It has been some time now since John Bossy made the important point that in the patristic and medieval world charity was a social virtue, designating an ideal of integration, harmony, and peace that was embodied, however imperfectly, in the sacramental rituals and the social practices of Christian communities. In modern society, charitable giving is above all the heroic act of an individual, perhaps spurred on by religion, conscience, or social concern, but only contingently related to either the reproduction or imagination of social order; its meanings as a social act are diluted, secondary, and obscure. By contrast, what Bossy's analysis allows us to see is that in the world from which early modern Europe emerged, charity was not simply a theological idea, an action, or even a type of institution per se, but rather a kind of “thick” ethical concept through which people attempted to imagine, organize, and regulate their social existence and institutions in practices that extended far beyond almsgiving.Footnote 1

More broadly, then, early modern charity could be thought of as among those concepts whose use is highly context-dependent and irreducible to a core principle of application, but is rather specified through its embodiment in action; what it meant to be charitable took on concrete form through the use of that term in describing and inventing certain practices of sociability—almsgiving, hospitality, fund-raising help-ales, or debt forgiveness, for example—which then provided a pattern and a norm for further action under the same description. The conceptualization of charity resided in its application within the particular “language games” of description and evaluation that were grounded in practices of sociability. Built up through use and embedded in practices, it was open to modification, restriction, and extension through the way it was or was not applied in practical settings; through changes in cognate ethical and religious concepts; and through changes in and reconceptualizations of practices of sociability.Footnote 2 The pithy title of Daniel Defoe's pamphlet Giving Alms No Charity (1704) illustrates something of this rather well, and, indeed, the centuries preceding Defoe, and the one following, witnessed extensive discussion of how the concept of charity was fittingly to be applied in various social circumstances. The result throughout the early modern period was a difficult interplay of change and continuity in the concept itself and in its place in practices of sociability. The aim of this article is to map the configuration of the moral, social, and theological dimensions of charity by analyzing the public statements made about charity in the context of the early eighteenth-century charity-school movement as applications of inherited structures of thought to practical concerns surrounding the social and moral discipline of the poor. It aims further to describe the effects of this application in the practices of sociability and power relationships involved. The project of charity-school education was indeed one of the major venues for statements about charity through to the 1730s; the practices of sociability and power relationships that were formed in this context involved poor parents, their children, and the disciplinary apparatus of the schools, intended for the good of the poor. My analysis uses primarily the homiletic literature on charity promoting the schools and the administrative records of the schools to elucidate reciprocally the discursive and practical dimensions of the charity schools as a form of social action.

While I focus on some of the same homiletic literature as Donna Andrew drew on in her important study of conceptions of charity in eighteenth-century England, my approach here is rather different. Andrew was concerned, as I am, with the philanthropic aspects of eighteenth-century charity, those projects that aimed at the reform and improvement of beneficiaries for the sake of the public interest rather than simple relief and amelioration of immediate need. Her analysis of eighteenth-century sermons on charity provides what she terms the “background” to the increasing numbers of such projects toward the middle of the eighteenth century by tracing a shift from an emphasis on charitable giving as a virtuous response to the just claim of the needy on the property of the rich to a concern that charity be responsible to the ends of essentially mercantile policies concerned with the production of national wealth through the discipline and well-being of labor. According to Andrew, this shift is indicative of the broader social sensibilities to which clergy were appealing in their sermons on charity, most of which were preached to raise subscriptions to various charity societies, sensibilities containing “a remarkable energy that translated itself into the foundation of many charities” in the eighteenth century.Footnote 3 But where she attempted to decipher in sermons shifts in mentalities toward charitable giving across the eighteenth century and across a variety of charitable projects in order to explain the growth of philanthropic projects in general, I aim to explicate the structure of a conceptual vocabulary as it was embodied in the concrete project of providing education to poor children.Footnote 4

Certainly, as Andrew argues, the charity schools were very much a matter of “policing” the poor (in the early modern sense); mercantile concerns with the aggrandizement of national wealth inflected and infused the various disciplinary aims regarding labor that had pervaded the administration of charity and poor relief since at least the sixteenth century. Nor should specifically religious concerns be discounted.Footnote 5 The triple mandate of the schools, and at the time their celebrated success, was the inculcation of religious doctrine, moral habits, and work discipline among the children of the poor. But in contrast to Andrew's picture of a displacement of concerns about the virtue of charity and its connection to justice, I will argue here that charity education was conceptualized not simply in terms of the imperatives of social discipline for public benefit but simultaneously, in an idiom of natural law theory, as responding to the demands of justice in the exercise of reciprocal (or “relative”) duties between hierarchically related stations. The education offered to poor children gave them their due as children out of the surplus with which the beneficent subscribers were said to have been entrusted by God for precisely the purpose of ensuring the good of the poor.

These arguments drew on and articulated common presuppositions and practices of social reciprocity and mutual obligation. They extended this idiom of social understanding to claim further that charity schools were necessary in part because of the failure of the poor to perform their duties as parents in the proper formation of their children; the justice of charity could make up for something of the injustice of childhood poverty. To explore adequately what was said in the explication of charity in this particular context thus entails attention to the social practices and understandings of education and apprenticeship to which promoters understood the schools as pertaining. To ignore this practical context is to risk contrasting the overtly disciplinary aspects of the schools with abstract and perhaps anachronistic notions of rights and education.Footnote 6 I will suggest that in limited ways the schools may have offered genuine opportunities of livelihood and betterment for the children of the poor, to some extent precisely because they were new and alternative venues of training and discipline where poor families may very well have had few options. More broadly, however, the schools took shape within a perennial micropolitics of poor relief, of which charity was an enduring part.Footnote 7 In this dimension of analysis, the eighteenth-century charity-school projects were of crucial historical significance in articulating and establishing a new series of social and governmental relationships through the operation of which the role of the poor as parents in particular was opened to an intensified scrutiny, suspicion, and stigma. Charity-school sermons injected into public circulation a series of powerful images of the poor as essentially barbarous, unable to reproduce norms of order and discipline. Beyond these images, and largely unaddressed by the natural law perspectives of clerical supporters of the schools, the authority and agency of parents acting on behalf of their children and their household economies remained a continued presence and necessary constituent of the school project, however much schools enacted policies and strategies designed to curtail and to exclude parental influence.Footnote 8

Here I focus on the evidence relating to the charity school for girls established in St. James's Westminster in 1699, relying primarily on the monthly minutes of the board of trustees’ meetings, from which fleeting pictures of the relations between parents, children, and the schools emerge. Analyzed in conjunction with printed and manuscript materials of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the issues that emerged in the St. James's school and the aims and policies of its trustees can be taken as fairly typical. That it was a school for girls meant that it faced difficult issues surrounding what blend of work training and literacy would be of particular benefit to poor girls, but, mutatis mutandis, this no more than schools for boys.Footnote 9 Another reason for choosing St. James’s, however, is that it managed to achieve what few schools did by way of excluding parents. Following over a decade of paradoxical attempts to limit parental interference in the schools while simultaneously encouraging domestic reinforcement of the schools’ behavioral expectations, the trustees transformed the day school into a boarding school. These changes did not represent a trend among eighteenth-century charity-school projects. According to the annual Account of Charity Schools published by the SPCK, up to the establishment of the boarding school in St. James's parish in 1724, out of the schools in London and Westminster, only St. Margaret's Gray Coat and the school at Limehouse, Stepney, wholly maintained their children. Yet this only serves to highlight the establishment of a full boarding school at St. James's as a significant accomplishment. It was certainly the fulfillment of an aspiration continually stressed by the society, which every year in its annual report on charity schools cited the school of St. Margaret's Westminster as a model to be emulated in the attainment of the ends of the charity-school project.Footnote 10 Significantly, among the reasons for the change at St. James's given by the rector of the parish, the famous theologian and philosopher Samuel Clarke, was isolation of children from the deleterious environment of poverty, including their poor parents. Clarke's statement was in fact an expression of the developing policies and practices of the school as recorded in the minutes of the school trustees (of whom he had been one ex officio since his appointment as rector in 1709).Footnote 11

Local schools endowed by charity for the religious and vocational education of poor children had long existed in England, though most have left little record.Footnote 12 In the decade after 1688, in part as an effort to inoculate residents against the incursions of both Catholics and Dissenters, several schools were set up in the crowded outlying parishes of London and Westminster with the aim of providing a specifically Anglican catechetical education for the children of the poor, as well as a basic introduction to reading, writing, and, sometimes, arithmetic. In addition, the SPCK, which at its inception in 1699 began the extensive promotion of the schools by collecting the reports of local efforts and disseminating materials to facilitate their establishment, was extensively involved in cross-fertilizing charity-school and workhouse projects from an early date.Footnote 13 Following the SPCK's encouragement and local demand, many schools attempted to include some kind of physical labor in their educational regime; some had been schools for work training from the beginning; as the century wore on, a few were little else besides. By 1704, when the SPCK published its first Account of Charity Schools, fifty-four schools were recorded. Among them was the school at St. James's Westminster with somewhere in the range of sixty places for girls, which included provision of clothing. By 1711, there were 112 schools offering placements to 2,759 boys and 1,490 girls, with St. James's having apparently expanded its capacity to eighty places, though the extent to which all these places were actually filled is unclear. After 1711, the rate of establishment diminished considerably, as Craig Rose has noted, and thirteen years later, in 1734, the number of charity schools recorded for London and Westminster had increased by only twenty, offering placements to approximately 3,158 boys and 1,965 girls.Footnote 14 The schools had considerable high-church backing, though this should not be exaggerated; while the schools were to become embroiled in the church politics of the 1710s, involvement in and support of local charity schools did not necessarily indicate particular views about church and state.Footnote 15 Trustees and benefactors were often of a middling social status, with significant elite and clerical involvement, depending on the parish. As far as instruction, teachers at this time did not have any particular professional or social status, were generally of humble origins, and were certainly poorly paid; the quality of instruction and management they offered seemed to vary considerably.Footnote 16 St. James's Westminster was a wealthy parish where a relatively large proportion of gentry and aristocrats resided, and the charity school there was generously supported, with significant involvement among the titled.

As for the children who attended St. James's and elsewhere, no clear picture is available from the school records themselves. Further comparison of these with parish poor relief records, to the extent that these survive, and with other local registers may reveal something of the profile of families who had their children enrolled in the charity school and, in particular, the extent to which pauper children were enrolled. In parishes in which this kind of research has been done, the findings indicate that some of the children came from families dependent at some point in their history on poor relief, but some came from relatively well-paid artisanal households as well.Footnote 17 Orders in the St. James's Westminster Trustees’ Minutes dated 2 March 1713 specified explicitly “That no Girl who is upon the Parish or Orphans-Book shall be admitted into the School for the Future.”Footnote 18 To what extent this had been the case prior to 1713 is not known, but even after this rule had been passed, in December of the same year, the trustees ordered “That Enquirey be made into the Ages of one Babbs Children in Lyster Street, who with his Wife, are lately dead, leaving Six Children, some of which are likely to become chargable to the parish.”Footnote 19 Children for whom application was made to the school were not to be admitted until the “Visitors” (the trustees responsible for home visits) had enquired “into the Reputation of the Parents of such Child” and submitted their report to the rest of the trustees, according to the rule adopted on 1 April 1706. But of course, that the trustees were interested in reputation does not tell us very much about the kind of families that the trustees thought eligible, nor does it indicate that the very poor were excluded. In the almost identical rule listed at the back of the minute book among the “Rules to be read every monthly meeting,” “& Circumstances” is inserted after “Reputation,” but again, what the trustees considered in this regard can only be guessed at.Footnote 20 Nor does it help much to know that subscribers could recommend and insist on the school taking certain children. Their reasons are simply not recorded.Footnote 21

Regardless of the precise socioeconomic categories to which the charity-school children of St. James's parish might belong, three related points must be borne in mind here. First, as Paul Slack and others have shown, families often moved in and out of a situation of dependence on poor relief. Furthermore, the line between being independent and being in a situation requiring relief was for many incredibly thin; fortunes could change quite suddenly and quite drastically, whether from illness, death, accident, debt, or a downturn in trade. If some never crossed this line, this does not mean that they could not be regarded as being in some sense poor or in need.Footnote 22 Second, then, since poverty is a concept relative to notions of material well-being, it should not be overlooked that one of the effects of the charity schools was to put into circulation a new marker by which to designate and perceive poverty: the capacity of parents to educate their children to a certain standard. It was thus appropriate to speak of the charity schools as charity for the “the poor,” even if its beneficiaries were not exactly paupers, because those who used the charity schools were presumed by that use to stand in need of such education for their children. It was in part by using the schools and entering into a relation of charity between “the rich” and “the poor” that families occupied the category of “the poor.” Finally, as a consequence of this new marker of poverty around which a charitable relation was formed, a new and ambiguous dimension of poverty was put into discourse as a feature of social characterization. Given the connections, then as now, between education and the formation of moral character, a recognition of the challenges the poor might have in providing a proper education for their children could slip easily into a questioning of their ability to educate in a broader sense—that is, to provide for the moral and religious discipline of their offspring. It is with this slippage, at times seemingly indiscriminate, that the analysis that follows is in part concerned.

The elements making up the charity-school project, taken individually, were not necessarily novel. Care of the soul, its training and correction, was one of the traditional works of mercy.Footnote 23 And provision of work and work training for the poor was included among the clauses of Elizabethan poor laws, while various projectors throughout the seventeenth century continued to dream of and attempt its wider implementation. As for what was actually implemented, provision of work for adults under the poor laws seems to have been sporadic at best; on the other hand, the capacity of parish authorities to provide and enforce apprenticeships for poor children, orphaned and otherwise, gained momentum and enhanced judicial clarity and sanction toward the second half of the seventeenth century.Footnote 24 In any case, both religious and work education took on especial urgency in the period after 1688, when irreligion was perceived to be rampant and the poor rates rising precipitously, with the added imperative that Britain's national wealth be commensurate with its growing imperial power. These problems were articulated somewhat independently of each other, by clergy on the one hand and policy projectors on the other, but were often run together under a general and quasi-religious rubric of discipline. Yet while parish relief was being increasingly criticized for creating dependency and idleness, the political will to remedy this through statute and legislation foundered time and again. In spite of the Board of Trade's insistence in its 1697 report on a more rigorous inculcation of discipline among the poor, successive attempts at reform of the poor laws were never realized, and the recently revived Corporations of the Poor faced crippling partisan political opposition in effecting their agenda of work discipline in the municipalities.Footnote 25

As for religious discipline, it was widely acknowledged that after 1688 the established Church's social authority had considerably diminished. Ministers continuously lamented the decay of piety and the growth of irreligion, as also of dissent (quite the same thing for some). The power of church courts had long since lapsed, and while high churchmen lamented this disarmament of moral and religious discipline, they strongly resisted entrusting the secular magistrate with the task. Indeed, the notorious societies devoted to reforming manners, while they spoke to the broadly accepted agenda of moral purification sponsored by William and Mary, and later by Queen Anne, were strongly criticized across the spectrum of political opinion for being both illegal and ineffective.Footnote 26 Edmund Gibson, who, as bishop of London, would take a particular interest in the many charity schools of that city, noted in a charity sermon given in 1716 when he was still bishop of Lincoln that “it is next to impossible for Ministers, especially in large and populous Parishes,” to provide a competent preparatory “Knowledge of the general Principles of Religion” to which the minister could then appeal with effect in his preaching and visitations.Footnote 27 The SPCK had attempted in its early years, when the government was attempting to overhaul the Poor Law at the turn of the seventeenth century, to have catechetical education grafted onto any workhouse provisions of a new act of Parliament.Footnote 28 No such act was passed, but the SPCK and the ministers supporting the charity schools long maintained that a religious education specifically in accordance with the teachings of the established Church was, alongside vocational training and moral discipline, the main goal and major accomplishment of the schools.Footnote 29 At the school at St. James's Westminster, the trustees ordered in 1700 that the girls “be taught to read, and work, & so many of them as shall be capable, to write, and cast account.” Copies of “Bishop [John] Williams’ Catechism” and The Whole Duty of Man were purchased, in addition to inkhorns, spelling books, yarn for stockings and gloves, cloth for shifts, thimbles, and knitting needles.Footnote 30 Samuel Clarke celebrated the education of poor children at St. James's as combining all aspects of charitable duty in a single form with phrases and claims that can be found throughout the charity-school literature:

Sermons such as Clarke’s, which were preached and printed to solicit donations, were a central feature of the relatively novel fiscal machinery of associated, or joint-stock, subscription that backed the majority of charity-school projects in the eighteenth century.Footnote 32 To raise subscriptions, however, charity societies needed to appeal to the broader community by articulating the meanings of the social action being encouraged with reference to shared symbols, beliefs, and ethical norms. Obviously, these actions had practical aims and objectives. But charity was not simply a means to the end of a mercantilist disciplinary power, a convenient fund-raising scheme; it was rather an ethical form detailing in part the meaning of that end and specifying norms, rules, and limits at play in the relationships created through giving. Charity education was a creative extension of these meanings and norms in actions addressed to a cluster of practical problems surrounding labor and poverty. While it may be true that the sermons promoting the charity schools in the early eighteenth century “were rather formulaic in both their texts and their arguments,”Footnote 33 they should nevertheless be regarded as privileged statements of the public meanings of the charity education project and of charity more generally. To clarify these meanings was all the more urgent as the cause of providing, on a grandly envisioned scale, education for populations of poor children in institutional settings was contentious, arousing worries that the poor might think themselves above their station and become insubordinate because of a free education.Footnote 34

It is of central importance, then, that in many of the charity-school sermons from the first third of the eighteenth century we find significant appeals to notions of justice and, in particular, to the social duties of the wealthy. Charity established the outlines of a relationship between the rich and the poor as between those who had in surplus and those who lacked; it invoked the idea of a societas christiana, an imagined moral community obtaining concrete form through real material redistribution—imagined, because it did not exist, but was held out as a concrete possibility in the institution of the charity school and the financial apparatus of subscription. Charity articulated both aspiration and action through a prior act of social imagination.Footnote 35

Notwithstanding John Bossy's penetrating account of the general drift of the meaning and practice of charity toward discrete actions performed toward, or rather on, the poor, a vision of charity as a state of social integration and unification remained part of the repertoire of social concepts into the eighteenth century.Footnote 36 Importantly, as fraternal love, charity involved a mutual recognition as equals under God, but moral theologians throughout medieval and early modern Europe stressed that the social body was necessarily articulated into various “stations,” orders and functions that were appropriately differentiated through inequalities of wealth.Footnote 37 Charity was understood to be exercised reciprocally within and across this hierarchy. Liberality toward the poor was but one such instance of this exercise, albeit fast becoming its defining element; but the eighteenth-century charity-school project itself still involved both narrower and broader elements of the concept of charity. The efforts of charity-school and other voluntary charity societies were, it was hoped by many at least in the early years of the eighteenth century, expressions of a revivified “universal charity” crossing the divisions of doctrinal and ecclesiological difference to return to a purer and more practically invested form of Christianity.Footnote 38 In the case of the charity-school movement, by at least the mid-1710s such hopes had run up against the realities of divisive Anglican politics.Footnote 39 Nonetheless, it would be amiss to view them only as sites of political maneuvering. As Craig Rose has insisted, they were an expression of Anglican attempts at religious renewal and, from the Restoration onward, a significant feature of this call for renewal had been an emphasis on practical holiness, pastoral care, and moral discipline.Footnote 40 There was general concern among Anglican evangelicals that the entire social body had lost its moral discipline and that one of the casualties of this loss was social harmony. The specter of a world recently turned upside down was never far in the background.Footnote 41 Calls for charity were calls to restore the harmony of a hierarchical society by fostering reverence and respect for superiors and the proper and compassionate exercise of power for the benefit of the ruled.Footnote 42

When it came to consider the specific duties and responsibilities attaching to social station through the correct exercise of which universal charity could be expressed, the virtue of charity became “The Duty of Charity,” as in the title of the sermon Clarke preached to raise subscriptions for the charity school at St. James’s. Here Clarke argued that “[w]e are not absolute Lords of the things we possess, but enjoy them merely by the Divine Permission and good Pleasure. We are Stewards instructed with our portion of good things, under the supreme Householder the Governour of the Universe; and we are to give a strict account, in what manner we dispose of them.”Footnote 43 Several other charity sermons echoed this conception of wealth and duty.Footnote 44 Robert Nelson, a prominent and active lay member of the SPCK, offered a particularly nuanced statement of the natural law of charity in Some Reflections on the Necessity and Excellency of Christian Beneficence (1715), distinguishing Christian charity from the aristocratic virtues of liberality and generosity, and title from use-right, to argue that “Charity is a Sort of Restoring that Proportion of Wealth, which doth not belong to You.”

These sermons did not offer much by way of a precise philosophical or jurisprudential analysis of property and of the rights related to property, although Clarke, at least, would have been familiar with the terms of a vigorous seventeenth-century natural law discourse on the origins of property in the writings of Hobbes, Cumberland, Pufendorf, and Locke.Footnote 46 It was unclear, for example, to what extent charity as justice was thought of as primarily a right of the poor or a duty of the wealthy; even where Nelson stated baldly that “if You do not do Good with Your Riches … You use them contrary … to the Right of the Poor, who have a just Title to a Share of those good Things You possess,” it was not clear what kind of title this was nor how it was related to proprietary title.Footnote 47 Yet the language and images used by Clarke, Nelson, and others implied a set of concepts that quite clearly located proprietary possession in a broader social context, in which God's absolute dominion and his government of all humankind made possession relative to the aims of that government in ensuring the well-being of all, including the poor. This picture came closest perhaps to Locke's argument in the Two Treatises of Government (1690) that since it was the will of God that his creatures should be preserved in their lives, those creatures had a duty in relation to themselves and each other so to do, and consequently had certain rights in property in relation to both themselves and others to fulfill this duty. Justice, according to Locke, comprehended title in land or other goods that an individual had appropriated through labor for use in self-preservation; charity was a right of the needy in the property of another for the fulfillment of the duty of both the propertied and the needy toward the latter's self-preservation. Thus, as James Tully has pointed out, in Locke's analysis of property both legitimate proprietary possession and charity are grounded on the same natural law.Footnote 48 But this is equally the case in the homiletic images of God as absolute proprietor and governor. The wealthy are not just wealthy; they are entrusted with an office under the governing authority of God to obey his will for the provision for others.

Charity as an injunction of natural law in this sense was not the only mode available to represent the nature of charity in this context. It could be combined with, or displaced by, arguments appealing directly to the principles of revealed religion, such as the imitation and obedience of Christ.Footnote 49 Beyond this, however, what comparison of homiletic language to jurisprudential modes of natural law theory fails to capture is the element of social reciprocity at play in the images of household and government used to articulate the nature of charity. Charitable giving was not simply rendering to the poor their due but rather a site of exchange that strengthened the social bond within an enduring hierarchy; the expected return due for the charitable gift was deference, obedience, respect, and gratitude, if not affection.Footnote 50 Charity was thus conceptualized in promotional sermons in terms of the pattern of relative duties obtaining in relations of subordination more generally. These were prescriptive articulations, rationalized in the moral-theological form of obligation to divine law, of prevalent social practices of reciprocity that themselves formed norms of evaluation within such practices.Footnote 51 Particularly notable here are practices of gift giving, that, as Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos has shown, played a role in mediating almost all kinds of social relationships in the early modern world, including relations of subordination such as parents and children, and masters and servants, and involved both material and nonmaterial exchanges, of loyalty or trust, for example.Footnote 52 In figuring charity in terms of the moral economy of the divine household, writers were quite explicitly invoking these practices and evaluations in their asymmetrical dimensions.

Two things are important to note here, however. First, the language of relative duty that charity-school promoters used to articulate the nature of charitable giving, while it expressed general notions of social reciprocity, obtained most clearly in relationships of governance involving defined functions or roles: parent/child, master/servant, magistrate/subject, and husband/wife. The concept of relative duty tended to rationalize the asymmetry of power inherent in these relationships by specifying their ends and, in doing so, described the limits and norms of the exercise of power, including practices of gift giving. Rich/poor, while clearly entailing an asymmetry of power, was not on the face of it a separate and distinctly established relationship of governance. Here the language of natural law attempted to show that a series of social relationships governed the use of property, and this independently of the ways in which early modern forms of property grounded the possession and exercise of authority more generally. But the notion of stewardship, used in an attempt to make these relationships concrete, was ambiguous. It was intended most clearly to draw attention to a relationship of responsibility of the rich (as rich) to God on the one hand, and to a relationship of the poor to God's providence on the other. It was in consequence of these two relationships that stewardship entailed a third relationship between rich and poor, since the provisions of God's providence were to be determined by the steward. The steward had a duty under natural law to enact God's beneficence; how a material and social relationship of rich to poor was to be established in caritas, to what proportion of surplus wealth the poor were entitled, and in what form, was a matter of convention and expectation, certainly, but also of prudence and, of course, clerical direction.Footnote 53

Second, and following from this, charity schools were celebrated as a particularly excellent kind of charity that, in addition to providing clothing (and, in the case of full boarding schools, food and shelter) also “gave” to the souls of the poor through education, both catechism and, preferably as well, work discipline and training. The charity of the charity schools did not consist in the giving over of something to another for their disposal, as in the giving of alms, or of food or clothing. Of course, suspicion about the practices of the poor, about their pleasures and their prudence, or lack of it, had long dogged early modern reflection on charity, surfacing most prominently in efforts to distinguish the deserving and undeserving poor.Footnote 54 But however hedged by discriminatory demands,Footnote 55 the charity of materials was very likely prone to the ruses of the poor, to their use of charity. The charity of education, on the other hand, was aimed in part and quite explicitly at the very disposal of the poor subject. Whatever its success or failure in approximating this “impossible power,” it is important to mark the difference.Footnote 56 Charity schools were important not only as occasions of sociable gift giving simultaneously reinforcing and limiting hierarchical distance; they were particularly important because of the expanded possibilities of governance they permitted. This is not to invoke the figure of a manipulative or self-serving social control. It is rather to point to the express aims of the charity-school project and to the ways in which the concept of charity and of the relative duties of natural law in which it was partially embedded structured these aims and their implementation.

The reestablishment of society through a charity of education operating outside of the instituted structures of church and state was perceived as necessary in part because of the failures and limitations of both of these agencies; but on a level prior to such shortcomings, it was alleged to be necessary because of a perceived breakdown among the poor of one of the basic structures anchoring order and authority in the early modern world: the household. One of the central claims of charity-school promoters was that parents of poor children were, in an analysis of will and capacity that remained fundamentally unclear, unable or unwilling to provide the kind of breeding that they owed to their children. A crucial and crucially symbolic sphere of relative duties, of parent to child, was being neglected, putting at risk the reproduction of the ethical norms centered on authority and deference that were central to a hierarchical society of nested duties and responsibilities.Footnote 57 Charity schools were suggested as means to remedy the specific threat of poor parenting to social order, an acceptable disciplinary form through which to inculcate habits of industry in the poor by training their children, ideally helping them to establish economic independence and relieving the burden of ratepayers as a result. Premised on the expansive force of charity in providing for the needs of the poor, this was a form of social welfare that was, unlike the poor law, voluntary, the embodiment of an ancient Christian vision of a moral community whose members responded to their social duties with reference to a horizon far beyond that to which the eighteenth-century secular magistrate might appeal, but that promised to make good on a long-standing interest in regulating labor and production and ensuring its orderly reproduction.

The case against poor parents took place in relation to three aspects of parental responsibility, which most took to be interrelated. First, in both charity sermons and sermons on relative duties, parents were said to be responsible for the religious instruction of their children.Footnote 58 But the irreligion and ignorance of the poor, and their consequent immorality and wickedness, was taken by many clergy to be a notorious fact.Footnote 59 However, there was not widespread agreement among even the clergy that, if they were of a primarily catechetical nature, the charity schools would be the panacea for the moral problems of poverty many envisioned.Footnote 60 Dr. Francis Hutchinson wrote in 1701 to the secretary of the SPCK that, although he had attempted to establish catechetical classes in his parish of Bury St. Edmunds, they had more or less failed as regarded the poor, and “his greatest expectations are from those Projects on foot for setting the poor on work; whereby they are put into condition of living comfortably, Discipline and Teaching may be contrived to fall in with the same methods.”Footnote 61 As James Knight later formulated the strategy, since the poor “have no Views for their Children after them, but to gain a plain and honest Subsistence,” they, unlike the rich, would be “willing and ready to consign [their children] to the Care and Management of such, whose disinterested Zeal for the Glory of God and the Good of Souls” will give them an education both religious and materially useful.Footnote 62

Knight included poor parents among those who sought to provide a sufficient vocational education for their children “to gain a plain and honest Subsistence.” Such a provision was taken by many to be among the duties of parents to children natural justice demanded.Footnote 63 But this was the second responsibility on which many promoters of the charity schools claimed poor parents to be liable to default. As recent historical research suggests, the poor were for the most part unable to afford the apprenticeship fees to bind their children to a master or mistress to learn a trade.Footnote 64 Moreover, poverty frequently entailed as well the lack of resources and equipment for parents themselves to train their children in some skilled or semiskilled means of independent livelihood.Footnote 65 The apprenticeship and service of youth was widely practiced in early modern England among families of both the lower and middling social strata and was considered to be an important step in the long course of educating and enabling children to take up the responsibilities involved in replicating social order in the establishment of independent households in adult life.Footnote 66 The notorious poor law provisions for magistrates and parish officers to bind out the children of the poor as apprentices, “where they shall be convenient,”Footnote 67 while intended in part to relieve households overburdened with children that would otherwise make a claim to parish support, were a much resented extension of these practices. But parish apprentices were generally bound out several years earlier than was usual, in their early rather than mid-teens, before most were able to contribute significantly toward their own upkeep.Footnote 68 And from this perspective, a charity-school education might have offered a genuine advantage to some poor families, whether or not they were on parish relief: up until the late 1710s, the trustees at St. James's Westminster not only paid an apprenticeship fee of up to £5 for students who had stayed a sufficient length of time in the school,Footnote 69 they also took it as their responsibility to find what they considered to be fit masters or mistresses; and, whereas parish apprenticeships had by the early eighteenth century become notorious for abusive or neglectful masters, the board of trustees could act as arbiter for disagreements between master and apprentice. In 1713, the trustees summoned Mrs. Chidly and her apprentice Jane Bird “to attend this board on account of some difference between them,” where “their Cases were severally heard and Examin’d, on which they were both found faulty, viz. the Mrs. for abuseing the Girl, and the Girl for some Misdimeneors towards her Mrs. for which the apprentice asking pardon, the matter was made up between them.” Two years earlier, “Mrs. Wilder in Nottingham Court (with whom Ann Rice has bin upon Triall) is by the Visiting Trustee not thought a fit Mistress for her.” The trustees also resolved “to acquaint the Mistresses that no Girle go upon Triall until the Place be first Visited.”Footnote 70 What is more, in 1711 the trustees had restricted the minimum age of apprenticeship of girls to fourteen, and later, in 1716, to “15 or 16 years, by which time they may be fit for Services”;Footnote 71 the ability and maturity usually achieved by this age, which was, outside of parish apprenticeship, roughly the social norm, made it more likely that an apprenticeship would be successful, or at least less emotionally and physically difficult.Footnote 72 And finally, up until the late 1710s many of the apprenticeships to which girls were bound included some of the more prestigious occupations for laboring women, such as bodice maker, mantua maker, and child's coat maker.Footnote 73 While female apprenticeships in trades were sometimes little more than a source of cheap labor,Footnote 74 it might not have been a false promise when, in his 1706 charity sermon, White Kennett celebrated the providential provision of education for the poor through the gifts of benefactors by suggesting that the charity school saved children not only from being “left to play in the Streets, and to linger and pilfer from Door to Door,” but also from becoming “the lowest Servants, and hardest Labourers,” instead allowing them eventually to “live comfortably and creditably in [the world].”Footnote 75 It is worth recalling that the charity-school project emerged in the 1690s, when the economic fallout of the war with France, poor harvests, and a series of trade depressions and local economic dislocations had made the care of the laboring poor and provision for their children an especially urgent concern.Footnote 76

Parish apprenticeships were recognized in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a solution not only for the vocational training of the poor but also for their endemic idleness.Footnote 77 This was the third way in which promoters of the charity schools argued that the poor had failed their children in their duty to educate. The prevention of such idleness as a feature of moral discipline had been a feature of the government of the poor and their children since at least the sixteenth century and was a central concern to mid-seventeenth-century puritan-inspired poor relief projects, such as the London Corporation of the Poor.Footnote 78 Authorities intent on stamping out the disorderly “trade” of begging were particularly concerned that children whose parents could or did not provide a more or less regular form of occupation for them were all too inclined to supplement the household income through having them beg, and the worry then was that such a disorderly and idle life could only habituate children to laziness and to a life of vagrancy and crime.Footnote 79 This was to deny both that the poor children did contribute to their household economies in various tasks of an occasional and sporadic nature and also that regular employment might not always have been available or appropriate for younger children.Footnote 80 But it is also true that, in general, the opportunities for an array of tasks with which children in their early teens and younger could be entrusted was small and shrinking in early modern English households with less access to commons and increasingly reliant on wage labor.Footnote 81 Quite obviously, in urban settings such narrowed opportunities for the laboring poor would have been the case from the outset. In any case, the concern to ensure that children and youth were occupied in some structured, constant, and relatively demanding way, thereby inculcating industry and disciplined habits more generally, was a central premise of projects in the later seventeenth century to harness the labor of the underemployed for the public benefit of national enrichment as well as of charity-school projects themselves.Footnote 82 Work and catechism were the pillars of the charity school's educational regime, providing, in the words of William Whiston, “the Yoke of Order and Discipline” for the young, without which they would grow up to be “too obstinate in Vice and wicked Customs to be ever after dissuaded from them.”Footnote 83 They were to provide the remedy from what Edmund Gibson accented in global terms as the failure of the poor in raising their children “from the beginning to a Habit of Regular and Orderly living,” “by which means, there is perpetually growing up among us, not only an useless, but … a lewd, wicked, and profligate Race.”Footnote 84

The realities of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century family economies of the poor are a crucial context for understanding the charity-school project. Through providing a basic education in reading, writing, arithmetic, and work skills, and by way of the offer of clothing and apprenticeship and service placements, charity schools could be seen as offering goods and services to the poor for the upbringing of their children that indeed they all too often lacked. But consideration of the family economy also points to the continued possibility of the use of charity by the poor family. Whatever the gesture toward fashioning, for their own good, an appropriate poor subjectivity on the impressionable material of childhood, charity schools continued to have to deal with the family as a locus of agency among the poor.Footnote 85 Schools had to appeal at some level to parents to send their children and to keep them in school. Indeed, offering children of the poor the goods of clothing and basic schooling was itself at times seen as part of the charity of the schools and at others as something of an enticement for parents to commit their children to the greater moral and specifically religious discipline of the schools.Footnote 86

Yet this leaves us with a puzzle: why were such strong and sweeping characterizations of the poor and of poor parents proffered as part of this charitable contract? Was it fear mongering, or the gratuitous rhetoric of a handful of splenetic clergy? Doubtless such language was vaguely “in the air.” But did it also have a functional value in the charity-school project itself? Statements such as Gibson’s, marking out a “useless … lewd, wicked and profligate race,” are particularly striking since, as we have seen, there were voices in the SPCK such as Francis Hutchinson’s, which argued that the material conditions of poverty were in large part to blame for the ostensibly widespread lack of morals and religion among the poor, and also those that objected to bringing so much weight to bear on the poor when the rich, who as superiors were understood to set the standard for virtue, remained unaccountable for their moral behavior, which was no better.Footnote 87 It is strange as well from the perspective of contemporary pastoral approaches to the moral education of the poor, which tended to recognize the positive agency of poor parents.

In The Duties of Servants (1688), clergyman Richard Lucas had remarked that while poorer parents could be excused from providing a vocational education for their children on account of its expense, “good Example, good Instruction, and good Government does not cost much.” As such a moral education was particularly crucial to the preparation of the poor, who would be solely dependent for their fortune and credit on their industry and virtue, it was all the more incumbent on their parents. And there were benefits for the parents in providing this education, rooted in the nature of the parent-child relationship and its internal goods, both moral and natural: “their Children will be more serviceable and delightful to ’em, their mean Condition will be more easie and honourable, being freed from the two Plagues of Poverty, Disorder and Sloth.”Footnote 88 Lucas's strategy was precisely to show the poor that they could fulfill the obligations of parenthood in spite of the meanness of their condition.

When William Fleetwood, a sometime bishop of Ely, took up the same topic in the same pastoral mode a decade and a half later, there was a different note. He cautioned in his sermons on the duties of parents against the temptation peculiar to the poor to let their children “continue lazy, idle, and doing nothing … imagining it a piece of Kindness … to let them rather beg their Bread, than put them to labour for it.” This was “a Mistake not only mischievous to the Common-wealth, but of most pernicious Consequence to their Children, the unkindest thing that they can do to them; for though it please them for the present, yet it entails on them perpetual Misery, and very often untimely Death, by engaging them in wicked Courses, the sure and ready Road to Ruin.” Parents are bound by both natural and divine law, Fleetwood concluded, to bring up their children “to Labour, and continual Business of some kind or other,” which “keeps them, at least, in a mean Sufficiency, if not in Plenty, and puts them into a Capacity of emerging out of their Difficulties, and bettering their Condition.”Footnote 89

Fleetwood may very well have been blind to the realities of the lives and household economies of the poor. It is important to note, however, that he assumed kindness of intent on the part of poor parents; while emphasizing certain common temptations and errors in judgment regarding means, he acknowledged a basically correct orientation of will. Such a stance was implied in the very mode of address: the sermon preached to the poor explicating their social duties in terms they could and would be likely to appropriate. Nor were ministers alone in the presumption of good intent. As one workhouse master declared, echoing Lucas, poor parents “are generally very solicitous to give their children learning and spare no cost in their power to make them happy in that respect; it being a common saying with them that learning is all the portion they can give them.”Footnote 90

It may have been possible, in terms of the practical realities of parent-school relations, to view the provision of charity education as a reciprocal exchange, the parents gaining a desirable education for their child in return for a measure of compliance, submission, gratitude, and respect in surrendering the charge of the child's soul to another. A broadsheet published in 1708 listing the Orders Read and Given to the Parents on the Admittance of their Child into the Charity Schools (“To be set up in their Houses”) shows how day charity schools needed to rely on the authority of parents to back school discipline in order for the educational regime to be effective, at the same time illustrating how moral reformers sought to hold parents to account on their side of the charitable contract by making the child's place dependent on the maintenance of certain standards of moral discipline and behavior in the home.Footnote 91 As was noted already, the trustees at St. James's Westminster inquired into the parents’ reputation before a child could be enrolled in the school.Footnote 92 Within this quasi-contractual framework, relationships of cooperation and mutual satisfaction might obtain. At St. James's school, in some cases the wishes of the parents appear to have been taken into consideration when deciding on an appropriate apprenticeship for a child. In 1707, the minutes note that “Mary Green having been ordered to be bound to fan Maker upon trial not Likeing, & a fresh application made by the Mother that she may be bound to Ann Marshall a Sempstress.” In the case of Ann Rice, it was “Ordered that if the Girls Mother can find a good service for her, and such as this Board shall approve of, then the Trustees will be pleased to consider her something towards Cloathing her for such Service.” In some cases as well, children were bound to their mothers.Footnote 93 While the boys at the school in the parish of St. Botolph Aldgate were called to “look upon thy Teachers as thy second Parents,” they were reminded that “the Duty of the fifth Command does reach to thy School-Master and thy School-Mistress as well (tho’ not as much) as to thy Father and Mother” and were admonished at length to “consider and practice thy Duty to thy Parents.”Footnote 94 Furthermore, this charity-school surrogacy could be viewed as an extension of the familial service and apprenticeship system through which parents across the range of social status sought to provide for the livelihood and education of their children.Footnote 95 Historians have pointed out that it was usual in early modern England for a child to spend significant periods of time away from home, particularly in service and sometimes for education. The replication of household authority in charity schools was analogous to what would have obtained in any early modern pedagogical relationship, and familial affection and respect for new masters was stressed by moralists as central to the success of newly established relationships of subordination.Footnote 96

Two features of charity-school statements must be noted in this connection. First, in most of their public statements on the nature of charity education, promoters had to appeal above all to subscribers, not to poor parents as householders capable and willing to carry out their duties as parents; here their interest lay rather in stating the failure of poor parents as fact, thereby justifying the need of an expensive and novel institution to stand to a large extent in the place of parents. More generally, parents could be regarded, ultimately, as a troublesome zone of interference in the production of piety and virtue. And not just poor parents: we should not discount that the charity-school project was sometimes articulated as a clerical fantasy of absolute control over the souls of the young. From the point of view of some elements of the clergy within the charity-school movement, poverty was to some extent merely an opportunity and an excuse in a generally wicked epoch to leverage a lamentably limited intervention into place. Was Andrew Snape being entirely disingenuous when, in a 1711 charity sermon, he remarked that, had charity children “been higher born, or more richly endow’d, they would have wanted this Manner of Education, of which those only enjoy the Benefit, who are low enough to submit to it, where they have such Advantages without Money and without Price, as the Rich cannot purchase with it”? The worry that there was nothing with which to force the rich to submit their children to healthy discipline was never far in the background. As Francis Gastrell pleaded: “how can it be supposed that those who so far approve the Design, as to give largely towards the Instruction of other Peoples Children, should be less solicitous for the Education of their own?”Footnote 97

In any event, in the everyday exercise of authority, schools came up continually against the exercise of parental agency. At times, charity was bluntly refused, as when “Mary Arlington sometime Since recommended by Captain Outing be putt bye on account that her Mother seem’d (on the Trusts Visiting her) to be indifferent in Accepting of the Charity.”Footnote 98 What this mother's reasons were are not given, but charity education may have been less compatible with the needs of the household economies of the poor than promoters were most often willing to recognize, at least publicly.Footnote 99 Children who attended day schools were thereby prevented from contributing however they could to the cost of their continued upkeep at home, and the age of eligibility for school roughly coincided with the onset of their increased competency and usefulness. For some, charity education might have been an unaffordable luxury. It was perhaps in view of such difficulties that the trustees at St. James's continually reminded the mistress to ensure that the monthly “Fault paper” be properly filled out “with the reason of the Childrens absence,” and the “respective parents of each Child, (who has been faulty)” were “to attend the Board to shew cause why such Child, shall not be dismist for offending.”Footnote 100 How much consideration the trustees displayed toward the impossible choices of poverty is not discernible. It is significant, however, that the girls were apparently permitted to do some work for their parents, and although this was not to “Exceed the making of four Shirts or Shifts or four pair of Stockings in the whole Yeare,” it may very well have enabled them to contribute to the household economy possibly even more than they otherwise would have been able to, given their access through the school to equipment and stock.Footnote 101 In 1708, Mercy Fernly was admitted by the trustees “to Learn to write on writing days” only.Footnote 102 Some give-and-take between home and school existed. Yet too great a display of parental authority could not be tolerated. Girls were fairly frequently expelled for their parents’ actions, as Jane Young was “on Account of her Mothers coming in Riotous manner and Insulting the Mistress.”Footnote 103 At issue in such conflicts was often the disciplining of children, which schools took to be their particular interest and prerogative.Footnote 104

The broader point to be made here is that the schools had reconfigured the parochial social dynamics of rich and poor, charging the field of existing needs, aspirations, opportunities, and inequalities with a new set of roles and accompanying power relationships in the project of free institutional childhood education. In this altered situation, the schools were ambiguous doubles of parental power, leading to conflicting claims over the children. The exercise of the parental role and the attempt to assert the pedagogical role as a form of charity resulted in an agonistic and at times antagonistic relationship between parents and schools, with school policies and parents’ tactical uses following on each other in circles. Publicizing a view of the poor as an immoral race was perhaps not directly related to these struggles, but its effect was to take the moral high ground from the outset: it put into circulation a repertoire of descriptors for poor parents that prejudged any parental interference in the schools as disorderly and categorized failure to use the schools where available in terms of the propensity of the poor to beggary and idleness. Furthermore, as long as charity education could be reasonably assumed to give to poor children and families something they lacked—as long as the form of charity obtained—poor parents would tend to be regarded with a maximum of suspicion, as obstructing the work of benevolence. However much the agenda of the schools conflicted with the needs of parents, poor parents were, as promoters baldly stated, helpless to provide what the schools could, and on this level the project had a legitimacy that parents either could acknowledge, choosing to navigate what was demanded of them as best they could, or from which they could simply walk away. Unlike parish apprenticeship, the limit of charity education was that, as charity, it could be refused, though at the risk of reinforcing the stereotyping of the poor as disorderly and irresponsible. But then, in some places even refusal was not an option: in Bedfordshire, where “they found it difficult to perswade the parents to part with their children,” the arm of the poor law was used to enforce charity-school attendance. Here the founder of the charity school had “taken upon him the burden of overseer of the poor” precisely to be able to force poor families to decide between retaining a parish allowance and having the authorities “take off one or more of their children.”Footnote 105

Steve Hindle has remarked on the double discourse whereby the poor might appeal to authorities to be relieved specifically as householders unable to provide adequately for their families, while “‘the poore’ as a class might conversely be characterized by the indiscipline and disorder they transmitted to their young.”Footnote 106 Such characterizations took place alongside the continued assertion that parents possessed a natural love for their children that impelled them to seek the good of their children. This was central to Fleetwood's discussion of parental office: the strength of parental affection, which naturally and impulsively sought the good of the child, both specified the goal of the relationship and thereby also provided the grounds for a natural-legal explication of the parent-child relation as the reciprocal exchange of good offices best suited to achieving its end.Footnote 107 This natural affection indeed helped to establish the authority of the parent, which was crucial for achieving the ends of child rearing and was consequently the duty of both children and parents to maintain.Footnote 108 Some charity sermons echoed Fleetwood's analysis.Footnote 109 Yet in the context of charity education, whose gift entailed an insertion of a pedagogic disciplinary authority between parent and child, to be able to appeal to the agents of benevolence as a virtuous poor householder entailed precisely the surrender of significant aspects of household authority to trustees and masters and mistresses; just as after the Workhouse Test Act of 1723, it would entail renouncing one's status as an independent householder and submitting, very much as a “minor,” to the rule of the workhouse “family.”Footnote 110 Some promoters of the charity schools articulated this situation explicitly by arguing that poor parents not only tended to neglect their office but that this amounted to abdication, and that de jure the parental office and its authority were surrendered to those who could claim to better carry out its duties and who were themselves merely exercising their social duty of charity. George Smalridge, later bishop of Bristol, drew up the contract: parents who did not impart “a good and virtuous Education,” leaving their children “destitute of the necessary means of rendring themselves happy,” were “unworthy therefore … of the Name of Parents” and “Unwarrantable are their Pretensions to the Love and Honour due to Parents.” “Those are rather to be esteem’d the Parents of Children, who give them good education, than those to whom they owe their birth”; the rights and privileges of parenthood were transferred to those “by whom the Offices of Parents are readily and constantly perform’d.”Footnote 111 White Kennett thus urged the charity children to “adore the Mercy of God, that when as to any schooling or breeding, our Father and Mother had forsaken us, then did God take us up, and commit us to the Care of many good and generous Christians.”Footnote 112

The case of St. James's Westminster is particularly instructive in showing the concrete effects of the social power articulated by the charity schools in dealing with the problem of parental authority. The idea of a full boarding school had been floated by the trustees as early as 1710, but in 1724, given the opportunity in a donation of land and generous subscriptions, they were finally able to transform the day school into a boarding school.Footnote 113 The result was a move away from working in conjunction with structures of household authority. In a sermon preached a year later to raise subscriptions for the additional expense of boarding the girls, Clarke noted one of its primary advantages: the less outside influence, whether of “Parents or Relations,” the less chance of the girls developing “vicious” habits since “Vice is not natural to mankind, but taught by ill Education and corrupt Examples.”Footnote 114 And the children in the new school were indeed kept in isolation; the parent problem was to be solved. The “Rules for the well Ordering of the Charity Schoole” stipulated that “none of the Children Shall be Suffered to go into the Streets but … shall take their playing Exercise in the Schoole Yard.”Footnote 115 In 1726, the trustees ordered further “that no Parent of any Charity Girls be Suffered to Come Into the Schoole at any time … a Standing Order to be Observed Under Penalty of Dismissing Such Girle out of the same.” Parental authority was now strictly limited to meek petitions to the board of trustees for a hearing.Footnote 116 Such a policy considerably tightened up previous statements on the issue, which specified expulsion where the “Mother come[s] to the Mistress in Clamourous manner & Disturb[s] them for doing their Duty.”Footnote 117 Moreover, in 1722 the Board had resolved to make it a particular rule that “if the parents of friends of any Girls in this Schoole refuse to put the Girle to such Service as this board shall approve of … then Every such Girl shall be Expelled the School,” apparently seeking to end contention of the point definitively.Footnote 118

The trustees’ minutes record that seventeen of twenty-two day-school children remained on at the boarding school (which had room for thirty), their parents or guardians having given their approval for the new arrangement, and the Board continued to pronounce on issues concerning parents.Footnote 119 The reasons parents had, and whether or not they found the new circumstances more favorable or not, are not available to us. It was not uncommon for poor parents to give up children they could not properly care for to parish authorities where friends, family, and kin were unavailable, at least temporarily.Footnote 120 Regardless, we should notice as well an accumulation and tightening of mechanisms in the government of the poor family. Around the same time that St. James's erected the boarding school for girls, the SPCK's Account of Several Workhouses (1725) noted that “the Church-Wardens and Overseers of the poor in this Parish, that they may keep pace with their neighbors, in a regular Provision for the Poor, have taken Measures for erecting a Work-House.”Footnote 121 As numerous reports in the Account attested, the intent—and, it momentarily appeared, success—of parochial workhouses under the Workhouse Test Act of 1723 was to discourage the poor from applying for relief by making willingness to live in a workhouse under the discipline of the master and mistress a test of true need. Such measures were thought to provide against the abuse of outdoor relief by the “idle” poor. As one SPCK correspondent wrote: the poor families now forced to practice “industry and frugality” in order to maintain their household independence “look like so many subordinate Factories to the publick Work-house, tho’ they have no relation to it, except as they conspire by Industry and Emulation to banish Idleness and Beggary from this and the neighbouring Parishes.”Footnote 122 With restrictions on outdoor relief, poor families may very well have welcomed being able to pass onto the parish charity school the full cost of keeping a child not yet sufficiently able to contribute to their expense, in order to avoid dissolving the household into the workhouse regime.

This is conjectural. At the same time, however, it is clear that some of the reciprocity between home and school disappeared with the advent of the boarding school. Most notably, in the boarding school, all labor and profit went toward the support of the school; nothing could any longer be sequestered for the home.Footnote 123 On the whole, the quarantine of parents from their children involved a fundamentally different dynamic of power than even the earlier strategy of holding parents responsible for their own and their children's behavior through the power to expel. Children could still be expelled from the school for misbehavior, in which case the burden of the failure of the master-student relationship in training a child correctly was to be carried by the parent, whose influence had been entirely extirpated. Deprived of authority, parents nevertheless bore the ultimate burden of responsibility in the case of a “failed” education, responsibility that, from a natural law perspective, gave parents both a strong inclination to seek the best for their child and the means to exercise their authority properly.

This article has explored the charity-school movement's extension of the idea of charity as justice to remedy what was perceived as a dangerous failure of poor parents to discharge their natural duties of educating and disciplining their children. It has detailed both the ambiguities and opportunities in the language of charity and the effects of these in its practical application to the project of charity education. Education in an institutional setting for the children of the poor was claimed as both the duty of the better off to provide and a legitimate substitute for certain functions of the household; charity education adhered to the existing social spheres of justice in concepts of relative duty. On one level, then, it can be seen as obtaining for children what poor parents could not provide but could be presumed to want. On another level, however, charity schools were not simply wholesale substitutes for the household and for household authority but created a situation of blurred jurisdictional boundaries. Parents and charity schools entered a practical contest of power and authority, which promoters of the charity schools sometimes idealized as spheres of mutually reinforcing authority and discipline but which could also pit the pedagogical imperative to have full control over the children against the continued assertions of parental authority in matters of discipline and the continued and urgent primacy of household economies.

But charity school promoters also offered a means to gain rhetorical hegemony over this intractable problem in their characterizations of poor parents. Such characterizations emphasized, as the concept of charity required and as was presumably the case in some circumstances, the helplessness of poor parents in being able to provide the basic goods of soul and body for their children. But they also went considerably further. For they moved quite radically away from the pastoral assumption that the poor were willing, in however misguided a way, to provide for the basic needs of their children, pointing to a total deprivation entailed by poverty in language that emphasized the deficits of the poor across both moral and material levels and envisioning a starkly polarized social space of virtue and vice, Christian and pagan—rich and poor.Footnote 124 In this social imaginary, the usual institutions of family and work could not be counted on for the successful reproduction of society. On this picture of poverty what was required instead was the complete re-formation of a class of people through the creation of an insulated pedagogical apparatus acting on impressionable youth at some remove from the poor household. Charity allowed concern for the welfare of others under the universal government of God to arm an intervention hedging the family as a grounding, and still functioning, structure of authority, as had zeal for godly reform throughout the two previous centuries.Footnote 125 But the closest achievement of this power in the enclosure of poor girls in the St. James's parish shows its moral ambiguities, for it was no longer clear just how the social paternalism of charity could be held responsible to its end at this extralegal, macrosocial level, where its failure did not consist, as in a family, of the shame and burden of a failed relationship, an intersubjective breakdown of trust and reciprocity with real material consequences, but very likely instead in the distantly exercised punishment of the law.Footnote 126