‘In ample halls adorned with mysterious things aesthetic’: Toynbee Hall as Aesthetic Haven

Abstract

The founders of the university settlement Toynbee Hall, Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett, believed that the social ills of poverty could be counteracted not through material charity, but through one-to-one friendships between the rich and poor, and the dissemination of a bourgeois culture that the poor had been denied. Students and graduates came down from Oxford to live at Toynbee Hall, where they gained access to the poor in East London by living among them as neighbors. Their work largely consisted of teaching classes and running social clubs, as well as organizing debates, concerts, and art exhibitions for working people.1 As self-conscious new citizens in the municipality, they also collaborated with the social machinery already at work in the East End. The reorganization of local government with the founding of the London County Council in 1888 afforded them new positions on school boards and local councils. As Toynbee Hall shifted its focus at the end of the century away from one-to-one, cross-class relations to economic study of the poor, its residents used their practical experience as advocates and researchers to enter the civil service as authoritative professionals. This story has been told before.2 In more recent years, Seth Koven has excavated a more colorful history of university settlement and the culture of slumming vis-a-vis constructions of masculinity and cross-class homosocial and homosexual desires.3