ABSTRACT
The gift of culture arose as a vivid late-century climax of the deep and quintessentially liberal project of Victorian social idealism. Far from being an eccentric effort on the margins, a 'fantasy of remedying slum chaos and slum brutality through communal aesthetic revelation', it sat in close and comfortably among the primary reformist concerns of the later nineteenth century. The loan of valuable artworks to the East End and industrial South London emerged as the supreme emblem of late-Victorian cultural philanthropy, most notably at Samuel and Henrietta Barnett's Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibitions. The Palace Journal announced shortly before the opening of the exhibition that the 'rich friends of the People's Palace have stripped their walls of all that is good in pictures, and the great living artists have emptied their studios for the benefit of East London'.
