C.F.G. Masterman, In Peril of Change

From In Peril of Change: Essays Written in Time of Tranquillity. London: T. Fisher Unwin 1905.

Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman (1873-1927) was an MP, editor and journalist. He was ostensibly a Liberal but his political allegiances were complex and contradictory. Though he believed strongly in the virtues of free enterprise, he believed also that the gulf between rich and poor was becoming dangerous and had to be closed by radical state intervention. Therefore he had much in common with the Socialists of the 1890s like H.G. Wells and Beatrice Webb, though in these extracts his patrician disdain for “clerkdom” and the ever-expanding London suburbs is very obvious.

[From “The Burden of London”]

The city is, for the most part, an endless series of replicas—similar streets, similar people, similar occupations: crowded existence, drifting through the choked and narrow ways. You journey on the tardy trams by stages linking together conspicuous gin-palaces, the only landmarks of successive regions: now you are in “Walworth,” now in “Peckham,” again in “Deptford.” The varying titles are useful but deluding. The stuff is homogenous, woven of drab buildings and a life set in grey. Lay down an interminable labyrinth of mean two-storied cottages. Pepper the concoction plentifully with churches, school-buildings, and block-dwellings of an assorted variety of ugliness. Cram into this as much labouring humanity as it will hold, and then cram in some more. Label with any name, as Stepney or Kentish Town. You have in essence the particular ghetto that you desire. …

On other margins of the city the texture insensibly is transformed into something quaint and strange. The lines of cottages protrude into bow windows. Children are scooped inside instead of discharged outside the houses. The population clothes itself in black coats, entertains yearnings after respectability, and attends on Sunday places of public worship. This is Clerkdom: Dulwich and Clapham and Harringay; where pale men protest Imperialism and women are driven by the tedium of nothingness into Extension Lectures or the Primrose League[1] — an uncanny and humorous region, illuminated with perplexing ideals. … And we recognise a population destined ever to extend. Greater London in less than thirty years is to amount to ten millions. The main part of this increase will be woven of this drab material. North, east, south, and west the aggregation is silently pushing outwards like some gigantic plasmodium:[2] spreading slimy arms over the surrounding fields, heavily dragging after them the ruin of its desolation. (161-5)

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[1] A genteel organization within the Conservative Party, founded in 1883 to promote the ideology of Imperialism.

[2] A thin sheet of living tissue, like a slime mould.