The City Parochial Charities: The “Dead Hand” in Late Victorian London

Abstract

In the familiar line “Time makes ancient good uncouth”, James Russell Lowell enunciated what can almost stand as a natural law of endowed charities. Over the decades, as social values change and new institutional arrangements develop, obsolescence becomes the inevitable destiny of masses of these benefactions in perpetuity, especially those with specific and rigid trusts. And broadly speaking, the more ancient the good, the more uncouth it will seem in the light of latter-day needs.The goodly company of Victorian reformers numbered in its varied ranks a small group of individuals whose particular concern was the condition of Britain's charities. Here, they suspected, was a national resource that might be made to contribute more productively to the new age. Early in the century Henry Brougham had professed to see in properly administered endowments the basis for an adequate system of elementary education, and had inspired the exhaustive survey of the nation's nearly thirty thousand charitable trusts. The inquiry lasted for two decades, cost more than £250,000, and filled about forty volumes — the “Domesday Book of Charities.” Parliament took nearly fifteen years to act on the report, and in the end granted to the Charity Commission (the agency that emerged from it all) less ample powers of initiative and supervision than the more eager reformers had demanded. As a general thing, only when the administration of an endowment became so scandalous as to raise questions of breach of trust or when its objects were so antiquated as virtually to immobilize the charity was the state inclined to intervene.