ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the late-Victorian circumstances of Toynbee Hall's inception and reviews the climate of ideas and activism around pioneering experiment to demonstrate the absolute centrality of the cultural mission to the settlement's practical social work. The appalling conditions of Whitechapel's sweatshops for the clothing trades were investigated by a House of Lords Select Committee, while other anxieties focussed on the volatile casual labourers of the East End docks, particularly during the period of aggravated unemployment and the Trafalgar Square disturbances of 1886 and 1887. The chapter argues that the extension movement had been revitalised by de-centralised and voluntarist effort in the mid-1880s, a pattern of work nowhere better exemplified than by the efforts of Samuel Barnett and his co-workers in Whitechapel. As the settlement movement mushroomed throughout Britain and internationally between the mid-1880s and the 1920s, the seminal influence of Toynbee Hall was widely acknowledged.
