The ‘Queen’s Shades’ and a ‘Gothicized’ London

This chapter explores how Barnardo uses the Gothic narrative mode as a central mechanism to raise affect and thus engage potential supporters. The discussion draws on Jamieson Ridenhour’s work on the Gothicised cityscape to explore how Barnardo’s London reflects societal anxieties related to the past and the potential degeneration of British citizenry. It focuses on Barnardo’s treatment of one site in London, ‘The Queen’s Shades’ a site formed by mounds of detritus at the old Billingsgate Fish Market, first in a novel Barnardo wrote and serialized in his juvenile periodicals, and secondly in a supposedly non-fictional account for adults which narrativized the beginnings of his work in the 1860s. Both raise crucial questions about thresholds and liminality, about borders between inside/outside, animate and inanimate, indeed, between human and not-human. The chapter argues that Barnardo uses the Gothic in the child’s narrative to excite and engage interest while eliciting fear and shame in the adult version. Ultimately, ‘The Queen’s Shades’ operates as a powerful Gothic trope in which human sensations, corporal bodies and architectural detritus merge to reflect societal fears regarding the stability of the wider English social body.

Narrative: Raising Affect, Raising Funds

This chapter uses Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s work on narrative to explore how Barnardo deployed the basic elements of narrative (story, plot, character, as well as figurative modes) in advertising and other innovative fundraising schemes as a form of direct appeal to raise both affect and funds. These practices operated in direct opposition to a general evangelical mandate against asking for money specifically while acting as a mechanism for making meaning in the public arena related to a range of concepts significant to Dr Barnardo’s work and brand, including: ideas of childhood, emigration, citizenship, labour, hospitality and Christian love. The chapter examines Barnardo’s experience as a writer and as a ragged School educator to demonstrate how his practices took charity work into the realm of entrepreneurialism and business, since narrative often functioned as advertising. The chapter explores how Barnardo developed a persuasive form of institutional vignette to stimulate public support. It concludes by examining how Barnardo used narrative to create highly successful, innovative incentive schemes to increase wide spread donations globally, drawing of affect and sympathy.

The ‘Open Door’: Metaphor and Promoting the Barnardo Brand

This chapter introduces Barnardo’s use of metaphor, employing conceptual metaphor theory to explain how comparing an organization to an ‘open door’ inculcated the values of Christian hospitality in the public perception of Barnardo’s work: particularly inclusivity and unconditionality. It argues that the ‘open door’ metaphor worked to characterize Barnardo’s values and institutional processes in putative opposition to the state mechanisms dealing with destitute children, most notably the workhouse ‘solution’ that operated unproductively to demean children rather than train up new ‘citizens’. It draws on Derrida’s work on hospitality, as well as George Simmel and Martin Heidegger on liminality and dwelling. The chapter analyses a range of Barnardo’s recursive ‘hospitable’ practices, such as the annual teas and suppers for ‘waifs’ and ‘factory girls’. Such events doubled as charity mechanisms and promotional manoeuvres, since subsequent celebratory reports circulated in media around the world. It concludes by discussing how the ‘open door’ metaphor operates as a form of condensed narrative regarding Barnardo’s practice of child reform.

‘Panoramas’ and ‘Living Pictures’: Dr Barnardo’s Annual Meetings

This chapter analyses how Barnardo created spectacle from the massed exhibition of child bodies in the annual general meetings and fêtes held in Barnardo’s homes and in high-profile public venues such as the Royal Albert Hall. It focuses on spectacle as integral to the philanthropic agenda, such as scale, the boundaries between the real and performed, and the capacity to ‘move’ an audience in a context of amplified emotionality. Barnardo used spectacle to create capital and to represent social change to his supporters. The close relation of spectacle with disaster is crucial; the orchestrated spectacles conveyed both the underlying potential for, and the spectator’s vulnerability to, unleashed catastrophe should they choose not to contribute. Although Barnardo repudiated theatre and associated performance, he nevertheless devised spectacles that presented his brand in highly positive terms as another form of coherent narrative about child reform in the nineteenth century, and the organization’s social welfare work into the twenty-first century.

Barnardo’s Bazaars: Desire and Restraint, Consumption and Self-Denial

Chapter Five considers spectacle in Barnardo’s artfully constructed encounters with objects in his charity bazaars, analysing the notion of the Victorian consumer as a desiring agent in the context of evangelical charity bazaars, optimizing profit by inflecting the sale of ‘fancy goods’ with moral usefulness. The result is a strange nexus of excess and frugality, both affirming and denigrating consumerist desire. The discussion culminates with a look at Barnardo’s concomitant ‘Self-Denial Weeks’ instituted in 1894. The discussion examines the pull between moral restraint and unlicensed desire as Barnardo’s calendar of promotional and fundraising events enflamed in his supporters the desire to spend and consume, countermanded with the moral obligation to self-regulate desire. These events exemplify his ‘snowball’ mechanism for raising funds, a mode that had the capacity to reverberate almost virally around the globe.

Afterword

The Afterword reiterates how Barnardo orchestrated metaphors, narratives and spectacles to circulate his desired public meanings on a grand scale in the Victorian era. This section speculates that Barnardo used a form of identity construction normally associated with the 20th century, synthetic personalization, which Norman Fairclough argues works to create social spaces that link separate individuals who aren’t present, but nevertheless appear to communicate, simulating the bonds of friendship, loyalty and family. That is, Barnardo used mass media to constitute and perform his identity as the ‘Father’ of the world’s largest and most Christian ‘family’, creating the context for his supporters to feel as if each were individually a significant, contributing member of the Barnardo family. Thus, by using the technologies available to him as a Victorian, Barnardo converted the chaotic work of reform and charity into the perception of a unified, institutional identity and community. His use of metaphor, narrative and spectacle offers fertile ground for further scholarly investigation into a wide range of studies, including the history of marketing and production as well as philanthropy and child reform.

Dr Barnardo’s ‘Young Helpers’: Agency, Philanthropy and Juvenile Periodicals

This chapter examines how Barnardo used narrative to create entrepreneurial roles for children as fundraisers. He wrote and published a plethora of stories for children in the periodicals he owned and edited for children, relying on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s qualification associated with Uncle Tom’s Cabin for proper narrative: that is, a reliance on ‘real’ events in order to motivate readers’ sympathies and provoke widespread commitment to eradicate the world’s evils. The chapter examines the generic aspects of children’s periodicals to show how Barnardo used existing modes of periodical publication to generate forms of agency for children, specifically relying on notions of embodied sacrifice. The chapter demonstrates how Barnardo’s publications for children ask readers to identify with other children as ‘like-to-like’ subjects, as both supporters and recipients. The discussion reveals Barnardo’s shift to motivate children through emotions linked with family, recognizing their work as of national and civic obligation as Christian duty. Thus, the chapter demonstrates Barnardo’s shift from evangelical conversion to the development of the healthy, productive citizen that would reverberate throughout the British Empire.