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Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social
Change in Britain, 1880–1939
Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social
Change in Britain, 1880–1939

Robert Snape
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2018

This paperback edition published 2020

Copyright © Robert Snape, 2018

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Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

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an extension of this copyright page.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.

Names: Snape, Robert, author.
Title: Leisure, voluntary action and social change inBritain, 1880-1939 /
Robert Snape.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, [2018] |Includes
bibliographicalreferences and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017061320| ISBN 9781350003019(hardback) | ISBN
9781350003026(epub ebook) | ISBN 9781350003033 (PDF eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social change--GreatBritain--History--19th century. | Social
change--GreatBritain--History--20th century. | Leisure--Great
Britain--History. | Voluntarism--Great Britain--History.
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To Mary, James and Anna
 Contents

List of Figures x
Acknowledgements xi
Abbreviations xii

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Historicizing leisure, voluntary action and social change 1
1.2 Leisure and community 5
1.3 Leisure, voluntary action and civil society 9
1.4 Overview of content 11

2 Associational Leisure and the Formation of Community in

the Mid-Nineteenth Century 15
2.1 Introduction 15
2.2 Industrialization, urbanization and community 16
2.3 Leisure in mutual association 20
2.4 Temperance, leisure and community 20
2.5 Working men’s clubs 22
2.6 Conclusion 24

3 Evangelicalism and the Inner Mission: Religion, Leisure

and Social Service 27
3.1 Religion, the social mission and leisure 27
3.2 Towards social service: John Brown Paton, leisure and
the inner mission 31
3.3 Conclusion 34

4 Leisure, Community and the Settlement Movement 35

4.1 Introduction 35
4.2 The Barnetts and Toynbee Hall 37
4.3 Oxford House and the public school mission 42
4.4 The Liverpool University Settlement 46
4.5 The settlement movement, social work and leisure 47
viii Contents

5 Utopian and Radical Leisure Communities 51

5.1 Introduction 51
5.2 The Clarion movement 56
5.3 The Co-­operative movement 61

6 Leisure in Inter-War Britain 65

6.1 Introduction 65
6.2 Social and cultural dimensions of inter-­war leisure 66

7 Theorizations of Leisure and Voluntarism in Post-First

World War Social Reconstruction 69
7.1 Introduction 69
7.2 Leisure in the new society 74
7.3 ‘New leisure makes new men’ 77
7.4 Leisure, modernity and social change 81
7.5 Conclusion 87

8 Reconstruction, Social Service and Leisure 89

8.1 Introduction 89
8.2 The National Council of Social Service – leisure and
community well-­being 92
8.3 Re-­constructing the rural community: leisure, village
halls and folk dance 96
8.4 The new estates and community centres 102

9 Young People, Youth Organizations and Leisure 111

9.1 Introduction 111
9.2 Leisure, young people and industrial welfare in the
First World War 112
9.3 Educating the young citizen 114
9.4 Cultural rebels and radical leisure association 118

10 Leisure, Unemployment and Social Service 123

10.1 Introduction 123
10.2 Unemployment, leisure and social capital 125

11 Work-Based Leisure Communities 133

11.1 Work, leisure and community in inter-­war Britain 133
11.2 The workplace as a social community 134
11.3 Model industrial villages and leisure 136
11.4 Leisure and industrial welfare in inter-­war Britain 138
 Contents ix

11.5 Co-­operative and collective alternatives to welfare 142

11.6 Conclusion 144

12 Conclusions 147

Notes 155
Select Bibliography 205
Index 235
 List of Figures

1 View of Bolton from Mere Hall 17

2 Clarion House, Newchurch-­in-Pendle 60
3 Bolton Socialist Club exterior 62
4 Bolton Socialist Club interior 63
5 Hemming towels 86
6 Bolton St. Thomas’ Church Garden Party, 1914 92
7 Scout Parade in Bolton, 1938 114
8 Guides and Brownies in Procession in Bolton, 1938 115
9 Gibraltar Mill Rounders team, winners of Sir William
Edge Shield 1926–28 140
10 Rounders spectators 141
 Acknowledgements

Several individuals and institutions supported the research for this book and my
thanks are owed to numerous librarians and archivists. In addition to the staff of
the University of Bolton Library, those at the following institutions have helped
retrieve materials over several visits: Bolton Public Library, Bolton Museum,
Borthwick Institute, British Library, Co-­operative Wholesale Society Archive,
Greater Manchester County Record Office, Lancashire County Library, Liverpool
City Libraries and Archives, Liverpool University Archive, London Metropolitan
Archive, Manchester Public Library, Manchester University John Rylands Special
Collections and the Working Class Movement Library in Salford.
I would like to express particular thanks to Bolton Museum for kind
permission to reproduce photographs from the Humphrey Spender Worktown
Collection and to Matthew Watson and Perry Bonewell for their assistance with
these, and also to Liz Perry, Lisa Croft and Adrian Greenhalgh for permission
and help in taking photographs of Bolton Socialist Club. Thanks also to Beatriz
Lopez at Bloomsbury Publishing and to Sarah Webb and Merv Honeywood who
helped with the proof-reading and production of this book.
I also wish to thank my colleagues Dr Peter Swain and Bill Luckin, Emeritus
Professor of History at the University of Bolton, for their support and for
comments on a draft manuscript. Thanks are also due to Professor Jeffrey Hill,
Gwyndon Boardman and the Nelson Independent Labour Party and Land
Society for help with information on ‘Red’ Nelson and the Clarion movement.
Needless to say, any errors are my own.
Finally, thanks to my family for their continuing interest, patience and
support.
 Abbreviations

BWSF British Workers’ Sport Federation

CHA Co-­operative Holidays Association

COPEC Conference on Christian Politics, Economy, and Citizenship

COS Charity Organisation Society

CUKT Carnegie United Kingdom Trust

NCSS National Council of Social Service

NHRU National Home Reading Union

YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association

YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association

 1

Introduction

1.1 Historicizing leisure, voluntary action and social change

This book is concerned with the idea of leisure as a field of voluntary association
in Great Britain between 1880 and 1939. It focuses on the historical theorization
of leisure as an agent for social change in a period of rapid technological
advancement, strident demand for greater democracy and the social and cultural
upheaval of the First World War. Although popular leisure was largely shaped by
commercial entrepreneurship throughout the period, there is an alternative and
synchronous history of leisure not as an economic commodity but as a primary
or social good, essential to individual and community well-­being in a
modernizing industrial society. It is an aim of this book to explain how and why,
in this period, leisure became associated with the idea of the common good,
valued for its potential capacity to realize the good society and adopted as a field
for experimentation in the advocacy of social, cultural and political values. In
the later nineteenth century social and philosophical interpretations of leisure
became of interest to social policy makers and cultural commentators, producing
a discourse of leisure and voluntarism that flourished until the Second World
War but that remains largely overlooked in the historiography of both leisure
and voluntary action. Although acknowledging that some aspects of leisure were
socially problematic, the general tenor of this discourse was optimistic,
articulating leisure as beneficial and desirable to a more harmonious and
democratic society. Leisure became a feature of wider social debates on work,
democracy, community, civic life and post-First World War social reconstruction,
with notable contributions from figures as diverse as John Ruskin, William
Morris, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, John Brown Paton, Ebenezer Howard,
Bernard Bosanquet, Robert Blatchford, John Atkinson Hobson, Bertrand Russell,
William Lever, Clive Bell, R. H. Tawney and Storm Jameson. These writers were
concerned not only to expose faults and fractures in contemporary society but
also to propose new social and cultural frameworks in which leisure could help
2 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

bring about social improvement and community well-­being. Their work was
influential on social theory and policy, diffused through a multiplicity of
channels which included monographs and journal articles, particularly those
published in the International Journal of Ethics, and seminars and discussion
circles concerned with the social sciences. In practical terms they were of little
immediate influence on state provision for leisure, which, apart from public
parks, municipal libraries and museums, remained minimal for much of the
period, but their ideas influenced numerous voluntary organizations and policy
interventions committed to social change and an improved quality of life.
Examples include the university and social settlements, the Clarion movement,
Guilds of Help, Councils of Voluntary Aid and, after 1919, the National Council
of Social Service.
Both leisure and voluntary action are anachronistic terms in the context of
the earlier decades covered here and modern meanings of leisure and voluntary
action cannot be read back into the nineteenth century.1 The meanings and
practice of social work have been noted to be historically fluid2 and this is equally
true of leisure. Consequently, one of the objects of this book is to explain how
modern social meanings of leisure and voluntary action evolved in response to
cultural change and social need. The term voluntary action is used in the broad
sense described by Colin Rochester as volunteering by individuals and also the
collective organized actions of voluntary bodies.3 It therefore accommodates the
historical constructs of charitable philanthropy, social work, voluntary aid and
social service. Leisure, it will be argued, is a more complex concept, but for ease
of reference to its historiography it is generally used to mean both the non-­work
time available for relaxation, entertainment or self-­improvement and the
activities people chose to undertake in it. However, it will be argued that the
deconstruction of this normative and all-­embracing understanding of leisure
was crucial to the philosophical justification for its inclusion in social policy.
Since Keith Thomas’ seminal work on leisure4 in the 1960s, an extensive
historiography of leisure has come into being, much of which deals with the
provision and consumption of leisure since the industrial revolution. Common
themes have been the regulation of working-­class leisure in terms of time and
activity, the reproduction of societal divisions of class and gender in leisure
and the emergence of new mass forms of popular culture after the First World
War.5 All these are relevant to the current project. However, the questions
this book aims to address are not primarily concerned with the socially
problematic aspects of leisure, though these will not be ignored, but the ways in
which leisure, as a field for voluntary association, was articulated in terms of
 Introduction 3

social change in the broad sense of leading to the improvement of society

according to a particular set of social, religious, political or cultural ideas and
values. This change was not expected by its protagonists to be revolutionary but
rather to be progressively transformative in the sense, outlined by Maeve Cooke,
in which obstacles to social improvement are seen to be contingent and thus
replaceable by enabling conditions.6 In modern terms this implies critical social
theory but, as Cooke notes, it applies to any ethical reflection leading to a critique
of social arrangements in terms of their preventing human flourishing. In
identifying social, cultural, economic and political barriers to the common
good, critics, social policy theorists and voluntary movements were engaged
in such a process of ethical evaluation and discussion. Considered in terms of
the theoretical processes of gradual transformation outlined by Jennifer Todd,
public debate and voluntary action through leisure contested cultural values
and social practices seen as obstacles to individual and community well-­being
through an articulation of and experimentation in alternative forms of leisure
and new values.7 Although not all hoped-­for change was achieved, neither were
all interventions meaningless. It was in terms of this transformative process that
leisure and voluntary action were theorized in progressive social thinking and
acquired modern understandings.
Voluntary association for leisure and conviviality has been under-­explored in
the historiography of voluntary action in comparison with efforts to provide
social relief or health care.8 Nevertheless, it is not historically insignificant.
Voluntary association and voluntary action were not mutually exclusive terms as
conviviality and sociability by themselves served as vehicles for the expression of
values, as for example in the temperance movement and the Clarion cycling
clubs. As G.D.H. Cole noted, although friendly societies, trade unions and co-­
operative organizations were animated by motives different from those that
informed voluntary social service they were nevertheless part of a wider
understanding of service and not distinct from it.9 The importance of voluntary
association to a sustainable community has gained a high profile over recent
decades through Robert Putnam’s work on social capital and community
vitality.10 In historical terms Jeffrey Hill has shown how voluntary leisure
associations, for example musical and dramatic societies, working men’s clubs
and sports teams, were crucial to the formation of an urban civic culture in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century.11 Of particular importance to the
current study are Helen Meller’s seminal study of leisure as an engine of social
and civic reform in Bristol between 1870 and 191412 and Jose Harris’ analytical
account of voluntarism, social welfare and social thought in the same period.13
4 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

Both demonstrated the importance of voluntary leisure association to civic

culture and the formation of a social community. More recently Helen McCarthy
has illustrated how in the inter-­war period associational life was shaped by
leisure through membership-­based clubs and societies, which increased
opportunities for social citizenship.14 A related strand of research has focused on
women’s leisure as a sphere of emancipation and political empowerment;
Caitriona Beaumont, for example, has explained how the Young Women’s
Christian Association and Women’s Institutes not only provided opportunities
for sociability and conviviality but also enabled women to take a greater part in
public life;15 McCarthy too has noted the importance of Women’s Institutes to
women’s active participation in civic work.16 Narratives of a decline in
voluntarism after the First World War have thus been challenged by historical
accounts of a dynamic and changing field of associational life of increasing
importance to civic identity and one to which leisure was crucial.17
This study goes beyond the period covered by Harris and Meller to explore
how, through differing phases of social reform between 1880 and 1939, voluntary
leisure associations expressed values and behaviours that reflected the social and
cultural characteristics of ideal social communities imagined by reformers.
Although leisure activities are chosen and enjoyed individually, there are few
forms of leisure that are not in some ways collective undertakings in which
voluntary association and social intercourse are important and desirable. Much
voluntary leisure association lies outside the field of organized voluntary action
while nevertheless fulfilling social objectives. It is possible therefore to distinguish
between leisure associations formed solely for the benefit of their members and
those with ulterior social objects. Hobby societies, gardening clubs and sports
clubs, for example, are collective groups formed around a particular leisure
interest to enable shared enjoyment, increased knowledge and expertise and
social intercourse. As expressive associations, they have no consciously adopted
instrumental objects but have served historically important sociological functions
in enabling social integration and a sense of community.18 Instrumental voluntary
associations, in contrast, aim to produce something of value to others rather than
for the specific benefit of their members. In many cases the intended benefit has
been societal; historical examples include the National Anti-Gambling League,
formed in 1890 to reduce poverty by preventing people falling into debt through
betting and the Young Women’s Christian Association’s promotion of Christian
values in everyday life through leisure activity.
Instrumental voluntary associations are central to this study. Between the
middle of the nineteenth century and the Second World War leisure was adopted
 Introduction 5

by a range of secular and religious voluntary organizations as a core around

which to form inter-­connected social, spatial, political, cultural and work-­place
communities embodying and promoting values associated with an imagined
society. While these leisure-­based associations were often formed in response to
perceived misuses of leisure, they were not simply a means of containing leisure
behaviours within normative bounds but were concerned to promote alternative
and sometimes contested social values and moral principles, and were thus
implicitly engaged in the processes of social reform. The extent of this
involvement is impossible to quantify as it often lay below the surface. For
example, despite their heterogeneous aims, the National Federation of Women’s
Institutes, British Legion, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides all gave support to the
League of Nations Union in the inter-­war years.19 Much instrumental voluntary
intervention in leisure has been grounded in a deficit model; in the early
nineteenth century, for example, paternalistic interventions in leisure were
concerned to address the social problems of industrialization and maintain the
established social order rather than to effect social change. However, from the
mid-­century, Christian socialism and the embryonic social sciences opened new
perspectives on political, economic and social questions. As Robert Tombs
observes, the period between 1880 and the First World War produced a calmer
and more stable society, which enabled reforming movements and voluntary
bodies to think in terms of social change and reform.20 Reformers and social
philosophers articulated imaginations of a new society defined not by
materialism and social class but by ideas of democracy, equality and well-­being.
Several offered alternative and utopian models of society representing, as
Bauman terms it, a kind of world preferable but not necessarily available.21 A
familiar example is William Morris’ News from Nowhere22 but more practicable
alternatives included the experimental societies of garden cities, model villages
and inter-­war housing estates in which leisure was adopted as a field in which an
associational culture and sense of community could be nurtured.

1.2 Leisure and community

The theme of community runs throughout this study. Throughout the period
there was a concern that society was increasingly divided in terms of class,
culture and space. Leisure was a field in which boundaries of class could be
dissolved by enabling working-­class people to experience middle-­class culture
through intermingling in public spaces, typically municipal libraries, galleries
6 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

and parks. In the second half of the nineteenth century missions and church
societies deployed leisure as a means of reaching into working-­class communities,
a technique further developed in the settlement movement’s extension of
middle-­class friendship, through a shared leisure, to the poor of the community
in which they were located. In the inter-­war period the idea of community, by
then conceptualized in terms of social science, formed a major policy area of the
National Council of Social Service in terms of community well-­being and of the
village hall and new estate community centre movements.
Community is a complex concept and has been described as elusive and
without specific meaning.23 However this has not prevented its wide usage in
historical discourses of leisure and voluntary action. The core meaning of
community is of a group of people sharing common interests and an identity
formed through social relationships and interaction.24 Hobby groups, dramatic
societies, sports clubs and similar voluntary leisure associations can thus be
conceptualized as communities of leisure, bringing people together through a
shared interest and enabling social networks and mutual interests to develop.25
Leisure communities are also spatial, forming around neighbourhoods, pubs,
churches, and workplaces.26 Neither of these interpretations implies that
community, as an historical concept, was synonymous with neighbourliness or
that those living in a community necessarily shared a sense of belonging to it.27
Rather, through the growth of the social sciences, the idea of community became
an object of social reform and an informing principle in the historical
development of voluntary action through leisure.
The work of Robert MacIver and Amitai Etzioni offers useful perspectives on
the historical relationships between community, leisure association and
voluntary action. MacIver, a sociologist and political theorist, published his
monograph Community28 in 1917 as First World War reconstruction raised
questions about post-­war social renewal, bringing community well-­being into
social policy debate. To MacIver social progress depended on a functional
community and in the opinion of a contemporary reviewer Community was one
of the most important sociology books of the decade.29 Community, as MacIver
stated, was the object rather than the subject of social science. Sub-­titled as a
sociological study, the book marked a shift from the quantitative methods of
natural science to a discursive interpretation of social relationships and social
institutions; the former being activities or the ‘threads of life’ and the latter the
loom on which these threads were woven into a cloth.30 A community was any
area of common life within which there existed associations, not simply
aggregations but purposeful organizations of men and women formed for the
 Introduction 7

pursuit of some common interest. Associations were essential to the development

of community, having interests and objectives that determined the nature and
range of their activity. In this sense a leisure association was not a casual gathering
or a crowd but a social collective with a sense of itself as an association and a
shared purpose, or interest. It is of note that MacIver identified associations of
conviviality and camaraderie such as clubs and societies formed around art,
music, literature and drama, to be important to the socialization of individuals
into the community.31 Associations could however have competing or conflicting
interests. Working men’s clubs and gentlemen’s clubs, for example, were leisure
associations that catered for a shared interest of male sociability and conviviality
but served different interests in terms of social class solidarity. The final point to
note from MacIver is his emphasis on the ethical nature of the good society and
its values.32 Through MacIver, associational leisure can be interpreted in terms of
community and the interests of a leisure association theorized as harmonizing
or conflicting with those of other associations and the dominant interests and
values of wider society.
Much voluntary action was geared to social improvement; as William
Beveridge commented, whether conducted through charitable philanthropy,
social work or social service, its unifying feature was private action for social
advance that was not subject to the authority of the state.33 Social advance implies
the idea of social change and the good community. It was noted above that social
change is gradual rather than immediate. Amitai Etzioni, an authority on the
social theory of community, argues a useful model through which to evaluate
voluntary action through leisure, noting that a community is not just a social
entity formed by affective bonds but one in which members share a set of shared
values, or a moral culture.34 Etzioni sees society itself as a form of community, a
good society being one committed to ethical values, norms and identities
acquired through cultural practice. These values are derived and accepted
through what he terms as a process of moral dialogue. For new or changed values
to gain social recognition they must be widely embraced and, as Etzioni notes, a
good society requires moral dialogues to determine the values that constitute the
shared cultures of its communities. His emphasis on the role of cultural practice
links his model directly to leisure and voluntarism. As Nick Stevenson has noted,
ideas of the good society have emerged through cultural citizenship and
democratic debate and deliberation,35 a process that seems close to that of a
moral dialogue. Following Gerard Delanty’s interpretation of modernity as an
encounter between the cultural and institutional models of society, cultural
practice – including leisure – becomes a process of reflection and cognitive
8 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

self-­interpretation that can lead to the transformation of the institutional order

of social, economic and political structures.36 Voluntary action through leisure
can thus be read as one element of an historical moral dialogue through which
cultural values and practices were promoted and debated in terms of a better
society. The critical question was of course what was meant by a better society, a
concept always contested and historically evolving in response to a continuously
changing contemporary social order and dominant culture.
Moral and ethical considerations have been important to historical concepts
of the right use of leisure, reflecting contemporaneous social ideals and values
and influencing socially instrumental interventions in leisure. The nineteenth
century saw a sustained evangelical effort to replace perceived immoral forms of
leisure with alternative practices as middle-­class reformers sought to substitute
drinking and gambling with improving forms of recreation.37 Although concepts
of the right use of leisure never became fully detached from moral concerns,
they were, from the final third of the century, increasingly articulated in terms of
social change and citizenship. In this process leisure acquired sociological
meanings. A similar turn to the social was the challenge to the personal case-­
work approach of the Charity Organisation Society by a model of social work
that focused instead on the social community.38 Morality remained important
but increasingly in the guise of social ethics. The ethical society was a central
concern of British social idealism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Social idealist philosophy borrowed from the Greek political
community of the polis and its emphasis on participatory citizenship.39 Drawing
from Aristotle’s politics and ethics in its articulation of the good society, social
idealism brought Athenian ideas of leisure and voluntarism into social policy
discourse. It exercised a direct influence on the new liberalism, voluntary action
and the notion of the ethical community. In the inter-­war period it was a prime
motivating force in the theorization of social service and leisure. Social service
adopted community well-­being as the primary focus of its work, building village
halls and new housing estate community centres as spaces for an associational
community life in which an active use of leisure would be a catalyst for the
formation of a social community and social citizenship.
From the late nineteenth century socialism became a further voice in the
moral dialogue of charitable philanthropy and leisure. Through Marx, and
especially William Morris, leisure entered political discourse as inequalities in its
distribution and its undemocratic regulation by a leisure class were interpreted
as products of industrial capitalism. After the First World War labour demands
for more leisure led to a gradual shortening of the working week but increased
 Introduction 9

automation raised concerns about boredom and its perceived tendency to

passive uses of leisure. In its religious and cultural forms, ethical socialism was a
guiding principle for the Clarion and worker sport movements and also the less
politically radical but equally influential Co-­operative Holidays Association and
rambling movement.

1.3 Leisure, voluntary action and civil society

John Garrard’s observation that civil organization in Britain was not a resistance to
the state but a response to its lack of ambition40 is particularly appropriate to
voluntary action and leisure. Leisure was not a major concern of the state until the
later twentieth century. Prior to the First World War, government interest was largely
confined to the maintenance of public order through permissive Acts; only with the
Holidays with Pay Act (1938) did it recognize the validity of a need for leisure
amongst the working classes.41The theorization and practice of voluntary action
through leisure were accordingly conducted primarily within civil society rather
than government. Civil society is a further contested idea.42 Nevertheless, as Jose
Harris has argued, it is a useful conceptual framework in which social institutions
and practices can be appraised.43 Discussing the structural transformation of
welfare provision between 1870 and 1940 Harris drew attention to the ‘mass of
voluntary and local institutions’ that helped form British civic culture and civil
society, shaping policy and provision through dialogue and practice.44
Michael Edwards has identified three theoretical models of civil society as
associational life, a desirable order, and a public sphere for debate on the common
good.45 These are not mutually exclusive categories but broad perspectives
through which leisure and voluntary action can be evaluated in relation to social
change. As a field of associational life leisure was an enabling sphere of voluntary
association, distinct from the state, in which shared interests led to the formation
of hobby societies, sports clubs and cultural associations. Religious and political
groups formed around leisure interests also belong within this category. This
type of voluntary associational culture has historically been associated with the
growth of civil society and participatory democracy, enabling both the middle
and the working classes to construct a civil society that, as Rodger and Colls
argue, reflected their own needs and interests.46 The urban civil society of the
Victorian town, for example, involved voluntary institutions and organizations,
typically temperance societies, literary and philosophical societies and church-­
based social organizations, in the civilizing processes of industrial society.47 In
10 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

the later nineteenth century, as Morris notes, it widened to include co-­operative

and political associations48 and in the twentieth century liberal, conservative and
labour clubs, all with associated leisure provisions, became common features of
British urban life. Frank Prochaska has described this model as a buffer between
the government and the citizenry, creating a moral environment in which civic
virtues essential to social well-­being may be expressed.49
The idea of civil society as a desirable social order is also relevant to this study.
Ideas of the good society were contested and debated in social thinking, with
capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, the new liberalism, Fabianism, idealism,
feminism and socialism assigning different functions to both leisure and voluntary
action. In this respect civil society was not a static formation but a dynamic
pursuit of a good society, based upon a particular set of values and debated
through a moral dialogue. Raymond Williams’ observation of the necessity of
cultural associations and socially democratic institutions to ‘teach particular ways
of feeling’50 is highly relevant to leisure; cultural production was not historically
limited to art and literature but included the wider leisure practices of what Hugh
Cunningham termed as the secular leisure reformist culture found in Chartism,
co-­operative societies and the Left Book Club, which embraced rational change,
political beliefs, mutuality and democracy.51 Organized voluntary action was an
important source of energy within civil society, not necessarily seeking change in
capitalist economic production but aiming to improve social conditions and
quality of life within its parameters. More radical change was advocated through
socialist voluntary associations, not initially accepted into civil society, but that
proposed alternative models of society through socialist clubs, worker sport
organizations and associations celebrating alternative lifestyles through leisure.
Edwards’ third version of civil society is that of an area for public debate on
the common good and the promotion of active social citizenship. Drawing from
the Greek polis and valuing associational life in terms of service to the community,
this model gained ascendancy in the late Victorian and Edwardian period in
which, as Jose Harris notes, social theory posited active citizenship and public
spirit through voluntary association to be essential to a well-­ordered society.52
Young people’s membership organizations such as Lads’ and Girls’ clubs and
scout and guide associations typically had ulterior aims of creating good citizens
through leisure clubs and activities. With the co-­ordination of voluntary service
in the early twentieth century through local Guilds of Help and Councils of
Voluntary Aid the relationship between leisure and social citizenship became
formalized. In the inter-­war period the National Council of Social Service,
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Pilgrim Trust and Church of England all
 Introduction 11

adopted leisure as a field in which to produce the good citizen. Civil society was
not, however, necessarily representative of society as a whole and in terms of
leisure, socialist and radical voices were often marginalized on political or
cultural grounds; furthermore certain sections of society, slum dwellers for
example, had little collective representation.
The locating of leisure and voluntarism in civil society thus provides a
framework of analysis in which to evaluate leisure and voluntary action in
dialogues of social change and the imagination of the good society.53 By the good
society is meant the ethical and broadly socially democratic society imagined by
progressive thinkers amongst whom William Morris, Thomas Hill Green, Robert
Blatchford, John Hobson and Cecil Delisle Burns figured prominently. Their
shared aim was to articulate modifications or alternatives to the society of
industrial capitalism and although they did not necessarily agree on what this
would be, it involved the potential contribution of leisure to a reformed social
order. Some writers looked to Aristotle’s philosophical works on social citizenship
and leisure; others to a pre-­industrial pastoralism or to Marx and a future
socialist society. Ideas of the good society and the function of leisure within it
were debated through scholarly reviews, monographs, newspapers, discussion
groups, conferences and social service organizations. Importantly, the values
of an imagined good society could be practised in leisure association; the
Co-­operative Holidays Association, Woodcraft Folk, worker sports clubs and co-­
operative society clubs, for example, operated according to the democratic and
socialist values of a future society imagined by their founders. In modern
sociological terms, leisure has similarly been argued by Karl Spracklen as a
Habermesian space of communicative rationality, enabling experimentation in
new modes of leisure to act out new ideas in response to social inequality and
capitalist cultural production.54 By no means all voluntary leisure intervention
was grounded in terms of an idealized new society; much aimed to counter
perceived, social, cultural and moral defects of popular and especially
commercially provided leisure. The key shifts in the meanings of leisure and
voluntarism, however, were produced in the moral dialogue of the good society.

1.4 Overview of content

Chapter 2 provides a pre-­history to the main body of the book. It commences in

1830, a year described by F.M.L. Thompson as a turning point from an agrarian
society of aristocratic rule and the cultural dominance of a leisure class to a new
12 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

industrial and urban society in which political and economic power was passing
to the middle classes and urban working-­class leisure was becoming socially
problematic in terms of morality, drunkenness and public safety.55 Middle-­
class interventions in leisure were essentially concerned with morality and the
maintenance of social order. However working-­class leisure associations, notably
friendly societies, teetotal temperance societies and working men’s clubs, offered
an alternative mode of reform through the creation of communities of interest
with wider social objectives, thus establishing organic links between leisure,
voluntarism and social change.
Chapter 3 reviews the influence of Evangelicalism, Christian socialism and
the civic gospel in terms of the application of religious values to the creation of
social communities through leisure. Through a study of John Brown Paton, a
leading late-­nineteenth-­century Congregationalist, it demonstrates how models
of German Christian social work were adopted in Britain and led into the
formation of the British Institute of Social Service.
Chapter 4 argues that the importance of leisure to the settlement movement
has been under-­estimated. Leisure was a field in which the poorest sections of
the working class could be brought within the ambit of the settlement’s middle-­
class culture of clubs, concerts, socials, libraries and home-­visits. Settlements
foregrounded the idea of community, being based on the rationale that the city
itself was a community fragmented spatially and socially by class divisions.
Although the early settlements struggled to appeal to slum populations, they
advanced the methods of social work and trained a cohort of predominantly
young residential workers, many of whom later occupied influential positions in
social service and government social policy circles. In the early twentieth century
the Liverpool University Settlement helped bring both leisure and social work
into the domain of the social sciences. Through Elizabeth Macadam, Fred D’Aeth
and Fred Marquis it became a field laboratory for the University’s School of
Training for Social Work, articulating leisure as a field of social service.
Chapter 5 introduces the radical alternative to social work represented by
socialist leisure associations committed to political change. Leisure was the core
around which various organizations lived out socialist values in practice. These
existed along a spectrum reaching from the mildly Fabian Co-­operative Holidays
Association to the politically active Clarion movement. Socialist leisure
organizations were influenced by William Morris and John Ruskin. Morris in
particular became an important figure in the theorization of the relationships
between capitalist industrial production and leisure and in News from Nowhere
portrayed a utopian commonwealth in which all men would live under equal
 Introduction 13

conditions with a strong sense of a community. This chapter also includes a short
case study of ‘Red’ Nelson, a Lancashire cotton town in which a strongly
represented Independent Labour Party and a flourishing Clarion movement
created a large and sustainable socialist leisure culture.
The narrative of this book hinges on the First World War. Chapter 6 presents
a brief résumé of the changed nature and context of leisure in inter-­war Britain,
outlining the growth of the wireless and cinema and the increased sense of
leisure as an element of modern life.
Chapter 7 is the most important of the book in terms of theoretical
content. It presents an analytical account of the theorization of leisure and
voluntary action in post-First World War social reconstruction, locating them
in discourses of social policy. Reconstruction was not limited to industry and the
economy; it also included a reappraisal of what civilization meant and a revival
of moral energy to establish new socially constructive values and practices. It
was an ethical project in which understandings of community and leisure were
constructed around themes of social justice, well-­being and social citizenship.
The continuing influence of a leisure class was rejected as incompatible with a
new democratic leisure culture and social constructs of leisure reflected
contemporary interest in a more equitable community and a common culture.
A major influence on social reconstruction was the social idealism articulated
in Thomas Hill Green’s work on community and the obligation of the citizen.
Bernard Bosanquet, a disciple of Green, re-­visited Aristotle’s distinction of
leisure from recreation and entertainment to argue voluntary service to the
community as a desirable use of leisure. Through social idealism, leisure and
voluntary action were interpreted in terms of the ideal community and good
society. John Hobson, a social economist and biographer of John Ruskin, defined
leisure in terms of social as well as economic wealth, enabling it to be argued as
a social asset to both communities and individuals. This chapter also reviews the
contribution of Cecil Delisle Burns, writer and Stevenson Lecturer in Citizenship
at the University of Glasgow, to the inter-­war discourse of leisure. Unlike critics
who looked backwards for the ideal society, Burns saw it in the process of being
formed. Where writers such as Henry Durant and the Leavises saw leisure as a
machinery of amusement, Burns welcomed the new leisure of inter-­war Britain
as a potential civilizing agent of modernity. Mass leisure forms, for example,
were not alienating or conducive to passivity but created new shared interests by
bringing the social classes into a closer relationship.
Chapter 8 provides an analytical comparison of the use of leisure in social
reconstruction in urban and rural areas. The formation in 1919 of the National
14 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

Council of Social Service (NCSS) established a national forum for voluntary

action and a co-­ordination of voluntary effort in leisure, sometimes in partnership
with the state. The NCSS placed a priority on community well-­being and
recognized leisure as an important element of community reconstruction. The
new urban housing estates presented an opportunity for experimentation and
under the direction of Ernest Barker a programme of community-­centre building
was implemented. Barker likened the estate to the Greek polis; the purpose of the
community centre was that of a democratic meeting place for ordinary citizens
to come together, without the intervention of a leisure class, to exercise the social
duty of the management of the community. Leisure association was the intended
catalyst for social citizenship. The extent to which this worked out in practice is
discussed in case studies of the Watling and Becontree estates. In rural areas a
radically different approach was adopted. As on the estates, village halls were built
as focal meeting places but through the presence of a strong rural voice at senior
levels of the NCSS, leisure was shaped by the revival of an imagined folk tradition,
supported by funding from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust.
Chapter 9 investigates the impacts of wartime measures to regulate young
people’s leisure and the extension of these measures into peacetime, notably
through Juvenile Organizations Committees and the co-­ordination of provision
for youth at a local level. Although they provided leisure opportunities these
committees also found leisure a useful field of surveillance and control. Outside
social service radical youth movements, influenced by the German wandervogel,
promoted pacifism and primitivism through woodcraft and an organic relationship
with the land; the Kibbo Kift and the Woodcraft Folk are adopted as case study
examples.
Chapter 10 discusses the impact of unemployment on leisure and the question
of what leisure meant if there was no work. Through concerns that the
unemployed might become a separated community the NCSS supported the
government in occupying their time. Differences in the degree of resilience to
unemployment were measured in terms of social capital and the extent to which
leisure retained the active interest of the unemployed.
Chapter 11 reviews the growth of industrial welfare, a further retained
wartime measure, and its expansive provision for leisure. In some areas the
leisure amenities and programmes of large employers were significantly more
extensive than those provided through voluntary and municipal effort. However,
employer schemes were widely unpopular with trade unions and challenged by
a worker sport movement that adopted sport as a socialist critique of capitalist
society.
 2

Associational Leisure and the Formation of

Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

2.1 Introduction

The historical development of leisure and voluntary action corresponds

with thematic approaches and periods in the historiography of social policy.
Pat Thane adopted the sub-­periods of 1870–1914, the First World War, and
the inter-­war decades;1 Derek Fraser deployed a similar framework of an
age of laissez faire from c.1780 to c.1885 and the emergence of a social
service state c.1885 to1939.2 Although no single model of voluntary action,
or indeed leisure, was absolute at any given point, these temporal frameworks
reflect broad phases of social, economic and cultural change and mark shifts
of emphasis in voluntarism from paternalism and charitable philanthropy
to social service and organized voluntary action. Modern meanings of
leisure were similarly formed between the 1880s and the Second World War
as rational recreation was superseded by scientific social understandings of
leisure.
In the early nineteenth century responsibility for the regulation of popular
leisure shifted from the landed gentry to the industrial middle class in what
Roberts describes as a private moralizing effort in English culture.3 However, in
the 1840s aristocratic effort to regain control of leisure was contested by working-­
class agency in the formation of mutual and socially improving leisure
associations. This chapter serves as a pre-­history to the main body of this book,
evaluating the growth of self-­managed and largely working-­class leisure
associations and the formation of imagined communities of leisure at local,
regional and national levels.
16 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

2.2 Industrialization, urbanization and community

The industrial revolution changed the dominant mode of work from hand to
mechanized factory production. It involved a transition from an agrarian to an
industrial and predominantly urban society with a new economic base and
social order, described by Arnold Toynbee as a radical change from the simple
social systems of the market town to those of a manufacturing town.4
This distinction was, as Jose Harris notes, dichotomous; the organic rural
community of gemeinschaft was bound together by ties of kinship, fellowship,
custom, and the communal ownership of primary goods; in contrast, the
gesellschaft society of the industrial city comprised free-­standing individuals
whose social interactions were formed through self-­interest, commercial
contract and rational calculation.5 Urbanization created new social contexts
for leisure and voluntarism. Patterns of leisure in pre-­industrial Britain were
shaped by custom and organically integrated in cycles of agricultural work,
religious holidays and feasts;6 in the new industrial town open space to enable
continuity of traditional rural leisure practices was lacking as were public
buildings and amenities for voluntary association and recreation. The
requirements of a decent civic life, as John Hobson noted, were thus not replicated
in the transformation of the medieval settlement into a modern manufacturing
town.7
Surveys of the new industrial towns fuelled middle-­class anxieties about
popular leisure with graphic descriptions of a working-­class culture lacking self-­
restraint and improving amenities.8 Manchester – Asa Briggs’ ‘shock city’ of
Victorian Britain – was the epicentre of industrialization and a site of new values
and a changing social order9 which attracted interest across Europe. Peter
Gaskell’s account of the moral condition of its working-­class population gave
alarming insights to the grossness and vice associated with its one thousand beer
houses and gin vaults.10 The demoralizing effects of these were experienced by
Engels in his encounter with drunken street crowds11 and, as the French politician
Leon Faucher reported, working-­class leisure had made the city unsafe to the
middle classes.12 Pointing to the considerable geographical variations in popular
leisure before 1830, Emma Griffin has warned against unsustainable
generalizations.13 However, parliamentary Select Committees and local reporting
in the Lancashire textile towns were consistent in their portrayal of urban
working-­class leisure forms as incompatible with orderly social intercourse and
civic improvement. In Bolton, for example, pedestrianism engendered large
crowds and religious festivals were re-­configured as wakes holidays and fairs. In
 Associational Leisure and Community 17

Figure 1 View of Bolton from Mere Hall. In the 1930s Mass Observation chose Bolton
for its Worktown Study of an industrial town. Urbanization produced a space inimical
to outdoor leisure activities but also created close-­knit neighbourhood communities
and a rich communal leisure culture.
Source: © Bolton Council. From the Collection of Bolton Library and Museum Services.

1841 the police were unable to maintain order at the Dean Wakes and bull-­
baiting was still practised in the 1840s, while in 1853 a midnight dogfight in
nearby Horwich attracted hundreds of spectators.14 Progressive thinkers
advocated a persuasive rather than a coercive approach to leisure reform;
William Cooke Taylor reflected a widely held view in proposing that moral
education and improving leisure amenities would be the most effective resolution
of what had become a problem of leisure.15
The industrial town of the early nineteenth century had numerous endemic
problems of which leisure was only one amongst health, education, poverty and
others. Voluntary efforts to resolve problems of leisure were, accordingly, not
isolated from those that set out to address moral behaviour, education and the
construction of civil society. Early nineteenth-­century critiques of leisure,
notably those by the evangelical educationalist Hannah More, were not directed
towards the working classes but the failure of an aristocratic leisure class to set a
moral example;16 Alexis de Tocqueville too concluded that the traditional
18 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

influence of the aristocracy on social life was in decline.17 Young England, a

Conservative group of the early 1840s comprising inter alia Benjamin Disraeli,
Lord John Manners, George Smythe and Alexander Baillie Cochrane, sought to
reverse this decline. A forerunner of later interest in the solution of the leisure
problem through the re-­creation of an imagined Arcadian past, Young England
aspired to re-­energize a national community of Christian responsibility and
social harmony,18 urging the aristocracy to demonstrate friendship to the
industrial working class by building public libraries, opening parks and shared
participation in ‘traditional’ sports and pastimes. Cricket was eminently suited to
this; speaking at the opening of the Bingley Cricket Club in 1844 Manners
described it as manly, bracing and capable of bringing the various social classes
into harmonious contact. The Club would, he believed ‘give place to cordial
sympathy, to the performance of duties and responsibilities on the part of the
rich, and to contentment and loyalty on the part of their less fortunate fellow-­
countrymen’.19

Young England was unsuccessful and the responsibility for setting standards in
the leisure of the poor was transferred to an expanding urban middle class
anxious to preserve social order and suspicious of democracy.20 The shaping and
regulation of leisure through philanthropic paternalism became a field of social
intervention and moral regulation, seeking to integrate the middle and working
classes through a set of leisure behaviours. Rational recreation was a classically
utilitarian response to the problem of leisure, grounded in Jeremy Bentham’s
greatest happiness principle, which maintained that the merits of actions could
be judged only by their propensity to increase or diminish happiness. It was,
according to the Darwinian scientist George Romanes, ‘not a pastime entered
upon for the sake of the pleasure it gave but an act of duty undertaken for the
subsequent profit it insured’.21 Bentham also insisted that moral or religious
opinion was not a basis for the determination of a right use of leisure. While this
did not deter religious organizations from the moral reform of leisure, it invoked
an alternative philosophical differentiation between uses of leisure. John Stuart
Mill criticized Bentham’s principle on the basis that it did not distinguish
between preferable forms of pleasure and argued that as human conceptions of
happiness transcended the ‘lower’ animal pleasures of sensual satisfaction, the
‘higher’ intellectual forms of pleasure were better. This distinction was not
quantifiable in terms of Bentham’s felicific calculus but was, Mill maintained,
based on the fact that human beings had faculties more elevated than the animal
appetites and once conscious of these, would only obtain happiness through
 Associational Leisure and Community 19

them. Capacity to discern this distinction resided only with those who had
experienced both lower and higher pleasures who would, according to Mill,
always prefer the latter.22 By implication, competence resided with middle- rather
than working-­class people whose lack of education and ‘social arrangements’
would, Mill believed, delimit their capacity for the higher pleasures.23 Competence
in leisure could accordingly be mapped in terms of Engels’ two competing
communities of a proletariat and a bourgeoisie,24 with Mill implying the latter as
the arbiter of cultural taste. Simon Gunn has more recently interpreted Victorian
social distinctions of leisure in modern terms of Bourdieu’s cultural capital,
contrasting the ‘higher’ classical music concert with the ‘lower’ music hall.25 It
became axiomatic that the moral improvement and social reform of leisure
could be achieved by middle-­class voluntary charitable action to bring working-­
class cultural patterns in alignment with normative values. However this
approach failed to acknowledge fully the fact that the better educated sections of
the working class were able to create their own socially constructive and moral
leisure associations.
Distinctions of competency in the use of leisure raised the question of
what it meant to be ‘cultured’. The impression gained from contemporary
surveys and parliamentary reports is of a homogeneous working class leisure
of dissipation, rough behaviour and immorality. This was not however the case;
as Thomas Wright pointed out, although the working class was thought
uncultured, it nevertheless included literate men who, through reading and
intelligence, could correctly be described as cultured.26 Furthermore, as
Durkheim noted, community was not abolished by urbanism but assumed
different forms and meanings; communal life and collective activity were found
in both small and large social groupings.27 As E.P. Thompson observed, by the
early nineteenth century leisure and community were closely bound in a
working-­class culture of self-­help and mutuality through associational
formations, which nurtured self-­respect and collectivist values.28 As early as
1832 hobbies such as pigeon-­fancying and tulip-­growing flourished in
Lancashire; evidence to Thompson of growth in self-­respect and character.29
Working-­class leisure association, as a purposeful collective pursuit of sociability,
conviviality and mutual interest, corresponded with what Kenneth Good has
described as a pre-­democratic culture of democracy,30 not in a political sense but
in terms of self-­managed associations, communities of interest and collective
identity. Examples include friendly societies, temperance associations and
working men’s clubs, all of which created an associational culture of mutual
interest in which leisure was crucial.31
20 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

2.3 Leisure in mutual association

Described by Bernard Harris as the most important form of working-­class

voluntary association in the early nineteenth century,32 friendly societies were
organized around mutual interest and derived their social cohesion through
conviviality; Good estimated approximately 25 per cent of all male workers to be a
member of one.33 An example of De Tocqueville’s observation of an English
propensity to create associations to pursue both political and recreative ends,34 they
became a common feature in the industrializing towns of Lancashire and
Yorkshire.35 Through club nights and dinners, better off working-­class and middle-­
class people shared the same space, enjoying entertainment and conversation and
fulfilling middle-­class aspirations to a shared leisure culture with other classes.36 As
Gorsky notes, they also encouraged spatial identification with a local community,
providing the good of social insurance while promoting civic engagement and a
collective attitude to social welfare.37 Most importantly, in terms of community
formation, they nurtured the acts of listening, discussing and voting; skills that
were viewed as essential to the foundations of any democratic community.38
Institutions combining leisure with instruction for working-­class people were
particularly valued by middle-­class reformers. Appetite for education existed;
Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton, for example, described men in the Lancashire
cotton industry who ‘might have an open copy of Newton’s Principia on the loom
to be snatched at in work hours or revelled over at night’.39 James Hole urged
Mechanics’ Institutes to do more to appeal to such men, arguing that a blend of
education and leisure would meet a latent demand for instruction with conviviality.40
The Miles Platting Mechanics’ Institute was formed upon this principle, aiming to
emulate the atmosphere of a club,41 while the Accrington Mechanics’ Institute,
founded in 1845 by tradesmen together with professional men, combined a library
with chess and billiards for ‘social enjoyment as well as intellectual improvement’.42
Lyceums similarly became popular for their newsrooms and libraries of light
reading. By 1851 fewer than half of the lectures presented at the Manchester
Athenaeum were on science and those on travel, history and the customs of foreign
peoples attracted large and socially mixed audiences.43

2.4 Temperance, leisure and community

Drink was the most intractable aspect of the leisure problem in Victorian Britain.
Although landed interests in parliament resisted political measures to reduce
 Associational Leisure and Community 21

consumption, voluntary initiatives to address drunkenness exceeded those in

any other field of leisure. Temperance created national leisure communities. By
1829 there were around 60 temperance societies in Ireland with approximately
3,500 members and 130 in Scotland with over 25,000.44 The first temperance
society in England was formed in Bradford, followed by others in Warrington,
Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds;45 nationally the Anglican-­inspired British and
Foreign Temperance Society was supported by both secular and religiously
motivated philanthropists.
Initially temperance meant abstinence from spirits but the first teetotal
temperance society, which excluded all alcohol, was founded in Dunfermline in
1830.46 In England teetotalism resulted from tensions between the dominant
Anglican control of the British and Foreign Temperance Society and its non-­
conformist members, particularly in northern industrial towns where dissent
was strong.47 The Preston Temperance Society, founded in January 1832, was
initially committed only to moderation before becoming the first teetotal
temperance society in England in March 1833.48 This was not a middle-­class
intervention; Joseph Livesey, its originator, was a cheese factor; the occupations
of the other founders included clog-­making, carding, shoemaking and plastering.
Through the Preston Society teetotalism spread on a regional and national
basis,49 aided by Livesey’s temperance newspaper the Moral Reformer and the
first teetotal periodical, the Preston Temperance Advocate. Members of the
Preston society shared a similar social and cultural background to the northern
working-­class audiences they addressed; in 1840 Edward Grubb, for example,
expounded the benefits of teetotalism to packed meetings on three consecutive
evenings in Oldham.50 Teetotalism challenged middle-­class interpretations of
temperance; in Bolton the Anglican-­formed temperance society was forced to
compete with a predominantly non-­conformist teetotal society after a visit by
the Preston Society in 1833.51 Teetotalism’s empathy with the intemperate was
not paternalistic but mutual;52 Livesey realized success depended upon the
provision of alternative leisure amenities and through the Star of Temperance
newspaper promoted a teetotal leisure culture of temperance hotels, coffee bars
and reading rooms.53
The temperance movement blurred sectarian and class divisions in an
associational leisure community of what Erika Rappaport describes as a sober
consumer culture.54 Temperance Halls were its focal social meeting place and
from the late 1830s fulfilled many of the social functions of the pub in northern
working-­class towns – first in Burnley (1837) and Bradford (1838).55 By 1853
there were approximately 350 beer houses and 174 public houses in Bolton but
22 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

also over fifty dissenting chapels whose members rejected the leisure culture of
the pub; the opening of its Temperance Hall in 1839 provided them with a
cultural alternative for social gatherings, public meetings, concerts and juvenile
gatherings.56 Temperance societies invested considerable effort in the creation of
a youth leisure culture, notably through the non-­denominational Band of Hope.
The first was formed in Leeds in 1847; by 1887 the United Kingdom Band of
Hope Union had over one million members. Temperance values were inculcated
through magazines, magic-­lantern shows and images connecting drink to
poverty and destitution.57 The creation in 1855 of the Band of Hope Union
brought local groups into a wider associational community of instruction and
pleasure.58 In 1861, for example, the Leicester Band of Hope, with the Sheffield
and Nottingham Sunday School Bands of Hope, organized a grand Band of
Hope Gala in Nottingham Arboretum attended by 5,000 young people.
Historians have observed that popular leisure was not necessarily a form
of resistance or struggle but could equally be an expression of autonomy and
self-­reliance;59 to socially progressive reformers this was an indication that self-­
managed working-­class leisure associations might hold wider appeal than those
controlled by the middle class. The temperance movement, especially in the
form of working-­class teetotalism, reflects this; its integration in a wider public
culture was noted by Edward Baines in the House of Commons in 1861.60
Teetotalism recruited from a respectable stratum of the working class to form
and maintain a moral community through cultural practice. The idea of a self-­
managed temperance club as a non-­alcoholic alternative to the public house was
widely embraced; several were established in Oxfordshire villages and in 1860
the formation of the Westminster Working Men’s club inspired Henry Solly’s
working man’s club movement.61

2.5 Working men’s clubs

Working men’s clubs have sometimes been described as a form of rational

recreation that failed when their teetotal principles were rejected by members
who successfully challenged them and sold beer. More positively, however,
they can be argued to have been important contributors to a moral dialogue of
leisure. What the precursors of working men’s clubs lacked, according to Henry
Solly, was the opportunity for unrestrained social intercourse without an
obligation to participate in cultural or educational improvement. Solly advocated
self-­managed clubs to reduce working-­class dependency on middle-­class
 Associational Leisure and Community 23

philanthropy.62 He was one of the earliest reformers to connect leisure to

citizenship, imagining the club as an ideal community whose members, like
citizens, were responsible for its continued existence and common good.63 The
idea of membership was central to this; as Raymond Williams noted, a member
of any society was conscious of being a member, benefiting from membership
and able to contribute to discussion on the operation and management of the
institution.64 Membership also implied co-­operation and compromise.
Working men’s clubs extended working-­class agency in leisure, though not
always without conflict and debate. Many of the early clubs were jointly managed
by middle- and working-class men. The fact that a number of self-­managed
clubs were forced to close through incompetent management lent weight to a
widely held assumption that the working classes were incapable of club
management and by implication unfit to participate in a democratic society. The
Preston Club, for example, founded in 1864, occupied a large building near the
market-­place with accommodation for over 600 local men, leading the Club
secretary to doubt if working men had the experience or time to manage such an
institution.65 The Bolton club enjoyed a more harmonious relationship between
working men and a ‘few of the class above them’; the St. James and Soho club, on
the other hand, floundered through the internal resentments of management by
two committees, one comprising gentlemen, the other working-­class men.66 It
was through self-­management however that working men’s clubs came to sell
beer, an almost unimaginable step to contemporary middle-­class reformers.
When it became apparent that the movement could not survive under a teetotal
regime, beer was gradually introduced and by 1883 was sold in 80 per cent of
clubs.67 This was not simply a response to a demand for beer per se but to
significant middle-­class resistance to its sale.68 Some clubs however chose to
remain teetotal; the Walthamstow Working Men’s Club and Institute, for example,
was founded in 1862 on this basis and remained teetotal until at least 1932.69
Working men’s clubs appealed to respectable working- and lower middle-­
class men, offering a blend of leisure and education. The Borough of Hackney
Working Men’s Club, for example, had 1,600 members and provided social
rooms, a large billiard-­room, a library of 4,000 volumes, a reading-­room,
classrooms and a meeting hall.70 They were also social centres of their community,
especially from the 1890s when women were admitted on one evening a week or
to attend lectures.71 The balance between leisure and education was sensitive
and, as Solly noted, clubs would have differing emphases according to location.72
According to a survey in 1874, 21 per cent of clubs held classes in the arts and
sciences; 33 per cent sponsored lectures; 64 per cent held educational and
24 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

elocutionary entertainments and nearly all had lending libraries,73 suggesting

that even where recreation was dominant it was not to the exclusion of education.
Although predominantly located in urban areas some rural working men’s clubs
were established, for example that in Hanley Castle in Worcestershire with
reading room, library, classes and a band.74 Working men’s clubs fulfilled Solly’s
aim of becoming places that represented a ‘fellowship formed for mutual benefit’
with a mutual understanding of the need to promote the common good.75 They
were not, however, concerned with radical social change; although Conservatives
and Liberals were permitted to form a club, socialists and trades unionists were
denied this opportunity.76

2.6 Conclusion

The initial utilitarian response to the problem of leisure was the middle-­class
encouragement of rational recreation. However this approach assumed that
working-­class people did not possess the capacity to create and manage their own
leisure associations. Although this was partly true, there is substantial evidence
that the better educated and respectable working classes were able to organize
their own associations of interest and leisure. Associational leisure practices
nurtured a sense of community identity, conveying shared values and enabling a
social life in which their members could participate. Although this occurred
mainly at a local level, technological advances in communications created wider
imagined leisure-­based communities of interest. Where a crude utilitarianism
attempted to impose cultural practices on working-­class populations, enlightened
reformers, notably Henry Solly, realized that agency and democratic self-­
management were necessary to the formation of working-­class leisure association.
Even when friendly societies and working men’s clubs are argued to be essentially
middle-­class creations, it remains the case that their values of mutuality and
collective ownership matched those of their working-­class members who retained
their independence77 and more importantly developed the skills to assume
control or establish new working-­class associations. The temperance and teetotal
movements and working men’s clubs accordingly fit into Roberts’ categorization
of working-­class people who were able to transform themselves from the objects
of moral reform to its practitioners78 and suggested that, given the right conditions,
voluntary association and active social citizenship would be more productive
towards the resolution of the leisure problem than middle-­class intervention
or state interference. As MacIver observed, free voluntary association was crucial
 Associational Leisure and Community 25

to the development of community.79 Community was, however, only possible

because interests were realizable in common life and the expression of interests
described above in terms of mutual societies, the temperance movement and
working men’s clubs show how in differing contexts leisure became a field
in which working and lower middle-­class groups contributed to an emerging
civic culture.
 3

Evangelicalism and the Inner Mission

Religion, Leisure and Social Service

Evangelicalism has been credited with the invention of the voluntary society;1
by the end of the nineteenth century, as Pat Thane notes, it was the largest
single inspiration of charitable effort.2 Evangelicalism was a pervasive cross-­
denominational movement that proclaimed the responsibility of the church to
apply the message of the gospel to social problems.3 Its defining characteristic as
a force for voluntary intervention was its emphasis on social ethics and welfare
and from the 1830s it inspired a middle-­class crusade to infuse social and
cultural life with Christian principles,4 prompting churches and socio-­religious
organizations to become providers and organizers of leisure. Puritan religion
was suspicious of leisure as a source of sin and non-­conformist denominations
in particular imposed strict limits upon recreation. In the face of the new social
problems of urbanization, religious attitudes to leisure changed. The extent to
which they did so was varied; leisure remained a potential cause of sin and thus
required moral regulation, but might also serve as the basis of a Christian social
life. This chapter reviews the integration of leisure in a new framework of
religious social service and evaluates the influence of evangelicalism on secular
voluntary work in the early twentieth century.

3.1 Religion, the social mission and leisure

Religion has a strong historical relationship with sociability; from medieval

times holidays, feast days and processions blended the religious and social life of
the parish as a church community.5 The post-Puritan revival of a social religion
in the late nineteenth century owed much to the Christian socialist movement
founded in 1850 by Frederic Denison Maurice, John Ludlow and Charles
Kingsley. John Atherton helpfully describes this as a socialization of Christianity
28 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

rather than a Christianization of socialism;6 with few exceptions,7 it offers deeper

insight to evangelical effort to develop a Christian social community through
leisure. As non-­conformity gained urban prominence, religious missions
adopted social objectives8 and, like their temperance equivalent, mission halls
became focal spaces around which a social community could coalesce.
Many non-­conformist churches integrated leisure in their social works prior
to Christian socialism; the Liverpool Domestic Mission, for example, founded in
1836 by the Unitarian William Rathbone, opened its first Mission house in 1838
with a mechanics’ library, evening schools and a temperance coffee house.9 Both
Anglican and non-­conformist Sunday Schools blended religious instruction
with the nurturing of social life and a sense of community through leisure.10
When John Wesley visited Bolton in 1786, 555 children were registered in
Methodist Sunday Schools11 and by 1834 most Bolton children belonged to a
Sunday School in which recreation was a salient aspect.12 Furthermore, as
Doreen Rosman points out, Sunday Schools often included adults and became
pillars of community social life;13 their participation in ceremonial forms such as
Whitsuntide processions blurred sectarian divisions and contributed to the civic
life of northern industrial towns until the mid-­twentieth century. Such parades
were important; as Paul O’ Leary notes, Irish processions in South Wales helped
create public perceptions of Irish respectability, enabling civic integration
through participation in the public life of the community.14
Religious influence on leisure was often mediated through municipal local
government, which was itself shaped by religious values. In Blackburn, for
example, a Conservative and Anglican dominated library committee purchased
large proportions of popular fiction as a paternalist response to popular
demand while in adjoining Darwen a Liberal and Congregationalist committee
sought to raise cultural standards by promoting standard literary fiction.15
Local government leaders often became leaders of voluntary organizations
and brought with them a range of values; links with the temperance movement
were, for example, particularly common in non-­conformist dominated
councils. Hardly anywhere was the influence of Christian socialism on leisure
better illustrated than in Congregationalism, the denomination in which the
civic gospel originated in Birmingham through George Dawson and the
Congregationalist minister Robert Dale. Dale held active involvement in local
civil society to be a Christian duty and the civic gospel became a powerful
motivating force for socio-­religious intervention and the construction of a
provincial urban leisure culture.16 The Congregationalist relaxation of strictures
on leisure in 1879 retained an emphasis on its moral regulation17 but Dale went
 Evangelicalism and the Inner Mission 29

further in seeing leisure as a positive component of human social life.

Congregationalist, Unitarian and other non-­conformist denominations became
notable for their clubs, classes and tea parties, which nurtured social fellowship
amongst congregations as well as providing a counterforce to the perceived
moral dangers of commercial entertainment.18 The latter was aided by the
absorption of popular leisure forms; the growing popularity of spectator sport
for example was countered with church football, cricket and other sports clubs
for both men and women.19
Evangelicalism extended social projects in leisure beyond the church and
congregation to society more generally. From the 1880s a distinctive Christian
social mission formed, especially in non-­conformist denominations, which
possessed a stronger tradition of communal life and fellowship than
Anglicanism,20 and it was in the non-­conformist denominations that leisure
became particularly important to church social life.21 Religious-­based leisure
association formed a good proportion of what F.M.L. Thompson described as a
Victorian apparatus of social service.22 Helen Meller’s study of civic growth in
Bristol demonstrated the prominence of Quakers, Congregationalists and
Baptists in the development of a social community; the Anglican church was
also active in this respect.23 Church interventions were fundamentally local,
creating opportunities for sociability and fellowship in urban populations in
which dislocation and family dispersal were common features.24 In London
Booth noted how leisure helped religious organizations reach into neighbourhood
communities, recording a Unitarian church on Highgate Hill with literary
societies, sports clubs and a social institute. The Sunday Society, Sunday Lecture
Society and the National Sunday League also provided a range of ‘decent’
occupations and pleasures whose appeal extended to ‘non-­church going
respectable people’.25 Beyond London, Victorian and Edwardian churches
embraced sports and games, fairs, concerts and pantomimes and even the
showing of films as part of their social provision of leisure.26 This trend continued
into the early twentieth century when nearly all denominations developed local
social welfare schemes, which typically included youth clubs, men’s societies,
Boy Scouts and Girl Guides.27
National organizations blending social and religious objectives were also
important providers of leisure. The YMCA (1844) and YWCA (1855) were
prominent Christian young adult organizations with branches in nearly all
major towns. Aiming to appeal to single young men and women in rapidly
growing cities, leisure was crucial to their viability; in both Bristol28 and
Leicester29 the introduction of recreational facilities was a factor of increased
30 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

membership. This hard fact helped soften restrictive attitudes to leisure; the
YMCA, founded by the Congregationalist George Williams, initially precluded
leisure on moral grounds but by the 1870s found libraries, reading rooms and
board games essential to recruitment.30 The YWCA followed a similar pattern,
initially focusing on girls’ moral safety but eventually supporting girl guides and
other girls’ organizations. Some organizations were formed to retain Sunday
School pupils; notable examples include the Church Lads’ Brigade (1891), which
by 1908 had a national membership of 70,000 in 1,300 companies, and the
Church of England’s Girls’ Friendly Society (1875), a strictly denominational
organization founded by Mary Elizabeth Townsend to prevent Anglican girls
from mixing with those from dissenting denominations in the YWCA.31
Achieving its peak membership in 1913 with 39,926 associates (leaders) and
197,493 members it was conservative in outlook and opposed women’s suffrage.
Its aristocratic leadership helped it spread in rural areas where it appealed to
domestic servants and encouraged deference through recreation, but was less
successful in the urban environment.32 Many non-­denominational young
people’s clubs were not overtly religious but nevertheless promoted spiritual
development. The Salford Lads’ Club, for example, aimed to advance ‘Christ’s
Kingdom among working lads’; Brighton Boys’ Club prepared ‘God-­fearing and
intelligent citizens’ and the St. George’s Jewish Boys’ Club at the Bernhard Baron
Settlement developed ‘labourers to establish God’s kingdom on earth’.33 Scouting
similarly encouraged duty to God and attendance at church, chapel or church
parade on Sundays.34
Interest in the organization of leisure within churches declined towards the
end of the century. To some degree this reflected increased competition from an
ever-­expanding market of commercial leisure and a general decline in the status
of religion. This was not, however, necessarily a process of secularization. The
secularization thesis has been challenged in recent decades – Callum Brown for
example has argued that it did not take a significant hold until the late twentieth
century.35 Secularization is problematic in other ways; as Jeremy Morris has
noted, it has been differently interpreted in terms of church attendance and the
associational culture of the church.36 Taking the latter as a measure, although
interest in leisure declined in theological terms, religion remained a major
force in voluntary culture until at least the close of the inter-­war period. In
Congregationalism, for example, the social gospel of leisure became diluted as
the previously highly valued Bands of Hope and cricket and football clubs were
alleged to be detrimental to church attendance;37 as a contemporary critic
observed, despite numerous societies, guilds and crusades, the ‘tone of religious
 Evangelicalism and the Inner Mission 31

life’ was low.38 Dominic Erdozain, however, has attributed the decreased religious
interest in leisure provision to its success; instead of being ancillary to religion,
leisure had come to dominate church life but without any apparent spiritual
benefits. People enjoyed religious clubs and societies but leisure did not
necessarily lead to conversion or even church attendance.39 However, withdrawal
from leisure was not absolute; Unitarians and Quakers founded the Leeds
Association of Girls’ Clubs in 1904.40 On a wider scale, religious leisure-­based
societies not only survived but new ones emerged, concerned not with conversion
but the maintenance of Christian values in leisure. The influence of Christian
socialism did not diminish but became expressed in an articulation of a religious
social service and a co-­ordination of voluntary effort; as Graham Bowpitt has
argued, Christian involvement in late nineteenth-­century social work was not
terminated by a secular take-­over but survived in a different form in the
voluntary sector.41 The following section reviews the extent to which this
argument was true of leisure and considers the contribution of socio-­religious
leisure organization to the formation of a twentieth-­century model of social
service.

3.2 Towards social service: John Brown Paton,

leisure and the inner mission

By the end of the nineteenth century evangelicalism had built a complex

framework of organized leisure for working people both in and outside of
congregations.42 Its enthusiasm for an associational culture was personified in
the work of John Brown Paton, an ecumenical Congregationalist who infused
secular social service with Christian values. A fellow student of Robert Dale at
Birmingham’s Springhill College, Paton was committed to the idea of the civic
gospel and as the first Principal of the Congregational Institute at Nottingham
encouraged ecumenical engagement with civil agencies to improve social
conditions.43 From Dale, Paton learned that although the municipal adoption of
services previously provided through philanthropy might appear to be a process
of secularization, the growing interest in social reform could be exploited to
revive religious social intervention.44 Paton applied this principle to leisure.
An educationalist, he blended informal adult education with leisure to attract
and retain working-­class people, founding the Recreative Evening Schools
Association (1885) and National Home Reading Union (1889) as national
secular organizations. Both were aimed at young adults between school leaving
32 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

age and twenty-five years old. Recreative Evening Schools interspersed instruction
in subjects relevant to students’ everyday lives with musical drill and magic
lantern shows.45 Supported by Robert Yerburgh, Conservative member for
Chester, they were most successful in industrial urban areas and attracted a
national weekly attendance of 81,068 by 1893.46 The National Home Reading
Union (NHRU) was conceived as a British replica of the North American
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle with secular and religious support
from Arthur Acland, bursar of Balliol College, Charles Rowley, founder of the
Ancoats Recreation Committee (later Ancoats Brotherhood),47 Joshua Girling
Fitch, lecturer at Toynbee Hall, and John Percival who as headmaster of Clifton
College had led the civic renaissance of Bristol in the 1870s. The Union promoted
the formation of local reading circles, which followed a prescribed list of books
under the guidance of a voluntary leader. Circles were formed by churches,
literary societies, co-­operative societies, Sunday Schools, Adult Sunday Classes
and Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Associations.48 Initially some working-­class
circles were formed: one in a midlands factory studied in Carlyle; another in
Aston read Alton Locke.49 Several circles were formed in non-­conformist
churches.50 By 1906 the Union’s membership exceeded 13,000 but, like many
initiatives intended to bring working-­class people within the ambit of a middle-­
class culture, it became largely dominated by the middle classes themselves.
After the First World War it declined under competition from BBC wireless
talks and the expansion of the Workers’ Educational Association.51
Paton’s principal significance lies in his role in the creation of an ecumenical
and co-­operative Christian social service through which religion could influence
leisure without the direct involvement of the church or a congregation. Paton
was deeply influenced by the German social thinking on policy discussed by
Hennock52 and became a forceful advocate of the ‘inner mission’ of the German
Kirchentag, or Church Assembly. Devised in 1848 as the basis of a German
Evangelic Union, the inner mission emphasized provision for social needs
through city missions and schemes of social welfare. Paton introduced the inner
mission to Britain through a series of leaflets advocating the harmonization of
social institutions and social life with the will of God.53 The inner mission was,
in Paton’s term, to be a ‘ministry of good’ concerned with social as well as
religious well-­being and implemented through a secular Christianity.54 Applying
these principles to leisure, Paton established religiously inspired but outwardly
secular Social Institutes to deliver educational classes and enable convivial social
intercourse. These were non-­sectarian, non-­political and teetotal. The first was
established at Dunscomb Road School in Islington in February 1894 under the
 Evangelicalism and the Inner Mission 33

supervision of Thomas A. Leonard,55 followed by those at the Camden Street and

Thomas Street Board Schools.56 Several more were opened in London, including
one exclusive to the employees of Welsbach Incandescent Gas Light Company,
based in the schoolrooms of Westminster chapel, which recruited 230 members.57
Social Institutes were also formed in Glasgow, with a combined membership of
1,500, and in Birmingham and Leicester.58 Like the Recreative Evening Schools
they blended education with leisure, organizing clubs for cycling, tennis, football,
cricket and rambling while remaining teetotal. Affiliated to the Federation of
Working Men’s Social Clubs and open to both men and women, they hosted
trade union and other mutual society meetings59 and were widely reported in the
public domain,60 providing a prototype for inter-war community centres and
continuing to flourish well into the twentieth century.61
Paton also adopted the German Elberfeld system of spatial division under
which local inner missions would function as an organizing body comprising
representatives of civic institutions and societies. Although secular, these would,
according to Paton, retain a Christian spirit and an emphasis on ecumenical co-­
operative working.62 In 1889 this became the informing principle of the Christian
Social Union by the Anglican Christian Socialist James Granville Adderley and
Henry Scott Holland, canon of St. Paul’s and former student of T.H. Green.
Through this prototypical council of voluntary aid, churches formulated and co-­
ordinated local social policies on a non-­sectarian basis, which included the
growth of an associational leisure culture.63 With support from Charles
Masterman, David Watson, founder of the Scottish Christian Social Union, and
Sidney Ball, founder of the Social Science Club at the University of Oxford, the
Union aided the Christianization of social reform as religion seeped into policy
discourse through academic and social networks comprising both Christian
socialists and socialist Christians. Important to this sharing of secular and
religious ideas was the Rainbow Circle, formed in 1894 as a non-­sectarian
political and discussion group with a strong leaning towards the social philosophy
of the new liberalism. Early members were drawn from leading social reform
institutions and included: Percy Alden, Warden of the Mansfield settlement and
co-­founder of the Christian Socialist League; John Henry Belcher, its secretary;
Percy Dearmer, Secretary of the Christian Social Union; the social economist
John Hobson; Rev. Alfred Leslie Lilley, Canon of Hereford Cathedral; and
William Pember Reeves, Director of the London School of Economics.64
Paton became an important influence on secular social work, promoting
Civic Leagues, modelled on the Bradford Guild of Help,65 as a ‘municipal
conscience’ for civic authorities.66 With his son John Lewis Paton he was
34 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

instrumental in the establishment of the British Institute of Social Service in

1904.67 By blending religion into the new world of social science, Paton helped
ensure Christianity was represented in social policy debate on leisure. The
Institute was not secular in the sense of being free of religious influence; it also
included the Rev. Samuel Barnett, Percy Alden and Congregationalist Minister
Benjamin Kirkman Gray of the Bell Street Mission in Marylebone. Other
members included practising Christians with experience in leisure as a field of
social improvement, notably George Cadbury, Joseph Rowntree and Mrs
Humphry Ward. It also co-­opted organizations including the Sociological
Society, Working Men’s Club and Institution and the Garden Cities Association,
all of which brought leisure into social policy and debate.

3.3 Conclusion

Leisure was important to the implementation of the social gospel. Through the
civic gospel, non-­conformists in particular contributed to the growth of a dense
network of church-­based leisure associations and societies. Rather than ceding
power to secular social science, religion retained a strong influence on secular
social service. Providing the model upon which the National Council of Social
Service was established after the First World War, the Christian Social Union and
the British Institute of Social Service served as conduits of social thinking on
leisure and voluntarism and extended the influence of Carlyle, Morris and
Ruskin into the early decades of the twentieth century. They run counter to the
idea that religion declined as a force of voluntarism in the face of secular
competition and established a foundation upon which religion was to re-­vitalize
its social duty in the inter-­war years, notably through William Temple’s Christian
Conference on Politics, Economics, and Citizenship in 1924. John Brown Paton
made an important contribution to the development of voluntary leisure
associations which incorporated informal education, and it was not coincidental
that the first conference of the National Council of Social Service in 1919,
organized by John Lewis Paton, adopted leisure as its theme.
 4

Leisure, Community and the

Settlement Movement

4.1 Introduction

Walter Besant’s novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men and Andrew Mearns’ The
Bitter Cry of Outcast London,1 published in 1882 and 1883 respectively, stimulated
middle-­class interest in the urban slum2 as a separated community. Together
with social surveys they contributed to a topographical imagination of the late-
Victorian city, which, in Rosalind Williams’ terms, posited the slum as a
subterranean social underworld inhabited by a dispossessed class.3 At a time
when degenerationist theories were fashionable, the slum seemed to herald a
collapse of civilization. Helen Dendy (later Bosanquet), a leading figure in the
Charity Organisation Society, expressed a widely held view in describing its
population as a ‘residuum’ characterized by lack of foresight and self-­control.4 To
middle-­class reformers the slum constituted a challenge to address the spatial
and cultural distances between prosperous and poor communities.5 Through
Besant and Mearns, the leisure of the slum became a field of opportunity for
intervention, the latter warning that despite the efforts of temperance societies
and missions, the ubiquity of gin palaces, public houses and brothels had thus far
rebuffed all reforming efforts.
The settlement movement aimed to establish a common ground on which
working class populations could be brought under the cultural influence of
the middle classes; to William Beveridge, a sub-­warden of Toynbee Hall, it
was an attempt by voluntary action to counteract the break-­up of cities into
preserves of the rich and leisured and the warrens of the poor and labouring.6
Residential settlement workers, mainly young university-­educated men and
women,7 lived alongside the poor, offering cultural guidance and developing
their capacity to become active citizens. This chapter evaluates the settlements’
adoption of leisure as a field of shared cultural experience and community
building.
36 Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880–1939

Late-Victorian understandings of charitable philanthropy and the city were

shaped by the increasing complexity of society. There was, as Stephen Webb
argues, a debate around modernist understandings of social work and a shared
recognition within reformist discourse of the need for active citizenship to effect
social change. Social work could not thus be constrained to the Charity
Organisation Society’s model of charitable philanthropy that focused on case
work and the deserving individual.8 The development of a community-­focused
model drew from Edward Denison who in 1867 had taken residence in the East
end to live alongside the poor. Of equal importance was the social idealism
emerging from Balliol College and the philosophy of Thomas Hill Green, which
offered, as David Boucher and Andrew Vincent have argued, an optimistic,
liberal and ethical theory of citizenship in which the state – in the wider sense
– would enable a worthwhile life for all citizens.9 Green was a major influence on
social work throughout the period 1880 to 1930.10 Appointed to the teaching
staff of Balliol College in 1866 he was active in civic life as a Liberal town
councillor, treasurer of the Oxford diocesan branch of the Church of England
Temperance Society and from 1876 president of the Oxfordshire Band of Hope
and Temperance Union.11 Social idealism articulated the ethical community as
an informative principle for moral dialogue on the good society. It extended the
scope of social work beyond relief to the development of the community and
posited active citizenship to be necessary, as Bernard Bosanquet argued, to
enable a community to resolve its own problems through a democratic process.12
Although the high water mark of Green’s influence came later, the Victorian
settlement movement marked a stage in the transition to modern social work.
Settlements were, in Sandra den Otter’s terms, institutions to which the idea of
community and a community life defined by a common good was a motivating
force in a period of concern about the fragmentation of urban life.13 Although
religious principles underpinned the settlement movement they remained
largely implicit, expressed through what Derek Fraser describes as a ‘secular
evangelicalism’14 working through a widening of cultural horizons rather than
preaching.15 As a field of cultural practice leisure was ideally suited to this object.
It is therefore of significant note that the use of leisure was incorporated in the
first object of the Universities Settlements Association to provide ‘education and
the means of recreation and enjoyment for the people of the poorer districts of
London’.16 Although the moral improvement of leisure remained important, it
acquired a social instrumentality in terms of education, class integration and
citizenship. This was however a difficult task in a period of a rapidly expanding
popular leisure. Described by Chris Waters as a ‘unique moment in the history of
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 CHAPTER II.
THE KEEPER OF THE ROYAL CONSCIENCE.
ICHELIEU, thoroughly exasperated, determined to crush the girl
who had dared to brave him. He called to his aid his creature
Chavigny. Chavigny was intriguing, acute, and superficial; an
admirable tool—for he originated nothing. Years ago he had sold
himself to Richelieu, but as he always went out of his way to abuse
him, the connection was not suspected. Under the direction of the
Cardinal, he had entirely gained the King's confidence. His easy
good-nature encouraged the shy Louis to tell him all his secrets, and
to consult him in all his difficulties.
Chavigny, who up to this time had attached little importance to the
King's inclination for the new maid of honour, looking upon it simply
as a passing admiration for an attractive girl, too inexperienced to
take advantage of his favour, upon being questioned, informed
Richelieu that the King wrote to her daily, and that she replied as
often. Richelieu at once resolved on his course of action. He would
in future see the correspondence himself. Each letter was to be
skilfully unsealed by his secretary, Desmaret, and read, before it was
delivered.
It was not possible for even the hard, stern Richelieu to peruse
these letters unmoved. He had been once young and passionate
himself. He could not but appreciate the delicacy and eloquence with
which the King veiled his passion, and softened intense love into the
semblance of friendship. Nor could he avoid feeling some admiration
for the sweet and simple nature that breathed in every line written
by the maid of honour. Both were evidently ignorant of the ardour of
their mutual attachment. What was to be done? He must consult the
King's confessor.
 Father Caussin, a Jesuit, had been only nine months confessor to
the King. He was learned, conscientious, and guileless. Richelieu had
selected him for this important post in the belief that he would
assume no political influence over his royal penitent. The General of
the order had objected to his appointment on the same grounds. In
person Caussin was tall and spare. His long black cassock hung
about his thin figure in heavy folds. His face was pale and
emaciated. Yet a kindly smile played about his mouth, and his black
eyes beamed with benevolence. Such was the ecclesiastic who
seated himself opposite to Richelieu.
"My father," said the Cardinal, saluting him stiffly, and leaning
forward and laying his hands on some papers placed beside him on
a table, as though they related to what he was about to say.—"I
have summoned you on a very grave matter." Nothing could be more
solemn than the Cardinal's voice and manner. The pleasant smile
faded at once out of the confessor's face. He became as grave, if not
as stern as the Cardinal, leant his head upon his bony hand, and
turned his eyes intently upon him. "Circumstances have come to my
knowledge," continued Richelieu, "which, in my opinion, justify me in
asking you a very searching question." Caussin moved uneasily, and
in a somewhat troubled manner interrupted him.
"Your Eminence will not, I trust, desire to trench upon the privacy
of my office,—for in that case I could not satisfy you."
Richelieu waved his hand impatiently, placed one knee over the
other with great deliberation, and leant back in his chair. "My father,
I am surprised at your insinuation. We are both Churchmen, and, I
presume, understand our respective duties. The question that I
would ask is one to which you may freely reply. Does it appear to
you that his Majesty has of late shown indifference in his spiritual
duties?" Caussin drew a long breath, and, though relieved, was
evidently unwilling to answer.
"Pardon me, my father," again spoke the Cardinal, a slight tone of
asperity perceptible in his mellow voice, "I ask you this question
entirely in the interest of the holy order to which you belong. Many
benefices have fallen vacant lately, and it is possible,—it is possible,
I repeat, that I may advise his Majesty to fill up some of them from
the ranks of the Company of Jesus." His half-closed eyes rested
significantly on Father Caussin as he said these words.
Caussin listened unmoved. "There are, doubtless," said he, "many
members of our order who would do honor to your selection,
Cardinal. For myself, I should want no preferment;—indeed, I should
decline it." He spoke with the frankness of perfect sincerity.
Richelieu looked down, and worked the points of his fingers
impatiently on the table. His hands were singularly white and
shapely, with taper fingers. As a young man he had loved to display
them; the habit had remained with him when he was thoughtful or
annoyed. "Well, my father," said he, "your answer?"
Caussin eyed the Cardinal suspiciously,—"I am happy to reassure
your Eminence; his Majesty is, as usual, in the most pious
sentiments."
"Hum!—that is strange, very strange; I fear that the benevolence
of your nature, my father—" Caussin drew himself up, and a look as
much approaching defiance as it was possible for him to assume
passed into his pleasant face. Richelieu did not finish the offensive
sentence. "It is strange," he went on to say, "for I have reason to
know—I ask you for no information, reverend father—that his
Majesty's feelings are engaged in a mundane passion which, if
encouraged, may lead him from those precepts and exercises in
which he has hitherto lived in obedience to the Church."
"To what passion do you allude?" asked Caussin cautiously.
"To the infatuation his Majesty evinces for the new maid of
honour, Louise de Lafayette. The lady is self-willed and romantic.
She may lead him into deadly sin."
 Caussin started. "I apprehend nothing of the kind," replied he
drily.
"True, my father, but that is a matter of opinion. I think differently.
Absolution, after repentance," continued the Cardinal pompously,
"may wash out even crime, but it is for us,—you, his Majesty's
confessor, and I, his minister, both faithful servants of the Holy
Father,"—Caussin looked hard at the Cardinal, who was by no means
considered orthodox at Rome,—"it is for us to guard him from even
the semblance of evil. I have sent for you, my father, to assist me in
placing Louise de Lafayette in a convent. It will be at least a
measure of precaution. I shall require all your help, my father; will
you give it me?" Richelieu, as he asked this important question,
narrowly observed Caussin from under his drooping eyelids. The
confessor was evidently embarrassed. His kindly countenance was
troubled; and he was some time in answering.
"To dedicate a young and pure soul to God," he replied, at length,
with evident hesitation, "is truly an acceptable work; but has your
Eminence considered that the lady in question is of the most
blameless life, and that by her example and influence his Majesty
may be kept in that path of obedience and faith which some other
attachment might not insure?" As he asked this question Caussin
leaned forwards towards Richelieu, speaking earnestly.
"Father Caussin," said the Cardinal, in his hardest manner, and
motioning with his hand as though commanding special attention,
"we must look in this matter beyond his Majesty's feelings. I have
good reason for alarm. A crisis is impending," and he turned again to
the papers lying on the table with a significant air. "If Louise de
Lafayette has any vocation, let her be advised to encourage it.
Consider in what manner you can best bend the King's will to
comply. You tell me the lady is a good Catholic; I rejoice to hear it.
She comes of a family of heretics. She may be sincere, though I
much doubt it. At all events, she must be removed; simply as a
matter of precaution, my father, I repeat, she must be removed. Let
me beg you to consult the General of your order upon this matter
immediately. Understand me, I am advising this simply as a matter
of precaution, nothing more." All this time Caussin had listened
intently to the Cardinal. The troubled look on his face had deepened
into one of infinite sadness. His brow was knit, but there were doubt
and hesitation in his manner.
"I can only consent to assist your Eminence," he replied, in a low
voice, after some moments of deep thought, "on the condition that
the lady herself freely consents. I can permit no violence to be done
to her inclinations, nor to the will of his Majesty. If the lady is ready
to offer up herself to the Church through my means, it will doubtless
redound to the credit of our order; but she shall not be forced."
"Certainly not, certainly not," interposed Richelieu, in a much more
affable tone. "I do not know why your reverence should start such a
supposition."
"I will consult our General, Cardinal," continued Caussin; "but I am
bound to say that the influence the lady has hitherto exercised has
been most legitimate, most orthodox, altogether in favour of our
order, to which she is devoted, and of the Church. She is a most
pious lady."
"All the more fit for the privilege I propose to bestow upon her,"
answered Richelieu, with unction; "she will be safe from temptation
within the bosom of the Church, a blessing we, my father," and
Richelieu affected to heave a deep sigh, and cast up his eyes to
heaven, "we, who live in the world, cannot attain. We act then in
concert, my father," he added quickly, in his usual manner, "we act
for the good of his Majesty's soul?"
Caussin bowed acquiescence, but mistrust and perplexity were
written upon every line of his honest face, as he observed the
evident satisfaction evinced by the Cardinal at his compliance.
Richelieu rose: "We will force no one's inclination, my father," he
said blandly, "but all possibility of scandal must be removed. You
must at once prepare his Majesty. It will be a good work, and will
greatly recommend you to your order." Caussin, with a look of the
deepest concern, bowed profoundly and withdrew. When he was
alone, the Cardinal re-seated himself and fell into a deep muse.
"Now," said he, at length, speaking to himself, "her fate is sealed. I
will take care that her vocation shall be perfect. This presumptuous
girl shall soon come to rejoice, ay, rejoice, that she is permitted to
take refuge in a convent. As for Caussin, he is a fool. I must remove
him immediately."
Richelieu, as he said of himself, never halted in his resolves.
Caussin was shortly sent off by a lettre de cachet to Rennes,
narrowly escaping an intimation from the Cardinal to his Superior
that it would be well to exercise his devotion to the order as a
missionary in Canada.

SALON OF LOUIS XIII. AT FONTAINEBLEAU.

 CHAPTER III.
A NOBLE RESOLVE.
HE Court had removed from the Louvre to Saint-Germain, always
the favourite abode of the melancholy monarch.
Louis suffered tortures from the galling restraints his position
entailed upon him in his intercourse with Mademoiselle de Lafayette.
He rarely saw her alone. When he addressed her, he was conscious
that every eye was fixed upon them. Their correspondence, carried
on by means of Chavigny, was, he felt, full of danger. His only
comforter in his manifold troubles was this same treacherous
Chavigny. Prompted by the Cardinal, Chavigny urged the King, on
every possible occasion, to make some arrangement with
Mademoiselle de Lafayette to meet in private. "If she loves you,"
said this unworthy tool, "if you really possess her heart, she will long
to meet your Majesty with greater freedom as much as you can do.
It is for you to make some such proposal to her. Do it, Sire; do it
without delay, or I assure you the lady will think you careless and
indifferent." Thus spoke Chavigny. Louis listened, meditated on what
he said, and was convinced. He gave himself up to the most
entrancing day-dreams.
The season was summer. The weather was hot, and the tall
windows of the great saloon were thrown open. The Court had
gathered round the Queen, who was engaged in a lively
conversation with Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the young daughter
of the Duc d'Orléans. Seeing that her services were not required,
Louise de Lafayette, pensive and silent, stole away to the balcony
outside the windows. She stood alone, lost in her own thoughts.
With noiseless steps Louis approached her. He lent by her side over
the balustrade, bending his eyes on the broad plains towards Paris.
 "You are thoughtful, Sire," said Louise timidly. "Will you tell me
your thoughts?"
"If I do," replied Louis, casting a fond glance upon her, "will you
trust me with yours?"
A delicious tremor passed through her whole frame. She cast
down her large grey eyes, and smiled. "Indeed I trust you, Sire," she
murmured softly; "you know I do."
"But trust me more,—let our communion be more intimate. A
brother's love is not more pure than mine," whispered the King;
"but," and he hesitated and blushed, "I have never enjoyed the
privilege of a brother." Louise raised her eyes inquiringly.
The King was greatly confused. "A brother—" and he stopped.
Then, seeing her earnest look of curiosity—"A brother," he repeated,
"salutes his sister: I have never enjoyed that privilege, Louise." He
was scarcely audible. "Let my self-denial, at least, secure me all your
confidence."
"Oh, Sire, you have it, entire and unreserved; you know it. I might
distrust myself, but you, Sire, never, never!"
"How happy you make me!" returned the King, and a sickly smile
overspread his haggard face. "I understand—I appreciate your
attachment to me; but oh, mademoiselle, how can my feeble words
express mine to you?—how can I describe that which is without
bounds—without limit? You can live without me. You can find solace
in your own perfection, in the admiration of those around you—but
I, I am nothing without you. I am a mere blank—a blot upon a
luxurious Court—an offence to my superb wife. No one cares for my
happiness—not even for my existence, but you. When I cannot
approach you, I am overcome by despair. Oh, Louise, give yourself
up to me, in pity—without fear, without restraint. Let me see you
every day,—let me be encouraged by your words, led by your
counsels, soothed by your pity, blessed by your sight. You say you
do not doubt me. What then do you fear?"
 The maid of honour looked at him with tearful eyes. His
earnestness, his desolation, his entreaties, melted her heart. His
unconscious love made her pulses beat as quickly as his own.
"You know that I am devoted to you,—what more can I say?" she
whispered softly.
"I have a favour to ask you," said Louis anxiously,—"a favour so
great I hesitate to name it." He was greatly agitated. At this moment
the passionate love he felt animated him with new life, and lent a
charm to his countenance it had never borne before.
"A favour, Sire?—it is granted before you speak. How is it that you
have concealed it from me?"
"Then I am satisfied,"—the King heaved a sigh of relief,—"what I
ask depends entirely on you. You will grant it."
"Am I to promise?"
"Well, only give me your word; that is enough."
"Sire, I give you my word; from the bottom of my heart, I give
you my word. Tell me what it is you desire." And she raised her face
towards the King, who contemplated her with silent rapture.
"Not now,—not now," murmured he, in a faltering voice; "I dare
not; it would require too long an explanation,—we might be
interrupted," and he turned and glanced at the scene behind him,—
at Anne of Austria, blazing with diamonds, radiant with regal beauty,
her silvery laugh surmounting the hum of conversation. He saw the
brilliant crowd that thronged around her where she sat. Great
princes, illustrious ministers, historic nobles, chivalric soldiers, grave
diplomatists, stately matrons, ministers of state, her ladies in
waiting, and the five other maids of honour, in the glory of golden
youth. He saw the dazzling lights, the fluttering feathers, the
gorgeous robes, the sparkling jewels, standing out from the painted
walls,—all the glamour of a luxurious Court. Then he gazed at the
sweet face of the lonely girl whose loving eyes were bent upon him
awaiting his reply,—his soul sank within him.
"Would to God I were not King of France," he exclaimed abruptly,
following the tenor of his thoughts. Then, seeing her wonder at his
sudden outburst, he added, "The favour I ask of you shall be made
known to you in writing. This evening you shall receive a letter from
me; but,"—and he drew closer to her and spoke almost fiercely,
—"remember you have pledged yourself to me—you cannot, you
dare not withdraw your word. If you do,"—and an agonised look
came into his face,—"you will drive me to madness." Saying these
words, he suddenly disappeared. She was again left standing alone
on the balcony.
Louise de Lafayette was startled, but not alarmed. The notion that
the King was capable of making any indecorous proposition to her
never for a moment occurred to her; at the same time she felt the
utmost curiosity to know what this secret might be. She formed a
thousand different conjectures, each further than the other from the
truth. On entering her room at night, she found a letter from the
King. She hastily tore it open and read as follows:—
"I have long adored you, and you only. During the whole time you have been at
Court, I have been able but twice to address you alone, and to chance only did I
even then owe that inexpressible privilege. It is impossible for me to endure this
restraint any longer. If you feel as I do, you will not desire it. I have therefore
commanded that my hunting-lodge at Versailles should be arranged as much as
possible in accordance with your taste. There is a garden laid out, filled with the
flowers you love; there are secluded lawns; there is the boundless forest. Above
all, there is freedom. Come then, my Louise, and share with me this rural retreat—
come where we can meet, unrestrained by the formalities of my Court. Bring with
you any friend you please. At Versailles I hope to spend part of every week in your
company. My happiness will be perfect; you will find me the most grateful of men.
You will have nothing to fear. Do you dream calumny? Who would dare to attack a
lady as pure as yourself? May I not claim your consent when I rely on your
promise to grant whatever I ask? I feel that you cannot deny me, for you have
repeated a thousand times that you trust my principles. You cannot doubt my
honour. To refuse me would only be to insult me. Surely Louise, you would not do
that! It would wound me to the very soul. It would destroy every hope of my
future life.
 "(Signed) Louis."

When Mademoiselle de Lafayette read this artful letter, which had

been composed by Chavigny under the direction of Richelieu, and
copied out by the King, she was utterly confounded. The fatal veil
which had so long concealed the truth fell from her eyes. Even to a
girl pure and simple as herself, all further delusion was impossible.
This letter and the feelings that dictated it were not to be
misunderstood.
"Merciful heavens!" cried she, clasping her hands, "with what a
tone of authority, with what assurance, he proposes to dishonour
me! This, then, is the attachment I believed to be so pure! What!
does he, the husband of the Queen of France, suppose that I would
encourage a guilty passion! Wretch that I am! Instead of helping
him, I have led him into sin! I had no right to engross his thoughts.
He is already estranged from his wife, and I have severed them still
further! O God! what will the Queen think of me? How can I atone
for this horrible sin? I must—I will—reconcile them. Then God may
forgive my involuntary crime!"
Again and again, with tears streaming down her cheeks, she read
and re-read the letter. She pressed the paper to her lips. The next
moment she dashed it on the floor in an agony of remorse.
"Oh, how can I reply?" sobbed she. "What can I say to temper the
blow which must sever us? He will be in despair—he will die. But my
reputation, my honour—his own—his duty to the Queen! No, I will
never consent to such degradation—my soul revolts at the thought!
How gladly would I sacrifice my life for him, but I cannot commit a
sin. I must leave the palace, I must go—Whither?"
 MLLE. DE LAFAYETTE.
FROM MONMERQUÉ'S "TALLEMANT DES RÉAUX."

As she listened to the echo of her own words, an unformed

thought suddenly darted into her mind. Go—yes, she would go
where none could follow. Youth, beauty, wealth, the sacrifice should
be complete. She would prove, even in separation, how great had
been her love. "There is no other way," she said, speaking aloud,
and an angelic smile lit up her face. She cast herself upon her knees,
and prayed in peace. Her prayer finished, she took up her pen and
replied thus to the King:—
"Your Majesty desires that we should no longer meet in the presence of
witnesses. Before knowing what was required of me, I promised to comply. I will
not withdraw my word; but I entreat of your Majesty the liberty of myself selecting
the place where these private interviews are to be held. When I have received
your Majesty's assent, I will inform you where this place is to be. In eight days'
time I shall be prepared to receive you. Your Majesty can then judge of the extent
of my confidence, and of the unbounded devotion I feel towards you.
"Louise de Lafayette."
 CHAPTER IV.
THE SACRIFICE.
EXT morning, as soon as it was light, Louise sent for the King's
confessor. She showed him the King's letter, and confided to him
her resolution. Caussin listened in silence; but the kindly old man,
priest though he was, could not restrain his tears—so touching was
her innocence, so heartfelt her sorrow. He understood the simple
goodness of her heart; he trembled at the sacrifice she was
imposing on herself; but he could not combat her arguments. He
promised, therefore, to assist in making the needful arrangements,
and he pledged himself to support the King in the trial awaiting him.
The coach was in waiting which was to bear her to her future
home. All at once she recollected she had still one final sacrifice to
make. The letters of the King, which she always carried about her,
were still intact within the silken cover in which she preserved them.
She drew these letters from her bosom and gazed on them in silent
agony. Her eyes were blinded by tears. She dared not read them
again, for she knew they would but increase her grief. As she held
them in her hand, remorse at what she had done preponderated
over every feeling. Thus to have enthralled a husband belonging to
another—her sovereign and her mistress—came suddenly before her
in its true light. She felt she had forgotten her duty. Once more she
kissed the crumpled leaves over which her fingers had so often
passed; she deluged them with her tears. Then she lit a taper and
set fire to the whole.
She sat immovable before the burning fragments; her eyes fixed,
her hands clasped. As the flame rose, glistened, and then melted
away into light particles of dust that the morning air, blowing in from
the open window, bore away fluttering in the breeze, she seemed to
look upon the death of her love. "Alas!" cried she, "now all is over."
Vows of eternal constancy, entreaties that would melt a heart of
stone, confidence beyond all limit, affection that enshrouded her in
folds of unutterable tenderness—gone,—vanished into air! Such was
the image of her life: a life bright in promise, gay and dazzling, to
smoulder down into ashes, too fragile even to claim a resting-place.
Louise de Lafayette wrote a few lines to the Duchesse de Sennécy,
praying her to convey her dutiful salutations to her Majesty, and to
request her dismissal from the post of maid of honour, which, she
said, "she felt she had fulfilled so ill." Then she addressed the
following note to the King:—"I request your Majesty to meet me this
day week, at noon, in the parlour of the Convent of the Daughters of
Mary, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."
When the King read these lines his heart sank within him. The
austerity of the place, a rendezvous in a convent of peculiar sanctity,
where he knew Mademoiselle de Lafayette always resorted at the
solemn season of Lent and Passion Week, where he could only
converse with her between double bars, was not the place of
meeting of which he had fondly dreamed! Yet his natural delicacy
made him fully appreciate the modesty of Louise and the gentle
rebuke she administered to him for his too pressing solicitation in
naming a place of meeting. At the convent, although they would
certainly be alone, no scandal could possibly attach to the interview.
More than this he never for an instant imagined. The habits of piety
in which Mademoiselle de Lafayette lived, and her frequent retreats
for religious purposes, raised in his mind no suspicion. He should see
her, and see her alone, undisturbed, unwatched. On that thought he
dwelt with rapture; time would, he hoped, do the rest.
Punctually, at noon, the King arrived at the Convent of the
Daughters of Mary. He was received by the Abbess in person, and
conducted into the parlour. Here she left him. A moment more, a
curtain was withdrawn, and, behind double bars of iron, Louise de
Lafayette stood before him. She wore the dark brown robes and
corded girdle of the order, the long white veil of the noviciate falling
round her lovely face. The King stood transfixed, his eyes riveted
upon her.
"Forgive me, Sire," said she, in a voice full of sweetness, "forgive
me for having dared to dispose of myself without your leave. But,
Sire, a too fervent attachment had led us both into danger. I had
forgotten my duty in the love I felt for you,—your Majesty forgot you
were a husband. That letter, in which you proposed meeting me at
Versailles, opened my eyes to the truth. God be thanked, there was
yet time for repentance. This morning I have taken the white veil,
and in a year I shall pronounce the final vows. My life will still be
passed with you, Sire; but it will be a life of prayer." As she spoke
she smiled sadly, and awaited his reply.
"Great God!" exclaimed Louis at length, when he could find words.
"Is this a vision? Are you an angel already glorified?" He sank upon
his knees before her.
"Rise, Sire," said she solemnly; "such a posture befits neither the
dignity of your station nor the sacredness of mine. I am no angel,
but still your tender friend; a friend who watches over you, who only
lives to remind you of your duties. You will share my heart with the
holy virgins among whom I live, the saints in heaven, and my God.
Let not even the tomb divide us—live, Sire, such a life that we may
be reunited among the spirits of the just."
"Oh, Louise!" exclaimed Louis, in a voice choked with emotion;
"Louise, who alone fills my despairing, my solitary heart! at your feet
I abjure all profane, all unholy thoughts. Speak—command me! my
spirit follows you. But, alas!" and he rose to his feet and wrung his
hands in bitterest anguish, "what is to become of me in the midst of
my detestable Court? Suffer me to follow your example; let me too,
within the walls of a cloister, seek that resignation and courage
which make you so sublime."
"Good heavens, Sire!" exclaimed Louise de Lafayette, "what do I
hear? You, a sovereign, a husband, bury yourself in a cloister! Our
situations are utterly unlike. I, a solitary girl, have but withdrawn
from a world to which you were my only tie. Your glory, the glory of
France, your own welfare, and the welfare of the Queen, are to you
sacred duties. And now, Sire, listen to me," and she approached
close to the bars which divided them, and a look of the old melting
tenderness passed for a moment over her beautiful face, "Sire, if
ever I have been dear to you, listen. The sin for which I feel most
poignant sorrow—the sin which years, nay, a life of expiation cannot
wipe out—is—that I have by my selfish, my miserable attachment,
alienated you from the Queen." Louis was about to interrupt her, but
she signed to him to be silent. "I know, Sire, what you would say,"
she broke in hastily,—"that our attachment has in no way altered
your relations towards her Majesty. True, it is so; but my influence
over you ought to have been devoted to unite you. It ought to have
been my privilege to render both your Majesties happy as man and
wife, to give heirs to France, to strengthen the Government. Alas,
alas! I have sinned almost beyond forgiveness!" and for awhile she
broke into passionate sobs, which all her self-command could not
restrain. "Her Majesty, Sire, is a most noble lady, beautiful,
generous, loyal, courageous. For twenty years she, the greatest
queen in Europe, has been neglected, almost scorned by you her
husband. Under these trials her lofty spirit has not flinched—she has
been true to you and to herself. Temptation, provocation, nay, insults
have not shaken her virtue. Believe nothing against her, Sire—her
soul is as lovely as her body. Sire, the Queen is childless, devote
your whole life to her and to France; tend her, protect her, love her.
Then, and then only, shall I be reconciled to God." As she spoke her
sweet grey eyes turned towards heaven, her countenance was
transfigured as in an ecstasy; no saint standing within a sculptured
shrine could be more pure, more holy.
The King gazed at her awestruck. "Dispose of me as you will,"
murmured he; "command my life—but, remember that now I have
lost you, happiness is gone from me for ever!"
 "Adieu, Sire," said Mademoiselle de Lafayette. "The hour-glass
warns me that our interview is over. Return in six months and tell
that I have been obeyed."
She drew the dark curtain across the bars, and the Abbess
entered. Louis returned hastily to Saint-Germain.
 CHAPTER V.
MONSIEUR LE GRAND.
N the broad valley of the Loire, between Tours and Saumur, the
train stops at the small station of Cinq-Mars. This station lies
beside the Loire, which glides by in a current so broad and majestic,
as to suggest a series of huge lakes, with banks bordered by sand
and scrub, rather than a river. On either side of the Loire run ranges
of low hills, their glassy surface gashed and scored by many a rent
revealing the chalky soil beneath, their summits fringed with scanty
underwood, and dotted with groups of gnarled and knotted oaks and
ragged fir-trees, the rough roots clasping cairns of rock and blocks of
limestone. In the dimples of these low hills lie snugly sheltered villas,
each within its own garden and policy. These villas thicken as the
small township of Cinq-Mars is approached,—a nest of bright little
houses, gay streets, and tall chimneys telling of provincial
commerce, all clustered beneath chalky cliffs which rise abruptly
behind, rent by many a dark fissure and blackened watercourse.
Aloft, on a grassy marge, where many an old tree bends its scathed
trunk to the prevailing wind, among bushes and piled-up heaps of
stones, rise the ruins of a feudal castle. Two gate towers support an
arch, through which the blue sky peeps, and some low, broken
walls, without form and void, skirt the summit of the cliff. This ruin,
absolutely pathetic in its desolate loneliness, is all that remains of
the ancestral castle of the Cöiffiers de Cinq-Mars, Marquis d'Effiat.
From this hearth and from these shattered walls, now raised "to the
height of infamy," sprung that handsome, shallow, ambitious
coxcomb, known as the Marquis de Cinq-Mars, who succeeded
Mademoiselle de Lafayette in the favour of Louis XIII.
Deprived of Louise de Lafayette, the King's spirits languished. In
spite of his partial reconciliation with Anne of Austria, and the birth
of a son, he was sullen and gloomy, spoke to no one, and desired no
one to speak to him. When etiquette required his presence in the
Queen's apartments, he seated himself in a corner, yawned, and fell
asleep. The internal malady of which he died had already
undermined his always feeble frame. His condition was altogether so
critical, that the Cardinal looked round for a companion to solace his
weariness. Henri de Cinq-Mars had lately come up to Paris from
Touraine. In years he was a boy, under twenty. He was gentle,
adroit, and amusing, but weak, and the Cardinal believed he had
found in him the facile instrument he sought.
Cinq-Mars was presented to the King. Louis was at once
prepossessed by his handsome person and distinguished manners.
Cinq-Mars, accustomed from infancy to field sports and country life,
angling in the deep currents of the Loire and the Indre, hunting wild
boars and deer in the dense forests of Azay and of Chanteloup, or
flying his gear-falcon from the summits of his native downs, struck a
sympathetic chord in the sad King's heart. One honour after the
other was heaped upon him; finally he was made Grand Seneschal
of France and Master of the Horse. From this time he dropped the
patronymic of "Cinq-Mars," and was known at Court as "Monsieur le
Grand," one of the greatest personages in France. For a time all
went smoothly. King and minister smiled upon the petulant stripling,
whose witty sallies and boyish audacity were tempered by the
highest breeding. He was always present when the Cardinal
conferred with the King, and from the first gave his opinion with
much more freedom than altogether pleased the minister, who
simply intended him for a puppet, not for an adviser. When the
Cardinal remonstrated, Cinq-Mars shook his scented curls, pulled his
lace ruffles, talked of loyalty and gratitude to the King, and of
personal independence, in a manner the Cardinal deemed highly
unbecoming and inconvenient. Monsieur le Grand cared little for
what the Cardinal thought, and did not take the trouble to hide this
opinion. He cared neither for the terrible minister nor for the
eccentric Louis, whom he often treated, even in public, with
contempt. It was the old story. Confident in favour, arrogant in
power, he made enemies every day.
Monsieur le Grand, however, passed his time with tolerable ease
when relieved of the King's company, specially in the house of
Marion de l'Orme, Rue des Tournelles. He was presented to her by
Saint-Evrémond, and fell at once a victim to her wiles. Marion was
the Aspasia of the day, and the charm of her entourage was
delightful to him after the restraints of a dull and formal Court. Here
he met D'Ablancourt, La Chambre, and Calprenéde, the popular
writers of the age. The Abbé de Gondi and Scarron came also, and
even the prudish Mademoiselle de Scudéri did not disdain to be
present at these Noctes Ambrosianæ. Marion de l'Orme, then only
thirty, was in the zenith of her beauty. Her languishing dark eyes
exercised an absolute fascination over Cinq-Mars from the first
instant they met. Her affected reserve, the refinement of her
manners, the entrain of her society, free without license, captivated
him. He believed her to be virtuous, and desired to make her his
wife. Marion de l'Orme was to become Madame le Grande!
This was precisely what that astute lady had angled for. Hence her
reserve, her downcast eyes, her affected indifference. She saw that
she was dealing with a vain, ignorant boy, who, in her hands, was
helpless as an infant. Truly, he was madly in love with her, but he
was a minor, and under the guardianship of the Dowager Marquise
de Cinq-Mars, his mother, who might possibly not view an alliance
with Mademoiselle Marion de l'Orme as an honour to the ancestral
tree of the Effiats de Cinq-Mars. The marriage must be secret. Early
one morning they started from the Rue de Tournelles in a coach and
never stopped until they had reached the old castle among the hills
of Touraine, above the feudatory village of Cinq-Mars. In the chapel
of that now ruined pile their faith was plighted. Marion promised
love, Cinq-Mars constancy. They were incapable of either. For eight
days the old castle rang with the sounds of revelry. Cinq-Mars and
Marion were as in a fairy palace; life was but a long enchantment.
But at the end of that time Nemesis appeared in the shape of the
Dowager Marchioness, to whose ears the report of these merry-
makings came at Paris. Cinq-Mars replied to his mother that it was
all a passetemps, and that Mademoiselle de l'Orme—well—was still
Mademoiselle de l'Orme; that he loved the Principessa Maria di
Gonzaga (to whom the handsome profligate had, indeed, paid his
addresses before leaving Paris, the better to throw dust in the eyes
of the world), and that he should shortly return to Paris and his duty
with his Majesty.
The mediæval chatelaine, however, was not to be deceived. She
knew of the secret marriage, and nothing could exceed her rage.
That Marion de l'Orme should sit on the feudal dais upon the
seigneurial throne—that she should wear her jewelled coronet,
should eat out of her silver dish, and inhabit her apartments—the
thing was atrocious, scandalous, impossible. She flew to the
Cardinal, with whom she had some friendship, and informed him of
what had occurred. The Cardinal, who had formerly favoured Marion
de l'Orme with more than his regard, was as much incensed as
herself. That his protégé, Cinq-Mars, should supplant him, made
him, old as he was, furiously jealous. That Cinq-Mars should dare to
abandon the splendid position he himself had assigned him, leave
the morbid Louis a prey to any adventurous scoundrel whose adroit
flattery or affected sympathy might in a few hours render him arbiter
of the Court and master of the kingdom, was, to Richelieu's thinking,
an unpardonable crime. The artful prelate immediately took his
measures. A royal ordinance was speedily framed, making all
marriages contracted by persons under age, and without the
consent of guardians, null and void!
 CINQ-MARS.
FROM A PAINTING BY LENAIN.

Cinq-Mars returned to Court indignant, insolent, defiant; swearing

vengeance against the meddling Cardinal, and ready to enter into
any scheme for his destruction. Mademoiselle Marion de l'Orme re-
opened her salon in the Rue des Tournelles.
As for Louis, from whom the knowledge of this little escapade had
been carefully concealed, he received back the truant with greater
favour than ever. Cinq-Mars, confident in the King's attachment, and
looking on him as too feeble to combat his own audacious projects,
spoke words which Louis had not heard since the beloved voice of
Louise de Lafayette had uttered them. "He ought to rid himself of
the Cardinal, and rule for himself," said Monsieur le Grand; "if not by
fair, then by foul means." "Let Richelieu die," cried Cinq-Mars, "as he
has made others die—the best blood in France: Montmorenci,
Chalais, Saint-Preuil, Marillac, and so many others." It is certain that
the King listened to these proposals favourably. He actually
consented to conspire against himself and the State which he
governed. Louis was too stupid to realise the absurdity of his
position. He permitted Cinq-Mars to coquet with the Spanish
Government, in order to insure the support of Spanish troops to be
sent from the Netherlands to defend Sedan against the Cardinal and
his own army in case of failure. But Richelieu, now fully alive to the
dangerous ascendancy of Cinq-Mars,—for he had spies everywhere,
specially the soft-spoken Chavigny, who was always about the King,
—openly taxed his Sovereign with treachery in a message borne to
him by the Marquis de Mortémart. Louis was dumbfounded and
terrified. He wrote a letter that very same day, addressed to the
Chancellor Séguier, apologising for his seeming infidelity to his
minister. "He did not deny," said he, "that Monsieur le Grand desired
to compass the Cardinal's death," but, with incredible meanness, he
added, "that he had never listened to him." Monsieur le Grand,
whose weak head was by this time completely turned, fully believing
himself invincible, openly discussed what he should do when he was
himself prime minister. Suspecting Louis of being too weak to be his
only supporter, he turned to Gaston, Duc d'Orléans. Monsieur, whose
life, like that of his brother's, singularly repeats itself, bethinking
himself of early times and of a certain moonlight meeting on the
terrace of Saint-Germain, at once addressed himself to the Queen.
But she had already suffered too much to allow herself again to be
drawn into danger. When Monsieur detailed the plot, and asked her
significantly, "What news she had lately had from her brother, the
King of Spain?" she answered that she had had no news, and
instantly changed the conversation. This did not at all cool
Monsieur's ardour, such as it was. Three times he had been banished
from France for treason, and three times he had returned, as ready
as ever, with or without the Queen, to conspire, to betray, and to be
again banished. So the traitor-prince and the vainglorious favourite,
both intensely hating Richelieu, laid their heads together to destroy
him by means of Spain. To them was joined the Marquis de Thou,
one of the jeunesse dorée of the Court, along with Fontrailles,
secretary to Monsieur. The great Cardinal, sitting in the Palais Royal
like a huge spider in his web, ready to pounce upon his prey as soon
as it had reached the precise spot where he intended to seize it, was
familiar with every detail. Monsieur was to receive four hundred
thousand crowns in order to raise levies in France; he was also to
declare war against France in concert with Spain.
The Cardinal was to be assassinated or imprisoned for life; Gaston
was to be proclaimed regent for his nephew Louis XIV. It was the old
story, only, now an heir was born to the throne, Monsieur did not
dare to claim the first place. Fontrailles, a creature of his own, he
allowed to be sent into Spain. The treaty was signed at Madrid by
Fontrailles, on the part of Monsieur and Cinq-Mars, and by the King
of Spain on his own part. This done, Fontrailles flew back to France,
with the precious document stitched in his clothes. Scarcely was the
ink dry, before Richelieu was provided with a copy.
The Court was at Narbonne, on the Mediterranean, whither Cinq-
Mars had led the King, in order to be near the Spanish frontier.
Richelieu was at this time greatly indisposed, and in partial disgrace.
He hung about the Rhone, sometimes at Tarascon, near Avignon,
sometimes at Valence, conveniently near to be informed by Chavigny
of everything that happened. Chavigny, deep in Louis's confidence,
pendulated between the King and the minister. At the fitting
moment, Chavigny requested a formal audience. It was the
afternoon of the same day that Fontrailles had returned to
Narbonne, the treaty with Spain still stitched in his clothes. Contrary
to custom, when Chavigny knocked at the King's door, Louis
requested Monsieur le Grand to retire. This alone ought to have
aroused his suspicions. While Chavigny talked with the King, Cinq-
Mars, ashamed of letting the Court see his exclusion from the room,
lolled in the anteroom reading a story. Fontrailles found him there.
"How now, Monsieur le Grand," said he, "do you allow his most
Christian Majesty to give an audience at which you are not present?
You are getting him into bad habits."
"It is only Chavigny," replied Cinq-Mars, not taking his eyes off his
book; "he can have nothing particular to say, for he is here every
day. I am weary of the King's company. I have been with him all day,
and I want to finish this story, which is much more interesting than
his stupid talk." And Cinq-Mars threw himself back in his easy-chair,
and resumed his reading.
"Ah, Monsieur le Grand," said Fontrailles, smiling at him curiously,
"fortune favours you. You are a beautiful man. Look at me, with my
hump" (Fontrailles was deformed); "I use my eyes; I am going to-
night to meet Monsieur, before I leave Narbonne. I have brought
him that little present from Madrid you know of. I have it safe here
in my pocket," and Fontrailles tapped his side and grinned. "Come
with me, Monsieur le Grand," said he, coaxingly, and he tried to take
his hand, but Cinq-Mars repulsed him. "Come with me; believe me,
the air of Narbonne is heavy at this time of year. I am not sure that
it is not deadly, very deadly, indeed—especially for you, Monsieur le
Marquis. A little change will do your health good. I am going. Come
with me where we can breathe"; and Fontrailles laughed a short dry
laugh, and looked out of the window upon the blue expanse of
ocean, whose waves beat against the yellow shores of the
Mediterranean.
"I pray you, Fontrailles, do not trouble me," said Cinq-Mars,
looking up over his book and yawning. "I really must have some
time to myself, or I shall die. Besides, I want to see his Majesty
when Chavigny goes; he is staying longer than usual, I think."
 "Yes, Monsieur le Grand, too long for a man coming from the
Cardinal, methinks."
Fontrailles still stood watching Cinq-Mars. His deep-set eyes were
fixed upon him intently, as Cinq-Mars, with perfect indifference, went
on reading his story. Fontrailles passed his hand thoughtfully over his
brow two or three times. A look of pity came into his face as he
contemplated Cinq-Mars, still reading. He was so young, so fresh, so
magnificent; his golden locks long and abundant; his pleasant face
faultless in feature; his delicate hands; his perfumed clothes,—all so
perfect! Should he try to save him? A tear gathered in the eye of the
hardened conspirator.
"Monsieur le Grand," said he softly, stepping up nearer to Cinq-
Mars and placing his hand on his red and silver shoulder-knot
—"Monsieur le Grand, I say——"
"What, Fontrailles, are you not gone yet? Ma foi! I thought you
were far on your road to Monsieur——"
"No, Monsieur le Grand; no, I am not gone yet."
Cinq-Mars put down his book, sat upright, and looked at him.
"What the devil do you want with me, Fontrailles? I will meet you
and Monsieur le Duc to-morrow. For to-night, peace."
"Have you no suspicion of what Chavigny is saying to the King all
this time, Marquis?" asked Fontrailles with an ominous grin.
"None, my friend; but I shall hear it all before his coucher. His
most gracious Majesty is incapable of lying down to rest before
telling me every syllable," and Cinq-Mars snapped his finger and
thumb contemptuously towards the door of the room within which
Louis was closeted with Chavigny.
"Are you quite sure of the King, Monsieur le Grand?" asked
Fontrailles significantly, still leaning over Cinq-Mars and pressing his
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