ABSTRACT
The reverberations of the debate over philanthropy and welfare color texts about the British Empire like E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and novels about city and country life like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or Forster’s Howards End. Albeit skeptical of the philanthropy of empire, A Passage to India insists on the values of friendship, goodwill, and hospitality as the bedrock for individual rights, literary creativity, and national independence. By contrast, a 1905 fantasy novel entitled The Decline and Fall of the British Empire warns a hypothetical Japanese Empire about the inglorious end of Britannia, the new Rome. In Britain, the legal definition of charity dates from Tudor times. As Michael Chesterman points out, “What the philanthropist of Tudor times tried to do forms the basis of the legal definition of charity. No other single period of English history is so important to the formation of the modern concept of charity”.
