But there’s a psychological side to this too. The 19th century was haunted by itself. Its new industrialisation seemed to have unleashed the very powers of hell. Visitors to Manchester called it the Inferno. The English writer Mrs Gaskell wrote of her visit to a cotton mill, ‘I have seen hell and it’s white . . .’ And the new poor, the factory slaves, the basement-dwellers, the toilers in iron, heat, filth and degradation, appeared like spectres, thin, yellow, ragged, semi-human, half-dead. That this is also the century of organised charity and philanthropy is not a coincidence. And that it is
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