Social Responsibility for the Destitute

Abstract

As England headed into the fin de siècle, the nation confronted a plethora of societal challenges, especially on the economic front. Summarizing the situation, William Greenslade asserts that “[i]n the early 1880s, Britain was entering what appeared to contemporaries to be a decisive economic, social, and political crisis.” The turn of the decade, the Times claimed, “combined ‘more circumstances of misfortune and depression than any within general experience.’” The problems in the agricultural and industrial sectors of the 1870s brought high unemployment, both for rural and urban laborers, and by the mid-1880s affected a tenth of the population, Greenslade indicates. Moreover, the movement of unemployed workers from the country to the city led to a horrific London plagued by overcrowding, cramped housing, and dangerous slums, and the population burgeoned into the next century. “Huge agglomerations of people lived … in a densely packed urban environment,” comments Jose Harris, “to an extent that was quite unprecedented in human history.” Aggravating the problem was the continuing rise in the city’s population, which Andrzej Diniejko places at four million in the 1890s. Foreign economic threats added to the nation’s burdens as Europe tended toward a tightening of its markets and kept England from continental consumers, David Thomson states. A revitalizing Germany brought competition in commerce, and the United States became a powerful antagonist in the wake of the Civil War, “provid[ing] new and serious competition” for agricultural and industrial goods. U.S. railroad development increased access to grain, creating “a dramatically different scale of productivity, which England could not match.” Also impeding British trade was the U.S. MacKinley tariff of 1890 with its “rigorous system of protection,” Thomson observes. Penned during this difficult fin de siècle, the poetry of Isabella J. Southern and other New Women spoke eloquently about the misery of the destitute.