ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes it in the sense of personal charitable dealings with the poor; and especially with the attempts made by individual women of the middle and upper classes to make contact with the poor and distressed, to visit them in their homes and bring material and spiritual comfort to bridge, as they hoped, the social and political gulfs between them. Nineteenthcentury philanthropic organisations depended to a very great degree upon voluntary women visitors, and many of the earliest state welfare provisions of the twentieth century were predicated on the continuing existence of this work force. Philanthropic enterprise and spiritual missions were, in fact though not in principle, almost inextricably intertwined in visiting work. Philanthropic enterprise brought wives and daughters to discuss the privatisation of middle-class life and the confinement of women to domestic and familial roles, not in academic journals, but round the fireside, and with fathers, brothers and husbands.
