# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Barnett, Samuel Augustus

​BARNETT, SAMUEL AUGUSTUS (1844-1913), divine and social reformer, the elder son of Francis Augustus Barnett, of Bristol, was born at 5 Portland Square, Bristol, 8 February 1844. His father was a man of wealth, the first manufacturer of iron bedsteads; his mother, Mary Gilmore, came of an old merchant family in Bristol. Educated at home, he went in June 1862 to Wadham College, Oxford, which was chosen because of the tory and protestant prejudices of the warden, Benjamin Parsons Symons. These did not appeal to young Barnett, and he never felt that he had got the best out of Oxford; ‘I made the mistake of using my time to grind at books rather than to know men.’ But he remained devotedly attached to Oxford and to Wadham, and not the least of his claims to be remembered is that he, as much as any man of his generation, brought his university into living relation with the social and moral life of England.
He took a second class in law and modern history in 1865, and then, after two years of teaching, travelled in America, a visit which ‘knocked all the toryism out of me’. In December 1867 he became curate at St. Mary’s, Bryanston Square, London, to William Henry Fremantle (afterwards dean of Ripon). He was at once introduced to his life’s work, the problems of a great city. Here in 1869 was founded the Charity Organization Society, through which he made the acquaintance of Miss Octavia Hill [q. v.] and through her met his future wife, Henrietta Octavia, daughter of Alexander Rowland, of Champion Hall, Kent, who shared and inspired his work for forty years. They were married in January 1873, and went to St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, a parish, in the words of its bishop, ‘the worst in the diocese, inhabited mainly by a criminal ​population’. Barnett’s connexion with Whitechapel lasted throughout his life, though he resigned St. Jude’s in 1894, when made a canon of Bristol. In 1895 he was a select preacher at Oxford, and at Cambridge in 1889 and 1905, and from 1906 to 1913 canon, and finally sub-dean, of Westminster. He died at Hove 17 June 1913; the funeral service was at St. Jude’s but there is a memorial to him in the Abbey. He had no children.
Barnett’s life is best recorded by his activities. He was before all things a religious man; his aim was ‘to decrease not suffering but sin’. Conscious of the failure of the church services, he tried to give them a higher reality, and in his ‘worship hour’ every Sunday evening from 8.30 to 9.30, he sought to reach by music and by non-biblical readings those who would not come to church. His attempt was condemned as unorthodox, but he had the warm support of the suffragan, Dr. Walsham How [q.v.]. Barnett was a pioneer in other forms of teaching. His art exhibitions, begun in 1881, introduced East London to good pictures, and resulted in the building of the Whitechapel art gallery; he was never more himself than when expounding pictures to crowds of listeners. His parish library, from the first a centre of good reading, developed, through the students’ library at Toynbee Hall, into the Whitechapel public library. He was also a pioneer in bringing primary school teachers to Oxford; out of the vacation courses held there from 1885 onwards developed the Oxford day training college. In his own parish schools he was one of the first to introduce handwork (in 1886) and pictures, and so to anticipate the work of the ‘art for schools’ association and of the association for promoting technical education (1887). The first pupil-teacher centres were held in his schools (1885). All these activities and others now generally adopted were promoted by his education reform league, founded in 1884.
Barnett knew that education could not succeed unless the material conditions of the people were improved. He pressed for the destruction of insanitary dwellings, and had a large share in promoting the Artisans’ Dwellings Act of 1875. He was a guardian in Whitechapel for twenty-nine years from 1875, and chairman for twelve years, and the administration of poor relief there was everywhere taken as a model. He was one of the first to advocate universal pensions (1883), and to urge the danger of unemployment and the need of special study as to its causes and its remedies. Largely thanks to him the Mansion House relief fund in 1893 was much less mischievous than that of 1885-1886. The ‘children’s country holiday’ fund, started by him and Mrs. Barnett in 1877, has been one of the greatest blessings to East London.
But probably the work by which Barnett will be remembered is university settlements. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London in 1883 had stirred public sympathy, and in an article in the Nineteenth Century of February 1884 he put forth proposals for bringing university men into the life of cities, which have been adopted and developed all over the civilized world. On the basis of these proposals Toynbee Hall was founded in 1884, and he was its first warden (1884-1896).
There was indeed no movement for social or moral improvement in which Barnett did not take a prominent part; in many he was the prime mover. He was an effective speaker, but his strength lay in his personality. He had a unique power of discovering what was best in a man and of helping to make it effective. His friends looked on him as a ‘prophet’; many whose names are unknown would agree with M. Clemenceau’s remark in 1884, that Barnett was one of the ‘three really great men’ he had met in England. He was a good writer; his letters to his mother from Egypt, when Herbert Spencer was one of the party, will live for their literary merits, and few men have had a greater gift for summing up a principle or a line of action; his works are a storehouse of quotations; the most important are Practicable Socialism (1888), Religion and Progress (1907), Religion and Politics (1911), Worship and Work (1913), and Vision and Service (1917), the two last-named edited by Mrs. Barnett. His portrait, painted by G.F. Watts in 1887, is in the possession of Mrs. Barnett; a copy hangs in Wadham College hall. He was also painted with Mrs. Barnett by Sir H. von Herkomer in 1909; this portrait is now at Barnett House, the institution founded at Oxford to encourage, what he had always urged, the study of social problems.
[Life by Mrs. Barnett, 2 vols., 1918; Annual Reports of Toynbee Hall and St. Jude’s, Whitechapel; personal knowledge.]
J. W.