Lessons in Seeing: Art, Religion and Class in the East End of London, 1881–1898

Review of periodical literature published in 2011

“…Latham, Qureshi suggests, used the museum to develop a classification of human types, presenting cultures from Asia, Africa, and the New World as ‘ethnological specimens’. Matthews‐Jones explores the didactic function of the Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibitions established in 1881 by the Anglican minister Samuel Barnett. If they did not quite fulfil Barnett's Ruskinian aspirations, they did at least garner some enthusiasm among the local residents.…”

Building the docklands settlement: gender, gentility, and the gentry in east london, 1894–1939

“…Unlike the better known East End missions of Toynbee Hall and Oxford House (Bradley 2009;Matthews-Jones 2011), the Malvern Docklands Mission has not been the subject of sustained, academic study, save passing references in Nigel Scotland's Squires in the Slums (2007: 108, 114). This is despite the Settlement's contemporaneous reputation and prominent patronage, as well as its longstanding influence on the Church of England's understandings of urban mission and youth work, through the formation of ordinands 63 from the 1950s and the practical experience of "faith in the city" gained here by future episcopal heavyweights like David Sheppard and Roger Sainsbury (Watherston 1994).…”

“…Drawing, as did Samuel Barnett at Toynbee Hall (Koven 2004: 250;Matthews-Jones 2011) upon the theological legacy of the Oxford Movement and the aesthetics of Ruskin and Morris, Kennedy-Cox was emphatic in his own conviction that "we, who live in the slums, know the brotherhood of man, and knowing it, must also feel the fatherhood of God" (1939: 228). Casting his eye across other interwar philanthropic efforts, including other East End settlements, he diagnosed the "failure of much of the social work of to-day" as due to "the lack of religion within and behind it.…”