the public sphere. The mode of imagination inspired
by the social problem novel made charity work approachable to the public.
However, as the introduction argues, the COS did not replicate the sentimentality and
focus on sympathy of Dickens novels but instead relied on the authority of fact, which was also
discussed in the introduction. The tension between fact and feeling marks the point at which the
COS achieves a new way of representing the poor. Reliance on facts risked cancelling out the
ethical basis for philanthropic work: recognition of the poor at the level of the individual. The
COS notes such tension when it says:
Tabulated, the returns of the Committees appear dull and official, but each case
represents human interests, a crisis possibly in the history of a family, a strenuous
attempt to save from misfortune, or an application for relief, regarding which
charity had, in honesty, to confess that no relief could be of service. It is in this
work of discrimination and still more in the endeavour to aid those in distress by
personal devotion and persevering thoughtfulness, that as in former Reports, so
again here, the Council must be importunate in asking all who sympathise in the
work of the Society to take part.” (Tenth Annual Report 11-2)
It is in the tension between factual knowledge and personal knowledge that the COS begins to

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outline the way that their methodology ventures into new territory, even while it uses two
authoritative discourses of the time: sympathetic exchange and scientific method.8 Its reliance
on sympathy is evident in the section about personal stories: family crises, individual endeavor,
and misfortune. The shift in representation comes where the COS seems to overcome the tension
between sympathy and fact by outwardly retaining sympathy as motivation for potential
philanthropic workers, while undergirding its methodology with scientific authority. Yet, the
COS discourages sympathy with suffering, creating a narrative opening for a different way of
relating to the poor. Importantly, the COS asks workers to trust that they have already done the
work of discrimination of cases and that a philanthropic worker can sympathize with figures that
appear “dull and official” while knowing that they represent suffering. Because the COS
replaces the unmediated narrative of immediate suffering with their own narrative of careful,
systematic discrimination—a narrative form that doesn’t provoke ready sympathy as easily as a
picture of individual distress—it is necessary to train workers to be responsive to this new
narrative. While dull facts and figures may not seem artful, the COS’s insistence on its narrative
artistry underscores both that the COS is creating a new kind of representation, equally as ethical
as sympathy with the individual poor, and potentially even more so (according to the COS)
because of its mediation through the authoritative discourse of the organization and its scientific

8

Mary Poovey “pose[s] a historical question about the conventions of representation” (xi) of the fact in nineteenthcentury Britain in her book, History of the Modern Fact. She says that the “epistemological unit of the fact has
registered the tension between the richness and variety embodied in concrete phenomena and the the uniform, rulegoverned order of humanly contrived system” (1). She also notes that this tension results in two interpretations of
fact: “incontrovertible data that simply demonstrate what is true” and data that is “manufactured and informed by all
the social and personal factors that go into every act of human creation” (1). These two interpretations register
particularly strongly in the COS’s argument about numbers being representative of the complicated lives of the poor,
and Poovey’s argument that the modern fact is a “battleground” (2) for the production of knowledge, I argue, create
an interpretive opening for the COS and their representation of the poor. That the COS can both claim that their
statistics say something concrete about the condition of poverty in the late-nineteenth century, while at the same
time claiming that these statistics can also represent the suffering of individuals marks a shift in the representation of
the poor towards systemic knowledge rather than personal, sympathetic knowledge.

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method.
The most jarring shift in representation of the poor, however, is the fact that the poor are
notably absent from the new narrative of the COS. Even as philanthropy claims its literariness in
order to create an imperative for philanthropic work and make a common language for the public
to participate in the work of benevolence, it does so at the cost of not preserving representations
of the poor as individuals who speak for themselves and have complicated lives. Instead, the
focus is on training philanthropists. Literature became a manual for philanthropy, with the goal
of training readers to read the poor in a way approved by the COS. Moments of sympathy and
commonality remain primarily in the space between philanthropists themselves. It is evident in
both the discussion of Dickens Bazaars and “the sacred lamp of literature” that the people we
typically consider to be the objects of sympathy in the philanthropic sphere, the poor, are
nowhere to be found. The imaginative space of the Dickens Bazaar is reserved for philanthropic
workers only. This notable absence, even while philanthropists invoke the language of the social
problem novel to make their work recognizable to the public, marks professional philanthropy’s
major departure from the social problem novel: the lack of individual portraits and stories of the
poor that are common in novels about philanthropy. In this way, the major revision of sympathy
in philanthropic writing is turning it from something that engenders more “feeling with” the poor
to something that achieves a mediatory function between philanthropies and the poor: the literary
language of philanthropic organizations becomes the primary mechanism for managing the
emotions of both philanthropic workers and the public in terms of how they “read” the poor.
Jim Chandler’s An Archaeology of Sympathy provides an important history of the
inherent tension in taking action based on sentiment and its connection to the novel. Chandler
defines the sentimental case as “the situation in which one stands apprehended as an object of the

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sort of imaginative projection that Smith terms ‘sympathy’” (iv), and he argues that sympathy
problematizes causality because “the dynamic of the sympathetic exchange leaves it unclear who
is doing what to whom, and sometimes even whether we can safely say there is a ‘who’ to begin
with” (205). Further, “sentimental probability [ . . . ] depends on an extraordinarily high degree
of ambiguity” (216-7). The development of sentimental probability that Chandler traces through
the eighteenth-century sentimental novel was a kind of probability that the COS was no longer
willing to use in its calculations of the problem of poverty. Dickens, as An Archaeology of
Sympathy notes several times, was the nineteenth century epitome of sentimental probability that
Chandler defines as “part of the ‘calculation’ in a sentimental narrative has to do with the
question of what is likely to interest and move the heart of the audience” (223). He even goes on
to say that this problem takes on even more importance within “humanitarian sensibility,” which
is what this dissertation takes on: the problem of sentiment within philanthropic work.
Sympathy, in that it required face-to-face contact with poor, did not guarantee the
probability that readers of the poor would act in a way that the COS wanted them to in order to
solve poverty. Because of this, the COS had to reject calculations based on sentiment. In its
tenth annual report, the COS expresses relief that there was not an emotional overreaction to a
particularly trying year:
They note with satisfaction that, notwithstanding the unusual severity of the
season, there has been no panic among the benevolent, and that it has not been
necessary to resort to such exceptional measures as have been thought
indispensable under similar circumstances in past years. This seems to be the
natural consequence of the increased knowledge of the facts dealt with by this
Society, and of the increased strength of the organisation now at work in ordinary

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times. (Tenth Annual Report 10)
In this way, the COS was able to counteract sentimental probability with its own, factually based,
scientific method. The organization touted its role as purveyor of factual knowledge about
poverty that could prevent a quick reaction to difficulty, arising out of excessive fear, by the
benevolent. Importantly, the organization was also proud of its ability to create a situation where
it was no longer necessary to rely upon the “question of what is likely to interest and move the
heart of the audience,” as Chandler defines sentimental probability, in order to get donations
from the public. As this chapter moves forward in the next few pages, it examines how the COS
had to come up with new terminology and a new narrative style, based on distanced scientific
judgment rather than sentimental probability, in order to find a solution for poverty that did not
rely on the unknowns and ambiguity of sympathy.
Formed in 1869, the Charity Organisation Society (COS)9 led the transformation of
Victorian philanthropy. The COS began as the Society for Organizing Charitable Relief and
Repressing Mendicity, and its originally stated goal was to remove the temptation for ordinary
middle-class urbanites to have their heartstrings tugged by an immediate and present request for
help. This temptation, as the COS described it, of responding immediately to a beggar on the
street and therefore wasting one’s well-intentioned emotional response on a temporary solution
that would not fix a larger problem, was considered to be extremely dangerous by the COS.
Indeed, the COS defined a new methodology for charity work by calling this immediate
emotional responsiveness a “vice” and working to deflect sympathy from the streets to the
organization:
Large though it is in some ways, the Society is but a small body if it is to achieve
9

Now Family Action: https://www.family-action.org.uk/

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such a purpose as this, and if its present members and those who succeed them are
to make this vice of charity prevail. And to this end they must be trained for the
work, as men and women train themselves who care very much for excellence in
anything—in golf, or music, or scholarship, or the management of life—with the
spontaneous and persistent earnestness that comes of a strong desire. It is for this
work that personal and other help is asked—simply on the merits of the object and
the goodness of the work itself; and indeed it is a thing worthy of all honourable
effort and ambition, to draw together, be it ever so slowly, those who differ in
creed and class, so that in their charity they may find a bond of common
conviction and common activity. (“A Note on the ‘Cautionary Card’” 5-6)
Charity work, according to the COS, could not succeed with simple good intentions; rather, a
philanthropist needed training and practice in gathering information in order to contribute to the
charitable goals of the society. By calling certain kinds of charity—particularly the amateur kind
that only responded to beggars on the street—a vice, the COS lends moral urgency to their
methodology. Moreover, they shift the focus of charity from emotional responsiveness to
organizational apparatus, saying that philanthropists can only work together to be successful.
This marks a major shift from earlier narrative forms that concerned themselves with
philanthropy, such as a Dickens novel. Dickens’s descriptions of the individual poor in his
novels were designed to mark the individual poor as remarkable and deserving of sympathy by
careful description and characterization that elicited a sympathetic response from the reader.
This model was so popular as to be common knowledge for a public already trained in the art of
sentimentality. An example of this Dickensian approach is found in the Salvation Army’s
Kingdom Makers in Shelter, Street, and Slum, a part of the “Warrior’s Library.” That there is a

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“Warrior’s Library” denotes the importance of literature in the training of a philanthropic
worker, and these books read like novels. Filled with descriptions of those in need of help,
Kingdom Makers also describes in detail the poor living conditions and neighborhoods of their
subjects. These descriptions are designed to elicit the sympathy of the reader, as they describe
the person as in need of help but also as a person with unseen feelings and histories:
To-morrow’s breakfast is unearned, and Jean stands in the shadow and coughs,
coughs, coughs, unbraced to her night’s work by the usual glass of spirits,
shivering through body and soul; for Jean is not without a brighter past, and
knows well that treading this path is a quickstep to double death. Speak to her,
and you will get a flood of tears, a quick appeal ‘For God’s sake, don’t speak to
me of the old days. I am dying as I stand here; but who in all this cruel world will
help me now?’ Ah, who will? Will you? (Allen 14-5)
As some philanthropic organizations drew people in with captivating individual portraits of
individuals down on their luck but with a sense of their need for change, other organizations
recognized that further involvement in philanthropic work would require retraining in how to
read the poor. While organizations such as the COS made their work approachable by relying on
such training to hold events like the Dickens Bazaars, they also understood that Dickensian
sympathy’s reliance on the immediacy and knowability of the individual poor was not feasible in
an increasingly anonymous urban culture where one might not know one’s neighbors, much less
know about the person begging on the street. In such a context, the COS understood that an
immediate response to an unknown person would inhibit the reform of philanthropic practice.
An essay called “A Note on the ‘Cautionary Card’” offers more detailed context for the
idea that the vice of charity was based in immediate sympathetic or emotional response to

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unmediated narrative. This COS leaflet from 1900 warns against uninformed judgment when
trying to decide whether or not to help a begging-letter writer. The “cautionary card” is a
metaphor for a danger signal that alerts the trained charity worker to a false cry for help and,
importantly, enables the worker to balance her own suspicion, to determine if the beggar can be
trusted, and to avoid the adoption of cynicism so that the worker can continue to work without
emotional fatigue. Most importantly, an independent charity worker, as an individual, is
incapable of recognizing when the cautionary card should be used: “The moral seems to be, not
to trust to one’s own judgment only but to inquire, even when the letter does not suggest roguery.
Rogues will thrive so long as honest people think that their own uninformed judgment of the
unknown will enable them to decide on the merits of a begging letter whether and how much
they should give” (2). Here is a clear moment of the revision of the sympathetic scene. This
piece of the essay describes a moment of solitary reading that focuses on the charity worker
reading a begging letter independent of any other knowledge than what is on the page
immediately in front of her. This moment of reading also describes the conditions for traditional
sympathy: it is an interaction between two individuals mediated by a representation of the object
of sympathy. However, this essay rejects the conditions for traditional sympathy by saying that
individual judgment causes more problems than it solves. Additionally, the representation of the
object of sympathy, the begging letter, does not provide adequate knowledge upon which to base
one’s judgment because it also relies upon an individual’s representation of herself; the beggar
could be lying. Without clear knowledge of the beggar, the independent social worker has the
potential to make a judgment that will benefit a dishonest person and, ultimately, increase the
problem of poverty. This is where the COS needed to provide the additional mediatory layer of
multiple voices with its professional methodology of verification: “Charity requires training as

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much as warfare” (5). By introducing the concept of training into the methodology of
philanthropy, the COS moves away from a metaphor of battle, shifting the focus of philanthropic
work from the immediacy of a “front” (the immediacy of solitary reading) to the preparation that
leads up to it. Thus, the COS establishes itself as the authoritative mediator between the
narratives of the poor and the well-intentioned social worker by acting as both a trainer and a
balance between the worker’s desires to help and the larger social good, thus shifting the focus of
philanthropy from sympathy to inquiry.
This new methodology involved balancing the social worker’s emotional response.
Indeed, the problem of poverty that the COS grappled with was not a lack of resources, but
misdirected emotional response. Many people became involved in charity work because they
were moved by a personal experience with the poor, but it was difficult to keep emotional
momentum going long enough to create effective change. Or, another problem the COS
highlighted was that someone was moved to give in a more reactionary way based on one
experience, and without consistent emotional stimulus, would not be moved to give again. This
essay highlights these problems and the difficulty they created for sustained, effective charitable
work:
Thus the Cautionary Card touches one side of charity organisation; and charity
organisation will fulfil its task, only as the petty droppings of relief, the gifts of
the people who pity but do not pity enough, grow less, and as the pity that pities
enough possesses their hearts. Then out of their deeper sympathy they will feel
discontented unless they are sharers in giving some completer help, or unless they
prevent, as far as they can, the constant recurrence of sorrow in the same familiar
forms, so inevitable that, as people say, you might have prophesied it, and,

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because you might have prophesied it, so preventable. Would not the deepest pity
prevent distress if it could? Yet, strange to say, few would associate pity with
thrift—pity for the ill-being of a class—with the thrift and good home life that
might prevent it. Often indeed, our pity arises only when a picture of distress is
before us, and when it springs up, often it is too late. Someone’s pity should have
been stirred thirty years before perhaps! Then the distress might have been
prevented by self-support. (4)
Emotional sensitivity is valued here, but not in the form of traditional sympathy where an
individual responds to a representative “picture of distress.” In another revision of sympathy, the
essay author modifies “sympathy” and “pity”: people who have “enough” pity will give less
materially as they develop a “deeper” sympathy that, instead, works to prevent sorrow and
distress.

The essay author also notes the difficulty of striking the right balance between an

emotionally responsive person and long-term charity work that addresses the causes of poverty,
not just its symptoms. The essay encourages the charity worker to move beyond superficial
sympathy to a more sustained sympathy with the causes of poverty rather than the effects of it,
justifying the organization’s movement away from immediate sympathy based on representations
of the conditions of poverty. Rather than responding immediately to the effects of poverty that
create the picture of distress, the COS advocates for restraint in giving by turning one’s judgment
over to the organization that can prevent this picture in the first place. The author notes that the
“cautionary card”, or one’s trained ability to judge and verify a request for help, is key to more
systematic, or organized, philanthropic work. That training and mediation is a hallmark of
organized philanthropy. In this way, the COS argues that ethical action means allowing one’s
sympathy to be mediated and restrained by the training and verification provided by the COS.

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This, then, is the “vice of charity”: emotion without judgment prevents good work.
The new methodology of the COS, in that it moves away from immediate sympathetic
response between two individuals and offers a new form of mediatory judgment, is, essentially, a
new method of reading the poor. The audience for “A Note on the ‘Cautionary Card’” is those
who have already felt sympathy for the poor and are interested in doing charity work. The
problem, then, is not that they need to be convinced of the necessity of charity work but that they
must be trained in order to make their work more effective. Implicit in the essay is a more
careful and detailed definition of the kinds of narratives available to philanthropists: the
unmediated narrative of the begging letter and the “picture of distress,” which demand
immediate sympathetic response, and the mediated narrative of professional training and record
keeping, which requires distance and careful judgment. In this way, the COS considers the
sympathy of Dickens and the social problem novel as a rudimentary form of sympathy; the
organization instead recognizes the need to develop a body of writing that functions as a training
manual for philanthropic workers, the features of which this chapter will describe closely. What
we recognize as modern philanthropy, or the structured, mediated judgment about the proper
ends of one’s sympathy, was cultivated primarily through a narrative style that rewrote the rules
of sympathy. Where the discourse of the social problem novel relied upon individuals as the
actors in sympathetic exchange and focused on emotional response, the discourse of
philanthropic narrative was based in anonymity, multiple actors (even organizations as actors),
and a reliance on verifiable fact.
To examine philanthropic narrative in detail, I turned to the case records of the Charity
Organisation Society. Previously in this chapter, I examined the publications of the COS in
order to understand how the leaders of the organization perceived themselves and how they

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chose to portray themselves to the public and subscription members. These texts included
annual reports, monthlies, and pamphlets. The case reports that follow, however, were never
published, as they contained the private information of the individuals and families who were
referred to the COS by hospitals, parishes, and private parties interested in the organization’s
ethos. Each of these case reports began on forms and followed a similar pattern of information
gathering through home visits by agents, referrals, and letters. The information gathered by the
agent, who was usually only identified by his initials in the case reports, was then passed along
to the district committee, which made the ultimate decision about the appropriate way to help (or
not) the subject of the case. These case reports are unique in that they are the only documents in
the COS collection that focus on and name the individual poor. While most of the discourse in
the COS archives concerns the organization and other philanthropists, the case reports contain
the multi-voiced, complicated information about the poor, aggregated by a COS agent, who
recorded information, observations, and interpretation. These case reports contain the process of
representing the poor becoming a narrative before transformation into representative facts and
figures.
As the case papers are the written record of the methodology of the Charity Organisation
Society, they represent the construction of a new way of relating to the poor as well as the agentnarrator’s training in action. The cases are centered around forms that were filled out in the same
way by each agent and include lists of the dates letters were sent and received, but they also
contain written narratives that describe the agent’s interactions with case subjects and referees, as
well as the original copies of received letters and carbon copies of those sent. The forms show a
careful, highly regimented process of information gathering, but the written descriptions of
interactions show the decision-making process of the COS in action, in which agents use their

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training to follow through on their hunches and sensitivities about each subject. In what follows,
I will argue that agents paid attention to signals that are much like the features of novels—
characterization, voice, and the like—in order to make decisions about how each case should be
handled, demonstrating that these philanthropists regarded their work as art. Yet the forms and
regimented process achieve different generic expectations from the social problem novel: each
narrative had to be mediated through the methodology of the COS, represented by the form that
each agent had to fill out.
The COS was very self-conscious of their narrative style, and they set out guidelines as to
how each case should be handled. The first step of the process, after the referral, was to gather
information about the client. On the top of each stack of case papers was a form that was filled
out for each individual, including immediate family members. The form asked for basic
information such as name, age, occupation, last work, any insurance, and a list of references.
There was also space on the form for the agent to include notes on the first home visit and
interview of the client. Following that form, the agent kept track of each letter that came in and
each contact with the client. At this stage, the COS thought of the information-gathering process
as completely neutral and unbiased, as demonstrated in this selection from B. H. Alford’s10 essay
“Need of Thoughtfulness in Charitable Work” in the 1898 edition of The Charity Organisation
Review:
Another way of reconciling methods of charity with methods of the State has been
provided—not quite recently, indeed, but within the limits of my own experience.
A third person, as it were, has stopped in between the rival friends of the poor and
offered arbitration. I mean the Charity Organisation Society. At their committee
10

Alford was a board member of the Charity Organisation Society.

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table in every district meet the representatives of the Guardians and the
representatives of the Clergy. Upon the bookshelves round the room are ranged
volumes invaluable to anyone who understands how to handle them. They
contain the life-history of the poor, not ‘set down in malice,’ but compiled with
care and utmost endeavour to arrive at the naked facts. Interspersed with
narrative in black ink, stand endorsements in red ink giving the judgments of
Committee upon the case, recording any help rendered, any help refused;
determining whether the circumstances demand reference to the Poor Law, or
permit of private charity, or need yet further investigation by means of trained
agents. It may be objected that this chronicle of antecedents is too private for
perusal; that it is inquisitorial to consult it; that a clergyman and his workers had
better not explore secrets, but go to the bestowal of help with kindly, unbiassed
[sic] minds. That might be a possible excuse in the country, where residence is
continuous, where general knowledge is large because population is sparse. It is
no excuse in London, where flitting is habitual, where homes are mysterious,
where many prey eagerly upon the innocence of others. Here almsgiving must be
a science, if for no other reason, because mendicity is a science—practised within
doors upon the naïve, the unguarded visitor” (Alford 130-1).
The first feature of philanthropic narrative that Alford outlines here is a movement away from
the individual as the central figure of philanthropic narrative, or, in this case, a “novel-like”
narrative. The central problem that defines the founding of the COS is that of urban anonymity.
London is characterized by shifting populations, anonymous households, and people whom it is
impossible to know. Therefore, charity workers in the city cannot respond in the same way to

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the poor as charity workers in the country. Where rural charity workers could experience
poverty alongside the poor, or at least observe the causes of poverty in their own community,
urban charity workers interacted with people who they had never met or observed before. This
also meant that the agent couldn’t respond to the private needs of the individual since he is
unknown. As a result, Alford describes a “scientific” methodology that looks similar to thirdperson narration: objective, distanced, guarded. The agent, or narrator, becomes the focus of the
art of philanthropic narrative where the individual is so opaque as to be detrimental to the
construction of the narrative. Further emphasizing the idea that the trained agent is to be a
careful reader of the poor, Alford notes the life-histories, contained in books, that are available to
the agent who has been trained in objectivity. Much as a third-person narrator does, the agent
has to sort through multiple perspectives and make judgments about what deserves narration and
what can be left out. This agent models the narrative training of the COS and intervenes
“between the rival friends of the poor.” His arbitration ultimately replaces the first-person,
individual perspective of the poor; the third-person narrator becomes the central figure of
philanthropic narrative.
Because of this conflict between a neutral narrator and inconsistent multiple perspectives,
the process of the narrative’s movement from private case papers to organization publications
and statistics enacts the training of the philanthropic worker as reader of the poor. The
philanthropic worker begins his task as a neutral observer, seeking out multiple first-person
accounts about the client that may be conflicting or leave many unanswered questions. As he
moves from filling out a basic form to summarizing the situation at hand and, finally, reporting
his findings to the District Committee, the agent presents his reading of the client’s story.
Alford’s discussion of the need to reveal the private life of clients outlines the process by which

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the transition from private to public eliminates the first-person, individual point of view of the
client even while the form in which it is set down gives the impression of preserving it.
At the first stage of the process, the individual client is motivated by a desire to keep as
much about himself private as he can. His own first-person account, recorded by the
philanthropic worker, presents his narrative in its most unmediated form: the client has chosen
what to disclose and what to ask for. Because of this, the COS relies upon the multivocality of
references to get as many points of view as possible in order to confirm what the client has
chosen to reveal about himself. In this way, the narrative agency of the client is in constant
conflict with the desire of the COS to mediate these multiple and possibly contradictory
narratives: the client’s ability to preserve his own telling of the story is always at risk. Yet, the
way that the client remains the subject of the narrative all the way through case papers to the
publication of his (anonymous) story in annual reports, gives the appearance that the client
remains a sympathetic figure even as his voice is determined to be inherently untrustworthy by
the agent. These claims of laying bare the “naked facts,” of scientific neutrality, and of being an
observer or recorder, makes it seem like the philanthropic worker and the COS are merely
relaying the first-person account of the client so that they can get the best help possible, while the
process of that account’s transformation hides the ways by which the client’s perspective is
gradually lost.
A good example of this process of the conflict of competing narratives is the case of the
Manley family in 1887. Mr. Manley, because he is the primary client in the Manley family case,
is also the potential object of sympathy for the COS. Yet, the progression of this case
demonstrates how the focus on the individual as an object of sympathy is disrupted by the COS’s
need to verify his story through the mediation of the agent-narrator. Eventually, because the

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narrator’s drive to verify becomes the focus of the case, Mr. Manley is eventually pushed aside
in favor of other characters that the agent has not heard from yet. Mr. Manley, having pawned
away most of his clothing and his family’s possessions after a series of illnesses, asked for
money for a new set of clothes so that he could take a promising job. The district office then
sent out reference requests to several people: an acquaintance of Mr. Manley’s, a parson, and a
colleague in the insurance business. All letters in reply are positive; they know that Mr. Manley
is in need and that he is an “able” insurance agent. These references are coherent enough to
continue, and so the philanthropic worker makes a home visit in order to gather more
information about Mr. Manley. As the case proceeds, however, Mr. Manley adds a complication
that disrupts his own narrative and inhibits the sympathy he has so far received from the COS
agent. Once he finds out that the COS has been inquiring about his situation to his landlord, he
refuses to disclose any more potential references, saying that the “enquiries had gone quite far
enough” (Document 21). He is especially worried about the COS asking his employer questions,
as it could do damage to his reputation. Mr. Manley’s reluctance to reveal more information
than he already has underscores the tension between the narrator striving for neutrality and the
individual voice of Mr. Manley, who desires to preserve his own point of view. True or not, Mr.
Manley has constructed his own individual narrative, one that was designed to garner sympathy,
and one that is threatened by the agent’s desire to know. This tension puts the narrator in
conflict with the point of view of the individual object of sympathy; Mr. Manley’s story and the
agent’s controlling narrative are mutually exclusive in that the narrator, as aggregator of multiple
points of view, cannot preserve points of view that conflict with his own.
In this way, the Manley case demonstrates how the COS, as it trained its agents to
eliminate minority voices that clashed with the majority, rewrote the role of the narrator. Rather

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than a guide who shows the reader around multiple points of view, the agent-as-narrator becomes
the primary reader, enacting the decision-making process that places primacy on his own
adjudication based on what he observes. The narrator, in this case, remains an observer, but the
structure of COS information gathering lays bare the ways that the narrator-as-observer, despite
any claims to objectivity, mediates all other points of view through his own. In what follows, the
agent-as-narrator’s overriding point of view ultimately displaces Mr. Manley’s. In the agent’s
account of his home visit, he records many instances that made him uneasy:
I visited Mrs. Manley but could not talk to her as her husband was there and
talked all the time. He said he thought which Goodwin came the first time he
thought he had been sent by a friend and it was not till he came again with a case
paper and began to ask questions that he had any idea he was an agent of the
COS. He was particularly anxious to know who had written to us about him—I
could not tell him as I did not know—he talked so fast—he rather bewildered
me—he will not have his uncle or brother written to or any further enquiries made
from any relations as he says he would thereby risk any future benefits from his
uncle—in fact he wishes no further enquiries made at all. […] He thinks now he
has got one piece of work he shall “pull through” and cares very little whether we
help him further or not—I suspect—if I could see his wife alone and win her
confidence I should find she has had a great deal to endure—she is never, I think,
allowed an opinion of her own but always agrees submissively to what he says.
(Documents 19-20)
The most notable thing about this report is the way that the voices of Mr. Manley, Mrs. Manley,
and the agent-as-narrator are in constant competition. Mrs. Manley’s voice is completely shut

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out by Mr. Manley’s, while Mr. Manley also seems to overpower the agent as well. Yet, because
of Mr. Manley’s attempts to overcome the agent, the agent is unable to record Mr. Manley’s full
story due to its volume. What he does record, however, highlights the gaps in Mr. Manley’s
knowledge and his refusal to give the agent any more information. In this way, the agent’s claim
to neutrality actively shuts out Mr. Manley’s ability to narrate his own point of view. Since the
agent is merely an observer, he has no motivation to slow Mr. Manley down to make sure that he
doesn’t miss anything. He simply records what he sees. At this point, because Mr. Manley has
denied the agent any further observations, the agent moves on to Mrs. Manley. Mrs. Manley
offers the agent another opportunity for “reading” the situation, since Mr. Manley has denied him
any further opportunity. The way that the agent moves from one to the other in this case report
demonstrates that, in order to build a narrative in the first place, he can’t be overwhelmed or shut
out by those he is reading, further emphasizing the idea that a mediating narrator has to be in
control of the direction of the story and can’t allow an unmediated, first-person narrator to
overwhelm his own.
The next case demonstrates the way that the structure of COS information gathering and
narration ultimately changes readers’ relationships with the poor. The Biggs cases, which stretch
nearly 50 years, resist the idea that first-person narration, or reliance upon the stories based on
individual perspectives, are the complete story. In a similar way to the Manley case, the initial
client does not remain the only object of sympathy for very long. As the agent observes the
situation and aggregates several voices in the Biggs cases, his object of sympathy shifts from
Mrs. Biggs, who is initially the focus and whose narrative the case begins with, to her daughter
Marian Biggs, whose voice barely enters in to the case at all. In this movement from a client’s
own story as the focus of sympathy to a second-hand story as the focus, the Biggs cases

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demonstrate how the COS trains readers to focus on their own narrative mediations and decisionmaking process rather than focus on the voices that are contained within the narrative as a way of
determining the object of sympathy, and thus, the reader’s relationships to the poor. Ultimately,
the narrative of the COS is defined by its focus on the narrator-reader’s ability to mediate and
aggregate multiple voices rather than the reader’s ability to recognize multiple voices as unique
individuals and to preserve their multiplicity.
The Biggs case file includes four separate cases opened by the COS in 1891, 1915, 1927,
and 1937. The first case, in 1891, was opened and closed quickly, resulting in an outpatient
letter for Mrs. Biggs and the fees paid for Mr. Biggs to enter a trade club, a kind of insurance
organization that covers lost work when ill. The second case, opened in 1915, becomes more
complicated. By this time, Mr. and Mrs. Biggs have four grown children, most of whom live
outside the household; Marian, their daughter, has returned reluctantly due to lack of work. Mr.
Biggs has left the family, and no one knows where he is. The case opens when a hospital refers
Marian to the COS for convalescent treatment. The referral already precludes Marian’s story
from being purely first-person; it reaches the COS second-hand, and Marian is almost a minor
character. Even while she is the center of the case, her voice, and especially her ability to state
her own needs, is relegated to the background. The case is delayed when the hospital states that
at least a month needs to pass between stays, the Fulham and Hammersmith Committee learns
that Marian has just moved to their district and all references live in another district, and the
agent learns that there is family trouble that “needs careful investigation” (Document 13).
Again, Marian’s need for convalescent treatment is relegated to the background once the COS
finds another line of investigation that better fits the goals of the organization, which are to
ameliorate situations that prevent someone from helping themselves rather than fixing an

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immediate situation that will not solve a larger problem. In some ways, the COS is investigating
the family situation in order to find a different problem rather than focusing their attention on the
problem that was brought to their attention in the first place.
Further, the agents’ descriptions of Marian and their sympathy for her changes according
to the COS’s need to construct their own narrative about what should be done for Marian. At
first, Marian makes a good impression on the agent, who writes that she is “a nice looking girl
with nice manners” and that “she is nicely dressed and of superior appearance” (Document 10).
Further, when the agent visits both Marian and Mrs. Biggs at home, he discovers that Mr. Biggs
“was in prison five years ago and when he came out was shipped off [to] Canada by his late
employers. She promised them she would never go near them again to trouble them if only they
helped to send her husband away. He used to beat and ill treat her whenever he was drunk, and
she was thankful to be rid of him” (Document 17). At first, Marian and Mrs. Biggs are
sympathetic characters due to the fact that they seem to be doing as well as they can despite the
circumstances and that their situation has been further exacerbated by a formerly abusive, absent
husband and father. Yet, as the case goes on and a different agent (indicated by different
handwriting) meets Mrs. Biggs, he finds her to be a “very disagreeable woman who refused to
give any information whatever and appeared to be very much annoyed at the Hospital’s having
applied for help to get her daughter away for the benefit of her health” (Document 17). Further,
the reference letters oscillate between approval of Marian’s convalescence and the opinion of not
being “favourably impressed” (Documents 17 & 38). Rather than finding Marian’s limitations to
be a reason for sympathy for her situation, the agents of the COS see these limitations as gaps
that need to be filled by their own goals for her. In other words, constructing a narrative that
promotes sympathy for the poor is not the goal in the case papers of the COS. Rather, the COS’s

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narrative aims to construct further problems that cannot be solved through sympathy alone; the
goal of the agent is to construct a character that needs to be changed rather than understood.
This goal is exemplified by the way that the case papers construct Marian as a figure in
need of their agency’s mediation, particularly as they have to deal with an increase in volume of
reports about Marian that can’t be reconciled. As the COS receives more reference letters, they
become aware that Marian’s character could be lacking, despite the earlier reports by their own
agents that she seemed to be respectable. In a letter from the COS asking for help from a rescue
worker, Miss Edsall11, they say: “We hear the mother and daughter have bad character and that
she should be taken away from her mother’s influence. Doubts are expressed as to Marian’s
character, but we have nothing definite against her; only references all say she should be got
away from her mother’s influence. If you could see the girl you could more easily form an
opinion of her than one of our visitors can. The c’tee [sic] would be willing to help her to get
away to a home, if they felt that on her return, she would not be going back to her mother: we
wondered if you could give her a shelter until she could get into a situation” (Documents 27-8).
In this letter, it’s clear that having sympathy for Marian is beside the point. The COS doesn’t
know enough about her to be able to say if she is a sympathetic figure or not, and that’s not their
goal. They ask Miss Edsall to see Marian, not to understand her better or make a decision about
her character one way or the other, but to decide if they could help her in a way they’ve already
determined. The case ends when Miss Edsall visits Marian at home and then receives a postcard
from Marian saying that she does not wish to leave her home. As a result, “Miss Edsall can do
nothing further” (Document 38). In this way, Marian’s case report reveals the way that the

11

Importantly, Miss Edsall is not an agent-narrator, as discussed above. She had no role in recording or
adjudicating cases, but acted primarily as a data collector who added another perspective for the agent-narrator to
mediate.

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COS’s formulaic narrative of self-help and verification changes relationships to the poor from
ones characterized by sympathy to relationships characterized by only reporting those details that
help them to carry out the methodology of the COS.
Marian’s third case is entirely different from the second. Marian is more compliant with
the COS and confirms their earlier suspicions that she had a bad influence; from there her bad
character can be explained away by the COS’s earlier ideas from the second case. The case
opens in April of 1927 when the COS receives a letter from St. George’s hospital asking if
Marian could again be supported for a stay at a convalescent home. By this point, Marian is
married and has the last name Beals. The COS notes that they have dealt with her before and
begins to gather information and references. Marian is still having problems with her mother,
who accuses her of being unfaithful and refuses to watch Marian’s children while she goes for
convalescent treatment. Marian even asks for the COS not to let her mother know that she has
asked for help, since Mrs. Biggs has never forgiven her for asking for help the first time. At this
point, here is a dispute about Marion’s character, some saying that she has a bad reputation while
others say that she has been better since her marriage and that any bad behavior happened before
she was married. As the COS makes arrangements for her to convalesce and for her children to
be cared for, the case continues until Marian receives convalescent treatment and final follow up.
While it seems that the COS has had sympathy for Marian’s hardship this time around, it is only
because of the end result of their successful mediation; Marian has conformed to their ideas
about her character and its causation rather than being written as a sympathetic character.
The fourth and final case for Marian Beal is opened in 1937 when Marian asks for
dentures. She reports that the time since her past case have been hard for her because of ill
treatment by her husband and anxiety and depression. Her husband had been living with another

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woman, and when Marian tried to get a divorce, it was denied because of lack of evidence. As
the COS works to find funding for her dentures over the course of a few months, they also
construct a story about her family life. They find that Marian’s children try to help her as they
can, and they get a history from several sources about her husband’s cruelty.
Both the Manley and the Biggs/Beals cases follow a formulaic pattern of observation,
verification, and resolution. The agents in each case perform the role of the observer-narrator in
the way that they have been trained by the COS, reading the poor in such a way that allows them
fulfill the goals of the agency. The most important role for the agents is to be a neutral narratorobserver, a role outlined by the COS’s training manuals and Alford’s essay about the “scientific
method” of the COS. While this role would seem to meet the conditions for sympathetic
response, as observation and description of the individual poor is the formula for sympathy in the
social problem novel, the formula that the COS lays out in its case forms and reports changes the
primary condition for sympathy: a face-to-face encounter with an individual. Both cases
demonstrate how COS agents are trained not to focus the stories of individual poor in order to
cultivate sympathy, but to focus on their own mediation, asking if it follows the guidelines that
the COS creates. If the philanthropist is an artist, these case reports demonstrate that the creation
of philanthropy results not in portraits and preservation of individuality, but in the construction
of repeatable narrative patterns through its use of a form. In doing so, the COS also changes
readers’ relationships with the poor; readers become acquainted with the compliance of the poor
rather than the poor themselves.
Yet, even as the COS shifted the focus of philanthropy from sympathy to systems, the
public still desired individual stories that would justify the COS’s work and provide a reason for
them to give. After the first few years of publishing annual reports with only statistical

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accounting of the work that had been done that year, readers began to request more specific
stories about individual cases. This, on its own, is interesting, considering that the COS’s
argument that statistics could be representative did not seem to be enough for those interested in
philanthropic work. Yet, the organization’s inclusion of individual stories to satisfy subscribers
seemingly offers a more personal narrative while concealing the way that the COS has already
done the interpretive work for readers. A good example of this is found in the following
narrative from the Annual Report of 1872, in which the COS highlights the contrast between
immediate distress designed to create sympathy and the verification and factual information of
the COS:
2. Reported Unfavourably
Case 667.—In the autumn of last year an account appeared in the papers, headed
‘Death by Starvation,’ of a coroner’s inquest held on an infant of five months.
The mother, a girl of 19, said that the deceased and another child of 2 ½ years old
were her illegitimate children by a man who had left her and was earning £2 a
week in America. She described herself as supporting herself, her two children
and a sister (aged 12), by working at a lead factory at 9s. a week. She though she
had been poisoned by the lead, that the milk had been affected by the same cause,
and had thus caused the death of the child. Distressing details were given by the
Coroner’s officer at the inquest and by other who wrote to the papers of the state
in which the family were found; the case excited considerable sympathy,
subscriptions began to flow in, and an offer of employment was made by a
clergyman. In the meantime, enquiries had been addressed to this Committee on
the subject, in consequence of which our agent was directed to ascertain what he

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could about the family. His report was to the effect that the girl ought to have
been prosecuted for causing the death of the child by neglect, inasmuch as she
used to come home form work and go out shortly afterwards in company with
other young girls of loose character—and, indeed, according to one account, that
she had not been thoroughly sober since her child died; that the father of the child,
instead of being in America, was earning good wages in Drury Lane, and had
been in the mother’s company within a week of the child’s death; and that there
was no foundation whatever for the suggestion as to lead-poisoning. These facts
were made known to the benevolent persons who had inquired about it and to the
journalists who had taken the matter up, with the result that no further
subscriptions were solicited.” (Fourth Annual Report 25)
This essay is a debate about narrative representation rather than the morality of the poor. This
published case report outlines categories beyond simple deserving or undeserving; the essay
argues for new narrative standards. The category of “reported unfavourably,” even as it follows
the more familiar categories of deserving and undeserving, implies that the way the story of the
case was told by groups other than the COS was the problem, not necessarily the client herself.
The case report above uses style to mark the contrast between the report of the papers and the
verification by the COS. Before the COS enters the case, the sensationalized nature of the report
is emphasized with words and phrases like “distressing details,” “excited considerable
sympathy,” and “subscriptions began to flow.” These evocative details mirror the warnings
written in “A Note on the ‘Cautionary Card’”, where the danger lies in a focus on a picture of
distress, followed by immediate emotional response and wasteful giving. What’s more, this
section of the report frames the story with a first-person narrative, where the mother is allowed to

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speak about her situation herself and these details are merely recorded by the newspaper. The
shift in the tone of the report comes when the COS steps in to investigate the situation: the focus
is on a third-person narrative of the situation by the agent. Very few adjectives are used to
modify the details of the report, but the agent’s single use of emphatic language is telling: “no
foundation whatever” focuses on the flaws in the narrative method rather than the character of
the person whose report it contains. Other than that, the agent’s response is measured and
focuses on observable details rather than emotions. Further, these observable facts disqualify the
first-person narrative of the mother from consideration and are used by the agent to correct the
journalists’ exaggerated response to the coroner’s report and their naive trust of the mother. The
publications of the COS offer not just a report, but a didactic illustration of the dangers of
trusting the first-person narratives of the poor and emotionally cloying individual portraits of
those poor. The above case report highlights the necessity of intervention by the COS not just in
charity itself, but in the way cases are reported to the public. The mother’s first-person account
and the dangerous sympathy it inspires needs to be mediated by the COS in order to manage
emotion and draw attention to the corrective narrative of the COS.
This has important implications for the way that we critique the ethics of philanthropic
practice. While critics of Victorian philanthropy have tended to concentrate on the categories of
deserving and undeserving set forth by the COS, the above report indicates that the moral
character of the poor was less important as a category than the authority through which the story
was mediated. This shifts the critique of philanthropy’s removal of agency from the poor: it is
no longer about removing agency through unfair categorization but about removing agency by
placing primacy on narrative mediation even while claiming that the philanthropic reports
preserved first-person immediacy. The Charity Organisation Society’s revision of narrative

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sympathy, in that the individual poor were no longer the focus, destabilized the poor’s ability to
represent themselves. The poor were considered to be inseparable from their class; yet, as
sympathy lingered in philanthropic writing as a merely symbolic way of accessing the stories of
the poor, this change destabilized the figure of the individual and its role in narrative. Metaphors
of the part’s place among the whole explain how the individual no longer symbolizes a discrete
figure with a unique background and instead has become representative of a larger group. The
following remark on COS procedure underscores the tension in this representation and the
ambiguity as to whether the poor should be regarded as individuals or as a class:
“That each case should be considered solely upon its merits,” the council would
remark as follows:
1. The suggestion, if interpreted generally, embodies the usual action of District
Committees.
2. But it may mean that cases should be regarded as isolated and not as related to
the larger problems of poverty and pauperism. If such be the right interpretation,
it is clear that the Society could not acquiesce in such a view of its duties. The
Society could not dissociate the individual from the class, pretend that its action
could be limited to the person with whom alone it was dealing. It has to consider,
in the individual case, what the more general effects of its action would be, if
carried out on a large scale in similar cases; e.g. the gift of boots to enable
children to attend school if frequently made and widely known, would tend to
make parents neglect to send their children to school in order to get the boots.
Thus the object of the School Board would be in a measure defeated. (Tenth
Annual Report 36)

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Responding to the criticism that the COS was measuring the “deserving” poor through the lens
of their own methodology instead of to each case independently from all others, the COS offers a
procedure that preserves the appearance of considering each case objectively while still
obscuring the individual poor as mere parts of the whole of their class. When the COS suggests
that considering a case only upon its merits is their “usual action,” they also give themselves
leeway to ignore this practice.
In fact, the COS’s plan of action highlights the way that individual poor are preserved
only as symbols of philanthropic reformist ideology: “The Council believe that few can have any
personal intercourse with the poor without coming to the conclusion, that it is almost better that
Charity should not act at all, than that it should so act as to increase and perpetuate the causes of
distress among the wage-earning classes, and tend to undermine their independence” (Tenth
Annual Report 35-6). The COS wishes to preserve the independence of the poor, but only up to
a point. In a further twist of irony, this statement demonstrates how even face-to-face, individual
contact with the poor increases the philanthropist’s belief that the poor cannot be separated from
their class. Independence remains as a descriptor not of personal autonomy, but of the separation
of classes. Even though the individual poor might be initially isolated from the rest of her class,
the COS understands its actions as always affecting the entire class. In this case, potential effects
of charitable action cancel out the consideration of an individual’s background, circumstances,
and need. In this hypothetical case, even if one child needs boots to go to school, it might
encourage the class of which the child is a member to manipulate the system in order to get
boots. In such an example, the COS demonstrates how it, in fact, does not consider individual
cases, since it concedes that it cannot “pretend that its action could be limited to the person with

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whom alone it was dealing.” In this way, the COS’s procedure preserves the symbol of the
individual object of sympathy while acting as if each person is representative of their entire class.
This way of representing the poor leaves no room for the individual to represent himself
as such; it even makes self-representation appear deviant. One example of this incongruity
seems completely out of place in the COS’s collection of texts, yet it was curiously preserved in
its archive: that of Frank Foster, who requested assistance from the COS and was denied because
of his income. In his leaflet “A Vital Question,” Foster claimed that the denial of his request for
a few hundred pounds to pay off a debt resulted in greater debt to the bank at the time of the
leaflet’s publication. Of note on the title page of his leaflet, Foster addresses the COS saying that
the way that they exchange information on the individual scale is suspect: “For the supporters of
the Charity Organisation Society, to some of the chief among whom a copy of this document will
be sent, as the writer does not adopt the charitable mode of making accusations against others
through ‘private’ or privileged communications” (1). Here, Foster accuses the COS of
hypocrisy: while they claim to focus on individual cases, they make their judgments about each
individual private and thus completely mediated by the COS’s standards. By making his
grievances public, Foster facilitates public debate. While at first glance it may appear that Foster
is only taking issue with the final judgment of the COS on his case, framing his argument in this
way indicates that his larger grievance is with the narrative construction and methodology of the
organization as a whole.
Foster expands his grievance with the methodology of the COS, saying that the reader’s
attention shouldn’t necessarily be on him alone but on his case as exemplary of a larger problem:
Notwithstanding the irreparable injury and gross injustice I have suffered at the
hands of the Society in question, God forbid that I should assail it, as I now do,

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did I for one moment suppose my case to be an exceptional one, and that the
Institution conferred a benefit on the community at large. But this is the exact
opposite of my belief. Ready, as I am, to admit that hiring Inquisitors have
effected some good in suppressing professional beggars, I am at the same time
convinced that the detection of each real impostor has been followed by the cruel
oppression of a dozen that are not imposters. (4-5)
While Foster might not have a problem with a personal sacrifice for the greater good, as the COS
claimed in their denial of his request, he doesn’t believe this is the case. Instead, Foster argues
that the individual investigators or character references that the COS relies upon is the equivalent
to personal assassination, that the COS “stab[s] their victims in the dark with weapons sharpened
by the foes of the fallen one” (Foster 4). While Foster’s language may be hyperbolic, his
argument that character attacks on the individual do not in fact benefit the whole responds to the
rhetorical tension between the individual and the group in philanthropic debate at the time. He
would accept personal sacrifice on behalf of the whole, but the COS’s methodology denies this
possibility. That Foster went so far as to publish his own leaflet demonstrates how much he felt
the need to represent himself. Foster’s ultimate argument here is that, because the COS denies
individuals the opportunity to represent themselves, it works against its stated goal of making the
poor more self-sufficient.
Foster takes specific aim at the organized methodology of the COS when he explains how
the COS intervened in his situation and the process that took place afterwards. Having first
appealed to private parties for help in getting him out of debt, Foster was referred to the COS at
some point without his knowledge. Six months after his initial contact with agents, “the invalid
[Foster] wrote to ask on what legal or moral ground the Charity Organization Society claimed a

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right to enter—without solicitation or appeal to them for aid—a private dwelling and make every
inquiry both within and without, relating to the affairs of a family, without making known the
result of their inquiries to the chief person concerned?” (Foster 21). Foster’s lack of agency in
his own case meant that “the fountain of human sympathy was almost immediately cut off by the
turncock of 'Organization’” (21). Foster’s accusation against the COS makes an important point
about how sympathy towards the individual is weakened when the individual is sacrificed to
systematic organizations like the COS.12 Foster’s leaflet also implies a chaotic, disorganized
system for the poor to navigate. Unknown to him, he had become a part of that system, and
wasn’t aware of the fact until his home was, as he describes, invaded. Not only does the
methodology of the organization remove opportunities for sympathy and self-representation, but
it also creates a chaotic system out of which the poor cannot emerge to represent themselves.
The COS’s new narrative style that eliminates the need for sympathy in relationships
with the poor has far-reaching implications on the way that we understand the relationship
between philanthropic labor and the literary imagination. The result of the COS’s changing
narrative strategies and movement away from sympathy to statistics destabilizes the narrative
field surrounding philanthropy in the late-nineteenth century. Even while individual stories
remain as a way to garner support from the public, the systemic narrative change set in motion
by the philanthropic techniques of the COS moves the field in a new direction and displaces
sympathy as a way of judging the success of philanthropy. As a result, individual stories of the
poor come into conflict with philanthropic practices instead of being seen as supportive to them.

12

References to the machine-like nature of the Charity Organisation Society turns up elsewhere. The COS
themselves recognized the tension between the personal and the organization when they said that “without much
personal service, the mere machinery of the Society’s organisation will prove of but little worth, and it is therefore to
be hoped that an increasing number of persons in all classes of society will volunteer for the work in hand” (Second
Annual Report 20).

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chapter establishes the idea that philanthropic writing took part in literary tradition through its
self-conscious reconstruction of narrative style from sympathy to data collection and the use of
forms. As this dissertation continues, each chapter will examine how philanthropic novels
engaged with the shift away from sympathy, as they could no longer rely on the methodology of
sympathy to represent philanthropic relationships. Rather than simply representing philanthropy
or imitating its investigatory techniques, these novels thought deeply about the narrative of data
collection that circulated in writing about philanthropy and complicated the novel’s ability to
create social change by bridging the gap between readers and characters.

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CHAPTER THREE
“I Sheltered Myself Behind Myself”: The Paradox of Feminist Philanthropy in The Wife of
Sir Isaac Harman and All Sorts and Conditions of Men

The latter half of this dissertation is an evaluation of whether or not philanthropic forms
of individualization and attachment can be redeemed for feminist ends in the wake of
professionalized philanthropy. Where chapter two establishes that late-Victorian philanthropy
replaced sympathetic attachment in philanthropic relationships with objective detachment as a
mandate for professionalization, chapter three considers how such a mandate changed how
women participated in philanthropic work. Professionalization seemingly created the conditions
for women to take on a vocational, autonomous identity as philanthropists. Paradoxically,
however, it failed to provide the heroines of philanthropy the narrative agency that such a
privileged position promised to their male counterparts. This chapter argues that, as the
discourse surrounding female philanthropy suggested that a woman could improve herself
through professionalization, philanthropic narrative only strengthened the conditions that made it
difficult for women to gain autonomy.
Even as the figure of the singular feminist-philanthropists proliferated in literature and
other representations of philanthropy, these women protagonists were not experiencing progress
away from their roles as wives. This is evident in Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of
Men and H. G. Wells’s The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, where the female philanthropistprotagonists set out to create public, professional roles for themselves with their philanthropy,
only to be interpolated back into a marriage plot. These novels reveal the contradictory aims of
the new professionalized philanthropy, which claimed to be progressive and socially

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transformative while denying such social progress to women. Even as the Charity Organisation
Society (COS) focused on professionalizing its narrative strategies in such a way as to privilege
the philanthropist’s narrative voice above all others, such a professional identity was not
extended, rhetorically, to women. Women were professionalized in such a way that the
organization could co-opt their efforts back into the problematic system that focused on women’s
role in the private sphere. Both Besant’s and Wells’s novels point toward the dissonances this
philanthropic storyline created for women by highlighting the fragmented identities of their
female protagonists, rather than aggrandizing their status as philanthropic heroines. This chapter
contributes to the larger argument of the dissertation about the shift from sympathetic
philanthropy to professionalized philanthropy by arguing that philanthropic reform did not
contribute to social change and that professionalized philanthropy could no longer be represented
as transformative in the novel either. As demonstrated in chapter two, philanthropy prevented
social change by marginalizing the poor; in chapter three that discussion was extended by a look
at the ways that professionalized philanthropy marginalized women. Even while women were
encouraged to become professional philanthropists, the discourse of philanthropy set limits on
the way that they could exercise philanthropy—philanthropy itself was antithetical to female
agency.
Women were certainly invited to become professional philanthropists by taking on an
objective attitude in their work. As female philanthropists attempted to organize and solve the
chaos of poverty, philanthropic discourse depicts them as singular, charitable heroines, who
provide examples for other aspiring female philanthropists. An 1883 article “The Education of

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Philanthropy” by an anonymous rent collector who was trained by Octavia Hill,13 addresses the
idea that sympathy with the poor is the chief aim of philanthropists: “If it be agreed that rent
collecting offers to women one of the best and most useful means of direct personal sympathy
and influence with the ‘working’ classes, it remains to see how its duties may be most
successfully maintained” (58). Here, the author refers to the idea, common in discourse about
female philanthropists during this time, that women’s work in the public sphere was acceptable if
it fulfilled their role as sympathetic caregivers. The if/then structure of this sentence, though,
demonstrates how the author complicates this widespread opinion about women’s work in the
public sphere. She says that even if women are somehow sanctioned to do rent collection work
because it allows them to be femininely sympathetic, the fulfillment of this role does nothing to
assist them with doing the actual work. Again, as in chapter two, philanthropic discourse sets up
a conflict between feminine sympathy and philanthropic action, where personal contact is
detrimental to the practice of philanthropy and its overall goals.
However, this chapter moves beyond framing female philanthropy as a conflict between
dutiful action and sympathetic caregiving. Rather than an attempt to argue which of these
iterations of philanthropy is more feminist, the focus here becomes the ways that the discourse of
professionalism functions through a kind of detachment that distorts women’s attempts to
professionalize. Women’s participation in philanthropic work operates, then, not as an example
of successful professionalization, or feminist transformation of women’s roles, or of a woman’s
ability to individualize through her work; rather, it operates as a critique of the discourse of
professional objectivity and professionalization that is so important to philanthropic reform. The
13

Octavia Hill (1838-1912) was a social reformer who focused on housing conditions; she was also helped to found
the Charity Organisation Society and was on its board. She became a landlord (rent collector) when she was unable
to find housing for the poor in good condition. Rent collecting was later organized into a professional form of
philanthropy that went along with self-help trends of late-century philanthropic reform.

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idea that philanthropy is a form of vocational self-cultivation, or that women can overcome the
stereotypes of their sympathetic femininity through philanthropic work, is one that has expanded
along with feminist literary criticism. Dorice Williams Elliott’s The Angel out of the House
makes such an argument. She focuses on the “tensions and anxieties inherent in the figure of the
philanthropic woman” (4), in that the female philanthropist was both praised for fulfilling
feminine duty and scorned for leaving behind her domestic duty. Disappointed that “historians
and literary critics, including feminists, have written off women’s philanthropic work as dogooding or patriarchal collusion without recognizing the crucial role it played in redefining both
gender and class roles in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain” (5), Elliott aims to
“document the cultural work” (6) of philanthropic representations and argues that these
representations inspired an “inherent challenge that women’s practice of philanthropy posed to
the domestic ideology of separate spheres and to the ideal of harmonious class relations” (5).
For Elliott, representations of philanthropy could create “mimetic desire” (7) or “ambitious
desire” (8) in women. Elliott concentrates her argument on the idea that “by helping to rewrite
the defining terms of the category of woman, specifically by acknowledging their ambitious
desires, philanthropy did help to remove some of the limitations that the gendered division of
labor placed on women in the nineteenth century” (11-2). These representations were
everywhere, as Elliott points out: “it became commonplace in the 1860s for novelists to deploy
the figure of the noble philanthropic woman” and “the ‘philanthropic heroine’ could be said to
rival the traditional ‘romantic heroine’ as a literary convention” (161). Yet, later in the century,
novels such as Middlemarch document the failure of the philanthropic heroine. Nonetheless,
Elliott argues that even this failure marked “public acceptance of the figure of the philanthropic
heroine [and] signaled an important shift in the definition of women’s nature that paved the way

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for more systemic changes in the future” (188). Indeed, even All Sorts and Conditions of Men’s
protagonist, Angela, intends to change women’s roles with her philanthropic work.
Elliott’s scholarship documents the many, many examples of female philanthropists in the
nineteenth-century novel and grapples with their paradoxical position as both traditionally
feminine (sympathetic) and dangerously masculine (detached), yet, as the end of the book moves
toward representations of the failed philanthropic heroine, it does not come to terms with how
many late-century novels depicted the philanthropic heroine in such a way as to mark her
inability to change women’s roles in the public sphere. Philanthropic texts, such as “The
Education of Philanthropy,” discussed further on in this chapter, certainly privileged women’s
ambitious desires, but did so primarily by measuring the philanthropic heroine’s ability to detach
from the poor. The effect of such detachment on a woman’s public image could be detrimental
in other ways, as the readings of Besant’s and Wells’s novels demonstrate. Additionally, these
novels call into question the contradictions of progressive narratives of philanthropy that use the
figure of the feminist-philanthropist heroine to improve the social order by creating commonality
between the rich and poor. Such a social imperative came into conflict with the professional
requirement for objectivity. For the nineteenth-century philanthropist, vocational self-cultivation
meant developing a strong position of detachment from the poor. In the readings of the novels
that follow, this chapter argues that women, because of the way that their philanthropic work
came in conflict with their marriages, were not able to achieve a “professional” level of
objectivity. Women had to sacrifice either their marriages or their careers as philanthropists.
Further, because these novels focus on the way that women could not achieve objectivity, and
often had to resort to manipulations of their identities in their attempt to do so, the texts could not
offer a philanthropic heroine after which the reader could mold her ambitious desires.

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Professional objectivity, similar to the detachment examined in chapter two, is modelled
in philanthropic literature targeted at female rent collectors. Rent collecting, advocated by a
famous female philanthropist, Octavia Hill, was a popular way for women to participate in
philanthropic endeavor and not venture too far outside of acceptable roles for women. In the
article “The Education of Philanthropy,” however, the Charity Organisation Society’s (COS)
training in professional objectivity begins to remold the expectations around feminine sympathy
and caregiving that had dominated the field in the earlier part of the nineteenth century.
Authored by an anonymous woman who gains her authority from her personal training by
Octavia Hill, the article aims to pass on this new methodology to women in particular. This
intended audience is indicated by the article’s placement in Work and Leisure: a magazine
devoted to the interests of women, as well as the way by which the magazine frames rent
collecting, as work that “call[s] forth the power of English ladies” (58). The speaker of “The
Education of Philanthropy” argues that a female rent collector should emerge as a strong beacon
of dutiful action rather than a symbolic figure of feminine sympathy. She creates a vivid tableau
in which the trained philanthropist puts aside her immediate responses to a chaotic scene of
poverty in order to do her job:
The candidate for training, on probation as it were, will probably be first taken
round the beat by a senior collector, whose quick correctness and freedom from
care as she jots down succeeding beats, receives and gives varying scenes of
change, or casts a quick glance round washhouse and yard, noting here a stray
window-pane or an increasing rat-hole, there a neglected staircase or an unwashed
baby, while all the time there is an apparently uninterrupted attention ready for the
quick-succeeding tales of children’s weal and woe, [. . .] may well fill with

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wonder the inexperienced beginner, who of kitchens and garrets, of Smiths and
Browns, of tragedies and comedies, as the seventy or eighty bits of different
family life she has glimpsed at in the last two hours float in her brain in strange
confusion, with only the clean room at the top of the street, or the dirty passage
over the way, or the more than usually overpowering multitude of babies in the
kitchen at No. 20, shining as landmarks in the waste of misty impressions; yet that
wonder is increased tenfold as she finds her companion quietly striking off her
rapid notes, giving minute orders for necessary repairs, peremptorily dismissing
unwarranted demands, discussing which roofs shall be thoroughly set in order,
which temporarily patched, with the proved plumber, who waits his weekly
orders, ready to enter into honest but wordy explanation over each phrase of the
incomprehensibly technical bill, and watching his opportunity to carry off his
victim for a tedious inspection of half-cleared drains. (58-9)
This tableau, in addition to outlining the working conditions of a female rent collector, describes
the difference between the rent collector-in-training and the experienced rent collector as a
difference in ability to detach. While the collector-in-training can barely remember all she has
seen and is left with only “misty impressions,” the experienced collector can not only notice all
the details about the conditions of her properties, but can move on to the next task with practiced
speed, all the while avoiding having her time wasted by the loquacious plumber. Where the
trainee is overwhelmed by the multitude of problems, people, and locations swirling around her,
the trainer is marked by her “freedom from care.” What is more, even while the trainer notices
more than the trainee, the trainee’s memory is overwhelmed with impressions “shining as
landmarks,” indicating that her concentration on a small amount of items allows them to linger

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and become much larger in her mind than they actually are. The experienced rent collector gives
her full attention to the problems of the poor she visits, but she remains distant from them as the
surprises of her work become more routine.
The author of this piece depicts the rent collector as an efficient beacon, a professional
worker who objectively turns the everyday details of rent collecting into a systematic plan to
solve poverty. A plan of action only becomes clear when the rent collector “finds the details of
the rent-entry and account-keeping, of general supervision and reporting, fit into their proper
place, while day by day the great issues which all thorough knowledge of our fellow-creatures
brings to light stand out more and more fully defined” (“The Education of Philanthropy,” 60).
The author’s use of narrative metaphors throughout the piece, including the “more fully defined”
of this passage, describe the fully-trained philanthropist as a mediator through whom all the
mundane, disparate details of charity work coalesce into a picture of the human condition. She
does not merely keep up with a to-do list or record information. The details, written out as a list
even by the author, refuse to accumulate into a vivid picture of the poor in distress without her
guidance and discrimination. The immediacy of the “overpowering multitude of babies in the
kitchen at No. 20” (59) are not meant to “shin[e] as landmarks,” lingering in the memory of the
philanthropist as individual problems to be fixed one at a time; rather, these to-do items are
relegated into the background of their “proper place” as they are mediated into a larger picture of
the “great issues.”
As “The Education of Philanthropy” describes the professionalized role of the
philanthropist in narrative terms, it also elevates the well-trained philanthropist to a heroine who
can be admired and emulated. The author asks, “Shall we not rather press into the ranks of those
who would strike at least one blow in the gathering battle, who would strive for the honour of

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working under her guidance, as her humble followers, [. . .]” (61). The philanthropist becomes a
heroic figure in this narrative, fighting a battle while showing her followers how to win it.
Sympathy is beside the point of philanthropy; rather than honing her emotional sensitivity to the
minutiae of her job, the philanthropist must train herself to be objective and active rather than
responsive to every surprise that inevitably appears. In this way, she emerges from the chaos of
rent collecting as a professional with the powers of evaluation. Contact with the poor is not
useful to get to know them better; instead, its purpose is to provide a platform for the heroinephilanthropist to do her work and fix the conditions that cause poverty. What results is that the
philanthropist is expected to gain objectivity in such a way as to not only create a picture of the
great issues to be solved, but also to stand out as an example of someone who can craft a
coherent plan.
Continuing with the motif of professionalized objectivity, “The Education of
Philanthropy” claims that it is important for the rent collector to preserve distance from her
subjects. The essay hints at this detachment when it describes the fully trained rent collector as
someone who “casts a quick glance around” and “quietly strik[es] off her rapid notes” rather than
becoming emotionally involved like her trainee does. This priority of preserving distance—here,
supposedly, for the best of the poor—is repeated in a pamphlet about philanthropy (1898) from
the Ranyard Nurses:14
There are probably few conscientious workers amongst the poor who have not
made the painful discovery of the difficulty there is in bettering the lives of the

14

The Ranyard Mission and Ranyard Nurses (also known as the London Bible and Domestic Female Mission) was
founded by Ellen Ranyard in 1865. The mission began with the purpose of distributing Bibles and religious
literature to the poor in Seven Dials and later expanded to include a nursing service. The Ranyard Nurses focused
on sending women of a similar class status to the homes of the poor. They also focused on self-help, providing
domestic instruction to make homes healthier.

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lower classes and relieving their distress, without at the same time sapping their
self-reliance, and rendering them in the future more rather than less dependent
upon others. Many movements alas! are started with the noblest of purposes, they
yet have a demoralising tendency. The scheme here presented claims to be a
means of helping the poor to help themselves, and of ministering to their true and
permanent social welfare. On this ground it should enlist the co-operation and
support of those who deplore the present system of indiscriminate relief, and
believe that the truest benevolence consists in promoting habits of thrift and
independence.” (Hurry 85-6)
This pamphlet starts with the problem of self-preservation, saying that philanthropic workers
often find that their labor makes the problem of poverty worse by creating dependence rather
than independence. While philanthropists might start out with the “noblest purpose” of fixing
the problems of the poor rather than facilitating ways for the poor to fix their own problems, the
author argues that this attitude demoralizes the poor. Ultimately, the Ranyard Nurses are
working against the kind of “indiscriminate relief” where philanthropic workers are so overcome
by their own idealistic response to poverty that they make the situation worse. Instead, Ranyard
Nurses are trained to transform their benevolent impulses into more discriminate, practical
solutions to the problem of poverty. Trained in this way, philanthropic workers reach
professionalization when they overcome the naïveté of their initial idealistic response to poverty.
Generosity, characterized as emotional attachment, is contrasted with the professionalism of
detached consideration of what would be “best” for the poor. This methodology echoes that of
the COS outlined in chapter two, where the foremost cause of poverty was indiscriminate giving
in reactive response to scenes of impoverished distress. Professionalized detachment enabled

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philanthropic reform because it did not allow the poor to become too attached to the rich and,
thus, dependent on them for relief.
The implications of such a contrast between generous benevolence and the development
of a professional identity are explored in two novels that illustrate the interplay of identity and
community in the process of becoming a professional female philanthropist. H. G. Well’s The
Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914) and Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882),
demonstrate how the idealized (sympathetic, feminine) philanthropic heroine does not conform
to the late nineteenth-century mandate of objective professionalism. Where professionalized
philanthropy requires objectivity in order to solve poverty, women encounter more difficulty
achieving professional success in a context where they come into close contact with the poor and
are expected to fulfill traditional female roles. Additionally, the marriage plots of these novels,
which interpolate philanthropic work into marriage as a means to an end, illustrate how
philanthropy is unable to provide a lasting professional identity for women. Each woman is
successful in reaching her philanthropic goals, but each finds that she must compromise such
success for the good of her marriage, ensuring that the vocation of philanthropy reifies traditional
roles for women of the late-Victorian era. Indeed, professionalism came at a price for women.
Before the professional mandate for objectivity, women could successfully negotiate their roles
by using feminine sympathy to gain a public role as a philanthropist. Under these conditions, the
idealized philanthropic heroine, both sympathetic and the solver of social problems, could exist
in representations of philanthropy, as she did in the social problem novel. However, the new
social context of professionalism made it more difficult for women to move in and out of both
roles and to be represented as such in novels. As a result, the professionalization of female

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philanthropy unraveled the figure of the philanthropic heroine that women’s ambitious desires
were modelled after.
Each female character in All Sorts of Conditions of Men and The Wife of Sir Isaac
Harman begins her philanthropic work with self-cultivation in mind. As the novels progress,
however, the idea of the self is divided between the public, professional self and the private self.
In All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Angela Marsden Messenger wants to use her wealth and
education to improve working conditions for the poor by starting a dress shop with better hours
and wages. She also provides the women who work there with meals and recreational time.
However, she does this while disguised as Miss Kennedy, a working-class (yet with suspiciously
good manners) needlewoman who benefits from the patronage of Angela Messenger. Along the
way, she meets Harry Goslett, who was born poor but raised in the aristocracy. When he learns
of his origins, he decides to move to the East End and attempts to live the life of a working-class
man. Both Harry and Angela share the goal of cultivating the East End, and they work together
to build a “Palace of Delight”15 that they open by the end of the novel. They also fall in love
during this process and marry at the opening of the Palace, where Angela reveals her true identity
to Harry and the needlewomen who work for her. At this point, she turns over the stewardship of
the Palace of Delight to the people, and forsakes her professional identity as Miss Kennedy.
In The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, Lady Ellen Harman finds herself in a very unhappy
marriage to Sir Isaac, who controls every aspect of her life and keeps her out of society. As she
realizes her naiveté in marrying Sir Isaac in the first place, she rebels by joining the suffragist
movement and is subsequently arrested and jailed. She makes a deal with Sir Isaac that she will
save him from future embarrassment if he allows her to do philanthropy on her own terms. She
15

The Palace of Delight in All Sorts and Conditions of Men directly inspired the People’s Palace of London, which
was completed in 1887.

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takes up the project of building a hostel for the women who work in the factories of Sir Isaac’s
International Bread and Cake Stores. However, she finds along the way that she cannot run her
building without her husband’s oversight. She also works with George Brumley, who falls in
love with her. After Sir Isaac dies, Mr. Brumley begs Ellen to marry him, even though she has
already turned him down, so that they can continue to work together; he characterizes her
philanthropic endeavors as successful only because they have made a good team. Thus both The
Wife of Sir Isaac Harman and All Sorts and Conditions of Men represent philanthropy in a new
way. Though resembling in many ways the traditional social problem novel, these texts
represent the conflict, not harmony, between professional success and properly feminine personal
relationships. By inserting philanthropy into a marriage plot, each novel demonstrates that
professional philanthropy has created conditions where woman cannot have both.
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman and All Sorts and Conditions of Men are two very different
novels in terms of how they regard philanthropy. Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men
champions philanthropy—it inspired the building of the People’s Palace in London—especially
the kind that involves forging personal relationships with the poor whom the philanthropist is
helping. Yet, the novel’s proto-feminist bildungsroman style and its prevalent motif of disguise
sit uneasily alongside themes of philanthropy and sympathetic attachments. Ultimately, Besant’s
novel never quite unifies Angela’s philanthropic work with the marriage plot that she is a part of,
revealing the contradictions between feminist philanthropic work and the femininely sympathetic
persona the novel tries to develop for Angela as the caregiver for her needlewomen employees.
On the other end of the spectrum, Wells’s The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is more
straightforwardly critical of Lady Ellen Harman’s use of philanthropy to develop a mature, selfpossessed identity. She begins a philanthropic project as a way of gaining agency in a deeply

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patriarchal marriage but finds that her work always reifies the problems she hoped it would
solve. Further, she finds that her attempts to create commonality and equality between herself
and the women who benefit from her philanthropy always return to problematic power
relationships. Where these novels differ in tone, they both reveal that a model of philanthropy
that aims to be a mode of self-cultivation for the philanthropist is problematic. Besant
unconsciously reveals its gaps, while Wells consciously points out the problem with using
philanthropy as a feminist platform; yet each novelist concentrates on a model of philanthropy
that focuses on the heroic feminist trailblazer who aims to become stronger, gain independence,
and understand herself better through her benevolent work. Despite their difference in style and
opinion of philanthropy, each novel’s ending points out that, in fact, each female protagonist of
the novel is prevented from retaining a professional identity without concealing personal desires.
Angela begins her philanthropic work with the purpose of changing women’s roles and
gaining personal and professional agency. Her Cambridge education has exposed her to
feminism and social duty, imperatives that result in the paradoxical goals of self-cultivation and
self-sacrifice. While philanthropy might have been seen as something obvious for a wealthy
woman to do in order to enter the public sphere, Angela begins by framing her philanthropy not
as a rich woman’s duty, but as a woman’s responsibility to herself. First, it is clear that Angela’s
philanthropic endeavor is motivated by feminist impulses. After the time of her graduation from
Cambridge’s Newnham College,16 Angela has ambitions to do something great with her life, and
her outlook on vocation has been heavily influenced by her education:

16

Newnham College was founded in 1871, eleven years before All Sorts and Conditions of Men was published. Its
expansion began with the building of Newnham Hall in 1875. Angela would have been among the first female
students to take courses there, although she would not have been granted a degree. Different from Girton College of
Cambridge, which focused on women taking the same college courses as men at the same time, Newnham focused
on allowing students to work at their own pace. In that way, Newnham was less demanding and more pragmatic.

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A girl does not live at Newnham two years for nothing, mind you; when she
leaves that seat of learning, she has changed her mind about the model, the
perfect, the ideal woman. More than that, she will change the minds of her sisters
and her cousins: and there are going to be a great many Newnhams; and the
spread of this revolution will be rapid; and the shrinking, obedient, docile, manreverencing, curate-worshipping maiden of our youth will shortly vanish and be
no more seen. (Besant 21)
Angela is motivated by a desire to change women’s roles, and she sees her revolutionary kind of
philanthropy as something that would achieve this. However, the novel does not entirely endorse
Angela’s ambitions about changing women’s roles, framing them as rather lofty and idealistic.
While Angela formulates her plans to change women’s roles, she also maintains correspondence
with a friend from Newnham who thinks her ambitions are unattainable. She scoffs at the
fervent tone that Angela uses in her letters, such as that above, and Angela reacts by breaking off
their friendship. Additionally, Angela’s ambition to change women’s roles is rather abruptly
dropped by the plot, and Angela herself drops it when she is faced with the realities of
philanthropic work. Because of this, the novel treats feminist outcomes from philanthropic work
as naïve and mutually exclusive from the social expectations of philanthropy.
In The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, Lady Ellen Harman’s foray into philanthropy is also
framed as feminist; it is a way for her to get out from under the oppressive authority of her
husband, who imprisons her in the house and does not compromise until Lady Harman stages a
rebellion that humiliates him in the public eye. Her marriage is described as one “where one is
really tempted to be ultra-feminist” (Wells 18), while Lady Harman herself is described as the
“last of the women in captivity” (19). After Lady Harman learns from a servant that her

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husband’s company, International Bread and Cake Stores, takes advantage of its employees, she
decides that one way to achieve autonomy is to work to provide the waitresses hostels where
they could live independently and cheaply. Alongside this decision, the novel frames Lady
Harman’s philanthropic work as of a piece with her own personal development: “And while
Lady Harman was making these meritorious and industrious attempts to grasp the significance of
life and to get some clear idea of her social duty, the developments of those Hostels she had
started […] was going on” (109). Here the act of philanthropy is only a secondary consideration
when compared to Lady Harman’s desire to cultivate her own position as a philanthropist,
because it begins as a way for her to understand who is she is independent of her husband. The
novel defines “the significance of her life” as something Lady Harman had never thought about
before her marriage to Sir Harman, whose ill treatment of Lady Harman causes her to question
the purpose of marriage in the first place.
Yet, Angela and Lady Harman’s desires for developing a professional identity sit uneasily
alongside their philanthropy when it is actually put into action. Lady Harman’s initial goals are
unrealized, and her desire for independence from her husband is constantly thwarted by Sir
Harman’s schemes against her as well as by philanthropy’s inevitable inability to be
disconnected from capitalist, exploitative systems. While Lady Harman’s philanthropic work is
something she does to achieve autonomy from her husband, the results of her attempts only make
her more bound to him. Her desire to build and manage the hostels is only attained with a
compromise with her husband after a rebellion. Sir Isaac begs her to come back and be a good
wife, to which she acquiesces:
“And there were the children—such helpless little things. In the prison I worried
about them. I thought of things for them. I’ve come to feel—they are left too

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much to nurses and strangers…. And then you see he has agreed to nearly
everything I had wanted. It wasn’t only the personal things—I was anxious about
those silly girls—the strikers. I didn’t want them to be badly treated. It distressed
me to think of them. I don’t think you know how it distressed me. And he—he
gave way upon all that. He says I may talk to him about the business, about the
way we do our business—the kindness of it I mean. And this is why I am back
here. Where else could I be?” (Wells 96-7).
Far from achieving autonomy, Lady Harman’s compromise with her husband is framed as selfsacrificial: her desire to care for her children and the striking waitresses motivates her to make
the compromise. Yet another character, Mr. Brumley, recognizes that “Everything conspired to
give Sir Isaac and his ownership the centre of the picture” (Wells 98). Lady Harman’s
achievement of a sense of duty and purpose, rather than allowing her to find the “significance of
her life,” is just another way to keep her under the authority of her husband. In this way, Lady
Harman is unable to achieve the sense of professionalism that would enable her to find this sense
of purpose within her philanthropic work.
As Lady Harman continues her work, she learns the reality of her situation as someone
who is ill-equipped to do any kind of beneficial work rather than becoming strong and
independent through her work as a philanthropist. Any agency she gains turns out to be a sham,
such as when she tries to set more liberal rules for the women in her hostels, only to be overruled
by the hostel manager who really works for her husband, as “she was convicted of an absurd
self-importance, she discovered herself an ignorant woman availing herself of her husband’s
power and wealth to attempt presumptuous experiments” (Wells 127). Here, the very idea of an
autonomous woman doing work in the public sphere is not a possibility at all—the only reasons

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Lady Harman is able to build the hostels is that she has access to the International Bread and
Cake Stores through her husband, and his wealth gives her both the means and the time to do
such work. Additionally, rather than achieving any kind of change, Lady Harman finds “…more
and more that it was not certainly that fine and humanizing thing she had presumed it would be.
She began to feel more and more that it might be merely an extension of Harman methods to
cheap boarding-houses for young people” (104) and that the hostels turn out to be a place where
“over it all brooded the chill stillness of rules and regulations and methodical suppressions and
tactful discouragement. It was an Institution, it had the empty orderliness of Institutions, Mrs.
Pembrose had just called it an Institution, and so Susan Burnett had prophesied it would become
five years or more ago. It was a dream subjugated to reality” (139). In the end, Lady Harman’s
understanding that her efforts just do more to support her husband’s work means that her own
endeavors to improve the lives of the waitresses only ends up reifying the harsh and
unimaginative conditions of the International Bread and Cake Stores. Rather than gaining selfpossession, Lady Harman comes to doubt herself more and more. The narrator confirms Lady
Harman’s unrealized autonomy in the public sphere by describing the outcome as entirely
ambiguous: “We have traced thus far the emergence of Lady Harman from that state of dutiful
subjection and social irresponsibility which was the lot of woman in the past to that limited, illdefined and quite unsecured freedom which is her present condition” (104). While Lady Harman
might not be as fully subject to her husband’s whims anymore, at least in her own realization of
an existence outside the home, her work has hardly achieved the self-possessed, professional
identity and business reforms she hoped it would. Wells exposes the problems with the kind of
philanthropy that aims for self-cultivation; while it may be a vehicle for increased power,

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professionalized philanthropy creates conflicts for women that do not allow them to achieve their
ambitious desires.
Angela’s desires for philanthropic reforms and self-cultivation are unrealized in a less
straightforward way. On the first count, Angela’s rhetoric and identity as a benevolent heroine
obscures the agency and independent identities of her needlewomen employees. The plot of All
Sorts and Conditions of Men, as some critics of the novel have noted, is paradoxical in that the
upper-class characters of the novel aim to enable the working-class to help themselves, but with
limits. The novel “sings the praise of the respectable working class, but stops short of entrusting
their own political activists with any capacity for responsible leadership” (Neetens 144). In the
absence of working-class leadership, Angela is able to fill in as the heiress-cum-reformer. On the
first count, Angela abandons her independent identity and vocation by the end of the novel in a
way that is framed as the fulfillment of her work. In another paradox of the novel, Angela’s
entrance into philanthropy means that she has to leave her identity as a wealthy, educated heiress
behind. She disguises herself as Miss Kennedy, a needlewoman with a wealthy patroness. Such
paradoxes were not far from the revised narrative of the COS, which emphasized the values of
the organization rather than sympathy with the poor. In a similar way, All Sorts and Conditions
of Men frames Angela’s work as reformist. She wants to change how philanthropy is practiced,
promoting the idea of self-help by avoiding “pauperising” (Besant 82) the poor and by starting a
self-run dress shop, where “there was to be no mistress, but to be self-governed, and to share the
proceeds among them all in due order and with regard to skill and industry, we might adjust our
own hours for the general good. This kind of shop has been tried by men, but I think never
succeeded, because they wanted the capital to start it with” (119). Angela can step in to play the
role of both distant philanthropist and intimate head dressmaker, who works to build a female-

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only, utopian work space that focuses on the personal needs of needlewomen. This conflict
between the professional mandate for objectivity and the attachments that result from working
closely with the poor require Angela to take on a disguise that allows her to develop her
professional skills while avoiding true connection with the poor, thus maintaining objectivity.
This conflict and its resulting disguise creates a setting in which Angela, as Miss Kennedy, can
claim to understand disadvantaged women while still cultivating a sense of professional
accomplishment: “knowledge of her benevolent intentions, gave Angela a better opinion of
herself than she had ever known before” (88). In this way, Angela’s self-development supplies
both the plot of the novel and culminates in an ending that breaks ties with the needlewomen that
populate the novel—Angela’s sympathy for the needlewomen is at odds with the development of
her professional identity.
Angela’s disguise and the conflict between professionalism and sympathetic benevolence
effectively creates a hierarchy between herself and the needlewomen. Problematically, the dress
shop, while purporting to be a safe space for working class women who desire autonomy,
becomes a confining space for the needlewomen, where they are confused about their
relationship with Miss Messenger and feel beholden to her in a way that holds back their own
autonomy. Angela perceives her own attachment to the needlewomen as benevolent and caring,
while the needlewomen’s experience is more about compliance and submission. Additionally, in
these moments of attachment, the narrative itself cannot account for the two parties as
individuals. We never learn the names of each of the workers in Angela’s association; only two
women are ever named: Nelly and Rebekah. The rest of the employees are named only as types:
e.g., “the lame one” and “the stout one,” which prevents the reader from seeing their
individuality. These girls are very rarely important motivators of the plot, and they only seem to

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act as placeholders in settings where many characters are necessary or serve to highlight
Angela’s benevolence. As a result, these characters cannot emerge from the narrative as objects
of sympathy and are subsumed back into their class as a whole.
Additionally, Angela’s attachments to the named characters, especially Nelly, do not
function in a sympathetic way, where even named needlewomen have the opportunity to voice
how they feel about the situation they find themselves in. Instead, named needlewomen relate to
Miss Kennedy in a supplicatory way: “Nelly Sorenson stood beside the piano watching the
player with the devotion which belongs to the disciple who loves the most. Whatever Miss
Kennedy did was right and sweet and beautiful. Also, whatever she did filled poor Nelly with a
sense of humiliation, because she herself felt so ignorant” (Besant 135). Nelly also “simply
worshipped” Miss Kennedy and did not “ponder any more over that first difficulty of hers, why a
lady, and such a lady, had come to Stepney Green to be a dressmaker” (156). Nelly’s attitude of
devotion towards Angela/Miss Kennedy makes her submit to Angela in a way that reinforces the
secrecy between them. While Besant sets up this relationship as a performance of the kind of
commonality and harmony that philanthropists sought when they worked in the East End, it
actually serves to emphasize their distance from each other. Although Nelly is able to express
her feelings in the narrative itself, her attitude of awe towards Angela prevents her from
expressing her feelings of inadequacy and ignorance that could cause Angela or the reader to
have sympathy for her. Besides the fact that Nelly and Angela are distant from each other in that
Angela has a god-like presence while Nelly takes on the role of an acolyte, Nelly’s wonderment
sets up a boundary between them that Nelly feels she cannot cross. She recognizes that Angela
somehow does not belong in the East End; her manners are out of place. But rather than trying
to understand this phenomenon by asking Angela about it, she instead satisfies herself with her

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ignorance. In this way, Angela’s authority serves to preserve her secret, and Nelly’s
acquiescence keeps that boundary in place. Besant’s novel unconsciously exposes how Angela’s
cultivation of a distanced professional identity harms the women she works with every day and
prevents them from achieving a sense of autonomy.
Angela’s treatment of the needlewomen reflects Besant’s own political views around
poverty, in which he framed the poor as lacking individuality in a way that can only be solved by
admiration of the cultivation of the rich. Taking up the prevalent late nineteenth-century
philanthropic goals of cultivating individuality and self-sufficiency among the poor, the narrator
notes that the East End of London is the perfect place for philanthropy because of how the poor
there have lost sight of their independence:
Strange and wonderful result of the gathering of men in great cities! It is not a
French, or an English, or a German, or an American result—it is universal; in
every great city of the world, below a certain level, there is no religion—men
have grown dead to their higher instincts; they no longer feel the possibilities of
humanity; faith brings to them no more the evidence of things unseen. They are
crowded together, so that they have ceased to feel their individuality. (Besant 138)
Besant’s narrator draws out the difficulties that urban anonymity creates for philanthropic
organization, saying that the urban environment is such that it denies people the possibility to
know themselves, much less to know the others around them. The parallels between Besant’s
philanthropy and that of the COS are clear: each considered urban anonymity to be a problem
that exacerbated the difficulties of solving poverty, but they both lack an understanding of the
voices of the poor as independent of their own already. Besant’s language enacts the narrative
structures that chapter two discusses in detail; he claims to give the poor a voice through

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philanthropy but simultaneously erases that voice in the process. Angela’s understanding of her
own benevolence while her needlewomen have a problematic worshipful attachment to her is
mirrored in Besant’s views of the people of the East End. Kevin Swafford describes this
problematic affect of a sense of detached superiority to the poor when he says that “Besant
argues that if only the West End could see the East End as something more than a place of
meanness and working class barbarism, a city unto itself filled with a variety of people worthy
of understanding, cultural colonization and concern, then maybe something constructive could be
done to uplift the poor and the working class to an agreeable level of cleanliness and middleclass respectability (62, emphasis original). Yet, Swafford continues, the novel goes about this
using a method antithetical to reciprocal understanding, since its style only supports middle-class
ignorance of the East End: “As a ‘working-class romance,’ the novel was easily consumed by a
middle-class reading public that was either ignorant about the East End or had become a bit too
uneasy about the threatening implications of an increasingly visible and distraught working
class” (63). Angela and Besant’s attitude towards the poor demonstrates how a sense of
professionalism and cultivated authority creates a sense of detachment that obfuscates the
individuality of the poor. As we will see in The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, understanding how
this professionalism can affect the poor creates identity crises for philanthropists.
The idea that the identity of philanthropist heroine prevents the working-class characters
from finding their own agency in the novel continues in The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, where
Lady Harman’s relationships with the waitresses only serve to highlight her power over them
rather than provide an avenue for common understanding. After frequent misunderstandings
between the waitresses and the management, Lady Harman goes to the hostels herself to talk to
the occupants. This results in “…Miss Babs Wheeler and quite a number of the other girls

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present watched her face and fell in love with her” (Wells 124). Yet, this increased attachment
only serves to reinforce Lady Harman’s authority and further damage the chances for success of
Lady Harman’s scheme: “Their very loyalty to her expressed itself not so much in any sustained
attempt to make the hostels successful as in cheering inconveniently, in embarrassing declaration
of a preference, in an ingenious and systematic rudeness to anyone suspected of imperfect
devotion to her” (125). When Lady Harman tears up the rules of the hostels in solidarity with the
waitresses, she seems to make strides towards her goal of making the hostels a home for the
women rather than an institution that takes advantage of them. Instead, this action makes Lady
Harman realize that she needs to exercise some kind of authority over the hostels and its
managers in order to make it run smoothly, reversing her goal of finding commonality with a
different class.
The paradoxical nature of the philanthropic heroine’s identity is highlighted by the way
that Lady Harman’s and Angela’s positions of authority only serve to further fragment their sense
of self and undermine their identities as philanthropists. Both novels complicate the idea that
women could find an independent identity through their philanthropic work by examining each
woman’s doubts about her ability to achieve what she wants. For Lady Harman, her education in
business makes her less sure of herself rather than giving her a solid identity:
Through all these occupations and interruptions and immediacies she went trying
to comprehend and at times almost believing she comprehended life, and then the
whole spectacle of this modern world of which she was part would seem to break
up again into a multitude of warring and discordant fragments having no
conceivable common aim or solution. Those moments of unifying faith and
confidence, that glowed so bravely and never endured, were at once tantalizing

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and sustaining. She could never believe but that ultimately she would not grasp
and hold—something…. (Wells 106)
Lady Harman’s comprehension of herself is constantly under threat of destruction due to external
forces that she feels she cannot overcome—her feeling of complicity in her husband’s capitalist
exploitation of labor cannot be overcome by her own individual philanthropy. Wells uses
metaphors of the part and the whole to demonstrate Lady Harman’s inability to sort through the
complications of her life and make progress as a philanthropist and independent woman: she
cannot find her place through philanthropic work because “the modern world of which she was
part” never coheres into a clear direction for her. Essentially, she is not part of a whole; she is
just another fragment. Since her philanthropy is the source of her confusion and the context in
which she comes to understand the world, it also cannot be the solution for her lack of
independence.
Further, the fragmented perspective that Lady Harman describes above through free
indirect discourse is mirrored throughout the novel. Characters come into and out of the
narrative suddenly and seem to provide causation for Lady Harman’s actions, such as Susan’s
revelation to Lady Harman of the way that the International Bread and Cake Stores destroy
communities and abuse their workers. But, these motivations never take hold of Lady Harman in
a way that makes her actions cohere into something that has a clear social effect on the world
around her:
And while Lady Harman was making these meritorious and industrious attempts
to grasp the significance of life and to get some clear idea of her social duty, the
developments of those Hostels she had started—she now felt so prematurely—
was going on. There were times when she tried not to think of them, turned her

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back on them, fled from them, and times when they and what she ought to do
about them and what they ought to be and what they ought not to be, filled her
mind to the exclusion of every other topic. (Wells 109)
Lady Harman’s realization that she has started this project too soon indicates that she only
reacted to Susan’s revelation to her because of personal guilt, which causes her to question her
own motives in going into philanthropy. Outwardly, the work on the hostel is progressing;
inwardly, Lady Harman’s philanthropy provides the background for her own existential crisis.
Lady Harman is, herself, fragmented, as she is unable to fully commit to her project and
oscillates between complete denial and complete immersion. While she attempts to use her work
as a chance for self-development, indicated by her desire to understand her place in both society
and a larger understanding of her existence, her work only serves to make her identity less clear
to her.
The theme of fragmentation continues in All Sorts and Conditions of Men, where
Angela’s disguise works against the novel’s plot of self-development. Her disguise begins as a
desire to become a member of the class she has benefitted from all her life, saying, “I want to
feel myself a part of this striving, eager, anxious humanity, on whose labours I live in comfort
[ . . . ]” (Besant 27). Even further than simply becoming a member of a group, though, Angela
also gives over control of her life to this group when she says “I belong to the people!” (27).
This humility comes from Angela’s belief that “would-be philanthropists and benefactors, and
improvers of things have all along been working on a false assumption” (148), that the poor look
up to the rich and want to be like them. Yet, Angela argues, “they do not look up to us at all;
they do not want to copy our ways; they are perfectly satisfied with their own ways; [ . . . ]”
(148). Working against the notion that philanthropists have something to give to the poor,

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Angela instead gives up her way of life to become a philanthropist with a different goal. Arguing
that people will only change through discontent, Angela will “work upon them by showing,
practically, and by way of example, better things. This I can do because I am here as simply one
of themselves—a workwoman among other workwomen” (148). In this way, Angela uses her
disguise to avoid making any gifts in keeping with the philanthropic ideology of the time, that of
helping the poor help themselves.
In taking this disguise, though, Angela also gives up the identity of philanthropist. Even
though she uses the disguise to work towards her philanthropic goals, she is no longer in a
position to provide capital for her project as herself. In fact, Angela admits in a conversation
under her own identity that the kind of philanthropy she espouses, the kind that would actually
enable the poor to help themselves, is impossible if she retains her identity as Angela Marsden
Messenger:
‘Oh! Lord Jocelyn!’ she went on, after a pause, ‘you do not know, you cannot
know, the dreadful dangers which a rich woman has to encounter. If I had come
in my own name, I should have been besieged by every plausible rogue who
could catch my ear for half an hour. I should have had all the clergy round me
imploring help for their schools and their churches; [ . . . ]
‘I see. All this you have escaped by your assumption of the false name.’
‘Yes. I am one of themselves, one of the people; I have got my girls together; I
have made them understand my project; they have become my fast and faithful
friends; the better to inspire confidence, I even sheltered myself behind myself; I
said Miss Messenger was interested in our success; she sends us orders; I went to
the West End with things made up for her. Thanks mainly to her, we are

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flourishing: we work for shorter hours and for greater pay than other girls…
(Besant 347)
Angela assumes this identity in order to gain the trust of the needlewomen she works with in
order to truly know that their needs are not motivated by greed. In some ways she does this for
self-preservation: as Angela Messenger, she would be in danger of being taken advantage of. At
the moment that Angela assumes the identity of a philanthropist, she can no longer do the work
of a philanthropist. Yet, her excuses of self-preservation and her desire to remain anonymous do
not hold up as well because of the way that she possesses her project. Her frequent use of “my”
in the quote above undermines any claims to benevolence or to the project goal of empowering
the women she employs. Further, in taking on the disguise, she becomes neither a philanthropist
nor herself. Further, Angela’s solution, sheltering herself behind herself, is a phrase that is
difficult to pin down as a strategy. In order to do this, she has to disassociate her identity,
becoming two figures at once. Lady Harman is both the objective professional and the
sympathetic caregiver, but only because she is living two separate lives that cannot be combined.
Rather than achieving a new identity for all women through her philanthropic work, Angela
achieves neither philanthropic ambition nor a better understanding of her role as an heiress and
businesswoman because of the fact that she cannot fully claim either as an identity. Ironically,
Angela’s desire to keep her identity a secret prevents social change because she has to perform
her work privately.
If the idea of disparate fragments is extended into the structure of the novel itself, it is
clear that the breakdown of traditional models of philanthropy also resulted in fragmented novels
that refuse easy resolution. The endings of All Sorts and Conditions of Men and The Wife of Sir
Isaac Harman are dissatisfying in that they neither end with a fully autonomous woman nor a

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woman who continues to engage in philanthropy as a vocation. Additionally, the relationships
that each woman develops with the poor during the course of the novel seem to be beside the
point; these characters are left behind and do not contribute to the ending of the novel. These
failures suggest that philanthropy and feminism are mutually exclusive under capitalism—a
social order shaped around the individual—and under the professionalized discourse of late
nineteenth-century philanthropy. The female protagonists instead form romantic attachments
with men, which suggests that the final outcome of the philanthropic bildungsroman is entrance
back into traditional roles for women. Any individual growth that takes place during the novel
drives the protagonist toward marriage, but each novel does not resolve the issue of whether this
is through capitulation to a system that cannot be changed or out of the decision-making
processes of a newly autonomous self.
The way that All Sorts and Conditions of Men frames Angela’s marriage to Harry Goslett
contradicts the novel’s purpose several times: while Angela’s desire to get married seems to
come from its fulfillment of her new identity as a philanthropist, it also comes at the expense of
her desire to change women’s roles and to actually carry out her philanthropy as herself. When
Angela finally reveals her identity, it is during her wedding that takes place at the opening of
Palace of Delight, Angela’s most important philanthropic project: “With this simple ceremony
was the Palace of Delight thrown open to the world. What better beginning could it have than a
wedding party? What better omen could there be than that the Palace, like the Garden of Eden,
should begin with the happiness of a wedded pair?” (Besant 428). Angela has even kept her
identity a secret until after the wedding ceremony, only revealing her identity to her new
husband, Harry, at the reception at the Palace. The idea that Angela’s philanthropic project
becomes a wedding ceremony at the end of the novel, reverses Angela’s plot to change the role

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of women. Ironically, at the moment Angela reveals her identity and claims her work as her
own, she renounces the title of philanthropist and reverts to a Victorian woman’s traditional role
of wife and helpmeet. In fact, Angela even allows Harry to speak for both of them, the narrator
saying that Angela belongs to “the diminishing body of women who prefer to let men do all the
public speaking” (428), suggesting that Angela really has not achieved anything new. Even
though the comparison of the Palace to the prelapsarian Garden of Eden suggests a new
beginning, the symbolism of the garden supports the traditional view not only that women were
made to provide help to men, but that women’s attempts at autonomy would result in punishment
and banishment from paradise. In this case, the novel “punishes” Angela for revealing herself by
banishing her from the Palace of Delight. Additionally, Angela is only able to claim her identity
in relation to Harry: “‘He loves me for myself,’ she murmured. ‘He does not know that I am
rich. Think of that, and think of the terrible suspicions which grow up in every rich woman’s
heart when a man makes love to her’” (350). Ultimately, Angela’s desire to be known not for her
riches is not realized in the context of philanthropy, but in the context of marriage. Rather than
realizing her “ambitious desires,” becoming a philanthropist leads to Angela’s realization of her
romantic desires, contrary to Dorice Williams Elliott’s argument that the figure of the
philanthropist in the novel gave women permission to follow their ambitions independent of their
love life. By the end of the novel, Angela has either been a fragment, unable to claim her own
identity while doing her revolutionary work, or she is a wife and helper to her husband, no longer
a philanthropist who desires to change the role of women.
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman has a similarly ambivalent ending, with Lady Harman
compromising the philanthropy she has finally gained free of her husband by giving in to Mr.
Brumley’s romantic desires. Far from offering a resolution that fulfills Lady Harman’s initial

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goals of autonomy through philanthropic work, the ending suggests that Lady Harman can only
continue her work under her husband’s supervision. Throughout the novel, Mr. Brumley pursues
Lady Harman, and when Sir Isaac dies, he proposes marriage. Initially, Lady Harman rejects
him, and he becomes desperate and pitiful. The reason Lady Harman rejects him is that she now
has her own wealth and control of the hostels; she would rather have a working relationship with
Mr. Brumley, who has been a major confidant throughout the building and management process.
After Mr. Brumley runs away, hysterical at the thought of being rejected, Lady Harman
inexplicably goes after him. Mr. Brumley seems to concede to Lady Harman’s request for a
platonic, working relationship, saying “‘…we will go back to the house and talk … talk about
our Hostels.’ […] ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’m yours—to do just as you will with. And we’ll
work——. I’ve been a bit of a stupid brute. We’ll work. For all those people. It will be—oh! a
big work, quite a big work. Big enough for us to thank God for. Only—’” (Wells 155). At this
point Mr. Brumley requests a kiss, and the novel ends with Lady Harman fulfilling his wish:
“She crouched down upon him and, taking his shoulder in her hand, upset him neatly backwards,
and, doing nothing by halves, had kissed the astonished Mr. Brumley full upon his mouth”
(Wells 156). Janice Harris comments on the ending in her article “Wifely Silence and Speech in
the Three Marriage Novels by H. G. Wells.” She argues that Lady Harman’s “surprising
reversal” is “neither a marriage nor an end to their long association, but an arrangement with
multiple possibilities, a genuinely passionate friendship, an affair” (416). Yet, this
consummation of Mr. Brumley’s sexual desire by Lady Harman indicates at least a compromise
of her earlier position or at most her consent to his marriage proposal. It certainly reverses Lady
Harman’s request for a working relationship only. Further, Harris’s utopian interpretation of the
novel’s ending cannot be possible after Lady Harman initially refuses Mr. Brumley in a face-to-

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face conversation and only runs after a pathetic Mr. Brumley out of pity. Not only does this
scene suggest a repetition of Sir Isaac’s proposal, in that Ellen initially rejected him but finally
capitulated to his desperation out of pity, but it also eliminates the idea that this could be an equal
relationship; Mr. Brumley’s desperation is emotional manipulation rather than the basis for a
partnership. Because of this ending, it would be difficult to interpret the novel as a feminist
lesson in self-sufficiency and removing oneself from the prison of marriage, which Lady Harman
has apparently been working towards all along.
The paradoxical and fragmented nature of each character’s struggle to cultivate
themselves and develop a professional identity as philanthropists could be seen as merely
dismissive of feminism. After all, these two novels, written by men about female philanthropy,
seem to dismiss the feminist ambitions of their protagonists as the naïve ambitions of women
who are not exemplary models for feminism in the first place. Besant’s rejection of Angela’s
feminist impulses takes on a conservative form, where he dismisses Angela’s early Oxbridge
feminism as the fervent idealism of a recent graduate who has yet to face the realities of the East
End. In such an interpretation, it would also be easy to dismiss Besant’s formulation of female
philanthropy—of course Besant did not present a heroine with ambitious desires, because he
dismissed such desires in the first place. Yet, Besant’s conservativism serves to highlight the
hypocrisy of late-Victorian philanthropy. The novel’s motif of disguise demonstrates that Besant
uses the language of objectivity that was so important to professionalized philanthropy. In this
way, the novel’s conservatism is the point: if Besant represents the vanguard of professionalized
philanthropic methodology with his motif of disguise as the manifestation of the language of
objectivity, then that is the cause for the dismissal of Angela’s feminist ambitions. In other
words, professionalized philanthropy creates the conditions that require women to abandon their

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own desires when they attempt to do philanthropic work. If Besant is the epitome of lateVictorian philanthropy, that model has lost its ability to fulfill women’s ambitious desires.
H.G. Wells’s political leanings also demonstrate how he thinks feminism is incompatible
with professionalized philanthropy. Wells’s own socialist beliefs and interest in novelistic
experimentation17 are reflected in how he uses The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman to illustrate the
problems of a capitalistic model of professionalized philanthropy to achieve social change.
Where Besant had a conservative attitude about the purpose of philanthropy, Wells is cynical
about the possibilities for capitalist philanthropy to achieve feminist ends, or at the very least, a
professional identity for women. Whether or not Lady Harman acts as a model for feminism,
Wells is clearly cynical about the view that feminism and philanthropy go well together. In Wells
and the Modern Novel, J.R. Hammond uses Wells’s own label to describe his set of early
twentieth-century novels: “Then followed a phase he described as the ‘Prig Novels’—novels in
which a solipsistic hero (usually the narrator) comments extensively on political, social, and
moral questions and in which the quest for a purpose in life is the predominant element.
Marriage (1912), The Passionate Friends (1913), The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914) and The
Research Magnificent (1915) belong to this phase” (5). In line with this comment, it seems that
Wells himself considered Lady Harman to be too focused on herself and her quest for purpose in
life for her philanthropic schemes to have any success; but, it is not as if Wells considers Lady
Harman to have a character flaw that prevents philanthropy’s otherwise possible solution for
poverty. Rather, Lady Harman’s view of herself is of a piece with professionalized philanthropy.
In that case, philanthropy itself is the problem. John Partington centers this political view as

17

While this assertion is certainly debatable in the scholarship on Wells, J.R. Hammond (Wells and the Modern
Novel) makes a case for why Wells, even though he often used a more traditional realist style, was interested in how
different kinds of experimentation with style reflected a breakdown of the Victorian social order.

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central to Well’s novels, saying “he did attack liberal individualism and advocate a collectivist
philosophy” (3). If we consider that the predominant argument about philanthropy’s relation to
women is that philanthropy provides a way for women to achieve their own ambitious desires,
Wells’s socialist point of view on the matter is that it decidedly does not, especially because of its
focus on the individual philanthropist and his or her development of a professional identity. In
this case, capitalism creates the conditions where both feminism and philanthropy are targets for
Wells’s cynicism. At the very least, the progression of women will not thrive under capitalism,
much less a model of philanthropy that is based in building a professional identity.
The kind of personal and professional identities that Lady Harman and Angela develop
over the course of each novel departs from the way that individualism in philanthropy has been
described in other contexts. Different from the decadent model of individualism, where personal
development and self-expression, even “ambitious desire” allowed for the individual to
overcome the strictures of the late-Victorian social order, the model of individualism in The Wife
of Sir Isaac Harman and All Sorts and Conditions of Men is decayed and fragmented. As
discussed earlier in the chapter, each protagonist faces an identity crisis that is exacerbated by her
participation in philanthropic work. Philanthropy prevents Angela and Lady Harman’s own
identity coherence by requiring them to live divided lives. Such a reality contrasts with other
ways that the late nineteenth-century social order has been described, particularly that of
individualism and its relation to the social. In Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization,
Regina Gagnier outlines how the late nineteenth century was a time when individuality thrived
against the social order. For Gagnier, philanthropy was of a piece with the triumph of the
individual, since it “produced women’s autonomy and beautiful Souls” (121). However, the
models for individuality and relationality that Gagnier outlines in the introduction cannot be

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applied to the kind of fragmented identity that Angela and Lady Harman personify. With what
she calls “individuals-in-relation,” Gagnier makes an argument for how this term reveals
“relations of mutuality, when individuals-in-relation treat each other with attention and respect.
This includes symmetric mutuality, or mutuality between similarly-situated persons, equals, as
well as asymmetric mutuality, or mutuality in relations characterized by unequal power, status,
ability, or resources” (4). Individuals-in-relation can gain distance from themselves so as to
prevent solipsism when they understand themselves as part of an organic whole. The kind of
productive detachment that Gagnier discusses here does not work productively for Angela or
Lady Harman, who experience harmful attachments (in the case of Angela and her worshipful
needlewomen) or solipsism (in the case of Lady Harman and her insular existence as a cloistered
housewife). When Lady Harman is detached—when she sees herself as the part of a whole—she
gains a perspective that makes her doubt herself and her place in the social sphere. Where
Angela is detached, she is not even herself; she is disguised as a different person entirely.
Indeed, Wells’s pessimistic political outlook supports such an interpretation of his novels: “In
place of a confident faith in social advance his early novels and stories are notable for their
profound pessimism, their troubled sense of a society in process of fragmentation” (Hammond
12). Rather than seeing philanthropy as one of the primary catalysts for social change or solving
poverty, Wells views philanthropy as a catalyst for societal fragmentation. Because of its use of
a model of detached individualism that creates harmful attachments or solipsism rather than
productive detachment that results in self-expression, philanthropy could not allow women to
achieve ambitious desires as individuals-in-relation.
Wells further criticizes the focus on individualism of philanthropy when he discusses the
purpose of the novel, and of The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman more specifically. Wells notes that

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his telling of Lady Harman’s philanthropy in his novel will most certainly differ from the way
that a more conventional philanthropic genre, hagiographic biography, will tell her story. In
keeping with the idea that philanthropic work would allow women to gain independence and,
especially, achieve self-cultivation, Wells’s narrator sardonically notes that Lady Harman’s story
will be recorded in the form of biography:
It would be quite easy for anyone with the knack of reserve to go on from this
point with a history of Lady Harman that would present her as practically a pure
philanthropist. For from these beginnings she was destined to proceed to more
and more knowledge and understanding and clear purpose and capable work in
this interesting process of collective regrouping, this process which may even at
least justify Mr. Brumley’s courageous interpretations and prove to be an early
experiment in the beginning of a new social order. Perhaps some day there will
be an official biography, another addition to the inscrutable records of British
public lives, in which all these things will be set out with tact and dignity. Horatio
Blenker or Adolphus Blenker may survive to be entrusted with this congenial
task. She will be represented as a tall inanimate person pursuing one clear
benevolent purpose in life from her very beginning, and Sir Isaac and her relations
with Sir Isaac will be rescued from reality. The book will be illustrated by a
number of carefully posed photographer’s photographs of her, studies of the
Putney house and perhaps an unappetizing woodcut of her early home at Penge.
The aim of all British biography is to conceal. A great deal of what we have
already told will certainly not figure in any such biography, and still more
certainly will the things we have yet to tell be missing. (Wells 127)

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In this passage, the narrator cynically dismisses the Victorian love for philanthropic biographies,
hypocrisy that he hopes to expose by explaining the regressive conditions of Lady Harman’s life.
Where the reader of The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman has seen conflict, ambiguity, and thwarted
goals, the reader of Lady Harman’s biography will only see “one clear benevolent purpose in life
from her very beginning.” In order to propagate the idea of the philanthropic heroine, the
narrator says that her story will be “set out with tact and dignity” in order to preserve her
reputation. Further listing the familiar features of the form, the narrator predicts that
photographs with a clear purpose and illustrations of her houses—without the sinister tone
implied in the novel—will be included. By defining philanthropic biography as particularly
hagiographic, Wells points out how biography conceals the problems of philanthropy by writing
Lady Harman’s story as a narrative with clear purpose.
In doing this, Wells points out the ways that philanthropists are often lauded as heroines
who have reached the pinnacle of their professional development as a result of their sense of
purpose. In much the same way that Besant erases the needlewomen, the hagiographic
biography, which The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman’s narrator predicts will be written, never
mentions the poor with whom philanthropists come in contact. One could imagine the author of
“The Education of Philanthropy” writing such a biography; in each text the philanthropic heroine
has, through professional objectivity, conquered the chaos of the space around her in order to
create her own career. In biography, Lady Harman would be allowed to develop into a stable and
self-possessed philanthropist who has social influence. Instead, the novel presents Lady
Harman’s personal development as the main source of conflict in the plot, something that would
not be presented in her biography. Lady Harman’s thoughts and motivations, her self-doubt and
sometimes shallow reflections on her place in the philanthropic system would be forgotten by the

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biographer in favor of the idea that she is on the vanguard of a new social order. Through this
lens of genre comparison, it becomes clear that Wells’s ambiguous ending as to the fate of Lady
Harman is meant to deny Lady Harman and the reader this clarity and thus to deny the vaunted
individualism of professional philanthropy.
With his final discussion of form, where biography smooths over self-fragmentation and
the contradictions of philanthropy that the novel form allows him to discuss, Wells makes an
important intervention in the narrative form that dominated philanthropic work at the time.
Where the organization and professionalization of philanthropy constructed a narrative with the
purpose of unifying disparate voices by mediating them through the agent-narrator, Wells
intervenes by adding complexity, self-doubt, and the fragmentation of Lady Harman’s identity
into the narrative surrounding philanthropy. In doing so, Wells uses his cynical novel to argue
that the idea of the feminist philanthropic heroine rests on a narrative that has been mediated
through the conventions of biography. In the same way that the COS removed multivocality
from its representations of the poor mediated through the forms that followed the organization’s
system, biography would remove Lady Harman’s complexity under the strictures of a tightly
scripted narrative form. Wells commonly used meditation on genre in his novels to critique
social structures such as marriage and philanthropy. Zoe Beenstock contextualizes his work by
defining the social work of the novel as that which “pursue[s] a critique of social models and
highlight[s] the tension between sociability and individualism” (59). Further, “Wells’s ambitious
writings put various genres and literary periods into critical play” (59), especially important
during the late-Victorian era, when the boundaries between earlier depictions of the realistic
individual and the modernist fragmented identity were beginning to blur, especially in terms of
how they were presented in the biographical and fictional genres that Wells puts into

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conversation in The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman. No longer able to fit the Victorian social model
of individuals-in-relation, Well’s fragmented characters also fit into a larger trend in lateVictorian characterization, where the fragmented identity acted as a critique of the individual
upon which the notion of the philanthropic heroine was based.
Besant’s conservatism and Wells’s cynicism, as well as each author’s use of the model of
professionalized philanthropy that depends on detachment and an individualistic model of the
self, demonstrate why philanthropy and feminism are incompatible with each other. These
novels do not offer philanthropic heroines upon which readers can base their own ambitious
desires, but even more than that, the naïveté of each protagonist, who models her own ambitions
on the professionalism of late-Victorian philanthropy, is not an indictment of feminism but of the
application of feminism within capitalist philanthropy. This proves that, when women take up
the mandate of professional development and attempt to achieve feminist social change through
it, they find only identity crises and self-fragmentation. Importantly, they cannot achieve the
kind of detachment that produces productive self-expression. It is important then, not to value
philanthropy for women because it gets them out of the house; rather, it becomes important to
understand that philanthropy, through its use of objectivity and individualism, only replicated the
kinds of conditions that restricted women in the first place. Late-Victorian philanthropy cannot
be redeemed as a vehicle for women to gain agency in the public sphere; it is inherently
conservative to its core.

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CHAPTER FOUR
“As far off as ever”: Female Sisterhood and Philanthropy in A Sunless Heart and On the
Threshold

The latter half of this dissertation asks whether or not the conditions of late nineteenthcentury, professionalized philanthropy creates the conditions for women’s progress. Chapter
three focuses on the individual woman and argues that the conditions of professionalized
philanthropy, outlined in chapter two, did not allow for women to create a vocational,
autonomous identity for themselves. Chapter three also begins to establish the hierarchies
between women that were an inherent part of late nineteenth-century philanthropy. Chapter four
continues the argument that philanthropy did not create the conditions for women’s progress by
focusing on alliances between women such as sisterhood, a term that is frequently used to
describe female philanthropy, both in the nineteenth century and in critical scholarship now.
This chapter looks at two fin-de-siècle novels that both claimed to offer a different view on
female relationality within the context of philanthropy in order to demonstrate how redemptive
critical lenses do not apply to late-nineteenth century views on women in philanthropy. This
chapter argues that, by the late nineteenth-century, philanthropic work was mutually exclusive to
women’s progress rather than a special site for female attachment that transcended the
hierarchies of capitalist philanthropic models.
Edith Johnstone’s A Sunless Heart (1894) and Isabella Ford’s On the Threshold (1893)
haven’t received much critical attention, yet they capture a critical moment in the late nineteenth
century and illustrate how the detachment of philanthropy made it difficult for women to develop
their relationships to each other. On the Threshold hasn’t been republished since the 1890s, and

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it is now only more widely available through the British Library’s Historical Print Editions, and
A Sunless Heart has only been recently republished by Broadview Critical Editions. Both novels
frame themselves as unique from other novels in that they aim to show readers different kinds of
female relationships. At the same time, they are difficult to reconcile with the critical lenses
about female relationships and philanthropy that have been defined by Jill Rappoport and Sharon
Marcus. In support of its larger argument that professionalized philanthropy had a negative
effect on women’s relationships with each other, this chapter reads the peculiarities of each novel
as indicative of how philanthropy’s language of detachment prevented the development of its
female protagonists. We often think of progressive models of philanthropy and
professionalization for women as an idealistic opportunity for women to create their own
communities and move away from “traditional” women’s roles as selfless and self-sacrificial, but
these novels demonstrate how philanthropic work no longer allowed for such progression or
elimination of hierarchy between women. The progression away from older models of
philanthropy and each character’s attempts to move away from altruistic models, much as the
COS does in chapter two, mean that the novels do not fulfill their desire to represent more equal
relationships between women. Each of these novels is framed around the idea that women’s
relationships need to be reconsidered in the wake of professionalized philanthropy, and they
challenge traditional Victorian understandings of female relationships as sympathetic and as a
way to form alliances.
Edith Johnstone’s A Sunless Heart focuses its attention on the relationship between
Gasparine and Lotus. In the first part of the novel, Gasparine lives in poverty with her brother,
Gaspar. Their titled father has lost his income and left them, and Gasparine takes up teaching to
support herself and her increasingly sick brother. To add to the misery, Gasparine’s art teacher

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plagiarizes one of her paintings and prospers as a result. Gaspar and Gasparine have an
unusually close relationship: not only are they twins, but their connection is so deep that critics
of the novel, such as Constance Harsh, have discussed whether or not it could be incestuous.
Gaspar gets sick with tuberculosis, and after his death, Gasparine falls into despondency and a
deep level of grief. Lotus, a local women’s college professor, hears about Gasparine’s grief and
offers to take care of her until she recovers. Lotus invites Gasparine to stay with her and
furnishes Gasparine’s bare apartment. In the second half of the novel, Gasparine lives with
Lotus, Lotus’s mother, and a child who is Lotus’s daughter but is not aware of that. Lotus has
not told her daughter who she is, because she was born as the result of rape that has left Lotus
extremely self-protective and detached from everyone else. Even while Lotus is taking care of
Gasparine, she does not allow Gasparine to get close to her. Despite these broken relationships,
Johnstone wishes to show the “truer, higher” relationships that women have with each other,
which often result in difficulty understanding Lotus’s motivations and outlook on the world.
Lotus’s detachment also confuses Gasparine, who tries in vain to show her love for Lotus.
Isabella Ford’s political novel On the Threshold examines the relationship of two friends
and art students, Kitty and Lucretia, as they move to London, where they become involved in a
socialist political group. They idealistically try to change the world but are ultimately confronted
with the realities of their everyday life. They live in a run-down apartment in Bloomsbury under
the supervision of their landlady, Mrs. Mount, who employs a maid-of-all-work, Beatrice. As
they get to know Beatrice and Mrs. Mount, they come to understand that she treats Beatrice
poorly, and they offer her their understanding. When Mrs. Mount fires Beatrice and evicts her
from the living quarters that were her payment for her work, Kitty and Lucretia try to find her
and bring her back to their apartment so that she has somewhere to stay. Beatrice, however,

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refuses, and she succumbs to the harsh living conditions of the working class environment of
Bloomsbury. This encounter tests Lucretia’s idealism, and she begins to wonder if the socialist
change that she and Kitty believe in can really come to be. More importantly, however, the
novel frames her understanding of socialist change within her relationship to Kitty. Lucretia
narrates her misgivings and her infatuation with Kitty through a first-person narrative, resulting
in a novel that presents Lucretia’s connection to Kitty as one-sided and detached to the point of
being claustrophobic rather than a presentation of attachment between two women as a
progressive attempt at changing women’s roles. While Lucretia narrates her infatuation, Kitty
becomes involved with a man from her socialist circle, Mr. Estcourt. As they grow closer to
each other and get engaged, Lucretia loses hope that she and Kitty can remain close friends,
ultimately losing hope that socialism can provide a way for women to be more politically
involved rather than just hypocritically performing philanthropic work in a traditionally middleclass manner. The novel ends with Lucretia focusing on her one-sided infatuation with Kitty and
retreating further into her own ideals. Essentially, Lucretia loses Kitty to a traditionally middleclass marriage, preventing them from continuing their socialist work. This ending contrasts with
Isabella Ford’s assertion in her essay “Women and Socialism” that socialism relies on the
transformation of traditional gender roles.
Each of these novels demonstrates a different, and less optimistic, depiction of
seemingly progressive roles for women through their adoption of the detachment that
characterized professional philanthropy. The novels struggle to present the fully developed
female relationships that they initially set out to portray, but they are more successful in
rejecting, or at least pointing out the flaws in, previous accepted models of female philanthropy,
such as sympathetic sisterhood. The reason why they struggle with portraying the idealized

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female relationships that they intend to do, I argue, is because they are caught between the
conflicting discourses of sympathetic sisterhood as a model for female philanthropy and the
professionalized philanthropic discourse of the late nineteenth century. This conflict cannot be
explained by a more redemptive understanding of female philanthropy that critics employ today.
The ending of each novel is an exception to our current critical understanding that
professionalized philanthropy can provide progressive roles for women and more opportunities
for political alliances that benefit women.
One such understanding of the redemption for women in professionalized philanthropy is
in Giving Women. Jill Rappoport argues that women established attachments to each other using
an alternative system of exchange that was based in neither selflessness nor sacrifice. She says
“women took control of gift-giving to forge their own diverse alliances” (4). Rappoport’s
understanding of how gift-giving between women opposed the hierarchy of philanthropy does
not demonstrate that she has taken its late nineteenth-century professionalization into account.
While she concedes that she “shift[s] critical focus from the unequal exchanges of philanthropy
and patriarchal marriage to the peer alliances women established with one another through giftgiving” (5), allowing for the argument that philanthropy is ultimately unequal and not conducive
to the formation of female attachments, she allows that professionalized philanthropy increased
the opportunities for women to form what she calls “horizontal” attachments with each other.
She says: “The nineteenth century saw the rise of charity as an increasingly professional
occupation that allowed middle-class women to expand the ideological and practical reach of
their domestic sphere” (6). As discussed in chapter three, professionalized philanthropy, with its
language of objective detachment, was not conducive to the establishment of the kind of
horizontal exchanges that Rappoport argues for here. Because of that, this chapter considers

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other forms of relationality between women that rely neither on sacrifice nor on creating
horizontal exchanges.
Sharon Marcus, in Between Women, discusses the ambivalent relationship between
capitalism and female attachment during the Victorian era. She says: “as an ideal, friendship
was defined by altruism, generosity, mutual indebtedness, and a perfect balance of power. In a
capitalist society deeply ambivalent about competition, female friendship offered a vision of
perfect reciprocity for those who could afford not to worry about daily survival” (4). Here,
Marcus establishes the idea that female friendship was a way to balance out the hierarchies of
capitalism and was, by definition, based in altruism. Professionalized philanthropy, in many
ways, was not conducive to such attachments since it relied on detachment and rejected altruism
as a model for the way that it allowed the rich and poor to relate to each other. Elsewhere,
Marcus says that “Victorians accepted friendship between women because they believed it
cultivated the feminine virtues of sympathy and altruism that made women into good helpmates”
(26), which brings up the implications of what it would mean for friendship if altruism was no
longer an acceptable way of relating to other women. If altruism is the cornerstone of friendship,
as Marcus argues in Between Women, then it follows that friendship within the philanthropic
relationship, or the horizontality that Rappoport imagines, would need to be reimagined if late
Victorians no longer valued altruism within that same philanthropic relationship.
Ultimately, this chapter centers its discussion of female relationships around
professionalized philanthropy, arguing that its language of detachment requires us to look at
redemptive female relationships differently. Here it is important to remember that this
dissertation, in chapter two, has defined professionalized philanthropy as synonymous with
detachment. A focus on the detachment of professionalized philanthropy no longer allows

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philanthropic work among women in the late nineteenth century to be framed as a special arena,
separate or resistant to capitalism, where women could form bonds among themselves, as
Rappoport has argued, or to define philanthropy among women as inherently sympathetic and
altruistic, as Marcus has argued. While these models for philanthropic work were dominant in
the mid-nineteenth century, the rise of professionalized philanthropy made the development of
female attachments within such work more difficult. Johnstone’s and Ford’s novels depict
undeveloped relationships between women that are complicated, rather than deepened, by the
characters’ involvement in philanthropy. While the novels are on the fringes of the latenineteenth century canon, they do attempt to make an intervention in the way that female
attachments were represented, and they both attempt to imagine female relationships outside of
philanthropic work as a motivating motif. Johnstone’s and Ford’s novels, in their own attempt to
revise the way that female attachment was understood within philanthropic relationships, also
require us to reconsider the possibilities for equality between women when those relationships
begin to take shape because of a philanthropic encounter. They demonstrate that the language of
detachment had so permeated philanthropic discourse that altruistic and balanced friendships
were nearly impossible. In turn, a look at these novels also requires that we reconsider our
claims that philanthropy could be redeemed as a mechanism that benefitted women or allowed
them to resist capitalist hierarchies by creating horizontal exchanges or altruistic friendships.
Ultimately, these novels demonstrate how philanthropic work and the development of female
relationships were mutually exclusive as a result of the professionalization of philanthropy.
This chapter’s examination of Johnstone’s novel, A Sunless Heart, is primarily concerned
with the idea of sisterhood and its place in female philanthropic work. Johnstone explicitly
frames her novel as one that intervenes in representations of relationships between women. In an

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authorial aside between the First and Second Books of the novel, Johnstone appeals: “Here
indulgence is craved, for offering, as seemed to me necessary, though I am aware it is unusual, a
second apologetic explanation” (90). She wishes to write a novel that is not about love between
men and women: “It has been so far, the province of the novel to deal almost exclusively with
lives only in their relation to the passion of love between man and woman, [ . . . ] But this is only
one side of life. There are others. In many lives such love plays but a minor part, or enters not at
all. Will no one voice them, or find beauty in them?” (90). Johnstone understands that female
relationships are unique but have not been represented in quite the way she has in mind: “To all
who feel that men and women will come to closer, and higher relationships, when they cease to
wear masks each towards the other sex—removed when in the company of their own—to those I
have tried to show, in all purity of intent, and belief in the best of humanity, what women may
be, and often are, to one another” (90). Here, Johnstone suggests that female relationships hold
special potential, not merely to show that men and women could develop their relationships if
they removed artifice or as a way for women to learn how to relate to others before they get
married, but as their own special category. While her language here is vague, it is clear that
Johnstone wishes to start a new conversation about female attachments.
Johnstone’s “what women may be, and often are, to one another” may not be as new or
groundbreaking to a modern reader, but her intent becomes more complex when we consider her
choice to represent such relationships within the context of professionalized philanthropy. In this
context, it becomes clear that Johnstone is trying to redefine what sisterhood, as a form of “what
women may be [ . . . ] to one another,” means as philanthropy changed in the late nineteenth
century. Early on in the Second Book, Lotus challenges the common discourse around female

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philanthropy when she explains the reasons for taking care of Gasparine after her brother’s
death:
Poor child! poor child! It doesn’t do you any good either to know that others have
suffered the same. No, no. I have suffered, too, poor dear; I hate the people, too.
But listen. Life must be lived. Life must be lived. You now, poor soul, are
friendless, a poor teacher, as I am, too, struck with a great blow. I saw you, the
solitary mourner of your dead. I, too, have a grave. No, do not mistake me for a
sister of charity, or a missionary visitor—I am none of them, but a lonely one like
you…. (Johnstone 97)
Lotus rejects the idea of shared suffering, selflessness, and self-sacrifice as a way of forming
alliances between women. If we take Johnstone at her word that her intent is to show “what
women may be, and often are, to one other,” it is clear that her depiction of a different
understanding of female relationships involves rejecting the key themes that define those
relationships within philanthropic work. Although Lotus acknowledges that she shares a sense
of suffering with Gasparine, she refuses the idea that this suffering unites them. Lotus rejects
philanthropy as a way of making her more equal with Gasparine and denies it as an opportunity
to increase community with her declaration that she is not a “sister of charity, or a missionary
visitor.” By using the words “sister of charity,” Lotus directly engages with the language that
was common to female philanthropy and also begins to establish a more detached relationship
with Gasparine.
The language about philanthropy that Lotus rejects comes from nineteenth-century
models of female philanthropy that emphasized shared suffering as a way to create equality
between women of different classes, even within philanthropic work. Its language, defining

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sisterhood as shared suffering, mirrors the language that Lotus rejects in A Sunless Heart. The
Ranyard Nurses, who are also discussed in chapter three, are a particularly important example of
such a model. In a 1911 essay, “A Retrospect” from the “Report of the London Biblewomen and
Nurses Mission,” the anonymous author states:
In those days there was little systematic care for the needs of the poorer part of the
community. Public charities were chiefly dispensed in doles, and private charity was
often more on the lines of that kindly condescension, which draws too much attention
to the inequalities between the rich and the poor. Mrs. Ranyard looked deep into the
heart of things, and by the aid of her “sanctified common sense,” and sympathetic
imagination, saw the ever-widening rift between those who needed help, and those
who were willing to give it but did not know how, and by a stroke of Christian genius
she forged what she called at first “the missing link”—her first method of help. This
was to be a woman who had suffered, as these others were suffering, and who thus
held the key to many of the trials and temptations of those she visited, a key which
one who had lived in comfort all her days could never possess. (22)
Here, this description of the Ranyard Nurses equates philanthropy focused on shared suffering
with equality. The author starts by arguing that philanthropists had paid little attention to the
most needy members of the community, and when they did, their methods emphasized difference
rather than community. Here, it is clear that women needed to have a sense of attachment
through suffering in order to form communities that transcended class.
Currently, critics imagine female philanthropy as work that was able to transcend
problematic female self-sacrifice because of philanthropy’s focus on altruism and female
networking. Jill Rappoport is the most prominent example of this view, as she argues that gift-

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giving between women was a way for women to establish attachments that benefitted both
parties rather than creating a situation where either woman was expected to be self-sacrificial.
The female relationships that Rappoport discusses, however, while they sought to prevent
unequal relationships such as dependence, were based in attachment and increasing community
between the giver and recipient. She defines such relationships as the following: “Women
entered into volatile and profitable economic negotiations of power and created diverse forms of
community. Their personal gift transactions expanded kinship circles, served as the bases for
larger civic coalitions, and established both the reach and the limits of these alliances” (5).
These alliances avoided the language of self-sacrifice that dominated Victorian ideals of female
relationships while at the same time avoiding the language of detachment that dominated the
discourse of professionalized philanthropy. This idea of philanthropy also understands female
relationships, defined as sisterhood, to be central to the redemptive role of philanthropy for
women. The idea of “sisters of charity” that was common in the nineteenth century, is one that
Jill Rappoport looks to as well. She also looks to the Ranyard Nurses to support her argument
that women could create horizontal alliances or sisterhoods through this kind of relationship
building. Giving Women focuses on professionalized philanthropy as the work that created a
positive experience for women, as it increased non-hierarchical attachments between classes.
Rappoport argues participation in the Ranyard Nurses “allow[ed] slum-goers to cross socially
bounded spaces, and also to claim, through sisterhood, the ability to transcend and traverse class.
Slum Sisters attempted to put themselves literally in others’ places, speaking to as well as for
them, and showing how readers could do so too” (111). With their shared sense of suffering,
these sisterhoods, exemplified by organizations such as the Salvation Army Slum Sisters and the
Ranyard Nurses, Rappoport argues, offered more equal alliances, and notes that “impoverished

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families were often sustained for a time by working-class mutual aid, rather than top-down gifts
of charity. This support reinforced neighborhood networks” (111, 114). Yet, Lotus’s rejection
of the theme of sisterhood in philanthropic work is the point at which A Sunless Heart begins to
account for the late nineteenth-century development that philanthropic work was separated from
female community. Lotus is a coolly distant professional who does not consider helping
Gasparine to be an opportunity to speak for her, to claim sisterhood with her, or form bonds
through shared suffering. In this way, A Sunless Heart illustrates a philanthropic relationship
that does not operate in the redemptive way that Rappoport idealizes.
Lotus demonstrates her professional detachment elsewhere in the novel, particularly
when she describes her relationships with her students. She makes it very clear that she can help
her students by working hard rather than through emotional care:
“Listen, then,” said Lo impressively. “You say my girls love me. Yes. Why do
they all come here, and love me? It is love? You want to say, I know, that they
give me love, and that I give them contempt? Is it not rather this? I do not admire
them; I see them as they are, contemptibly selfish animals. Do I ever deceive
myself that it is for love of me they come? No, no; they know that when they
come to me, however bored I am, I put my work aside, and help and listen. I win
them by much toil and patience. I do not, by my mere presence, command love,
as Mona, who wins by existing … I by toil, that I may live. Have you any idea
how thoroughly people dislike and fear me until I compel them to do otherwise? I
do not take my geese as swans, but while I give them what they want it’s little
they care—geese are not high-toned animals, you know. And then that foolish
girl says I deceive people. I do not. I do not need to. They deceive themselves.”

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(Johnstone 136)
Here, Lotus identifies herself strongly with the discourse of professionalized detachment by
redefining her students’ admiration as merely results of her duty to her work. Where Lotus’s
students admire her and expect her to return that admiration, Lotus labels their request for a
reciprocal relationship self-deception. She further detaches herself from her students by
interpreting her students’ love as self-motivated, because they understand that Lotus will
sacrifice her time and energy for their success. Lotus thus centers her detachment as essential to
her professionalism and mirrors the language of professionalized philanthropy while she is
taking care of Gasparine and engaging in teaching, which has traditionally been understood as a
caring profession. She prefers to maintain hierarchy in these relationships, and her professional
life is marked by a mutual distrust.
At times, Lotus’s identification as a distant, dutiful laborer works well, as her students
seem not to be bothered by Lotus’s cold distance. Gasparine, however, is troubled by Lotus’s
distance, and is confused that Lotus’s seeming benevolence does not also lead to a closer
relationship or equality between the two. Gasparine finds herself simultaneously drawn to Lotus
and pushed away from her, which ultimately confuses her and prevents her from forming a stable
relationship with Lotus. She says that she “was at once repelled and attracted by [Lotus’s cruel
and imperious expression]” (Johnstone 135), and Gasparine feels that “The strange being became
always dearer and more distant. Day after day, week after week, new phases, aspects of
character, appeared, to charm, pique, soothe, or tempt. But always Gasparine found herself as
far off as ever” (139). Gasparine struggles with her understanding of the personal bonds of
philanthropic work, where older models of female philanthropy created the expectation of
equality and attachment. The idea of reciprocity, shared suffering, or even gratefulness

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ultimately does not survive Lotus’s emphasis on distanced professionalism: “After a long
struggle against it she was forced to acknowledge that Lo received her worship with no other
feeling than a gentle scorn, which yet trusted her completely” (139). While Gasparine is not
harmed, she is also not able to realize “sisterhood” with Lotus. Lotus’s benevolence towards
Gasparine is a significant turning point for her life, yet her choice to separate giving from
attachment means that she actively prevents any development of female community, “horizontal
alliances,” or equality. Even though Gasparine benefits from Lotus’s provision, a closer bond
with Lotus is not included in the gift.
As Gasparine and Lotus struggle with defining their work and their relationship with each
other, the novel does not allow either character to develop fully. Lotus’s detachment ultimately
ends in tragedy, while Gasparine, even in her success as an artist, continues to try to understand
Lotus’s suffering as she had when Lotus was still alive. As the novel comes to its conclusion,
Gasparine is frequently described as happy (Johnstone 176, 182), while Lotus continues to suffer
and remains cold and distant. Lotus’s relationships with each character in the novel are cut off
by the end; she rejects two entreaties for love from both Mona, a student with whom she had a
relationship, and Professor Raymond, who pursued her earlier but ended up proposing to Mona.
Further, when she leaves her home at the end of the novel and promises to reveal that she is
another character’s mother,18 she dies in a train accident along the way and is never able to
develop her relationship with her daughter. Even one last chance with Mona is denied to Lotus:
they die together in the train accident. These examples of Lotus’s failure to develop her
relationships with other characters come despite her philanthropic work. Professor Raymond
18

This character in the novel, Ladybird, was told that she was adopted at birth although she is Lotus’s biological
child. Lotus hides her identity from Ladybird because she was conceived during the rape that Lotus alludes to
elsewhere in the novel. Lotus planned to reveal to Ladybird that she is her mother after she comes back from a trip,
but she dies in a train crash along the way.

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describes her in the following way: “Your unmoved calm, for one so young, the depth of your
despairing convictions, in contrast with your noble endeavours in every good cause [ . . . ]”
(184), indicating that her work for others did not provide a space for her to find sisterhood or
equality with those she helped. On the other hand, Gasparine desperately hangs on to Lotus’s
memory and achieves recognition as an artist with the painting of her masterpiece called “The
Lotus-Flower.” “Numberless offers came to the artist from all parts,” yet Lotus still hangs on to
her past in the same way that she struggled with getting closer to Lotus while she was still alive:
“But she would not sell her treasure. It brought the lost back to her longing, aching eyes” (198).
In this way, the inequality between the two women remains and demonstrates the inability for
Lotus and Gasparine’s benevolent relationship to translate into an attachment or alliance. The
detachment that defined their relationship with each other fails to allow the two women to fully
move past their suffering and develop as characters. The consequence is that Gasparine and
Lotus fail to develop as characters or in their relationship with each other.
Isabella Ford also considers how philanthropy could no longer be considered a central
endeavor to the women’s movement by the end of the nineteenth century, and she complicates
the ability for women to form political alliances by simply sharing suffering. The idea that
sympathetic attachment could allow women to create alliances between themselves fails
throughout the novel. Ford certainly imagined a better future for women, as discussed in what
follows, but she did not think that philanthropy in any form would be the vehicle for it. Ford’s
essay “Women and Socialism,” written around 1904, intervenes in discussions surrounding the
socialist and feminist movements of the turn of the century, arguing that “unless the relation of
the Labour movement—or perhaps it is better to use the wider term of the Socialist movement—
to the Women’s Movement, be clearly recognised, the real inner meaning of Socialism itself

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cannot be understood, for the two movements have the same common origin and the same aims”
(Ford, “Women and Socialism” 2). For Ford, the aims that the women’s movement and labour
movements share include the idea that both women and men must have an “equal share of
service” (2). Importantly, to Ford, socialism meant more than just reforming labor practices or
making the work force more efficient through professionalization. Although she advocated
professional training, the achievement of her ideals meant that socialism, more than “merely
import[ing] Socialistic institutions into our midst, such as free meals” could not succeed until
gender relations were transformed: “[Socialism] insists on a moral regeneration of society of the
most complete and searching kind in order to make a lasting foundation for the political and
social changes many of us long to see” (2). Here Ford frames the women’s movement, and its
insistence on equality between the sexes, as foundational to political change; socialism could not
succeed without the women’s movement. As such she frames her politics with particular
relationships between people, going so far as to say that “Socialism goes straight to the home”
(3). Because of this focus on the particularities in personal relationships, Ford’s novel aims to be
different from a wider socialist movement, whose politics, as she points out, sometimes
overpowered the personal. The novel itself examines how the large-scale political goals of
socialism can either succeed or fail on a very small scale if relationships between the sexes aren’t
changed first. In turn, Ford demonstrates how the center for women’s progress has moved from
philanthropic work to Socialist work—Socialism and philanthropy are continually pitted against
each other in On the Threshold—and she uses a more nuanced understanding of class relations to
demonstrate how sympathetic understanding could no longer bring women together as allies.
On the Threshold focuses on philanthropic practice in large part because of the way that
traditionally feminine philanthropy, where women formed a separate sisterhood of labor in the

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absence of being able to participate in the male public sphere, did not allow for women to
achieve the “equal share of service” that she advocates in “Women and Socialism.” In an
important scene in the novel, Ford makes it clear that philanthropy that focuses on women’s selfsacrifice is antiquated and is a hindrance to socialism’s call for equality. After Kitty is called
away by her family, Lucretia moves in with her Aunt Henrietta, where she is miserable and
begins to lose hope that she and Kitty will be able to contribute to political change. Her aunt’s
house is “full of large and hideous furniture, and hung with heavy maroon-coloured curtains”
(Ford, On the Threshold 133), an indication that she is old-fashioned. Further, Aunt Henrietta
regularly hosts her friends during her at-homes, where they organize teas for the poor. Aunt
Henrietta airs her views on philanthropy during a discussion with Mr. Estcourt. Mr. Estcourt
takes an anti-philanthropy view, saying that philanthropy “‘generally means giving away what
you don’t want, to people who would be much better without it’” (177), where Aunt Henrietta
takes a view not unlike that of the Sisters of Charity and other parodied mid-Victorian
philanthropists, saying “‘One ought to have poor people in to tea and talk to them’” (177).
However, the most significant of Aunt Henrietta’s opinions on the role of women is one that
contrasts with Ford’s own opinion on women’s labor: “after dinner [Aunt Henrietta] asked me
[Lucretia] to read aloud to her out of a little book on female education, a chapter describing the
necessity for gentleness and submission on the part of women, and the beauty of complete selfsacrifice” (136-7). For Ford, Aunt Henrietta embodies the problems of the old way of thinking
about women’s labor. While she is somewhat clichéd, with her discussion of women’s selfsacrifice, she represents the barriers to equality between men and women. Even more tellingly,
she responds to Lucretia’s doldrums, thinking that she has just overworked herself, by advising
Lucretia to take up the same philanthropic “work” that she engages in. Here, Ford illustrates her

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idea that men and women must be able to perform the same kind of work, especially when it
comes to reform work, in order to achieve the broader goals of socialism. In this way, her novel
also illustrates “old” philanthropy as mutually exclusive from Socialism, which is where
progressive women’s work is currently taking place.
On the Threshold further illustrates this mutual exclusivity by taking up the themes of
living with the poor as a way to sympathize with them and thus reach equality with them, similar
to the philanthropic method used by the Ranyard Nurses and rejected by A Sunless Heart. The
novel represents a failed attempt at creating community and sympathy between middle-class,
educated women (Lucretia and Kitty) and their maid, Beatrice. Lucretia and her friend, Kitty,
come from middle- class families who are not completely supportive of their decision to study
art in London. The two friends move into a flat in Bloomsbury and start a friendship with their
maid-of-all-work, Beatrice. As they get to know Beatrice and their landlady, Mrs. Mount, they
come to understand that Mrs. Mount treats Beatrice poorly, and they offer her their
understanding. When Mrs. Mount fires Beatrice and evicts her from the living quarters that were
her payment for her work, Kitty and Lucretia try to find her and bring her back to their apartment
so that she has somewhere to stay. However, Beatrice’s refusal demonstrates the failure of their
sympathy through their experience living in similar conditions to Beatrice: “‘You’ve been kind
to me, kinder nor any one; but you’ll be going home soon, and I shall never see you again. The
likes of you, miss, can’t understand what it is; it seems fine out here, it’s like a bit o’ life. I know
you meant it kindly coming to fetch me back, and I’ll never forget it; but I can’t go back, I can’t,
and that Mrs. Mount will be harder nor ever after this’” (Ford, On the Threshold 50). Beatrice,
despite her thankfulness for the friends’ sympathy, recognizes that there is a chasm between the
two even after Kitty and Lucretia have taken the time to get to know her in close quarters. Kitty

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and Lucretia’s experiences with Beatrice have motivated them to find her and take care of her,
but even that sympathy is not sustainable. Beatrice recognizes that the friends’ kindness has
worse long-term consequences, while Kitty and Lucretia can only see their present kindness. In
this way, the novel demonstrates how sympathy or shared suffering was not a way for women to
create alliances between each other. More significantly, it is one of the few examples of a
rejection of fellow-feeling expressed through the point of view of the working class.
The novel depicts Kitty and Lucretia’s attempts at sympathy with Beatrice as the
consequence of a naïve understanding of class relations. Kitty and Lucretia’s experiences with
getting to know the less fortunate through close encounters further confuses them, as their
experiences only serve to make them understand that their “views about general morality were
altering strangely” (Ford, On the Threshold 42) based on what is immediately in front of them.
For example, their view of Mrs. Mount softens after they hear her side of the story about
Beatrice’s disappearance, and they feel especially sympathetic when Mrs. Mount tells them her
troubles right before they move out of the apartment. As they come to terms with their failure to
sympathize, their formerly clean-cut views of morality to become more ambiguous: “‘Lucretia,
what are we to do? We’ve found Beatrice, as we said we would, but now we cannot kill Mrs.
Mount, as we said we must!’ and Kitty groaned. ‘I wish people were either entirely good or
entirely bad, it would make the world so much simpler! We must really come back to these
rooms and try to love Mrs. Mount [ . . . ]!’” (83). Rather than guiding her in determining who
deserves help and who does not, Kitty’s attempt to sympathize with both parties and synthesize
both views into a common understanding only serves to confuse her morality and prevent her
from acting on it. The silliness of Kitty’s statement is highlighted with her mention of killing
Mrs. Mount with no sense of self-awareness about the hyperbole of that statement. There is

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nothing else to suggest that Kitty or Lucretia were seriously considering murder, and the phrase
is commonly used in an exaggerated way; but Kitty’s self-serious tone here makes her statements
seem out of touch. This strange statement in a moment that is all about the girls’ simplistic view
of morality and their rapid oscillation between sympathies underscore the idea that we shouldn’t
take seriously their musings on sympathy with the poor as political statements that are endorsed
by the novel.
Within the context of the novel’s separation between philanthropy and socialist
progressivism, Ford focuses on the relationship between Kitty and Lucretia and how it fails to
reach equality because Kitty and Mr. Estcourt also do not commit fully to the ideals of equality
between the sexes. The failure for the women to develop their friendship further is made visible
by Lucretia’s first-person narration throughout the novel. Where Lucretia is torn between her
desire for Kitty and her realization that she can’t acceptably communicate that to Kitty, the
reader is able to see the contrast between Lucretia’s inward thoughts and outward actions.
Additionally, her first-person reflections on socialist politics allow the reader to see where
Lucretia is more skeptical about the ideals that she and Kitty talk about. Where Lucretia seems
to share Kitty’s idealism, Lucretia’s recounting of the events of a socialist meeting complicates a
reader’s assumption that the women have, together, achieved a higher political plane in that the
focus on friendship allows them to move beyond a focus on marriage. Lucretia, at first, has full
faith that Kitty is on the same page: “Friendships between men and women, which we felt were
one of the leavening forces of the world, possessed much more interest for us than falling in
love” (Ford, On the Threshold 28). In this moment, Lucretia’s explanation of their friendship
follows a long discussion of relationships between the sexes, and her use of the unifying
pronouns of “we” demonstrates Lucretia’s assumption that Kitty’s neutral outward behavior

172

towards the main male character, Mr. Estcourt, is proof that Kitty’s politics come before a mere
interest in finding a husband. Her focus on friendship rather than love demonstrates the way that
she is required to code her desire for Kitty and justify the way that she wants it to replace the
desire that Kitty could have for a man. Yet, as the socialist meeting goes on, Lucretia comes to
understand that Kitty’s adoption of socialist ideals are a way for her to appear attractive to Mr.
Estcourt: “I saw Estcourt’s face light up as Kitty spoke, and for an instant their eyes met. My
heart sank, for I loved Kitty as I loved no one else, and it seemed to me as that look passed
between her and // Estcourt, something grew up between them which must separate her from me”
(31-2). At this point, Lucretia realizes that any evidence that she had of Kitty’s genuine
idealism, and any notion of shared ideals between them, were fantasies that she entertained about
their political aims. She frames that socialist meeting as merely a stage for the traditional
endeavor of marriage, and this realization also marks a shift in her narration from the shared
pronouns of “we” and “us,” to a more isolated narrative style that distances her from Kitty.
Lucretia’s realization that Kitty’s political ideals are more performative than genuine
allows the reader to see the superficiality of the girls’ politics; but more importantly, it makes
clear that the potential for the new world of socialism and relationships between women that go
beyond sympathetic caregiving are lost because of the hierarchy between Kitty and Lucretia.
Examples of worship, rather than equality, abound in the novel. Although we can’t take Kitty or
Lucretia too seriously, Lucretia’s naïve declarations of love for Kitty in the novel demonstrate
how, rather than rejecting their political viewpoints, we should reject the way that they express
their love in a hierarchical way:
However, after we had known Beatrice a few days, Kitty suddenly announced that
our creed had changed—I always followed Kitty’s lead—and that henceforward

173

we must understand, first, that people who are oppressed are often more wicked
than their oppressors, and, second, that wicked // people require more love and
help than good ones. (Ford, On the Threshold 11-2)
Here, Lucretia frames Kitty’s political ramblings as an illustration of their attachment to each
other. Kitty is the clear leader, and Lucretia follows her lead because she loves Kitty. It does not
matter to Lucretia where Kitty’s political opinions go; it matters to her that she can use politics
as a way to express her attachment to Kitty in an acceptable way. In the same way that Lucretia
does take her political expressions seriously, the reader cannot. Where Kitty’s politics are
enacted during the novel through attempts at altruistic shared suffering and sympathy with the
poor, the hierarchy between the two women is most visible. Ford also aligns the pair’s ideals
most closely to the antiquated altruistic ideals of philanthropy, which in turn makes their socialist
labor unrealized.
Because of Lucretia’s narrative detachment and their hierarchical relationship, both
women are unable to work towards a socialist future. The two women remain trapped in a world
of ideals rather than action:
“Lucretia,” said Kitty at last, “we must swear to one another, on our love for each
other, that we will set about changing all this. We must reform these things. Let
us solemnly swear it now, Lucretia dear.” Solemnly we swore it, and solemnly we
sealed our oath with a kiss. It was rarely that we kissed each other, but that night
we clung together in the darkness, for we seemed to be on the threshold of a great
unknown world, and we were filled with awe, though our faith and courage, like
our ignorance, were great, boundlessly great. (Ford, On the Threshold 52)
The pair’s glimpse of a utopian future is framed by their attachment to each other at its most

174

intense. Despite this moment of hope, though, the potential of Kitty and Lucretia’s attachment to
each other is undermined by convention. At the end of the novel, Kitty falls back on the
concepts of friendship and marriage to imagine a socialist future for herself, Lucretia, and Mr.
Estcourt. She talks about her and Mr. Estcourt’s future socialist work, unenthusiastically saying
that they might teach or write songs; then she expresses her disappointment in her relationship
with Mr. Estcourt, saying that it is not the “great and noble companionship” (124) she hoped it
could be. Rather than being on the threshold as she was for a moment with Lucretia, she now
feels that she is “lost in a dreadful grey forest” (125). But rather than reviving that moment,
Kitty still describes her attachment to Lucretia using conventional terms: “‘How beautiful our
friendship is!’ she went on presently. ‘We are somehow like each others’ mothers; we
understand each other all through, and how we rest in each other’” (125). She falls back on
labels that are acceptable to use to describe female relationships, such as mother and friendship,
but they are still hierarchical and offer no future.
On the Threshold, much as its title suggests, illustrates a key dilemma in late nineteenthcentury philanthropic reform work. As Lucretia and Kitty struggle to make connections to the
poor through sympathy, they also struggle to form equal alliances with each other. Because of
this, the novel cannot be explained with a critical lens, such as the ones that Sharon Marcus and
Jill Rappoport offer, that features altruistic or sympathetic philanthropic models as keys to
women’s progress. Ford’s and Johnstone’s novels both reject older forms of philanthropy and
point out the difficulties with professionalized philanthropy, but in so doing they do not seek to
return philanthropy to its earlier state of sympathy and fellow-. Rather, these novels create
conditions that make it impossible for women to return to these earlier models and make it clear
that, in order for women to create alliances with each other, they must leave philanthropic work

175

behind altogether. Ultimately, these novels challenge our own critical views about the role of
philanthropy in women’s progress in the late nineteenth century: it is not a tool for women to
transcend the hierarchies of capitalist philanthropic models, as Marcus argues, nor does it
establish the “horizontal exchanges,” as Rappoport argues, that are so essential for women to
transcend these capitalist hierarchies. As this dissertation argues, professionalized, i.e., late
nineteenth-century, philanthropy is an inherently unequal and detached enterprise, and just
because women can take up this enterprise does not mean that they change these conditions.
Philanthropic reform did not, and could not, also create reform in gender roles in the Victorian
era.

176

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