The Age of the Do-Gooders

Most reviewers of Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders (Mondays, BBC2, 9.00pm) accepted the line that Hislop pursues in the series; that it’s curious how ‘do-gooder’ has become such a pejorative term (a euphemism for interfering busybody) when doing good is what we should all aspire to.

The series celebrates Victorian social reformers who tend to be regarded as pious laughing stocks in this enlightened age; Hislop’s aim being to rescue them from ridicule and illustrate their importance in the evolution of British society. As the Metro notes: “He argues that the moral revolution of the 19th century invented the wide-ranging concept of a caring, just society, and that, far from being interfering busybodies, reformers were pioneering mavericks whose dynamism is to be admired.”

The dynamic 19th-century figures that Hislop highlights took it upon themselves to fix the Victorian equivalent of “broken Britain”. They overturned the ruling class’s callousness and unconcern for the poor and restored its social conscience. The big question was: What can I do? Hislop calls it “the moral revolution”: “They took a lot of flak at the time. That’s what interests me about it. I’m split between seeing why people took the p--- and thinking that, actually, they were rather good news.”

Reviewers generally thought the first episode was an eloquently argued slice of social history that aimed to reveal what a sorry state we’d all be in were it not for a bunch of remarkable 19th-century revolutionaries. What they seem to have missed was Hislop’s argument, highlighted particularly when interviewing members of the public, that our contemporary individualism militates against the 21st century (at least in its beginning) becoming an age of do-gooding. As Hislop stated in The Telegraph:

“We tend to see do-gooders as interfering busybodies … Few people believe they can personally make a difference. But the achievements of enlightened characters like Robert Owen [founder a model mill town in New Lanark], Thomas Wakley [scourge of cronyism among surgeons], Octavia Hill [pioneer of social housing] and George Dawson [the Birmingham social reformer] may just have something to teach us in the 21st century.

Amongst those reviews that I read only John Crace, in The Guardian, had a critique of this first episode. Crace argued that Hislop is turning into a rather good TV social historian but would benefit from providing rather more context to his story:

“Because while philanthropy emerged out of a sense that the better-off had a duty of care towards the less well-off, it also had its limitations. It is a start towards social justice but it is not an end or sufficient in itself. That's why the welfare state was introduced. To have followed this argument would not just have made these Victorians part of a historical narrative rather than liberal curiosities; it would have highlighted the obvious flaws in the coalition's belief that Do-Gooding can replace the state.”

Hislop’s series looks likely to be valuable in rehabilitating the idea of doing good to others for our strongly individualistic age but needs to be balanced by the perception that philanthropy alone is not enough. What may be most significant about those whom Hislop highlights, is that theirs was not simply individual philanthropy but instead a search for social and political solutions to the poverty of their age.

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 Willie Nelson & Emmylou Harris - The Maker.