2 English Traits (London, 1911), pp. 115-16.

3 Acton to Richard Simpson, 17/12/1862; Gasquet, J. R., O.S.B. (ed.): Lord Acton and his Circle (London, 1906), p. 246.Google Scholar

4 Pastoral Letter of the First Provincial Synod of Westminster, 17/7/1852; Guy, Rev. R. E.: The Synods in English: being the text of the Four Synods of Westminster translated into English (Stratford-on-Avon, 1906), p. 269.Google Scholar

5 The Earls of Shrewsbury and Newburgh, the Lords Camoys, Stourton, Petrc and Clifford, the Hon. Charles Clifford and the Hon. Edward Petre; the Dowager Countess and the Countess of Shrewsbury, the Countess of Newburgh and the Ladies Searle, Stourton, Bedingfeld and Petre. In 1847, the charity was educating three hundred children, and clothing two hundred and forty. Reports of the Catholic Poor Schools, St. John's Wood 1841, 1842, 1847, G.P., A.A.W.

6 ‘The Catholic population attached to this Church exceeds 3,000 souls, of whom the Irish poor form the great majority… . The munificent foundresses (the Misses Gallini) … would engross the whole merit of building the school rooms, had not the fabric of the Church … considerably reduced their annual income …’ Catholic Directory 1840, p. 11.

7 Caroll, Mother Mary Austin: Leaves from the Annals of the Sisters of Mercy (New York, 1883), Vol. 2, pp. 54–94.Google Scholar

8 Anderson, loc. cit.

9 Battersby's Complete Ordo, or Catholic Directory … for 1852 (London and Dublin, 1852), p. 301.

10 In Calmel Buildings: his salary was subscribed by a club formed by parents, who each week paid him a shilling or sixpence apiece. Waugh, op. cit., p. 21.

11 Guy, op. cit., p. 268.

12 Bishop Poynter's evidence before the Select Committee on the Education of the Lower Orders in the Metropolis, P.P. 1816 Vol. 4, p. 302.

13 See John Moore Capes on ‘The Rising Generation: our Poor Schools’, Rambler, November 1856, Vol. 6, pp. 326-33.

14 Vere, George Langton: Random Recollections of Old Soho (Barnet, 1910), p. 33, S.P.Google Scholar

15 Weir, W.: ‘St. Giles's, Past and Present’ in Charles Knight's London (London, 1851), Vol. 3, p. 270.

16 Thus the Virginia Street parish offered half a dozen levels of education: at two schools in the district, fourpence a week, or four shillings a quarter, were charged to children in the first class; threepence a week, or three shillings a quarter to the second and third classes; and twopence a week or two shillings a quarter to a fourth. The two remaining classes—for the destitute—were free. So the priest had to provide accommodation for quite distinct classes of children; the respectable Irish, who could pay their pence, and sought efficient teaching with but too little regard for religion, and the shiftless, who needed charity. The prosperous Irishman would not send his children to mix with the dirty and disreputable, and if he found the standard of instruction low, might be prepared to defy the priest and have recourse to the local Protestant competitor. ‘If, on the other hand’, wrote an East End priest, ‘you encourage cleanliness and regularity, the ragged … will not continue to come where etiquette requires shoes and clean faces…. One school will not for any length of time combine both descriptions of children.’ Rev. J. S. Wenham in Tablet, 17/3/1855; Rules and Regulations for the Schools attached to St. Mary and St. Michael's church, Commercial Road East 6/1/1861, W.P., A.A.W. See also the nice distinction made by Frederick Oakeley: ‘We have as yet but one school for boys, and one for girls, of the poor, if not the poorest class, such as ordinarily frequent the Church schools with us, or the National Schools among Protestants; one infant school, and one free and industrial school, for children who are quite destitute’ Tablet, 4/3/1854.

17 On the many Catholic children in Anglican and Dissenting schools, see the Newcastle Commission on Education, Part 3, p. 528, cited in Coleman, B.I.: Anglican Church Extension and Related Movements c. 1800-1850, Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge 1968, pp. 249-50.

18 Bogan, op. cit., p. 235.

19 Thus the Secretary of the Aged Poor Society, who regaled his confreres in 1844 with ‘the harrowing details’ of the condition of a sick applicant who had to be turned away; and ‘hundreds more … were lingering … in the same helpless state …’ Tablet, 17/2/1844.

20 As the heir of the Metropolitan Catholic Tract Society founded by W. E. Andrewes, it hoped to convert Protestants with an avalanche of polemical pamphlets—two and a quarter million in its first four years—and to fight the militant Tory No-Popery campaign. A Short Account of the Origin and Progress of the Catholic Institute of Great Britain … (London, 1839), pp. 3-5.

21 Second Annual Report (London, 1840), p. 6.

22 Fourth Annual Report (London, 1842), p. 8.

23 Third Annual Report (London, 1841). p. 7.

24 Lucas, Edward: The Life of Frederick Lucas, M.P. (London, 1886), Vol. 2, p. 280.Google Scholar

25 See its history, Tablet, 23/10/1847.

26 See Tablet, 4/9/1840.

27 E.g. the Wimbledon Institute, which formed a Catholic fraternity for ‘the support of the honest and indigent, and … the destitute sick …’ Tablet, 19/9/1840; London and Dublin Orthodox Journal, 26/9/1840, Vol. 2, p. 207; also the Confraternities of Christian Doctrine described in Part I.

28 See my ‘Roman Catholic Mission to the Irish in London’, Recusant History, October [969, p. 127.

29 Tablet, 10/6/1843. Fifth Annual Report of Catholic Institute (London, 1843), p. 11.

30 Tablet, 17/6/1843.

31 See the Finance Subcommittee of the A.C.C. Minute Book, 4/8/1842, M.A., on the declining income of the A.C.C. from the late 1830's.

32 Petre, Hon. Edward: A Letter to the Catholics of London on the State of the Catholic Charities in the Metropolis, February 25th, 1843 (London, 1843), pp. 4, 7.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., p. 4.

34 Notably the Bedingfelds of Oxburgh, Norfolk.

35 Finance Subcommittee of the A.C.C. Minute Book, 25/3/1840.

36 See Fr Kelly's appeal for the East London Catholic Institution, which had maintained the children of the East End poor schools. ‘In times gone by, some of the largest Catholic gatherings in London were held for their support; and a very remarkable one under O'Connell, before Emancipation. At last, no chairman could be found, and the annual dinner had to be given up …’ Tablet, 15/9/1860.

37 ‘ … the active zeal of friends in higher circles formerly gained for [the] Tudor Place schools support, often times munificent, from charitable individuals far removed from our locality. But most of these good persons have gone to their reward, and … St Patrick's Schools therefore … depend on local exertions…’ Report 1862, p. 11, S.P. Moreover its operations became increasingly localized: before 1850 children came to the schools from other London parishes; by 1870 they were all from the surrounding area. Report 1870, p. 6; also Report 1878, p. 6, S.P.

38 Thomas Stonor, first Baron Camoys. See Stonor, A. J.: Stonor: A Catholic Sanctuary in the Chilterns (Newport, 1951), pp. 334-5.Google Scholar

39 Tablet, 20/5/1843.

40 Catholic charitable bequests were illegal if they required prayer for the dead, which in the Charity Commissioners’ words ‘has been decided in the Court of Chancery to be a superstitious use'. Catholic charities therefore, had to be semi-secret, and could not be the object of enquiry by the Commissioners, who had no wish to destroy them—for, as the Commissioners observed, among Roman Catholics ‘a condition to pray for the Soul of the Founder… is sometimes expressly, always implicitly, annexed to every Charitable Foundation’. Report on the Charitable Uses Bill, and the Roman Catholic Charities Bill, P.P. (1857), Vol. 9, p. 3. There was a Catholic campaign to redress the law, which has cost us a wealth of information on mid-Victorian Catholic charity.

41 Lascelles, E.: ‘Charity’ in Young, G.M. (ed.): Early Victorian England 1830-65 (London, 1934), Vol. 2, pp. 337-8Google Scholar; cf. Florence Nightingale's dissatisfaction—Cook, Sir Edward: The Life of Florence Nightingale (Lindon, 1913), Vol. 1, p. 80.

42 See Lord Lyndhurst's speech in the House of Lords on the Charitable Trusts Bill, 18/5/1846, Lascelles, loc. cit., pp. 334-7.

43 Cf. ‘V.S.s’ attack on ‘Tea Bibbing and Charity Dinners’ and on the poor returns of a tea party in aid of the Lincoln's Inn poor schools: ‘What a delightful soiree that must have been! … A hundred and four score ladies and gentlemen sitting down to tea and rising up to dance! Sipping tea and “tripping the light fantastic” for the benefit of the poor! Well, if that be not “the spiritual works of mercy made easy”, I'll leave off drawing comparisons… . “The arrangements made for tea were very satisfactory!” That is very gratifying intelligence, Mr Editor, calculated to make a very salutary impression upon the minds of the 1,000 juveniles who are deprived of education in the Lincoln's Inn Fields district—enough to make their mouths water again …’ London and Dublin Orthodox Journal, 9/9/1843, Vol. 18, p. 165.

44 Tablet, 6/1/1844.

45 Tablet, 29/7/1843.

46 Tablet, 25/3/1843.

47 Tablet, 29/7/1843.

48 Tablet, 25/3/1843.

49 ‘The Christian Organization of Large Towns’, Tablet, 5/8/1843.

50 Tablet, 20/1/1844.

51 For a near contemporary account, pleading for its extension in England, Fr George Spencer in the Catholic Magazine, February 1843, Vol. 1, New Series, pp. 92-96.

52 Tablet, 3/2/1844.

53 He had helped build poor schools at Wapping, Whitechapel and Spitalfields, where he assited the Marists from 1850; he died while vice-president of the Society of St Vincent at St James, Spanish Place. A Sister of Notre Dame: Sister Mary of St Philip (Frances Mary Lescher) (London, 1933), pp. 1-3.

54 On Edward Blount, a sometime Secretary of the Catholic Association, a religious and political organization of the 1820's, see Cassirer, R.: The Irish Influence on the Liberal Movement in England 1798-1912, with special reference to the period 1815-1832, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1940, pp. 146-7. On the family's charitable concern in the character of Joseph Blount, a country gentleman and friend of Cobbett, see Gildea, Rev. Denis: Mother Mary Arsenius of Foxford (London, 1936), pp. 7-8.

55 ‘He had certainly a just pride in his family descent…’ et seq. in the attractive portrait by William Amherst, s.j., a co-founder of the Society of St Vincent and a lifelong friend, in Mr George Blount (London, 1899; reprinted from the Tablet, 23/1/1899), Pamphlets, Vol. 205, Downside Abbey Library.

56 One as a soldier, another as a courtier, a third as a banker, and a fourth as President of the English Benedictines. Reid, Stuart J.: Memoirs of Sir Edward Blount K.C.B. (London, 1902), pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., p. 86.

58 Ibid., p. 8.

59 Ibid., p. 7.

60 The inscription on the family tomb in Kidderminster church, appended as a suitable epitaph to Amherst's obituary of Blount by Dom Anselm Barnewell, of the family of Thomas Barnewell, for many years Secretary of the St Patrick's charities; cf. Parish Report 1863, p. 8, S.P. Like Blount, Barnewell's length of service was half a century; the Barnewells, an Irish family, boasted an equally illustrious pedigree, claiming descent from the Knight de Berneval whose name is on the roll of Battle Abbey. Barnewell, Robert: Genealogical Descent of the Eldest Branch of the Barnewells (London, 1844) p. 3 Google Scholar. Like Langdale, Barnewell was called (Tablet, 4/7/1857) the ‘Father of London Charities’; he was also a member of the Society of St Vincent and the only lay president of the ‘Benevolent Society’ for the aged—on which see above.

61 Minutes of (monthly) Meetings of the Society of St Vincent de Paul (henceforth cited as Minutes of (monthly) Meetings, 4/11/1846, A.S.V.P. English Catholics subscribed to French Catholic charities while in residence in France, and even raised money for them in England. See Frances Jones, Paris, to Mary Huddleston, Brussels, franked 12/2/1838, H.P., appealing for the Missions Étrangéres; or Fanny Couche, Paris, to R.H., 5/12/1841, H.P., asking money for the orphanage of the parish of St Roch.

62 Annual Meeting Report 1844, p. 6, A.S.V.P.

63 Sister Mary of St Philip, op. cit., p. 50.

64 William Lescher, on whom see above.

65 Tablet, 2/1/1858.

66 An early venture was an unsuccessful effort to found a Sunday School in Calmel Buildings (Annual Meeting Report 1845, p. 15, A.S.V.P.); in one year alone they taught in day and night schools in Lincoln's Inn, Sunday schools at Spanish Place and helped to establish Sunday Schools at Chelsea (London and Provincial Council Report 1848, pp. 16, 18, 122, A.S.V.P.). In 1849 they taught and clothed sixty children in a day-school in Kensington (London and Provincial Council Report 1850, p. 24, A.S.V.P.); in 1857 they maintained a school for two hundred and fifty children at St John's, Islington (Annual Report 1857, p. 19, A.S.V.P.) and a night-school at St John's Wood (ibid., p. 18), and this sort of sporadic, not always enduring activity was partly the basis of the claim made in 1856 that the Society had educated or otherwise assisted during the year three thousand children throughout England (ibid., p. 4). Even labouring members taught: cf. the Clerkenwell conference, which though ‘organized and managed almost exclusively by working men … keep up two day schools and two night schools’ (Tablet, 9/9/1854).

67 Annual Report 1849, p. 12, A.S.V.P.

68 Cf. Annual Report 1849, p. 10. A.S.V.P.

69 General Meeting Report 1847, p. 15, A.S.V.P.; Tablet, 15/5/1847.

70 Annual Report 1849, p. 10; Annual Report 1851, p. 27. A.S.V.P.

71 General Meeting Report 1846, p. 20; Provincial Council Report 1867, p. 22. A.S.V.P.

72 Westminster Conference Minutes, 7/4/1857, A.S.V.P.

73 Not only from England; the Society was responsible for the transmission of some 130,000 f. (over £10,000) collected by the Society in France. General Meeting Report 1847, p. 11, A.S.V.P.

74 London and Provincial Council Meetings Minute Book, 2/9/1844; The first orphans were supported in 1845: ibid., 4/3/1845, A.S.V.P.

75 Waugh, op. cit., p. 56; Annaul Report 1857, pp. 31-34, A.S.V.P.

76 Cf. M.C.P.B., 15/10/1856; Annual Report 1857, p. 17, A.S.V.P.

77 Tablet, 6/3/1858.

78 M.C.P.B., 1/5/1857, 5/6/1857, 24/7/1857, 27/8/1857, 16/2/1858, 17/5/1865, 18/11/1867, A.S.V.P.

79 Ibid., 4/7/1867, A.S.V.P.

80 Ibid., 24/7/1857, A.S.V.P.

81 First Bart., Sheriff of London 1889-90, Lord Mayor 1893-93. Boase, Vol. 5, cols. 833-4.

82 M.C.P.B., 27/5/1859, 21/8/1862, A.S.V.P.

83 Ibid., 4/8/1858, 2/2/1877, A.S.V.P.

84 Robert Biddulph Phillipps, sometime magistrate of Longworth, Herefordshire, Deputy Lieutenant and Sheriff of the county; Battersby, op. cit., p. 197.

85 M.C.P.B., 19/1/1866, A.S.V.P.

86 Hon. R. Stafford-Jerningham (1806-74), diplomat-son of the third Baron Stafford: Boase, Vol. 2, col. 87.

87 M.C.P.B., 16/11/1864, A.S.V.P.

88 The convert Francis Richard Wegg-Prosser, M.P. for Herefordshire, 1847-52, High Sheriff of Herefordshire in 1855, builder of Belmont Abbey. Gorman, op. cit., p. 289.

89 Minutes of the Westminster Conference, 27/12/1861, 17/1/1862, A.S.V.P.

90 Ibid., 22/10/1856, 5/11/1856, 20/10/1858; he also said Mass for the work, ibid., 10/11/1856; for another such sermon, Tablet, 25/7/1857.

91 M.C.P.B., 9/11/1857, A.S.V.P.

92 Ibid., 18/11/1857; on Hathaway see my ‘Heretic London, Holy Poverty and the Irish Poor, 1830-1870', Downside Review, January 1971, p. 79.

93 M.C.P.B., 14/12/1864.

94 Ibid., 27/10/1858. For another such lecture for the Society, on ‘Rambles through the Campagna', Tablet, 8/5/1858.

95 M.C.P.B., 19/3/1860, A.S.V.P.; on Furniss, see Lecky, W. E. H., History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (London, 1911) Vol. 2, pp. 223-4, note 2.Google Scholar

96 M.C.P.B., 6/3/1874.

97 Ibid., 19/3/1860.

98 Ibid., 3/11/1858, 3/6/1862; see also 18/2/1863, when the task was transferred to the seculars of the Sardinian Chapel.

99 Cf. their schoolmaster's report, ibid., 21/11/1873.

100 Ibid., 2/3/1873.

101 Ibid.. 14/2/1868.

102 Ibid., 17/2/1858, 16/3/1876.

103 Ibid., 5/1/1860, 24/12/1863.

104 Ibid., 21/5/1875.

105 Ibid., 15/6/1858, 19/12/1860, 13/1/1861.

106 See the Committee's defence of the boys against Catholic critics, ibid., 26/5/1876.

107 On an early Oratorian effort, see Bowden, John Edward: The Life and Letters of Frederick William Faber (London, 1869) pp. 336-7Google Scholar

108 Catholic Directory 1873, pp. 114, 344.

109 Tablet, 28/5/1864, 2/7/1864. Gorman, op. cit., p. 173.

110 Barnardo admitted that an undisclosed proportion of his boys, all brought up as Protestants, were the children of Catholic parents, but insisted that he only accepted them on the understanding that the parents agreed to the change of faith. He was willing to surrender them to any Catholic homes ready to receive them, declaring that anything was better than the slums from which he had saved them, but indicted the Church's failure to provide for its young and reluctance to undertake welfare work. Given the respect paid by the Irish to their priests, Barnardo thought that ‘an accredited Roman Catholic priest with a loving heart might almost empty the slums, and maintain such an effective crusade against profligacy and vice in cutting off the entail in its youngest victims as the nineteenth century has never beheld.’ Mrs Barnardo and James Marchant: Memoirs of the Late Dr Barnardo … (London, 1907), p. 209; also pp. 204-13.

111 Waugh, op. cit., p. 119.

112 Cf. Annual Report 1851, p. 10, A.S.V.P. Such a society was in fact founded in Liverpool: ibid., p. 27.

113 The suggestion was Wiseman's: ibid., pp. 11-13.

114 Cf. Lucas: ‘Not out of every log can you hew a God, nor out of every Christian can you make a Brother of St Vincent de Paul’ Tablet, 20/1/1844. Also General Meeting Report 1846. p. 17, A.S.V.P.

115 ‘… owing their vocation to the practice of ministering to the poor in this society.’ C. J. Pagliano, General Meeting Report 1846, p. 4, A.S.V.P. Thus two members of the London brotherhood left in its first year to study for holy orders, while one of the founders, William Amherst, later defected to the Society of Jesus. There were ho fewer than five such vocations in 1850, while Langdale was with difficulty dissuaded from the same course, and in fact took the vows of a Jesuit lay-brother on his death bed. Minutes of (monthly) Meetings, 1/7/1844; London and Provincial Council Report 1850, p. 20; Annual Report 1851, p. 6, A.S.V.P.; also Pagliano to Griffiths, 16/4/1845, G.P., A.A.W. One of the first Conferences of the Society in England had been established in 1845 in the Westminster diocesan seminary of St Edmund's, Ware, and gave two generations of priests and bishops, convert and cradle-Catholic, their first experience of poor-relief and district visiting. Ward, the Very Rev. Bernard: History of St Edmund's College, Old Hall, Ware (London, 1893), pp. 253-4.

116 Thus the Lincoln's Inn Conference was said to have to expect ‘always to be a fluctuating body, as our vicinity to the law offices adds to our Conference members whose residence in London is only for a year or two’. General Meeting Report 1846, p. 16; also Annual Report 1857, p. 2, A.S.V.P.

117 Cf. Reports of (monthly) Meetings, 7/9/1846, A.S.V.P.

118 ‘The cold shade of heresy has been unfavourable to its growth’ Tablet, 2/2/1858. Cf. a typical French criticism of the English Society: ‘In that rich country, money may be got, but even the most generous benefactors of the poor experience an unheard of reluctance to be themselves the distributors of alms. The various Conferences in England are making laudable efforts to break down this barrier which separates the poor from the rich; but … the rule of personal visitation of the poor is the main obstacle against the development of our Society’: an analysis described by an English member as ‘a faithful, though humiliating, picture of the social state of England.’ London and Provincial Council Report 1850, p. 26. A.S.V.P.

119 ‘The surest method of fostering that cordial feeling of brotherly affection, both towards the poor and towards each other.’ General Meeting Report 1846, p. 19, A.S.V.P.; while Gentili urged the Society to restore the golden age of the Church, when the Sacrament of the Altar was received daily by the Faithful. Ibid., p. 33.

120 Ibid., p. 119.

121 Reports of (monthly) Meetings, October 1845, A.S.V.P.

122 Inglis quotes this as the opinion of a ‘responsible’ clergyman; if the attitude was not untypical, the cleric could hardly have been less ‘responsible’. Inglis, op. cit., p. 135, cited from Purcell, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 316; also quoted, with malicious intent, by Strachey, Lytton: Eminent Victorians (London, 1929), p. 78.Google Scholar

123 As, say, in the Passionist plea for money to purchase artificial legs for one Ellen Burke (Universe, 7/9/1861); or the Camberwell parish priest's quest for aid for a pregnant widow with seven children, left destitute when her husband, an Irish labourer ‘notable for his zeal for religion, and for his regular discharge of all Christian duties’ (Universe, 8/8/1863), was run over by a train at Battersea Station.

124 Pastoral, dated 29/12/1846; reproduced Tablet, 9/1/1847.

125 Tablet, 30/1/1847.

126 Faber to Lady Arundel, 21/1/1855, Vol. 30, (54), O.L., L.O.

127 Fr Daniel Santry to Tablet, 3/3/1855.

128 Cf. Fr Toomey of Bunhill Row, to Wiseman, 31/1/1856, 10/2/1857, W.P., A.A.W.

128 John Stanton, 22/12/1857, in Tablet, 16/12/1857.

130 See Appeal for the A.C.C., Tablet, 16/4/1864.

131 Groups A, Folio 43, p. 18, Booth Papers, L.S.E.

132 E.g. Universe, 29/8/1863.

133 Wiseman, ‘Review of Rambler’, loc. cit., pp. 460-1; Ward, Life of Wiseman, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 383, 385.

134 Catholic Directory 1862, p. 211.

135 Faber, F. W.: Spiritual Conferences (London, 1860), p. 364.

136 Norfolk to Lord Albemarle, 18/1/1857, A.A.

137 On the difficulties of lay-clerical association in social work, see Keatinge, Canon James: The Priest: his Character and Work (London, 1903), pp. 279-82.Google Scholar