Soup and Reform: Improving the Poor and Reforming Immigrants through Soup Kitchens 1870–1910
Soup and Reform: Improving the Poor and Reforming Immigrants through Soup Kitchens 1870-1910
Philip Carstairs 0
0 School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester , University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH , UK
Charitable soup kitchens proliferated in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Three soup kitchens operating in England between 1870 and 1910 are compared; two were Jewish soup kitchens, the other was an English (non-Jewish) charity. Institutional buildings are often analyzed using Foucault-derived models of control based on surveillance and punishment. Such models may not explain fully charities, their buildings, or their method of reform. Historical archaeology can show how charity that coerces or dehumanizes the poor is less likely to create lasting improvements in the behaviors it is seeking to reform than charity that adopts a more positive approach.
Philanthropy; Charity; Building; Soup kitchen; England
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Charitable distribution of food to the poor has been part of almost every religious and
cultural tradition, but this has not prevented people from debating who should benefit
from charity and what form charity should take. In the increasingly secular modern
world, welfare is called on to perform the role of state philanthropy and has so become
one of the most contested and debated topics while at the same time showing
significant cross-cultural variation. Welfare reform and how to deal with Bthe poor^ have
been high on the political agenda in recent times, and food banks and soup kitchens
have opened up in many western countries since the onset of economic crisis of 2008.
Despite the importance of charity and welfare, few historical or archaeological
studies that have considered the subjects in any depth. By exploring how charity
operated, how it was experienced and its consequences (did the recipients benefit?)
historical archaeology can inform the debate and highlight the shortcomings of past
and present approaches to welfare. The giving of alms to the poor in the form of food
is advocated in Judaism (Isaiah 58:7, Proverbs 22: 9; Maimonides 1979),
Islam (Surah 89, 90 and 107) and Christianity (Matthew 25: 5–40, Luke 3:11).
Soup kitchens are part of this long history of the charitable distribution of food. In
Western Europe, soup kitchens appear in the late seventeenth century. They spread
rapidly throughout northern Europe and North America in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. This article places three soup kitchens that operated in
England between 1870 and 1910: the General Soup Kitchen, an English (BEnglish^ is
used for convenience to mean non-Jewish; many of the Anglo-Jewish community
were English born) soup kitchen in Newcastle, the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor
in London, and the Manchester Jewish Soup Kitchen at the Philanthropic Hall in
Manchester (Fig. 1), in the broader context of the development of charities, the
English Poor Laws and the growth of the Anglo-Jewish community, in each case
from the eighteenth century through to the First World War. Using the buildings, the
material culture and documentary evidence from the Newcastle, London, and
Manchester soup kitchens in turn, the article explores the different ways in which
the Jewish and English charities influenced, reformed and controlled the poor. Soup
kitchens differ both from modern food charities such as food banks and
breadlines, and their ancestor, the bread, meat, and coal society, by cooking and serving
ready-to-eat meals. This required specialized premises and a degree of permanence
making them more amenable to archaeological study.
Institutional buildings can express the ideologies upon which they operate both
externally and internally (Piddock 2007). For example, many of the large institutional
buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often adopted the style of palaces
or country houses (Markus 1993). Their appearance embodied the good taste and
power of the benefactors and communicated their reformative goals to those outside.
State institutions that dealt with pathology, such as prisons (Brodie et al. 2002; Casella
2001, 2007) and workhouses (May 2005; Markus 1993) adopted designs that facilitated
categorizing, segregating, controlling, and exercising surveillance over those inside.
The concepts of the total institution (Goffman 1961) and of dominance and control
(Foucault 1979) have been very influential in the study of institutional buildings. Some
charitable institutions have been found to conform to the pattern, for example, the
Philadelphia Magdalen Society (De Cunzo 1995) and almshouses (Baugher 2001;
Huey 2001; Spencer-Wood 2001).
Soup kitchens transformed raw ingredients into soup (in very large quantities) and
hungry people into fed and hopefully content people. The processes, the flows of
material and people, and the performance of daily life within the space both influence
and are influenced by the physical structure (Johnson 2010). Understanding (...truncated)