Women in English Philanthropy 1790–1830

Abstract

Students of institutional charity must sometimes share Walter Bagehot's melancholy doubt “whether the benevolence of mankind does most harm or good”; but they do not dispute that philanthropists were ubiquitous in England by the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Sir James Stephen called the period the age of charitable societies. “For the cure of every sorrow […] there are patrons, vice-presidents, and secretaries. For the diffusion of every blessing […] there is a committee.” Many issues raised by the expansion of philanthropy have been treated with considerable insight. But at least one question has largely escaped the historian: the role of charitable women among the “Fathers of the Victorians”.