The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE SERIES

Karen Chase, Jerome J. McGann, and Herbert Tucker, Editors

The Angel out of the House

Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

Dorice Williams Elliott

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF VIRGINIA

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

The University Press of Virginia

© 2002 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2002

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

   Elliott, Dorice Williams, 1951–

      The angel out of the house : philanthropy and gender in

   nineteenth-century England / Dorice Williams Elliott.

          p.  cm. — (Victorian literature and culture series)

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8139-2088-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

   1. Women in charitable work—England—History—19th century.

   2. Women philanthropists—England—History—19th century.

   3. Women in literature. 4. Charity in literature. I. Title. II. Series.

HV 541 .E44 2002

       361.7′082′094209034—dc21

                                                                                                             2001005108

For Bob

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1   An Assured Asylum against Every Evil

Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and Mid-Eighteenth-Century Philanthropic Institutions for Women

2   The Care of the Poor Is Her Profession

Hannah More and Naturalizing Women's Philanthropic Work

3   Hannah More's Heirs

Women Philanthropists and the Challenge of Political Economy

4   The Communion of Labor and Lectures to Ladies

A Midcentury Contest between Male Professionals and Female Philanthropists

5   The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South

6   Educating Women's Desires

The Philanthropic Heroine in the 1860s

7   George Eliot's Middlemarch

The Failure of the Philanthropic Heroine

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

THIS PROJECT WOULD NOT have happened without the insight and direction provided by Mary Poovey and Frances Ferguson, who oversaw it in its first incarnation as a dissertation. Thanks should go to many other professors and fellow graduate students at Johns Hopkins, especially Judy Walkowitz, Cynthia Rogers, and William Weaver. Members of the Folger Library's colloquium on Women in the Eighteenth Century offered valuable feedback on drafts of several chapters. Special thanks go to Sue Lanser, Vin Carretta, and Cathy Temple. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the University of Kansas. Pete Casagrande supplied helpful suggestions on the entire manuscript, while Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Joe Harrington, Katie Conrad, Dick Hardin, George Worth, and Max Sutton also read portions and gave thoughtful criticism, as did members of the Hall Center for the Humanities British Seminar. I also appreciate the advice and support of Jim Hartman, Tom Lorenz, and Marta Caminero-Santangelo.

Much of the work of the later stages of this project was supported by the University of Kansas General Research Fund, and travel grants for research in the British Library were furnished by the Johns Hopkins University English Department Bollman Fund and the Women's Studies Ford Foundation travel fund.

For assistance in preparing the manuscript, I would like to thank Pam LeRow, Paula Courtney, and Lynn Porter, as well as Donna Bonnel, Ann Thonen, Lori Whitten, and Dodie Coker. I also want to express thanks to Cathie Brettschneider at the University Press of Virginia for her patience and encouragement, to Ellen Satrom and Toni Mortimer for their careful attention and skillful editing, and to the series editors for the Victorian Literature and Culture Series.

For astute criticism of the manuscript and much-needed emotional support, I thank my colleague and friend Anna Neill. My deepest thanks go to my family. My parents, Tess and Maxine Williams, have been unfailingly supportive, and my children, Brooke, Jane, and Colin Elliott, have been cheerful and understanding about the countless hours required to finish this book. To my husband, Bob Elliott, I owe an unrepayable debt for his great personal sacrifice and the many ways, intellectual, emotional, and material, that he contributed. This book could not have been written without him.

A version of chapter 2 was published as "Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and Female Philanthropy," Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 35, no. 3 (1995): 535–53, by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 3 appears as ‘The Care of the Poor Is Her Profession’: Hannah More and Women's Philanthropic Work, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19, no. 2 (1995): 179–204, and is reproduced with permission from Taylor and Francis Ltd. Chapter 5, "The Marriage of Classes in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South," appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature 49 (June 1994): 21–49, and is reprinted with permission of the University of California Press.

Introduction

THE 1893 INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, held in Chicago and dedicated to showcasing the achievements of the nineteenth century, featured a new and unique section devoted to women's work. The contribution of Great Britain to this new department of the exhibition focused on women's philanthropy and was organized, at the invitation of a Royal Commission, by the well-known philanthropist Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts. The exhibit included a published report, a collection of Congress Papers by Eminent Writers entitled Woman's Mission. In her preface to the report, the baroness writes: It is fitting that the close of the nineteenth century should focus and illustrate in a definite form the share which women have taken in its development, of which, in my humble judgment, the truest and noblest, because the most natural, part, is to be found in philanthropic work. Reflecting on the previous sixty years of British history, Burdett-Coutts credits women's philanthropy, women's most natural work, with raising the moral tone of the nation and significantly contributing to the amelioration of the social ills industrialization caused. The papers that make up Woman's Mission stress the benevolent and sympathetic, but also efficient and professional, nature of the philanthropies they describe. No feature of the single-handed work of women is more striking, writes Burdett-Coutts, than the wisdom and discretion with which it is generally conducted. Inspired by a large-hearted benevolence, and warm sympathy with the poor and suffering, the majority of women workers in philanthropy have not allowed their feelings to obscure their judgment. They recognize that—‘The truly generous is the truly wise’ (285).

Published two years earlier, a popular satire by an anonymous clergyman gives a different view of nineteenth-century women philanthropists. My District Visitors (1891) represents women who participate in parish charity work as either officious and overbearing or naive and gullible. Of Kerenhappuch Blyte, Spinster and Prophetess, the clergyman writes, To set her down amongst our peace-loving denizens would be equivalent to introducing the hawk to the wood-pigeon; her self-authored tracts and hectoring visits frighten not only the poor but the clergyman as well (16). Dolly Beniment, by constrast, is young, sexually attractive, and credulous; although a most indefatigable visitor, she is so trusting and indiscriminate with her charity that the clergyman has to spend much of his time undoing what she has done (32). The third visitor, Mistress Agatha Comfort, is likewise taken advantage of by the poor because of her generosity and old-fashioned assumptions about the respect and deference due her as the lady of the manor. Despite their enthusiasm and well-meaning intentions, the parson's visitors either offend or are hoodwinked by the poor, and they require constant and careful supervision by the more judicious clergyman to keep them from doing more harm than good. Whether a domineering old maid, a pretty but silly young woman, or a patronizing Lady Bountiful, a philanthropic woman seems able to succeed only at making herself an object of derision (77).

The figure of the philanthropic woman had long evoked such contradictory perceptions. Perhaps the most famous parodies of the strong-minded woman philanthropist were the telescopic philanthropist, Mrs. Jellyby, and the cast-iron Lady Bountiful, Mrs. Pardiggle, in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), but many others appeared in print as well throughout the nineteenth century.¹ An unsigned 1859 article in Fraser's Magazine, for example, worried about the supposedly inevitable defeminization of women who became involved in philanthropic work. Entitled A Fear for the Future, That Women Will Cease to Be Womanly, the article describes a group of typical modern young women at a ball:

There are plenty of good-looking young ladies, whose toilette is not the most carefully arranged in the world…. They are influential members of society; they are presiding influences of sundry Committees and Female Associations for the Alteration of This, the Abolition of That, or the Advancement of the Other. They write pamphlets, and issue manifestoes; they speak at crowded meetings, and take an ardent part in important controversies. They are not really young women—they are Public Persons. (246)

The article writer's description explicitly raises the threat that women's philanthropy will jeopardize the separation between the domestic and public spheres that seemed to Victorians to be the foundation of social order. Paying attention to public affairs, the writer concludes, leads young women to neglect feminine duties, such as proper attention to their toilette. Women in his generation, the writer maintains, "were women, the helpmates, consolers, and adornments of our homes. To the younger generation, made unwomanly by their interest and participation in public activities related to philanthropy, he gives this warning about the consequences of their unfeminine behavior: Any of my sons, I am quite sure, would as soon think of making love to Lord Brougham or the statue of Mr. Canning, as of uttering a word of anything sentimental to these ladies" (246–47).

Another contemporary (male) writer, however, directly counters such attacks on philanthropic women. A vast amount of practical work has been recently done by women in ways hitherto unattempted, wrote J. H. Howson in 1860. New enterprises have been bravely undertaken by them, and patiently and successfully pursued. He explains that during the last ten years a palpable change has taken place amongst us, both in feeling and practice: There is less prejudice than there was. This is very evident to any one who has carefully noticed the books and pamphlets which have been published during this period, in description, and in justification, of the work of women.² In praising the work philanthropic women have accomplished, Howson notes that written representations have worked not only to describe but to justify women's work outside their homes.

Clearly, for a mid-Victorian audience proud of what Anna Jameson called its awakened public conscience, philanthropic work, and the widespread participation in it of middle- and upper-class women, was a crucial public issue.³ Philanthropy was crucial because it was the era's chief method of dealing with the social ills created by the rapid rise of industrial capitalism as well as by the age-old problems of poverty, illness, and misfortune. Although many men were involved in the direction of charities, visiting systems, and other philanthropic projects, the voluntary efforts of middle-class women were the mainstay of most philanthropic endeavors, as Baroness Burdett-Coutts documents retrospectively in Woman's Mission. Vital as their work may have been, however, contemporary representations—whether parodic such as Dickens's, admonitory such as that of the unnamed writer in Fraser's Magazine, or laudatory such as Howson's—reveal the tensions and anxieties inherent in the figure of the philanthropic woman.

Middle-class women's volunteer philanthropic work was centrally concerned with two social and ideological issues—the appropriate role of women and relations between the classes. On the one hand, women's charitable work was promoted as a laudable and natural extension of the idealized domestic sphere assigned to women. By relieving and educating the poor, often in their own homes, women's charity was supposed to ease conflict between the classes and foster social harmony. On the other hand, however, because philanthropy was the sphere of independent labour most accessible to ambitious women, it also gave rise to apprehensions about the defeminization of women and the destruction of the happy home life they were expected to superintend.⁴ Moreover, women's philanthropic efforts—especially the wrong kind of philanthropic efforts—could work to increase friction between working-class people and their betters. Dickens's Mrs. Pardiggle, for instance, ostensibly aims to break down class barriers by helping the poor in their own homes; instead, she creates resentment and hostility, symbolized by her voluminous skirts that both protect her person from any physical contact with the people she visits and also knock down little chairs that are quite a great way off. It is not surprising that the brickmaker whose cottage she visits responds to her intrusion with annoyance: I wants it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants an end of being drawed like a badger. Now you're a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom—I know what you're a-going to be up to. Well! You haven't got no occasion to be up to it.⁵ Similarly, the unnamed parson of My District Visitors has a working-class woman express the resentment many of the poor were feared to harbor: I reckon these Districk Visitors is a goin' to set us all to the rightabouts…. I ’spose poor folks was made to be axed questions on (78–79). Visitors such as these, of course, would not contribute to more harmonious class relations.

Because philanthropic work involved women in relations among the classes, it also inevitably brought them into contact—and conflict—with a (relatively) new class of male professionals whose claim to authority came from their supposed expertise in diagnosing and treating society's problems. Doctors and clergymen, of course, had long engaged in personal dealings with the poor and disadvantaged, but by the nineteenth century many other men—political economists, journalists, statisticians, and bureaucrats, as well as parliamentary reformers and well-known novelists such as Dickens and Disraeli—were making careers out of observing, reporting, and analyzing the conditions of life among the lower orders. The satires of professional female philanthropists and ignorant or overbearing charitable visitors reveal these male professionals' anxieties about competition for authority in a newly conceived social sphere. Such writers revealed they were uneasy about the challenge that systematized female philanthropy posed not only to accepted gender roles and class relations but also to their own position as experts on social relations.

Considering how controversial women's philanthropic work was for nineteenth-century writers and observers, it is surprising how many historians and literary critics, including feminists, have written off women's philanthropic work as do-gooding or patriarchal collusion without recognizing the crucial role it played in redefining both gender and class roles in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.⁶ Although eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philanthropy did work to reinforce some dominant cultural ideas and practices, the fact that women's participation in philanthropy could provoke such varied representations gives an inkling of the inherent challenge that women's practice of philanthropy posed to the domestic ideology of separate spheres and to the ideal of harmonious class relations, despite the common assumption that it was merely an extension of women's domestic role. It is not coincidental, for instance, that by the end of Bleak House Dickens has Mrs. Jellyby turn from philanthropy to women's suffrage.

While women's charitable activities could arouse anxieties and spark ridicule, most people in mid-nineteenth-century England believed that women should and would participate in philanthropic work.⁷ As a number of historians and critics who have studied the history of women and their roles have observed, women's philanthropy seemed to be a natural extension of their domestic role. Very few, however, have offered any explanation of why this assumption came to be made. Charity is not a natural extension of women's domestic role; rather, the connection between charitable and domestic work, like many other assumptions about gender roles, is the result of specific historical factors and cultural representations. It is the aim of this study to document the cultural work that such representations of women performing philanthropic deeds accomplished in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

By employing the term cultural work in connection with literary representations, I assert that literary works function along with other kinds of discourses in shaping the ideas, attitudes, and ideologies that organize human relations. Novels in particular, because they construct imaginary worlds peopled with invented characters, provide the ground on which ideological problems can be imaginatively staged and resolved. Thus novels, however realistic they may seem, not only reflect certain ideas or perceived realities but work to shape what people think and perceive as real. The novels and other texts that I discuss portray middle- and upper-class women taking an active part in endeavors that were perceived to have important social, economic, and political consequences, and in doing so they also helped to produce and authorize women's desires to participate in such endeavors.

Women's Ambitious Desires and Domestic Ideology

According to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology of separate spheres for men and women, women's desires centered in the home. Although the Eve-like image of women as sexually voracious, inherent in the Christian creation story and prevalent in the medieval and early modern periods, was largely replaced by the chaste, modest angel by the end of the eighteenth century, even this model of pure, virtuous womanhood defined women as inherently sexual. Marlene Legates, for instance, suggests that the eighteenth-century preoccupation with female chastity was a response to an underlying conviction of female sexuality; virtuous women's much-praised self-regulation assumed that underneath there were lascivious desires that needed to be regulated.⁸ Even if a woman's unruly desires were carefully controlled and properly channeled into marriage and motherhood, her position as the guardian and nurturer of the home was predicated on her sexual reproductive function.

As late as the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud re-inscribed sexuality as the sole determiner of women's nature. In his discussion of fantasies, Freud ascribed both ambitious and erotic desires to men, but he maintained that women have only erotic desires. Within the term erotic, of course, Freud would include not only overtly sexual but romantic and motherly desires, which, by extension or displacement, could even include spiritual or altruistic longings. All such emotions are similar in that they are traceable to women's reproductive function—their capacity to bear and nurture children. Men, by contrast, are only partly defined by their reproductive role as inseminators; Freud attributes to them another whole realm of desires not directly related to their sexuality—the realm of conquest and aspiration that he terms ambitious.⁹

Nancy K. Miller has disputed Freud's analysis, arguing that the implausibilities in literary works by women signal their hidden ambitious desires.¹⁰ Like Freud, however, Miller assumes that such desires are innate. I argue, by contrast, that women's ambitious desires for activity outside the domestic sphere were generated in part by representations of women's philanthropic work. My contention is based in part on René Girard's theory of desire in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Girard maintains that desire is fundamentally imitative and contagious; one's desires are not spontaneous but rather arise from an awareness that someone else desires the chosen object.¹¹

While theorists of the concept of desire, including psychologists and philosophers, have debated whether desires are inherent and natural or culturally constructed and imbedded in language (or some combination of the two), Girard's theory of mimetic desire works especially well in describing the competitive, individualistic society that followed the Industrial Revolution, beginning roughly in the later eighteenth century.¹² In a historical situation in which social hierarchies are unstable, explains Girard's follower Paisley Livingston, not only are specific desires likely to be mimetic but mimesis as a way of desiring is pervasive.¹³ In other words, a competitive capitalist society is fueled by people's desires for what other people have and desire.

Girard assigns literary representations a key role in generating mimetic desires because they can serve as the model of desires to be imitated. Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary, Girard suggests, desires through the romantic heroines who fill her imagination, while Don Quixote desires to experience the exploits of the heroic Amadis.¹⁴ Although he wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Girard's examples still repeat Freud's split between male and female desires; Don Quixote has both ambitious and erotic desires, while Emma Bovary's are all erotic. It is interesting, however, that an eighteenth-century rewriting of Cervantes's Don Quixote, Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), already uses women's philanthropy to undermine that distinction. Arabella, the heroine, tries to fashion her life (and her wardrobe) after antiquated tales of romance, but her activities include regular visits to the poor and performing other charitable works as well as seeking a heroic lover.¹⁵ Unlike Emma Bovary, then, Lennox's heroine exhibits both erotic and ambitious desires derived directly from literary representations.

While not all desires are generated so directly, especially by literary works, Girard's model suggests that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women may have begun to develop ambitious desires through seeing them represented. These desires could be generated even before actual opportunities to fulfill them were readily available. Although many women may never have read a novel that featured a philanthropic heroine or heard a charity sermon praising women's contributions to charitable institutions, such representations contributed to the array of cultural possibilities people came to accept as natural and desirable. Texts that represented women whose desires were neither exclusively erotic nor entirely contained within the domestic sphere made women's ambitious desires seem possible and even reasonable.

This project builds on the work of previous literary-historical critics such as Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey, who have demonstrated that ideas about and prescriptions for women, their desires, and their appropriate roles were foundational in the formation of a middle-class subjectivity in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹⁶ Domestic ideology, promulgated in large part through conduct books and sentimental novels, depicted a female subject whose value was defined by her exemplary internal qualities rather than by the showy exterior such texts associated with a corrupted aristocracy. As guardians of a domestic sphere that was increasingly portrayed as the repository of society's best values, women were accorded not only the management of the crucial activities of the home but also the power of their influence. Thus, women were accorded a new kind of cultural authority because of their role within a recently valorized domestic space, but it came at the cost of having their desires and activities more strictly confined within that space.

While earlier feminist scholars focused primarily on women's oppression by and resistance to patriarchal authority, these more recent accounts of the new power that domestic ideology afforded to women, in conjunction with historical examinations of the economic conditions many women faced, go a long way toward explaining why most women did not rebel against or actively resist what seem to twentieth-century feminists to have been intolerable limitations and constraints.¹⁷ Women of all sorts, including noted early feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, participated in and benefited from the organization of social relationships that assigned different roles and desires to men and women.¹⁸ Yet despite the fact that domestic ideology's gendered division of labor had achieved almost universal acceptance in nineteenth-century Britain, its ideals could not accommodate all women. Single women, whether never married or widowed, posed a problem for an ideology that confined all women's activities and desires to a home, husband, and family. Philanthropy was domestic ideology's primary answer to the problem of the single woman who had no obvious family duties; it was arguably a domestic activity, but it did not require a woman to be married. Because philanthropy allowed women to perform useful activities defined as domestic without channeling all their desires into marriage, it not only offered unmarried women an alternative to marriage but also proved that women could be defined by something other than their sexuality, or their ability to reproduce. Therefore, including women's philanthropic work under the umbrella of domestic ideology both reinforced and posed a fundamental challenge to that ideology's most basic premise. Rather than resisting the sexual division of labor, philanthropic representations extended it beyond the home to include social and eventually national institutions, thereby reinforcing the notion that men and women were essentially different. At the same time, however, by encouraging women's ambitious desires, such representations contested the idea, which was still being repeated by Freud at the end of the nineteenth century, that women's desires were fundamentally dissimilar to men's.

By focusing on a contradiction or tension within what by the mid-nineteenth century seemed a hegemonic ideology, I am able to identify one of the factors that enabled a change in the way the category of woman was defined between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth. One of the problems with studies that focus on women's oppression is that once the power of the oppressor is established and elaborated, it is difficult to explain where change comes from, or how individuals believed they could resist. Similarly, if, like many Foucauldians, one focuses on totalizing discourses that assimilate even open resistance, it becomes nearly impossible to explain how change occurs. By concentrating not on resistance but on an internal contradiction within domestic ideology, I am able to show how even women who heartily embraced its ideals (unconsciously or not) challenged and helped to change them.

Thus this book is not merely a thematic study of women and philanthropic work, several of which have been published, but rather it is an exploration of the ideological impact of philanthropy through its representation in literary and nonliterary works, primarily by women authors. I am indebted to two important historical studies of nineteenth-century women's philanthropic work: F. K. Prochaska's Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England and Anne Summers's A Home from Home—Women's Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century.¹⁹ Prochaska documents women's participation in a variety of philanthropic undertakings and gives consideration to both the causes and effects of such activity in the lives and experiences of women from many ranks of society. Summers pays attention to the ideological implications of women's charitable work in the context of the nineteenth-century rethinking of the causes and proper treatment of poverty. Both also recognize that women's philanthropy played an important role in other women's issues, including employment, education, and suffrage. While such historical studies are essential to a complete understanding of the impact of women's philanthropy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, this book takes up an equally significant aspect of this issue. Rather than analyzing the impact philanthropic work had on the lives of women, I consider how representations of women doing philanthropic work changed the way people conceived of the nature of women, regardless of whether any particular woman engaged in philanthropy.

Domestic ideology, of course, defined women as wives and mothers—emotional, nurturing, kind, and sympathetic. It was women's association with these qualities that supposedly justified their taking on the duty of caring for the poor and unfortunate; by depicting the needy as children, middle- and upper-class women could be represented as mothers to those beneath them on the social scale and as wives to public men who used philanthropy to address political and social problems. As the theory and practice of philanthropy changed, however, becoming at first more businesslike, later more professionalized, and finally bureaucratized, it became more difficult to naturalize women's mothering and wifely participation in philanthropic work. Nonetheless, by recasting the terms of domestic ideology, women could defend their participation in activities that were further and further removed from the domestic sphere that ideology prescribed. Using the terms of domestic ideology to elude its restrictions also limited what philanthropy could accomplish for women. As long as middle- and upper-class women were content to live with the legal, political, and economic inequality that domestic ideology justified, philanthropic volunteer work could only be a partial fulfillment of the desires that philanthropic representations helped to produce.

While philanthropy might open new avenues and opportunities for middle- and upper-class women, whatever gains they attained by manipulating the terms of gender were made at the expense of both men and women of the lower classes who were infantalized and kept in a subordinate position by philanthropic work. Thus philanthropy cannot be said to have offered new opportunities for all or even the majority of actual women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain; nonetheless, by helping to rewrite the defining terms of the category of woman, specifically by acknowledging their ambitious desires, philanthropy did help to remove some of the limitations that the gendered division of labor placed on women in the nineteenth century.

To understand how representations of upper- and middle-class women performing acts of charity contributed to a redefinition of the category of woman, it is first necessary to trace some changes in the understanding of charity, philanthropy, and their roles that occurred during the eighteenth century in Britain. This account will unavoidably oversimplify complex historical processes and interactions, but to explain how significant changes in the understanding and practice of philanthropy occurred I also need to give a brief summary of the gradual yet critical changes in the organization and structure of eighteenth-century society at large. The changes I summarize are important to the study of philanthropy because they gradually redefined virtue so that sympathy, marked by the performance of charitable acts, became an important manifestation both of individual character and class status.

To explicate the role of philanthropy in relation to eighteenth-century notions of sympathy and virtue, I also need to clarify my use of the terms charity and philanthropy. Although in twentieth-century usage, the term philanthropy often refers to large donations to any kind of nonprofit institution, in the eighteenth century philanthropy and charity could be used interchangeably with the general sense of having love for one's fellow beings or with the particular meaning of practical efforts to aid those in need.²⁰ However, the term charity was more often used to signify traditional, Christian, and localized or individual efforts to aid the poor and needy, while philanthropy referred more to secular, institutionalized, or at least systematized charitable endeavors. Charity was also sometimes used to refer to the emotion of benevolence that motivated the practice, termed philanthropy. By the nineteenth century, charity and philanthropy are most often used synonymously, although some nineteenth- and even twentieth-century texts still reflect the slightly different sense earlier conveyed by the two terms. Like most historians of voluntary efforts for the relief of the needy, I frequently use terms such as philanthropic and charitable interchangeably. Part of what I document, however, is a shift in the way voluntary relief activities were conceived from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and, since the use of these terms reflects this transition, my usage follows that of the texts I discuss.

Sympathy, Sentiment, and Eighteenth-Century Philanthropy

One of the foremost philanthropists of the eighteenth-century Age of Benevolence was a London bookseller named Thomas Guy.²¹ Guy, the son of a lighterman and coalmonger, began his apprenticeship in 1660, the year Charles II was restored to the throne, and he set up business for himself in 1668 with two hundred pounds as capital.²² A noted contemporary praised Guy's probity, skill, and zeal, although he also made a large portion of his money from the dubious practice of selling and reselling unlicensed Dutch Bibles that had been seized by the king's printers—and he was rumored to have