“Beauty is confined to no people”: The charitable aestheticism of Mary Eliza Haweis

In her work British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, Diana Maltz investigates the concept of ‘missionary aestheticism.’ By looking closely at Mary Eliza Haweis’s self-illustrated, and often neglected work Rus in Urbe (1886) it will become clear how she can be seen to endorse this form of philanthropy. Haweis passed her gaze across London and noticed the need for an aesthetic intervention in the lives of the masses. Her advice is to improve urban spaces through the cultivation of beautiful flowers and plants, which will in turn give “the crowded slum…refreshed air” (Rus 13). Alongside Rus, she contributed to a discourse that promoted the use of aestheticism for urban improvement with her texts The Art of Decoration (1881) and The Art of Beauty (1878). She did so through dress reform, as well as through championing individualism, to enable further social change. A cross-class appreciation of the aesthetic, Haweis suggested, could inspire reform, which she argues must “not come from above, but below” (Decoration 398). Greater artistic freedom, she contends, serves a social purpose. Thus, her works would wrest art from those that would see it in the hands of the few to distribute it to the many. It comes as no surprise that she supported the opening of museums on Sundays “when the busy working man can regularly visit them” (Decoration 399). Her texts can therefore fill gaps in the discourse of ‘missionary aestheticism’ and be considered as part of this artistic, and distinctly middle-class, reform movement.