Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature from 1850-1920
(Indiana University Press, 2017)
From the mid-19th century until the rise of the modern welfare state in the early 20th century, Anglo-American philanthropic giving gained an unprecedented measure of cultural authority as it changed in kind and degree. Civil society took on the responsibility for confronting the adverse effects of industrialism, and transnational discussions of poverty, urbanization, women’s work, and sympathy provided a means of understanding and debating social reform. While philanthropic institutions left a transactional record of money and materials, philanthropic discourse yielded a rich corpus of writing that represented, rationalized, and shaped these rapidly industrializing societies, drawing on and informing other modernizing discourses including religion, economics, and social science. Showing the fundamentally transatlantic nature of this discourse from 1850 to 1920, the authors gather a wide variety of literary sources that crossed national and colonial borders within the Anglo-American range of influence. Through manifestos, fundraising tracts, novels, letters, and pamphlets, they piece together the intellectual world where philanthropists reasoned through their efforts and redefined the public sector.
Review by Jarica Watts presented at Faculty Book Lunch
Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature from 1850-1920 is an ambitious project that maps the transnational threads of industry, urbanization, colonization, social reform, and gender politics onto the field of philanthropic studies. Professors Frank Christianson and Leslee Thorne-Murphy argue that philanthropy facilitates forms of affiliation across geographic, national, and social boundaries and can thus be used as a lens through which scholars approach Anglophone literature—particularly the social realism of American, British, and Indian texts. As war and revolution, industrialization and urban growth, shook the world through the mid-1800s, new demands were placed on philanthropic endeavors as questions emerged probing how to improve the quality of human life. The articles in this collection draw on documentary records, manifestos, fundraising tracts, and novels to reveal the emergence of a dual system of philanthropy: valiant private efforts, on one hand, and increased public responsibility for those in need, on the other. By the turn of the 20th Century, a professional class of philanthropists and social welfare activists worked to enact change at the community level, creating a more integrated and inclusive type of philanthropy. While women like Angela Burdett-Coutts, Jane Addams, Henrietta Barnett, Margaret Fuller, and Louisa May Alcott were able to exert more influence, exploring the ways philanthropy could support the needs of all humankind, particularly the poor, other reformers, mistakenly sure that the Western model was superior, attempted to impose Western concepts of philanthropy on other cultures. As Suzanne Daly argues in Chapter 3, oftentimes that philanthropy took the form of imperial education and its associations with coercion, indoctrination, and epistemic or structural violence. What becomes obvious in the nine essays in this collection is that philanthropic discourse not only crosses national and colonial borders, but it demonstrates the common discursive elements of poverty, patronage, sympathy, race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Taken together, the essays in this collection showcase a diverse written tradition at a formative moment in the development of philanthropy. Reading this text in light of Trump-era politics had me thinking about the ways in which the global complexities and diversities of 19th Century philanthropy can shed very valuable light on today’s philanthropic climate—from the explosion of tech philanthropy (think here of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) to woman mega-givers (Laurene Powell Jobs is a fine example) to immigration funding to all of the Go Fund Me requests popping up on each of our Facebook feeds. To be sure, this is not a time for people with resources to be bystanders. As Professors Christensen and Thorne-Murphy show so beautifully, there is a disruptive force to philanthropy which holds the promise of helping to reduce inequality while empowering individuals to act and speak for themselves.