The views of Thomas Malthus and his followers-including many in Darwin’s circle -were influential in Victorian Britain, supporting the belief that it would benefit society to weed out weaklings and to leave unemployed labourers and their surplus children without support. Humanitarians naturally disagreed. Darwin himself was torn between conflicting views, as expressed in The Descent of Man: allowing feeble individuals to survive and breed 'must be highly injurious to the race of man,' and yet solidarity and sympathy with others were essential aspects of human nature and vital to the progress of civilisation.
These debates were reflected in a new kind of social realist art, which fascinated the public and invited many different readings. Here the poor might be seen either as victims of circumstance or as feckless wastrels. John Thomson’s photographs of London street life and Luke Fildes’s illustrations in the Graphic magazine gave middle-class people an impression of life at the bottom of Victorian society, in which miserable workhouses offered the only safety net for homeless paupers. Hubert von Herkomer pictured the 'struggle for existence' endured by the poor in grander forms, occasionally, as in his painting On Strike, hinting at the political or economic causes of hardship.
Street Life in London, 1877, Thomson’s photograph of ‘The 'Crawlers'’
Thomson’s photographs allowed the middle-class reader to look in on ‘those back streets and courts where the struggle for life is none the less bitter and intense, because less observed’. ‘Crawlers’ were destitute women who spent their days sitting on the workhouse steps – this one is minding another poor woman’s baby. However, according to the author, Adolphe Smith, who was active in the trade union movement, ‘crawlers’ were often victims of misfortune. Given a helping hand, they would rally and fight life’s battles anew.
The Bodleian Library, Oxford
On Strike, 1891
Oil on canvas
Thomas Malthus and his followers claimed that destitution was an inevitable effect of over-population, for which the poor had only themselves to blame. In their view, the state had no duty to support unemployed workers or their surplus children. Most artists, too, depicted the sufferings of labourers and paupers without implying that they were caused by an unfair political or economic system. On Strike is exceptional in its implications of class conflict. Rather than showing the striking worker in an angry and potentially violent demonstration, however, the artist focuses on his mental struggle between his loyalty to fellow workers and the duty to provide for his starving family.
Royal Academy of Arts, London