ABSTRACT
In 1914, in the second issue of the modernist magazine The Egoist, An Individualist Review, Dora Marsden called for the end of “the doctrine of ‘ought’” that represented Victorian duty, altruism, humanitarianism, Marxism, and philanthropy. Marsden warned about the entrapment of humanitarian doctrines, “the old dodge of leading the poor to expect outrageous philanthropy from the enemy, but not the spunk of a chicken from themselves”; in the face of philanthropy, she emphasized individualism, self-reliance, and egoism. Violations of hospitality are at the center of E. M. Forster’s novels Howards End and A Passage to India, where imperfect philanthropy stands at the core of the disintegration of Empire. Although the Salvation Army and other private charities opened their arms to the hopeless, the fallen, and the wicked in need, the language these philanthropists employed perpetuated the trope of colonial poverty at the heart of England.
