ABSTRACT
In contrast to the preceding three decades, during which Britain’s middle class firmly established their economic dominance and social prestige both at home and abroad,1 the 1880s-90s emerged as an era of domestic social unrest and imperial insecurity. The rise of new international powers such as the German Empire and the United States, with their rapidly growing industrial and military strength, was seen to threaten the hitherto incontestable ascendancy of the British Empire. The mounting fear of loss in the fierce imperial competitions with rival foreign powers was characteristically conjoined with the domestic anxieties over ‘racial fitness’, and nowhere was this to be more explicitly evident than in the heated debate concerning the poor quality of recruits for the British troops fighting in the Boer War (18991902).2 At the turn of the century, the ruling order was forced to contend with the lingering existence of the urban poor and with their ‘otherness’, which Henry Mayhew had graphically sketched decades earlier in his influential London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62). Mayhew had not only described the lives of London’s indigent populations but sought to direct the public’s attention to an ironizing effect they had upon Britain’s ‘civilizing mission’ overseas. He wrote:
indeed, the moral and religious state of these men is a foul disgrace to us, laughing to scorn our zeal for the “propagation of the gospel in foreign parts,” and making our many societies for the civilization of savages on the other side of the globe appear like a “delusion, a mockery, and a snare,” when we have so many people sunk in the lowest depth of barbarism round about our very homes. It is well to have Bishops of New Zealand when we have Christianized all our own heathen; but with 30,000 individuals, in merely one of our cities, utterly needless, mindless, and principleless, surely it would look more like earnestness on our parts if we created Bishops of the New-Cut and sent “right reverent fathers” to watch over the “cure of souls” in the Broadway and the Brill.3
