The reputation of philanthropy since 1750

Britain and beyond

Hugh Cunningham

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526146373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

Most people now associate philanthropy with donations of money by the rich to good causes. It has not always been so. The Reputation of Philanthropy explores how our modern definition came about and asks why praise for philanthropy and philanthropists has always been matched by criticism. Were we really capable of loving all of humankind? Was it possible that what was thought of as philanthropy might create a dependency class and do more harm than good? Was it sensible to focus so much on far away places to the neglect of the poor at home?Deeply researched, timely and accessible, this book will inform today's thinking about the role that philanthropy should play in British society. The criticisms of philanthropy in the past have telling echoes in the present.

1

Writing the history of philanthropy

The historiography of philanthropy is sparse. Compared to other contingent areas of social history, for example the history of poverty and the Poor Laws, it is extremely thin. In this chapter I analyse the approaches taken in the main books that have informed views of how the history of philanthropy should be written.

B. Kirkman Gray, W. K. Jordan and David Owen

One marker of the poverty of the historiography is that students coming new to the subject are routinely directed to three books, B. Kirkman Gray’s A History of English Philanthropy from the Dissolution of the Monasteries to the First Census (1905), W. K. Jordan’s Philanthropy in England 1480–1660: A Study of the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations (1959) and David Owen’s English Philanthropy 1660–1960 (1965). One of these is over a century old, the other two over half a century. In no other field of history have books written so long ago failed to be superseded. There have been significant additions to our understanding of philanthropy in Britain since the publication of the three bedrocks but for a long-run chronology they remain in place. From my perspective one of the points of interest in them is that they all employ the word ‘philanthropy’ in their titles even though in two of them (Gray and Jordan) the word was hardly ever used by contemporaries and in Owen not for the first of his three centuries. This suggests (and it is hardly surprising) that the authors’ forays into the past were an attempt to make sense of the present.

Gray was the most explicit about this. ‘If we retrace this history [of philanthropy]’, he wrote, ‘we ought to be able to throw some light on its present meaning and problems’. ‘What is the meaning and worth of philanthropy?’ was the fundamental question he addressed.¹ Born in 1862, the son of a Congregational minister, Gray had a wide experience of teaching and had drifted towards Unitarianism before in 1897 taking up social work in London. A nervous breakdown in 1902 brought this to an end and he turned to trying to make sense of his experience. ‘I had become aware, in the course of several years’ work among the unfortunate subjects of philanthropic activity, of what is, of course, a matter of common knowledge, viz., that philanthropy does not entirely fulfil its aim, since the evils which it seeks to allay still continue, and many of them in an increasing degree.’ It is curious that with this agenda he chose to close his book with the first census of 1801. He argued that the census marked the point at which government and the state first began to become aware of the condition of the population and that from it followed, not immediately, but with some effect from the 1830s, a period when philanthropy started to lose ground to the state in tackling social problems. Continuing into the nineteenth century, Gray argued, ‘would have involved matters of present-day controversy’. His conclusion, however, was clear: philanthropy in the centuries he studied had failed in the sense that ‘the amount of want was far greater than the efforts made to relieve it’.²

The books by Jordan and Owen can in some respects be considered alongside each other. Most obviously, Owen began in 1660, Jordan’s end date. Less obviously, both were funded by the Ford Foundation. Owen described how the origin of his book ‘lies in the decision of the Ford Foundation in 1955 to sponsor a series of studies of modern philanthropy’. He ‘was asked to undertake a survey, rather general in scope, of English philanthropy, which might serve as a background for more detailed investigations of the American experience’. Jordan’s research began ‘many years’ before publication, benefitting from a variety of funding sources, but his work was ‘brought to completion with the help of a generous grant from the Ford Foundation’.³ What prompted the Ford Foundation to fund historical work on philanthropy? Philanthropy was becoming a subject that was attracting interest in the United States through the 1950s. F. Emerson Andrews’s Philanthropic Giving was supported and published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1950, and rapidly reprinted. ‘Informed, witty, and sensible’, it provided useful advice to donors as well as a brief ‘glance at history’.⁴ The University of Wisconsin hosted the ‘History of American Philanthropy Project’, one important output from which was Robert H. Bremner’s American Philanthropy (1960), published as a contribution to the Chicago History of American Civilization. The moment was perhaps ripe for further study and funding. Established in 1936 in Michigan, the Ford Foundation in the post-war world began to separate itself from the Ford Motor Company, to broaden the scope of its activities and to move its headquarters to New York. Much of this was prompted by recommendations of a committee set up to chart the Foundation’s future under the chairmanship of H. Rowan Gaither in the late 1940s. From 1953 to 1956, in the years when the decision was made to fund studies of philanthropy, Gaither was President of the Foundation.⁵ There is evidence that one of Gaither’s prime concerns (and he was of course not alone in this) was the Cold War. It is at least not impossible that a motive for financing studies of philanthropy was that they might highlight the contributions that philanthropy had made, and could make, to what Jordan was to describe as ‘liberal society’. One of the distinctions being made at the time by political scientists was that between ‘totalitarianism’ and political democracy, the latter marked by the plethora of voluntary organisations that mediated between the state and the mass of the people. Philanthropy was a safeguard against totalitarianism.

If there was a Cold War agenda behind the Ford Foundation’s funding of studies of philanthropy Jordan’s work must have delighted his sponsors. Based primarily on a study of wills, he argued that there was an outpouring of philanthropy directed away from the religious foundations of the medieval period towards what he called secular objectives, poverty relief, almshouses, schools, municipal improvement. Headed by merchants and gentry, over half the amount given emanating from London, Jordan celebrated a shift in men’s aspirations that created and grew out of a culture that made it a norm to leave an endowment at death to support a worthy cause in perpetuity. Here is Jordan in typical vein on the contribution made by private charity to poor relief between 1600 and 1660:

A truly magnificent effort was undertaken by private charity in the six decades with which our period closes to raise up and endow institutions which would at last bring endemic poverty under control by effective relief and achieve its cure by an immense expansion of the area of social responsibility for all classes of men. The state stood poised for intervention after 1597, if the need should arise, but because of the prodigal generosity of private men who had assumed for themselves an heroic burden of social responsibility that intervention was in fact to be long delayed; delayed, it is fair to say, in its ultimately complete sense, until our own century.

Jordan clearly preferred a society where such ‘incredible charitable generosity’ rendered the role of the state distinctly secondary.⁶ In contrast to Gray, far from failing, philanthropy became what we would now call an integral and successful element in civil society.

Jordan’s research, based on painstaking work on individual wills, was widely praised, but the conclusions he drew from it were immediately challenged. He had, knowingly, failed to take account of inflation and of rising population in tracing long-term trends. His critics argued that if these were factored in, Jordan’s rapid growth turned into a decline in the real value of charitable giving.⁷ Jordan was also criticised for his assertion that ‘in no year prior to 1660 was more than 7 per cent of all the vast sums expended on the care of the poor derived from taxation’. J. F. Hadwin concluded that Jordan’s downplaying of the significance of the Poor Law ‘now seems incredible’. Paul Slack endorsed this judgement; Jordan’s calculation ‘was deficient in almost every respect’. Local studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggest that half or more of such relief was from poor rates.⁸ This covered only charity given through wills; gifts given to the poor from living donors, Jordan thought, were one-third of the total. They were probably considerably more, certainly if casual giving to beggars is included. Slack concluded that they ‘may well have been more substantial in aggregate than those contained in wills’. If these conjectures about lifetime giving are right, then, on the one hand, the role of charity assumes greater importance but, on the other, Jordan’s focus on wills looks as though it distorts the reality of what was happening on the ground.⁹

The attempt to draw a sharp line in the relief of poverty between charity and taxation, as Jordan did, was misguided. Many endowments, probably over one-third of them on Jordan’s own reckoning, arranged for the distribution of relief to be carried out by parish or municipal officials. Much giving was in response to briefs, calls at national or local level for assistance in response to emergencies such as fire damage.¹⁰

The concentration by critics of Jordan on his failure to build into his figures anything for inflation and population rise, and his exaggeration of the contribution by charity as opposed to poor rates, has distracted attention from his wider claims about the significance of the changes in charitable giving. Jordan’s subtitle, ‘A Study of the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations’, was in many ways a better clue to the argument he was making than his main title; the ‘philanthropy’ of his title may have been a word he felt obliged to use. The Reformation was for Jordan the key factor in changing ‘social aspirations’. Whereas in pre-Reformation England, he argued, the main motive to giving was a concern for one’s own soul, post-Reformation it was for the good of society. Protestantism provided the ‘impulse’ for change, its impact ‘revolutionary’.¹¹ Since Jordan wrote, pre-Reformation charity has been reassessed more positively and scholars of Catholic Europe have documented changes on a scale and chronology comparable to those in Protestant England.¹² To put it at its mildest, Jordan’s emphasis on the degree and uniqueness of England’s changing aspirations looks overstated.

There is also a problem with Jordan’s emphasis on the shift to the secular. Jordan was well aware that most of his donors ‘were deeply pious men’. The almshouses and schools they founded, the bequests they made for the relief of poverty, nearly always had a profoundly religious element to them, at the very least an expectation of religious behaviour and observance in the beneficiaries. In what sense, then, were they ‘secular’? Only that they attended to needs and aspirations in this world which were seen as part of the make-up of a godly society. Jordan’s perception of them as ‘militantly and aggressively secular in temper and in purpose’ raised challenging questions. Many historians doubt whether it makes sense to try to draw a firm line between the religious and the secular in Jordan’s centuries. As Paul Slack put it, ‘Gifts to the poor and for education were no less pious in intent, no less directed towards saving the souls of donors and recipients, than gifts to churches or religious orders’.¹³ Jordan made the further claim that charitable giving, particularly outwards from London, contributed to the process whereby ‘England becomes a nation’.¹⁴ In short, ‘philanthropy’ was accorded a level of significance in bringing about change, and as evidence of that change, that few other historians find plausible.

David Owen, while acknowledging that his book ‘deals with a similar theme (and begins nominally at his concluding date)’, was adamant that it ‘is not designed as a sequel to Jordan’s monumental study’. Its scope was ‘wider and the evidence leads to no such precise conclusions as he is able to draw’. Moreover, the sections dealing with the 1660s to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Writing the history of philanthropy
• 2 The profile of philanthropy
• 3 The genesis of philanthropy
• 4 John Howard, the philanthropist
• 5 Howard’s legacy: Philanthropy and crime
• 6 Universal philanthropy versus patriotism: The impact of the French Revolution, 1789–1815
• 7 The Times and the telescope: Philanthropy, 1815–50
• 8 Mid-Victorian philanthropy, 1850–80
• 9 The failure of philanthropy? 1880–1914
• 10 Philanthropy since 1914
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index