In the later nineteenth century, magazines and journals were full of sensational accounts of the travels of middle-class reporters amongst the urban poor. The best known example is probably Henry Mayhew's work London Labour and the London Poor (first volume published 1851). Charles Dickens published pieces like this in All the Year Round and included some in his 1860s collection The Uncommercial Traveller. Charles Booth, when he began to investigate London life in the 1880s for the survey that would eventually be published as The Life and Labour of the People of London expected to expose the exaggerations and sentimentality of such writings. He was, however, genuinely appalled by the extent of the poverty he saw and his own book appears to sit in much the same tradition (Abbott, 1917).
Two journalists from this period who took a particular interest in the problem of hungry school children were George R. Sims and Charles Morley. Until 1906, local authorities were not allowed to fund school dinners and there was a great deal of concern about, as Sims put it, the ‘the starving children’ who came ‘day after day to school with feeble frames and bloodless bodies’ and who were hardly in a position to benefit from the education provided (1889: 35). The first attempts to address the issue were made by charities. These charities relied on the oxygen of publicity and it was journalists who could provide this.
George Sims (1847 – 1922) wrote the ‘Mustard and Cress’ column under the pen name ‘Dagonet’ in The Referee from 1877. He also wrote for the Sunday Dispatch, the Daily News and Pictorial World and some of his articles were collected into books with the starkly unambiguous titles How the Poor Live and Horrible London (Waller, 2004). Sims joined forces with Elizabeth Burgwin, the pioneering head of Orange Street School in Southwark, to use The Referee to raise funds to provide dinners for the school’s children from the winter of 1884/1885. The fund was subsequently used to support children from other local schools and by the early twentieth century it was the largest such charity in London (Horn, 1990). Sims regularly asked his readers for donations, informed them when enough had been collected for a particular year and thanked them for their efforts.
Charles Morley (1853 – 1916) was a journalist who ‘adored Dickens and was more Dickensian in his method than any journalist of [this] time’, according to his friend, J.A.Spender (Morley, 1916: 23). He had a particular interest in schooling and wrote about this in his columns in the Daily News. These articles were collected in Studies in Board Schools (1897). He was in contact with Elizabeth Burgwin and wrote about the Orange School dinners and it is from his work that we get the richest picture of what actually went on. He describes the food itself, which changed every day. He observed an occasion when ‘On each plate lay a most savoury lump of suet pudding and potatoes, steeped in luscious gravy…And the helpings were most prodigal’ (p.39). There is a touching description of how ‘little mothers’ (probably older girls kept home to mind younger siblings) crept in after the meal, to eat up scraps and feed the babies the gravy. Morley made sure to namecheck that ‘faithful friend to the poor’, George Sims, and the Referee fund (p.48). Articles like this kept the issue in the public consciousness and the money coming in.
This type of writing may feel somewhat exploitative to us today. Sims himself worried about the tone of his work, declaring ‘If an occasional lightness of treatment seems to the reader out of harmony with so great a subject, I pray that he will remember the work was undertaken to enlist the sympathies of a class not generally given to the study of ‘low life’ (1889: 10). There is no doubting the genuinely philanthropic intentions or indeed the positive results. Showing what could be achieved through charitable work was an important method of shaming the state into taking responsibility. Can journalists today build on this heritage and offer meaningful support to those working to combat child poverty?
References
Abbot, E. (1917) ‘Charles Booth 1840 – 1916’, Journal of Political Economy vol 25, no. 2, pp.129 – 216.
Dickens, C. (1861-1869) The Uncommercial Traveller, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Horn, P. (1990) ‘Elizabeth Miriam Burgwin: Child Welfare Pioneer and Union Activist’, Journal of Further and Higher Education, vol. 14: no. 3, pp. 48-60.
Mayhew, H. (1851) London Labour and the London Poor: Vol 1: The London Street Folk. London: George Woodfall and Son
Morley, C.(1897) Studies in Board Schools, London: Smith, Elder and Co.
Morley, C. (1896) Travels in London, London: Smith and Elder
Sims, G. (1889) How the Poor Live and Horrible London, London: Chatto and Windus
Waller, P. (2004) ‘Sims, George Robert’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ref: odnb/37964. Published on-line 23rd September 2004.
Picture Credits
George Sims – Walery Studio, published by Sampson, Low and Co, August 1990. Downloaded from Wikimedia commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Robert_Sims_c1890cr.jpg
Charles Morley – Frontispiece from Morley, C. (1896) Travels in London, London: Smith and Elder
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