The history of Victorian and Edwardian philanthropy is ostensibly well known, and the study of its transformation has long been central to the “social history paradigm.”Footnote ¹ This essay contends that one of the most important factors in the history of charitable practice has been overlooked: namely, the contemporaneous development, in the absence of formal state regulation, of a self-policing philanthropic marketplace.Footnote ² By focusing on changing notions of poverty, the resistible rise of welfare ideology, and the social return of philanthropic patronage, historians of philanthropy opened up key debates on class, social rights, and Christianity in Victorian and twentieth-century British society.Footnote ³ Over the last thirty years, this historiography has dwelled on the nature of philanthropy, the religious underpinning of charity, and the shift from reparation to prevention, with a particular interest in the development of social work.Footnote ⁴ More recent studies of twentieth-century nongovernmental organizations have highlighted the status of charities and voluntary organizations as self-conscious agents of social and political change.Footnote ⁵ Until the scholarship of Martin Daunton and Peter Mandler, however, economic and social historians' focus on the implications of Victorian and Edwardian charity often meant giving little attention to charitable work per se.Footnote ⁶ The fund-raising, management, advertising, and accountability practices that shaped the moral universe of Victorian charity have received even less consideration.Footnote ⁷

This essay sheds new light on the supposedly familiar world of Victorian philanthropy by considering charity in relation to market regulation. We argue that Victorian charity needs to be evaluated anew, as a dynamic and creative competitive market, with national and local operators, small and large operations, and clearly identifiable “actors” who sought to protect and amplify the inequalities of this particular market. Located in the context of broader financial regulation in the modern period, the charity market was in no way laggard: fully audited books and the employment of actuaries could be seen in the charitable sector as early as the 1860s and 1870s, when such practices were at the cutting edge of business customs. Historians of accounting have noted both the lack of common accounting cultures until late in the nineteenth century, and the dearth of historical understanding for the development of auditing practices among charitable ventures.Footnote ⁸

The development of financial and administrative practices as normative within the charitable marketplace was inextricable from the phenomenon of “charity fraud,” that is, the perceived misuse or misappropriation of donations. As we demonstrate, in the absence of a legal framework to police the charitable marketplace, “charity fraud” was a slippery construction, defined in symbiosis with, and opposition to, shifting notions of “best” or “virtuous” practice. Charities eagerly seized fraud denunciations of competitor charities to advertise and authenticate their legitimacy. This shaped a contested but oddly virtuous exchange market: by the turn of the twentieth century, charities not only published account sheets but debated them publicly, too.Footnote ⁹ As innovative administrative practices became increasingly normalized, the boundaries of “fraud” expanded to include organizations unable or unwilling to keep pace. The dynamic and extra-legal character of this process meant that definitions of charity fraud and attempts to regulate it were neither fixed nor resolved: charity fraud remained a discursive product of those who took the trouble to denounce it.Footnote ¹⁰

This article draws on the exposés of charity frauds published by the journal Truth and the little used “Enquiry department” archives of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) which interrogated, among other things, the auditing practices of charities on a national scale, to illustrate how self-regulation of the charitable marketplace developed in a vacuum of state regulation. Indeed, most philanthropic enterprises remained entirely unregulated by the state until the Charities Act of 1960.Footnote ¹¹ A case study from the start of the twentieth century illuminates how mechanisms for identifying fraud developed by Truth and the COS were applied at a regional level. The limited success of those mechanisms demonstrates the constantly shifting boundaries of fraud and highlights the extremity of the problem facing the donating public: if one could not be entirely certain of a local charity, how could one discern between the national organizations that undertook fund-raising for international disasters?Footnote ¹² That, at the start of the twenty-first century, charities, and their critics, remain preoccupied with authenticating business practices as a signifier of legitimacy and competition highlights just how important the innovations of the Victorian period were.Footnote ¹³

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In his pioneering article on charity and the Victorians, Brian Harrison noted that snobbery and self-aggrandizement combined to make the financial administration of charitable management, the “grubby aspects” of philanthropy, a source of waste and duplication. Further, a new category of crime emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, “charity fraud,” whereby smiling swindlers quietly misappropriated charitable funds. According to Harrison, these frauds were rarely exposed for fear of frightening off subscribers.Footnote ¹⁴ Harrison was laboring under a misapprehension. Since the publication (and revision) of that essay, patronage and networking practices among charitable committee members have received considerable critical attention, but charity fraud, variously conceived, remains little understood.Footnote ¹⁵ The Charity Commission, established in 1853, dealt only with endowed charities, that is, charitable trusts set up by wills, rather than those that raised money by direct appeal to the public.Footnote ¹⁶ Cases of fraudulent fund-raising brought to court generally fell under arcane Tudor vagrancy laws and were overwhelmingly at the petty end of the scale.Footnote ¹⁷ Ignored by law enforcers and beyond the remit of state control, the bureaucratic management of charitable associations, relief funds, and myriad small organizations was left to the scrutiny of a self-regulating marketplace at the turn of the twentieth century.

As Anna Clark argued so persuasively, the history of regulation and reform bears a close relationship to that of scandal.Footnote ¹⁸ The philanthropic marketplace was no exception and, as this essay demonstrates, relied heavily on allegations of financial or administrative abuse to define best practice. The public had long turned to the press to make the complex world of finance “imaginatively visible,” to act as adjudicator of “trustworthy” financial systems and, through the circulation of information (in some cases, rumor), to affect changes to financial practices.Footnote ¹⁹ In the absence of robust legislation, fraud had to be presented and proclaimed—a process that increasingly raised issues of measurable accountability and performance, or effectiveness, to identify and define boundaries between the licit and illicit. In this context, “authentic” charities urged the public to give donations less from their heart, and turn instead to careful discrimination based on identifying sound financial practice.

By the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the number of charitable schemes operating across Britain had exploded. In his survey of English philanthropy, David Owen estimated that London charities alone expended up to seven million pounds annually by the late 1860s.Footnote ²⁰ As the Times speculated in 1888, however, a “handsome share” of annual donations simply “leak[ed] away.” Donors had no machinery for discerning the “wholesome” charity from the “shifty or shiftless,” a discriminatory language more commonly applied to recipients. That the newspaper turned to this anxiety in the month before Christmas was no accident: the festive season, the peak of the charitable campaign calendar, highlighted the sheer number of fund-raising schemes and the inability of the public to gauge their legitimate expenditure of funds.Footnote ²¹ Correspondence to the editor noted that the public discriminated between charities on the basis of patrons or well-known figures on committees, an inadequate safeguard as few patrons, or even committee members, were engaged in the everyday operation of charities.Footnote ²² Many charities, in fact, were “altogether unreal” in that they amounted to “one-man” organizations. At the other end of the spectrum, large and “splendid” institutions pleaded longevity and size as guarantors of credibility.Footnote ²³

Nationally, the most vigorous regulatory agent was the COS. Founded in 1869, it had well known ambitions to “rationalize” the multiplicity of overlapping charitable agencies and apply supposedly “scientific” principles to the distribution of relief and charity.Footnote ²⁴ In the former it made little headway over the ensuing decades, and by pursuing the latter, it would eventually find itself locked in an ultimately losing battle with quite divergent philosophies, notably Fabianism.Footnote ²⁵ However, as David Owen noted, one achievement of the COS over its lifetime was its “war on charity malpractice” in which it vowed to police fund-raisers as diverse as the begging letter writer and the “fly-by-night” charity.Footnote ²⁶ To this end, the COS employed a variety of regulatory tools that, in the process, helped to define what “fraud” and “legitimacy” in the context of charity actually meant.

First, the Society produced two separate publications aimed at guiding the benevolent through the philanthropic field. The Charities Register and Digest, issued for sale from 1882, followed in a line of similar attempts to provide basic information on assorted provident agencies, including Sampson Low's One Shilling Guide to the Charities of London (published periodically from 1850), Herbert Fry's Shilling Guide to the Charities of London (annually from 1863) and Thomas Hawksley's Charities of London (1869).Footnote ²⁷ While acknowledging this lineage, the COS version was far more comprehensive. Fry's first edition had 175 pages while his 55th, issued in 1919, had 359; already in 1890, the COS register contained almost 1,000 pages and boasted a national remit. The register gave details of the aims and management structure of known charities and ostensibly invited would-be benefactors to make independent judgments as to which of the listed institutions might best carry out the work they wished to see done. The introduction outlined the COS philosophy and urged donors to give only to those agencies that conformed to it. “A list of charities,” it noted, “without some knowledge of the modes in which their benefits ought to be turned to account, is like a pharmacopoeia without knowledge of the elements of medicine.”Footnote ²⁸

While the Register had its uses, the COS also produced a more explicit “Cautionary Card” from at least the early 1870s. This was a “blacklist” of charities considered beyond the pale of charitable support, which was privately distributed, chiefly to COS subscribers.Footnote ²⁹ A charity could be included on the Cautionary Card for numerous, not always clear, reasons. The knowledge base of both the register and the Cautionary Card was nonetheless the same. Since its inception, the COS had operated an “Enquiry Department” at its central office in London, which was closely supervised by the COS secretary (for most of the relevant period, C. S. Loch) and employed a number of visitors who, as the name suggests, investigated charitable causes to gauge their worth.Footnote ³⁰ These visitors then produced reports of varying length and detail on individual charities that could be sent in response to public requests for information. Such requests might be made from a variety of motives. To some correspondents, it seemed almost habitual to refer all appeals received to the authority of the COS; for others, only especially suspicious circulars were queried; and for many subscribers, the COS was contacted only in instances where the appellant's name was recognized from the Cautionary Card.Footnote ³¹

The greatest number of queries Loch received was in response to another ingeniously deployed weapon in the COS arsenal: the press “advertisement.” Concentrating on charities the COS considered the most egregious, generally prominent “one-man” outfits, this practice involved placing a simple notice, usually in the classified columns of the Times, along the following lines: “Persons receiving appeals from [named individual and/or institution] are requested before responding to them to communicate with the Secretary, Charity Organisation Society, 15, Buckingham street, Adelphi.”Footnote ³² This prompted two responses. First, it tended to attract a flood of correspondence from those who had been the targets of the charity's appeals, enabling the COS to put its case against their continued support privately and directly.Footnote ³³ Second, it planted a seed in the minds of readers, who might never get in touch with the COS, that the given charity was, in some degree, untrustworthy. Both techniques, the COS hoped, would lead to a reduction in the charity's income. This advertising reached only a limited section of the population, Times readers, but it was an influential section, including those whose net worth attracted constant charitable appeals, and who were likely to be solicited to lend their names to charity committees.Footnote ³⁴ From the COS's point of view, it was significant that such publicity could be achieved without giving the “advertised” charity any basis on which to engage in lengthy, and perhaps counterproductive, libel action. The infamous Barnardo arbitration case of 1877, which exonerated “Dr.” Barnardo of COS charges of misappropriation of funds, had probably been as damaging to the COS's reputation as Barnardo's, if not more so. The “advertisement” that raised public suspicion but made no allegation against persons or organizations was a neat and effective trick.Footnote ³⁵

This reflects the extent to which, Barnardo notwithstanding, the press rather than the courts became the main public arena in which charity fraud was combated, even as it was also (at least partially) perpetrated there.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, the COS soon had a journalistic comrade in arms. From 1876, Henry Labouchere published the weekly newspaper Truth, a curious mix of society gossip and investigative exposures, with an estimated weekly circulation, by the 1880s, of 30,000.Footnote ³⁷ Labouchere was by far the most proactive and risk-taking agent in terms of publicizing supposed charity frauds. An initial, typically gung-ho, series from its first issues named several alleged “Charity-mongers of modern Babylon,” many already known to the COS.Footnote ³⁸ Among the concerns Truth targeted as unworthy of public support were the ubiquitous begging letter imposter and the “padrone” of the “Italian slave trade.”Footnote ³⁹ As the paper pointed out, however, successful as these practices were in extracting money, they were “excelled by the ingenious managers and secretaries of certain sham Associations and Missions, the nominal objects of which have a larger attractiveness than the diseases and poverty of the letter writers.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Among many “one-man bands” singled out for opprobrium were, at the larger end of the scale, Dr “Bernardo” [sic] and Reuben May's Golden Lane Mission in Great Arthur Street, and, perhaps more “fly-by-night” in nature, a German named William Christian who ran the Middlesex Soup Kitchen and James Colmer, who operated a Society for Finding Employment for Distressed Gentlewomen as Printers.Footnote ⁴¹ The series signed off with the hope that the examples adduced would “serve as beacons” to warn a benevolent public against the “quicksands” of craft, deception, and villainy in charitable practice more generally.Footnote ⁴²

Although the personnel of COS and Truth cooperated closely, Labouchere's newspaper tended to publish and risk damnation in a manner that the more cautious COS avoided. Labouchere was sued for libel on numerous occasions, although few charity cases appear to have gone against him.Footnote ⁴³ Nervous editors to whom they communicated cases of fraud frequently pressed the COS for legal guarantees of indemnity.Footnote ⁴⁴ Other newspaper editors might seek advice from the COS on potentially fraudulent appeals from charities, and carry COS advertisements; the same editors might, frustratingly, continue to carry the appeals and adverts of charities on the COS blacklist.Footnote ⁴⁵ In contrast, Truth traded on scandal and was sufficiently dedicated to the exposure of fraudulent charities that it eventually began producing its own Cautionary List.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is worth noting that some newspapers carried clippings from Truth or reported Truth's investigations, thereby advertising suspicious charities from a distance and without fear of litigation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Not surprisingly, the COS harnessed Labouchere's paper and on at least one occasion, discussions about preparing a file specifically for exposure in Truth took place.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Loch told one inquirer, “we are in no way officially responsible for the Truth book, but the editor constantly appeals to us for information, and is no doubt guided by it to a considerable extent.”Footnote ⁴⁹

An active process of exposure, driven by two zealous national institutions, was therefore clearly in place. The question arises, however, as to what, precisely, the COS and Truth was exposing and with what ends in mind. It needs to be emphasized that the terms on which the COS and Truth cried fraud, while fairly well defined, were also broad. The question was not so much what constituted fraud per se but rather, as Truth asked, what constituted a “real charity?”Footnote ⁵⁰ First, according to the COS and Truth, a charity needed to have a committee overseeing its fund-raising and relief work. This had to meet regularly and could not consist simply of respectable persons who lent their name to the enterprise without ever exercising functions of oversight. Second, the charity had to account for all the money it received and expended via a regularly published, readily available, detailed and, ideally, independently audited balance sheet. Third, the proportion of money expended on administration costs and other non-relief expenses ought not to be too high, although this point was difficult to define precisely. While other criteria might be taken into account in judging a charity, particularly by the COS (the level of overlap in provision of services, for example), these were the key facets of a charitable institution that could be considered “legitimate.” Any institution, however well intentioned, that did not conform to them could be publicly branded, in some measure, as fraudulent.Footnote ⁵¹

To an extent this policing process also worked in reverse. Great Arthur Street Mission's eventual adoption of COS-approved financial practices after Reuben May's death, for example, saw it removed from the COS cautionary card after thirty years in 1911, even as the COS continued to regard its work as a “quaint survival of primitive Christianity” for which there was no real need.Footnote ⁵² Of course, many large charitable schemes already had such accounting mechanisms in place. The Duke of Sutherland's war relief fund, operating on the Ottoman side in the Russo-Turkish war as the Stafford House Committee from 1878, produced externally audited accounts and detailed expenditures: every invoice and expense could be justified.Footnote ⁵³ Yet expecting smaller charities to emulate this example put them in a double bind: auditing and administrative procedures required significant resources, while, at the same time, “accountability” demanded that agencies demonstrate minimal operational costs and that the greater share of donations went directly to intended recipients.Footnote ⁵⁴

In any case, the COS's mechanisms for authenticating charities caused some confusion among the donor community. Loch received numerous letters from benefactors of particular institutions plaintively wondering on what grounds their favorite charity had been placed on the Cautionary Card. As he explained to one correspondent, names on the card were not to be taken necessarily as rogues; it was, he noted, rare to come across institutions that were completely nonexistent, and many were on the list not because any definite criminality could be detected but because they were grossly mismanaged.Footnote ⁵⁵ The nuances of these distinctions may not always have been clear to the benevolent public, either in the stark cautionary lists or the sensational press denunciations. However, the culture of suspicion they engendered meant that even small voluntary organizations were increasingly expected by sections of the philanthropic public to adopt the infrastructure of “real charities” outlined above. Not having a committee or failing to publish detailed accounts was gradually established as suspect choices, allowing space for misappropriation of funds to take place. Charities that satisfactorily met COS or Truth criteria, however, might expect promotion in the very publications that exposed frauds and urged caution. Both the COS's Charities Register and Truth's Cautionary List juxtaposed identification of fraudulent outfits with advertisements for well-regulated and transparent organizations. The exposure of fraudulent practices in the charitable marketplace established the parameters of “legitimate” charity: it was two branches of the same work.Footnote ⁵⁶

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The social ills of Britain's “Modern Babylons” made charitable intervention necessary, but the charities who claimed to address such problems were increasingly distant, diffuse, and difficult to sift.Footnote ⁵⁷ From the perspective of the potential benefactor, who wished to transform the “love of self” into “God's love for all” via the philanthropic donation, the navigation of such a vast marketplace must have been bewildering.Footnote ⁵⁸ To put this in perspective, the examination of one case study highlights the complex process of identifying, proclaiming, and preventing charitable fraud at the turn of the twentieth century. As the case highlights, the blurred boundaries of poor administration and financial malpractice left donors vulnerable to unscrupulous fraudsters who, ostensibly, ran charitable schemes while creaming profits for personal use.Footnote ⁵⁹

In March 1908 the Reverend Hugh Lloyd Jones (Lloyd Jones), Birkenhead, warned Herbert Lee Jackson Jones (Lee Jones), Liverpool, that he intended to sue him and his printer for defamation of character and libel. Lee Jones invited the Reverend to “proceed at pleasure” and forwarded the name and address of his solicitor.Footnote ⁶⁰ The legal threat was the culmination of a three-year feud between the men, much of which Lee Jones conducted through his charity's journal, the Welldoer, and letters to the local press. Lloyd Jones operated a charity, the Gospel News Mission, also known as Elgin Street Mission and, prior to that, United Church Mission, in Birkenhead. Operational for around fifteen years, the Gospel News Mission purportedly provided breakfasts for poor children, parcels for poor widows, Christmas festivities and winter fuel for poor families in Birkenhead. Lee Jones's charge against Lloyd Jones was that he had never been ordained and that he misappropriated the charity's funds. Lloyd Jones was by no means the only target of Lee Jones's suspicion. In 1905, Lee Jones had a “blacklist” of six “discreditable” charities operating in the Liverpool and Wirral region: three “missions” and three children's homes.Footnote ⁶¹ Lee Jones also ran a charity, the Liverpool Food Association (renamed the “Liverpool Food and Betterment Association” in 1898 and “The League of Welldoers” (LWD) in 1908), founded in 1893, delivering welfare services in the dockland area of North Liverpool.Footnote ⁶² Similarity between the Gospel News Mission and LWD increased when Lloyd Jones changed his signature from “Hugh L. Jones” to “H. Lloyd Jones” around 1906: Lee Jones was known as H. Lee J. Jones. The two men, both in their thirties at the time of the scandal, were the founders, figureheads, and administrators of their respective charities and in direct competition for donations in the province. The LWD was a large and relatively successful outfit by regional standards, constantly expanding its remit in the first decade of the twentieth century, although the charity's debts were well publicized.Footnote ⁶³

Despite his “blacklist,” Lee Jones declared a “special” interest in Lloyd Jones's exposure: if the two men were apt to be confused in the public mind, Lee Jones hoped public castigation of Lloyd Jones would distance the LWD from its competitor, the Gospel News Mission.Footnote ⁶⁴ First, Lee Jones called the authenticity of “Reverend” Jones's ministerial status into question.Footnote ⁶⁵ Jones also mistrusted the changing and concurrent use of multiple names for a single charity (it was “not nicely” suggestive) and the absence of any public affiliation between the Gospel News Mission and a recognized denomination. Jones could also call on other allegations in the public domain against the “Reverend.” An article in the satirical journal Porcupine in February 1905 cast doubt on Lloyd Jones's credibility, asking how donations to his Mission were spent.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1907 Lloyd Jones sought a reduction in a debt order only for the case to be thrown out, the judge concluding that Jones ran a business disguised as a charity in order to cheat his creditors. Lloyd Jones appeared to have pocketed ninety percent of the previous year's Mission funds for personal use. Despite the judge's description of Lloyd Jones as a predator upon the public, it was not within his remit to bring formal charges.Footnote ⁶⁷ When Lloyd Jones next tried to fund-raise in Birkenhead Park, however, he met with public hostility and required police protection.Footnote ⁶⁸ Lloyd Jones's associates in the Mission were hardly worthy characters: one of his fund-raisers, James Baxter, carried previous convictions for collecting donations for an entirely bogus charity.Footnote ⁶⁹

The crux of Lee Jones's accusations of fraud rested on the opacity of the Mission's balance sheets. Accounts for the year ending 30 September 1907 showed that the Gospel News Mission raised more than £170, sixty-five percent of which was disbursed on rent, coal, gas, cleaning, and Lloyd Jones's “allowance.” The remaining thirty-five percent went to “general expenses,” into which costs for printing, postage, “incidentals,” furniture, the distribution of free meals, and outings for poor children factored. As Lee Jones observed, the (limited) objective of the charity was casually “lumped” with general expenses. Lloyd Jones's annual “allowance” was five pounds more (£65) than the expenditure on “general” costs although Jones lived with his wife and five (soon to be six) children at the mission, supported by a domestic servant, and he undoubtedly benefitted from the “expenses” on rent, fuel and so on.Footnote ⁷⁰ As Lee Jones observed, it was impossible to verify the authenticity of the reverend's claims to distribute over five thousand meals per year. Two members of the “committee” rather than independent auditors signed the Gospel News Mission's accounts. That one of the committee members, James McKinley, was barely literate hardly boosted faith in the administration of the Gospel News Mission.Footnote ⁷¹ Transparency did not improve when, in 1910, Lloyd Jones appointed his nineteen-year-old son, a grocer's assistant, as honorary secretary of the mission.Footnote ⁷²

Despite Lee Jones's collaboration with the Liverpool police in investigating several charities at this time, his efforts did not result in legal proceedings for fraud.Footnote ⁷³ Neither Jones nor the police had any grounds on which to prosecute Lloyd Jones, or others, in courts of law because the organizations under scrutiny ostensibly disbursed some charity, albeit a paltry percentage of funds procured. It is notable that one of the few successful legal cases against a charity's fraudulent financial dealing at this time, the “Shaftesbury Institute,” a supposed children's home and mission in Manchester, resulted from charges of begging under false pretenses, brought under archaic vagrancy law, against one woman aided and abetted by the charity's committee, rather than scrutiny of the organization's administrative practices.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the absence of police prosecution, Jones turned to the press to discredit Lloyd Jones and denounce his practice as scandalous.

Since 1905, Lee Jones had pressed editors of the city's papers Evening Express, Liverpool Courier, Daily Post, and Mercury with recommendations that they develop a localized “blacklist” to prevent newspapers inadvertently promoting suspect charities by running appeals or stories about the charity, copy that was often submitted, as Lee Jones knew only too well, by the charity rather than independent reporters. The fact that philanthropic news articles provided such easy (unverified) copy for newspaper editors thwarted others' attempts to combat fraudulent practice. Other charities that Jones investigated at this time, such as the Bethesda Children's Homes and White Rock Children's Home, frequently sent photographs of smiling waifs with cheery stories of “good works” for inclusion in the press, a process that simultaneously legitimated and promoted the organization.Footnote ⁷⁵ It was high time, Jones urged, that local and regional charities were “placed upon a proper footing.”Footnote ⁷⁶ That Jones's appeal effectively duplicated national “blacklist” schemes, most notably, those run by the COS, illustrates Jones's doubt about the value of schemes that demanded members of the public be proactive in seeking information about charities they sponsored. Similarly, Jones's lobbying of newspapers to take a lead in denouncing fraud replicated Labouchere's utilization of Truth as a “beacon” against deception but demonstrated the need for local responses to local charities. His action raised the very pressing problem of how far the public trusted a charity's legitimacy simply because it was local and, imaginatively at least, familiar. The vast majority of donors gave to charitable schemes on impulse rather than decisions made in full awareness of “sound” financial mechanisms.Footnote ⁷⁷

Jones was exasperated that his previous warnings to newspaper editors against specific charities had been ignored. Indeed, unless supported by the police, anxieties about “fraud” or “misappropriation” were difficult to authenticate. Nevertheless, Jones's petitioning bore some success, with some editors rejecting copy from organizations on his blacklist.Footnote ⁷⁸ The material rejected by editors was usually balance sheets that bore no evidence of independent audit, or unauthenticated reports of recipient relief. This suggests an increasing awareness among newspaper editors of mechanisms for testing an organization's credibility.Footnote ⁷⁹ The difficulty for Lee Jones was that newspaper editors were neither consistent nor courts of law. When financial reports appeared legitimate enough, newspapers tended to run with the story. Certainly, following the run of disastrous publicity in 1907, Lloyd Jones staged a Gospel News Mission Christmas party that he claimed was in collaboration with well-established, national organizations, notably the Band of Hope and Salvation Army. This lent Jones the sheen of legitimacy although the credibility of his claims concerning collaboration with other organizations is doubtful.Footnote ⁸⁰

Lloyd Jones was relatively confident in his enterprise although he failed to pursue his action against Lee Jones for libel. His assurance rested on the lack of clarity over legitimacy in the charitable marketplace. Who, he asked, had authorized Lee Jones as “cock of the walk” to legitimate charities? Charitable “fraud” was subjective and Lloyd Jones exercised “no more tomfoolery” in philanthropic endeavor than Lee Jones “or anyone else.” It was “scandalous” that Lee Jones should accuse him of fraud while “squandering” the funds of the LWD and failing to publish a list of subscribers.Footnote ⁸¹ The LWD ran highly successful fund-raising bazaars: what, asked Lloyd Jones, happened to all that money? Both charities claimed the support of a committee but were, in practice, the respective empires of Jones and Jones. Both men lived in the headquarters of their organization. Lloyd Jones suspected that Lee Jones's energetic persecution of small charities was to disguise shortcomings in the LWD He had a point.

The boundaries of legitimacy and fraud were opaque and the public had little machinery by which to discriminate. The Liverpool charity market was crowded and highly competitive.Footnote ⁸² Despite his increasing efforts to toe the bureaucratic line, Lee Jones was investigated by the COS on several occasions. From the outset, the Liverpool branch of the COS had kept a watchful eye on the charity's operations, especially as Jones, in his early twenties, was relatively unknown to the city's elite. The Anglican Venerable Archdeacon Madden and the Liberal MP William Rathbone, for instance, were suspicious of Lee Jones's motives (to “play shop” in the slums) and his “promiscuous” giving during the early years of the LWD's operation.Footnote ⁸³ Lee Jones came to the attention of the national COS in 1905 following an inquiry from Charles Dowding, a vicar from the Lake District who thought a newspaper advertisement for the LWD read “fishily.” Loch made inquiries to the Liverpool branch, even asking if Lee Jones had anything to do with Lloyd Jones. Although they found nothing untoward with the LWD, the COS could not recommend it because the charity's debts meant it was not self-supporting.Footnote ⁸⁴ The difference with Lee Jones was that, unlike Lloyd Jones, far from profiting from the charity, he kept it functioning by sinking his and his mother's private capital into the venture.Footnote ⁸⁵

For Lee Jones, the exposure and policing of local organizations in the local press was pivotal to raising public awareness, not only of “discreditable” schemes but also of the very need to discriminate. In this sense, his zeal for exposing suspect charities was self-legitimating. By identifying what was wrong with other charities, Lee Jones implicitly stated what was right about his. This was not lost on other organizations. Following initial press features on Lloyd Jones in 1905, the secretary of the Birkenhead Cinderella Society, a welfare scheme for children, wrote to Lee Jones declaring his intention to “take up the pen” against the “Reverend.” In the same letter, he “justified” the operation of the Cinderella Society and expressed “fraternity” with Lee Jones.Footnote ⁸⁶ Such correspondence suggests an anxiety to authenticate charitable enterprise, partially at least, by participating in the exposure of others.Footnote ⁸⁷

The parochial conflict between Jones and Jones illuminates the violent controversy and libelous dispute that could exist between charity entrepreneurs at the turn of the twentieth century. Immediately significant at a regional level, the case study also highlights the voluntary bureaucratic machinery for identifying fraud, validating charitable practice and regulating finance, which had emerged piecemeal within the charitable marketplace over the previous thirty years. Lee Jones's motivation in pursuing “suspect” charities may have been self-interested but his campaigns borrowed heavily from mechanisms of voluntary administrative scrutiny that had emerged at a national level since the 1870s. That he appropriated such mechanisms on behalf of a presumably ignorant public suggests the limited success of these modes of scrutiny. Nevertheless, the case demonstrates that the COS's parameters for identifying and proclaiming fraud, especially the scrutiny of charitable organizations' administration, were increasingly normative.

While a notion of “charitable legitimacy” was diffused repeatedly by Truth and the COS, there were several factors, as the “Reverend” Lloyd Jones case attests, that prevented the complete excision of fraud from the charity marketplace on a national scale. First, there was the remarkable ingenuity and adaptability of would-be fraudsters who wore the sheen of respectability by gathering a nominal committee and publishing some kind of balance sheet. At least one of Truth's warnings to the naively benevolent actually offered reassurance to the imposter: “So long as you are content, patient, and not too greedy,” it noted, “you need hardly fear scandal.”Footnote ⁸⁸ This may also explain why the COS was careful in the distribution of its detailed reports on charities: correspondents who requested a report were questioned closely about their motivation for doing so, for fear that COS investigations would give clues to the would-be swindler in avoiding detection.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is notable that Lee Jones's pursuit of Lloyd Jones may have raised public suspicion for a time but was hardly successful in ridding the Northwest of a resourceful fraudster. In 1914, the national magazine John Bull catalogued Lloyd Jones's “astonishing” record of chicanery, dating from at least 1892.Footnote ⁹⁰ At the time of publication, Lloyd Jones had moved premises and was running Saint Jude's Mission Church. Once again, he appeared to have the apparatus of an authentic charity, a meeting room, “children's home,” and balance sheet available on request. On inspection, these were each of dubious legitimacy: there were no children in the home, no flock at the Mission, and accounts were authenticated by the secretary and treasurer of the Mission, roles filled at that time by Lloyd Jones himself.Footnote ⁹¹

Indeed, the second problem facing the presumptive regulators of the charity marketplace was the continued absence of legislation to deal with fraud in the charity sector. Tudor vagrancy law was hardly appropriate for regulating sophisticated, ever-changing modern fund-raising practices and the Charity Commission could barely cope with its limited remit of regulating endowed charities. Those promoting regulation of the charitable market were divided on the means to achieve it. While the COS lobbied the home secretary for an extension of the Charity Commission's powers, Truth echoed Liberal MP Joseph Chamberlain's criticism of the “irresponsible body” and called for its powers to be “pared down.”Footnote ⁹² The shortcomings of the Charity Commission did not stifle calls for state regulation of the voluntary charity sector, although an attempt by Lord Shaftesbury to introduce legislation to “prevent frauds on charitable funds” in 1873 was thwarted. Members of Parliament felt that the proposed accounting regulations would be too onerous to what they still, anachronistically, imagined the voluntary sector to be: small groups of benevolent women in country parishes. Moreover, opponents to the bill deemed that protecting “fools” who were taken in by rogues should not take precedence over allowing genuine charities to flourish without excessive state regulation.Footnote ⁹³ Parliament, forced to act against fraud in other sectors, remained unwilling to regulate the charity marketplace, perhaps mindful that a kind of moral economy, overseen by the COS and others, was developing in lieu of any such action.Footnote ⁹⁴

Yet the self-appointed arbiters of that moral economy continued to lobby for legislative backing and stricter judiciary.Footnote ⁹⁵ In its “charity-mongers” series of articles, Truth had noted “Socially as well as financially the injury worked by fraudulent charities is so serious, and yet so very difficult of detection, that the necessity for legislative interference is unquestionable.” As the newspaper reflected, manipulators of frauds were “among the cleverest scamps of the day,” and knew just how far they could go to escape the law. Shaftesbury had continued to press for a charity fraud bill that would allow any subscriber of £20 to a voluntary fund to summon the charity manager before a court to reveal accounts and expenditure, but Truth thought it unlikely the bill would get parliamentary time that year.Footnote ⁹⁶Truth and the COS repeated the call for charity registration or licensing and a charity inspector on several further occasions, at one point stressing that this was not suggested “out of tenderness for those who waste their money on such institutions,” but rather for the sake of intended beneficiaries of donations who were the “real victims” of misappropriated or squandered funds.Footnote ⁹⁷ Both Truth and the COS compared the situation extant in the charity sector with that in private companies, imagining that much more stringent legislation was in place to deal with fraud and embezzlement in the financial sector; although historians disagree on how effective these laws were.Footnote ⁹⁸

There were obvious and pressing reasons for the COS and Truth to repeat calls for statutory regulation. As a charity, the COS, like Lee Jones, had a clear financial interest in attempting to shut out allegedly fraudulent competitor organizations from the charitable marketplace, but also took on a considerable financial burden in doing so. If the state were to regulate the sector, the COS might be relieved of some of this outlay. Moreover, an 1890 Truth article pointed out the potentially high costs to the newspaper editor and proprietor of denouncing alleged fraudsters. If the recently exposed Walter Austin, head of the London Cottage Mission went ahead with threatened libel action, Labouchere lamented “I have still before me a certain expenditure of many hundreds—probably thousands—of pounds, the prospect of recovering any of which, assuming everything in my favor, is extremely remote.” For this reason, he went on, “no man in his senses” would “make a public charge of dishonesty” against such fraudsters, leaving the average “charity-swindler” little to fear from exposure in the press.Footnote ⁹⁹

Further to parliamentarians’ “fools” remarks, the longer a publicity campaign against a supposed charity fraudster went on, the more frustrated campaigners became with a public that gave money without asking questions or heeding warnings. As a former superintendent of police who thwarted a bogus Manchester mission in 1888 later reflected, many people sent large donations annually to institutions they knew nothing about when “a little inquiry” would often show that a considerable portion of their money was “squandered” in expenses, and that the intended recipients received only “the pittance which is left.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Likewise, charting Lloyd Jones's history, John Bull proclaimed him an “imposter of the first rank.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ That it did so in 1914, over twenty years after Jones's first scam and almost ten years after the local scandal, suggested that however much the public was alerted to rogue philanthropists, they were woefully susceptible to imposters who, with little fear of legal prosecution, could make considerable profit from perpetual reinvention in an ever-proliferating and unregulated charitable market. By 1915, Lloyd Jones had moved to another address in Birkenhead and was operating the British Tract Enterprise, ostensibly raising money for soldiers at the front by selling soldiers' wallets and assorted pamphlets.Footnote ¹⁰² As early as 1908, the Reverend Samuel Hawkes urged Lee Jones to abandon his efforts at pursuing Lloyd Jones and the purveyors of the Bethesda Mission and Home for Friendless Girls: the police were impotent and both cases had been “so fully” set before the public, that if people were wronged by the fraudsters, they “deserved to suffer.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Thus, while continuing to call vainly for legislation, independent agencies that sought to regulate charities placed some responsibility for charitable fraud on the shoulders of the public. Truth increasingly assigned blame for fraudsters' success to these unquestioning donors, particularly “early subscribers by whose help the swindle is started”; those who had their attention called to the truth by a body like the COS but went on giving regardless; and committed annual subscribers who never received any financial report that would “bear investigation”. Such outright “negligence” made donors culpable in the perpetuation of fraud.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Donors, the COS told readers of its Charities Register, had to learn to discriminate not only between “useful” charities but also those that were well regulated.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In a legally unregulated but highly public and information-saturated charity marketplace, the onus was on charitable donors to act responsibly and to exercise what is now termed “intelligent giving.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

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Fraud debates and scandals raised essential questions of legitimacy, authenticity and respectability. By narrowing the range of possible answers to these questions, the COS and Truth, as well as those policing the parochial boundaries like Lee Jones, introduced normative capitalistic approaches to what had often been considered a pre-modern form of exchange. The alms giving of old did not entail such publicly monitored accounts or the demonstration of efficient relief. This market logic entailed a degree of caveat emptor assessment of charities by the givers. Yet it is not evident that this drive towards regulatory practices responded to genuine public anxieties. Rather, regulation emerged as a mechanism to control an expanding but highly competitive market devoid of normal regulatory dimensions, enabling individual organizations to proclaim virtue through advertising ‘best practice’ and identify fraud by pointing at those who did not conform.

Press scandals served as an expurgatory exercise through which purity and order could be reestablished, albeit tentatively. To patrol charitable administration as a unique, morally pure, sphere of activity was to set tight limits to the range of people and expertise allowed to compete for public generosity. Paradoxically, it also entailed a more jaundiced worldview in which the hydra of fraud would always grow new heads and false identities, making policing a necessary but thankless task. This was recognized by those who did the “cleaning up.” After the conviction of William Harper Bradshaw, “one of the most disgraceful cases in the fertile annals of charitable imposture,” who ran a seaside children's home, ostensibly, but unknowingly patronized by several peers and MPs, Truth editorialized “The charity world is full of Bradshaws. I have at least half a dozen of them under my observation at the present moment.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Later, recalling the exposure of Walter Austin, it complained that “as soon as one is down another springs up in his place.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

This lament did not entail a call for the abolition of charity and one could think about Truth's efforts as merely a way of limiting fraud to what accountants now call “an optimal level,” the threshold of tolerated abuse below which further regulation would stifle innovation and enterprise, while allowing “legitimate” charities to grow.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The idea of the market as, in Stephen Hopgood's phrase, “the most efficient mechanism” for meeting public needs was in the ascendant then as it is now, but the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regulators sought to harness ideas of a “good marketplace” in order to close it to the “discreditable.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the story of Lee Jones versus Lloyd Jones, it is unclear whether the so-called clergyman delivered any of the relief for which he obtained funding. His status as a “one-man band” and his lack of transparency and accountability attracted suspicion. Ironically, these were the same reasons that the COS repeatedly investigated his adversary, Lee Jones. The COS and Truth attempted to shape a moral economy for the charity market but, in the absence of adequate criminal law, their main focus was formal and fetishized bureaucracy. In order to flourish, charities increasingly tapped into the idea of the philanthropic marketplace as uniquely virtuous in intent, if not in practice.

This essay revises the historiography of Victorian charities, which has tended to take a class-based or “recipient” perspective or an “invention of the social” focus, by addressing the call issued by Harrison, first in the 1960s and again, in the 1980s, to consider the “grubby aspects” of charity financial management. The vitality of the charity market prior to the First World War (which generated a new wave of international organizations for charitable fund-raising) was intrinsically rooted, paradoxically, in the limited and self-monitored but, nevertheless, dynamic development of financial and administrative bureaucracy. That the voluntary sector remains preoccupied in the twenty-first century with demonstrating legitimacy through auditing and accounting practices illustrates the significance of late Victorian and Edwardian attempts to establish bureaucratic norms.