Crossed out

Connoisseurs of the rare and unusual will have been delighted with a recent report in The Guardian, which, contrary to form, spoke in praise of an incident in British history and even a member of the hereditary nobility. 

The article reported the erection of a blue plaque near Cambridge in memory of the unfortunate George Brewster, an 11-year-old chimney sweep who died after getting stuck up a flue that he had been ordered to climb by a master sweep, William Wyer. The news of Brewster’s death in 1875, said The Guardian, provoked Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885) to redouble his efforts to ban sending these “climbing boys” up chimneys. Shaftesbury had campaigned on the issue for 35 years, and seven months after Brewster’s death Shaftesbury’s support helped to enact robust legislation to outlaw this practice. 

The article spoke warmly of Shaftesbury’s tireless campaigning for the downtrodden and neglected. It also extolled the memory of Brewster himself, quoting James Littlewood, the CEO of Cambridge Past Present Future, that “his death was the spark for a change in British law that improved the working conditions for all children.” However, as correct as the article was to state that Brewster’s death was the immediate prompt for Shaftesbury to press for new laws, it was not the fundamental cause for his lifelong social activism. The origin of Shaftesbury’s desire to better the lot of the needy and outcast — the prime motive entirely omitted by the article — was not a vague humanitarianism provoked by a one-off tragedy, but his deep commitment to Christianity.

In the 19th century Christian evangelical zeal created a host of reforms on which we rely

It was Shaftesbury’s conviction that Christ Himself was knocking at the door of every house in Whitechapel (as he himself put it) which led him to a life dedicated to service. Like other evangelicals of the time, he was deeply moved by the biblical teaching that man was made in God’s image. Moreover, a Christian must give to the needy not simply because of Christ’s commands and their intrinsic God-given dignity, but also because the work of alleviating poverty and suffering was an act of evangelism. It was easier for others to hear the word of Christ and be converted if they weren’t pressed down with material want. “Alleviate their discomforts as far as lies in your power,” said Catherine Marsh, Shaftesbury’s contemporary who worked with the railway-building navvies in the 1840s and 1850s, and then “ … secure to them their Sabbaths; and hold forth to them the Word of Life.”

Hence, Shaftesbury himself worked ceaselessly, not just in Parliament and chairing committees for many hours a day right to the end of his life, but even teaching at “ragged schools” in the very slums of the East End of London. His calls for the humane treatment of the disadvantaged were couched in religious terms: “Is this a state of things, my Lords, which is to be permitted to go on? Are we to call ourselves a free and Christian country, knowing that 2,000 of our fellow-creatures, just as good as ourselves, are doomed to the most excruciating and intolerable agony, because some gentlemen say they will have sweeping-boys and will not use machines … ” he asked in a parliamentary debate in 1863. 

The 19th century was the age in which Christian evangelical zeal created a whole host of ideas and reforms on which modern society has come to rely, but also to take for granted. It is not just the outlawing of the use of “climbing boys” or the suppression of slavery. To the evangelical impetus can be owed, amongst other things, the development of many hospitals and medical missions for the poor; the emergence of the principles of modern nursing and ante-natal care; the establishment of long-term social assistance for the aged, infirm and disabled, with an emphasis on each person being able to lead independent and dignified lives; the provision of schools for destitute children; endeavours to protect the young from sexual exploitation; improvements in housing for the working classes; prison reforms and the formation of the probation service; the suppression of widespread public drunkenness; the extinction of duelling; and the propagation of the ethics of integrity, self-sacrifice, and the pursuit of merit in politics, the civil service and the professions. 

Given this debt modern British society owes to Christianity, it should concern us that its pivotal role is now being memory-holed in contemporary retellings of our history. And it is not just The Guardian. The great charities established in this era thanks to the fervour and vision of evangelical founders now almost completely cloak the religious inspirations of their origins.

Take, for example, Barnardo’s, the UK’s largest children’s charity, which traces its origins to 1867. The charity’s website tells the story of its founder, Thomas Barnardo, an Irish doctor, being moved to found a ragged school for children orphaned in a London cholera outbreak, and then — having been shown by one of the destitute waifs, Jim Jarvis, just how many penniless children were living on the streets — his decision to set up a home for them. In the early days he was prompted by the death of an 11-year-old boy, for whom he had no room, to declare a policy of never turning away a child in need. With his wife Syrie, whom he married in 1873, he developed a model of “cottage homes” for the children where they were looked after in small domestic family-like groups by foster parents, rather than the barrack-like military-style Georgian orphanages of an earlier generation.

A good story, but every Christian element is omitted. Barnardo was originally intending to go as a medical missionary to China. He saw staying in London as a “Home mission enterprise.” His Christian faith caused him to see the children as “responsible beings, possessing immortal souls, with a future as lasting as eternity,” and compelled him to treat them with requisite dignity. The concept of “cottage homes” with their more gentle and individual treatment of the children came from the pioneering contemporary example of German evangelical charities. His research, which found much of the destitution of the children in his care was a result of alcoholism, led him not just to follow the evangelical example of teetotalism, but also to lay literal siege to one of London’s largest pubs, the Edinburgh Castle. In August 1872 he set up a camp outside it and preached daily until it shut down, allowing him to buy the freehold and convert it into a “Coffee Palace” to offer education and other support for the poor. It was decorated with biblical pictures and quotations, and part of it was set aside as a church. 

Another example is the NSPCC. Its website says almost nothing of its early history, mentioning only that it was founded “in 1884 as the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC), by the Reverend Benjamin Waugh.” Although the NSPCC’s website does not care to explain what motivated Waugh to work with outcast children, we can discover it from Waugh’s own memoirs: “It was an agony to [Christ] to see a sheep without a shepherd, an unhappy life without another life wiser and stronger to care for it,” he wrote. Again, the note of each person’s inalienable dignity was a fundamental prompt: “Fruitlessly you seek to see one a smith, may you not still see him a saint?” 

These are just two examples, but it is easy to find other such instances of effacement on the websites of other well-known charities founded at this time. This omission of their Christian origins is of more than antiquarian or scholarly concern. At a time when the place of Christianity in the British public realm is constantly being eroded — just in the last few weeks with challenges to mandatory collective acts of worship in schools, the place of Bishops in the Lords, or daily prayers in the Commons — on the grounds that its visible presence is outdated, non-inclusive, or even malign, it is vital to judge these calls for the dismantling of public Christianity on the basis of what it has in fact historically contributed to national life and development. If what Christianity has done for us is constantly covered over, it becomes harder for us to come to what might be a radical and counter-cultural, but possibly true conclusion, that the presence of Christianity is no bad thing, and that as it transformed national life for the better in the time of Shaftesbury and Barnardo, it could possibly do so for us again now.