7 - Protestant Approaches to Begging and Alms-Giving

Summary

Introduction

Addressing the annual general meeting of the Dublin Mendicity Society in January 1838, the city's Church of Ireland archbishop, Richard Whately, boasted of having never given money to a beggar. Whately rejected the notion that one should give alms out of sympathy: instead, Christian feelings ought to prevent one from indiscriminately doling out alms to paupers ‘who most practised deception on the public, and to give them money was but to pay them for the purpose of keeping up the system of public misery and street begging’. This refusal to give alms seems to have been a well-known trait of Whately’s. W.R. Le Fanu, whose father was one of the prelate's acquaintances, relates Whately's recollection of one particular mendicant who solicited alms from him: ‘[Whately] used to tell of a beggar who followed him asking alms, to whom he said, “Go away; I never give anything to a beggar in the streets.” The beggar replied, “And where would your reverence wish me to wait on you?”’

The case of Whately provides a useful entry-point into considering how Protestants perceived and responded to street begging in the subject period, as it brings to light the complexities in negotiating how different people negotiated begging and alms-giving. Whately was a Church of Ireland archbishop and theologian but not an evangelical; his views on begging and alms-giving were grounded in scripture but also in political economy; he never gave alms to a beggar but was a regular and relatively generous contributor to charitable causes. Yet, Whately was a senior cleric and the question must be asked as to how representative were his views, either of his fellow Episcopalians or of the clergy (regardless of denomination) in general. How did his views tally with those of Protestant women? Mirroring the approach taken in the preceding chapter, this discussion will pivot on the questions of what Protestants said and did about begging and alms-giving in pre-Famine Ireland. The influence of evangelicalism on concepts of poverty and charity will be considered, before analysing how Protestant commentators contributed to the prolonged and fraught Poor Law debates of this period. Public discussion on matters of social concern did not escape the sectarian nature of contemporary political and religious discourses, and the questions of Ireland's endemic poverty and prevalent mendicancy were no different.