Klik på en miniature for at gå til Google Books
Indlæser... In Darkest England and The Way Out (1890)af William General Booth
Work InformationIn Darkest England and the Way Out af William Booth (1890)
Indlæser...
Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
This classic work in the literature of poverty was published in 1890 by William Booth (1829-1912), the founder of the Salvation Army. It was in fact mostly written by the crusading journalist W. T. Stead (referred to as an anonymous 'friend of the poor' in Booth's preface), but the practical ideas for relieving the poverty and squalor of late Victorian British cities are all Booth's own. Reworking the cliché of 'Darkest Africa', in the first part he describes the 'submerged tenth' of Darkest England - destitute and/or criminal - and goes on to suggest the way to 'Deliverance', which includes better housing, education and training for work, and the sending of the urban poor to 'colonies', both overseas and in the British countryside. These proposals had their critics, but drew wide attention to an appalling aspect of urban life of which the prosperous classes were barely aware. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsIngenPopulære omslag
Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)362.5Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Social problems of & services to groups of people Poor (from social service perspectives)LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
Er det dig?Bliv LibraryThing-forfatter. |
Booth is quick to dismiss the idea that this book is utopian, claiming that it's all actually achievable. The reason for this is essentially twofold. First, General Booth has statistics on his side. Secondly, everything he wants to do is completely practical. His big thing is to attack the actual causes of social maladies, something I think the Victorians in general were becoming more and more aware of. For example, he argues, the reason women become prostitutes isn't because they have low moral character, but because other people take advantage of women who have no other recourse. Similarly, alcohol isn't the cause of a problem, but a symptom of one.
He is also opposed to revolutionaries because their schemes of impossible hope make it difficult for him to recruit, and anyway the issue isn't some Bellamy-style top-down reorganization of society, but of changing individual behaviors to be more ethical; at one point he refers to his work as "revolutionising the character of those whose faults are the reason for their destitution" (252). It's sort of an interesting mix between increasing both social responsibility and individual responsibility. But it's all up to the Salvation Army to take the lead, because neither government nor society nor individuals are going to step up on their own.
Anyway, the most interesting parts of the book to a modern reader (or me, at least) are those where he articulates whys of his approach. In the rest of the book, there's a lot of hows, and they're very specific to both his time and place and his way of seeing the world. For example, he wants to establish New Britain, The Colony Over-Sea, which he calls "the unmooring of a little piece of England" (152), which has that usual nineteenth-century implication that all the continents that aren't Europe don't actually have people already living there. The schemes and data are also relayed in exhaustive detail.