This project was generously funded by the ESRC (Grant number: ES/I031359/1). It originated in a number of conversations between Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe and from their collaboration over a number of years. Both have had a strong interest in charities and humanitarian aid respectively; they also share a common enthusiasm for the Victorian era. Together they brought their initial concerns for the material culture of charity into a research question. Dr Sarah Roddy joined in, initially as the research assistant for this project, but she soon became one of the three co-authors, bringing to the project her own considerable scholarship. All chapters were debated and written collectively as were the various articles originating from this project and which develop more fully some aspects of the work. In particular we are grateful to the Journal of British Studies for allowing us to use some of the material that appeared in our article of January 2015, ‘The Charity-Mongers of Modern Babylon: Bureaucracy, Scandal, and the Transformation of the Philanthropic Marketplace, c.1870–1912’.
This work has been grounded in ongoing discussions with contemporary NGOs and in the work done through the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (hcri.ac.uk) at the University of Manchester and in collaboration with the Overseas Development Institute. We have benefited greatly from the insights arising from our discussions with colleagues at ALNAP or at the Centre de Reflexion sur les Actions et les Savoirs Humanitaires (CRASH) at MSF. For some of the policy implications of this research we invite our readers to consult our article ‘Humanitarian Accountability, Bureaucracy, and Self-Regulation: The View from the Archives?’ (Disasters, 39 [2015], 188–203) or the article co-authored by Bertrand Taithe and John Borton: ‘History, Memory and “Lessons Learnt” for Humanitarian Practitioners’ (European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 23 [2016], 210–24).
Over the lifespan of the project we have had the opportunity to present aspects of this research to a variety of audiences, and we wish to thank particularly the feedback we received from colleagues at research seminars at universities in Manchester, Exeter and the Institute of Historical Research; the ‘Material Religion in Modern Britain’ conference, Cardiff (2012); a workshop on ‘History, Consumption and Inequality’, Cambridge (2013); the Humanitarian Congress, Berlin (2014); the Humanitarian Studies Conference, Istanbul (2013); an MSF workshop in Paris (2015); the Modern British Studies Conference, Birmingham (2015); and the Voluntary Action History Society conference, Liverpool (2016).
We are blessed to be working in a remarkably fast moving and creative research environment in which an extraordinary number of colleagues, past and present, have cognate research interests that have fed into this project: among them, Eleanor Davey, Pierre Fuller, Peter Gatrell, Max Jones and Peter Yeandle. They have all contributed significantly to this project (whether they like it or not!). Of course, any errors remain ours entirely.
We wish to thank the archivists, curators and librarians of the following institutions: Barclays Bank Archive, Dr Barnardo’s Archives, Birmingham Archives, Birmingham Museum, the Borthwick Institute York, the British Library, Devon County Archives, Greater Manchester County Record Office, John Rylands Library, Lambeth Palace Library, Lancashire Record Office, Lancaster City Museum, Liverpool Catholic Diocesan Archives, Liverpool Record Office, London Metropolitan Archive, National Archives at Kew, National Army Museum, National Coal Mining Museum, National Railway Museum, Norfolk Record Office, Northumberland Museum, Salvation Army International Heritage Centre, Salford Diocesan Archives, Scottish National Archives, School of Oriental and African Studies Library, Staffordshire County Record Office, Tameside Local Study and Archive, Tyne and Wear Museum, University of Liverpool Special Collections, V&A Theatre Museum and West-Yorkshire County Archives. We owe a particular debt to the librarians of the John Rylands Library and of Saint Deiniol’s Library where this book first took its final shape.
This book took longer than we anticipated but it is, if anything, more relevant today than we expected when we first devised it.
Sarah Roddy, Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe
Manchester, 2018