ABSTRACT
In 1901, Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman, a journalist and a Liberal MP who worked with Lloyd George and Winston Churchill to engineer the Liberal welfare reforms of 1901–1914, edited a collection of essays by eminent British writers, entitled The Heart of Empire. Discussions of Problems of Modern City Life in England. This chapter explores the connections between philanthropy, empire, and modernism in two of Edward Morgan Forster’s novels, Howards End and A Passage to India, and in Rebecca West’s The Judge. The late nineteenth century saw the development of ethnographic and statistical methods that could be applied to study the poorer classes at home as well as exotic customs and people overseas. Pioneering social studies such as Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty, a Study of Town Life provided persuasive evidence of the alarming living conditions, death rate, and general health of the population of big cities, such as York.
