Founded in late 1884 as a new centre of social work in Whitechapel, London's most notorious slum, Toynbee Hall aimed to ‘link the Universities with East London, and to direct the human sympathies, the energies, and the public spirit of Oxford and Cambridge to the actual conditions of town life’ (Universities’ Settlement Association, 1884: 3). The proposal fused the social reformism then fashionable at the two universities with the improving parochial activities sponsored by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett at their impoverished East End parish of St Jude’s, Whitechapel since 1873. Educated young men would ‘settle’ there, to provide the civic leadership and social services the neighbourhood so evidently lacked and further the Barnetts’ ethos of ‘neighbourliness’. In tracing the origins of 87 of the first 100 or so residents at Toynbee Hall between 1884 and 1900, Meacham confirms that 90% arrived there directly from either Oxford or Cambridge (Meacham, 1987: 44).

This chapter reconsiders this origin story, asking whether a paternalistic desire to engineer a new social elite in Whitechapel was indeed the driving purpose behind Toynbee Hall's foundation. The fact that it was known as a ‘settlement’, with all the colonising implications of that term, certainly suggests it was; Scotland surmises Barnett's initial proposal as ‘the idea of establishing a colony of university men in East London…. As he saw it, the key factor was to be good neighbours and this meant to live among the poor and demonstrate neighbourliness in practical action’ (Scotland, 2007: i–xii). The standard account is that Barnett conceived this ‘settlement idea’ in June 1883, responding to an appeal from students at St John's College, Cambridge for advice in commencing social work among the poor. In a letter that in his wife's view arguably ‘founded Toynbee Hall’, Barnett urged the students to undertake personal residence among the poor as a direct social intervention across the barriers of class, wealth and education. ‘The letter pointed out’, Henrietta later recalled, ‘that close personal knowledge of individuals among the poor must precede wise legislation for remedying their needs, and that as English local government was based on the assumption of a leisured, cultivated class, it was necessary to provide it artificially in those regions [where it was absent]’ (Barnett, 1909: 246–7).