CROYDON CHRONICLES: A quiet residential street in South Croydon was where one of the leading works of 19th-Century philosophy was drafted and written. DAVID MORGAN looks at the life and works of Benjamin Kidd
After Benjamin Kidd died of heart failure at his home at 39 Blenheim Park Road in South Croydon on Monday October 2, 1916, obituaries were published nationally as well as locally. The news even reached Australia, with a paragraph in the Adelaide Advertiser later that week.
Kidd had been catapulted into worldwide status in 1894 with the publication of his book, Social Evolution.
Social pioneer: Benjamin Kidd was published around the world in the 1890s
Born in Ireland, Kidd was a career civil servant. But he spent much of his spare time with his nose deep in books, and had been writing essays, pamphlets and articles for several years. But Social Evolution was his first venture into writing at length about a subject which fascinated him.
It took him two years to draft, write and edit the book, after collecting evidence and developing his thoughts about life. Not for Kidd the academic view of the world from a university chair, but from a working man’s perspective.
As with all authors, stories of angst emerged about the writing process.
On one sunny day Kidd was writing outdoors when a breeze carried away a few pages of foolscap. Kidd was not amused. “Those pages carried sentences which, one day, would have been read by the whole civilised world,” he said.
Kidd believed that he had a calling to be a social prophet. His writing tried to answer the question, “How does society hang together and make progress?”
Kidd’s book was published a little more than 30 years after Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species had created a long-lasting storm, not only around evolution, but over religion and philosophy, changing the way many Victorians saw themselves, while causing fury among others.
Kidd, too, caused outrage when he stated that religion was the hub of humanity and that reason was selfish and short-sighted and no help in the time of a crisis.
Kidd at first struggled to find a publisher who would accept the manuscript. He had initially shown a copy of his text to Lord Milner, the chair of the Board of the Inland Revenue, who was hugely impressed with the work of one of the department’s clerks. Lord Milner encouraged Kidd to persevere in finding a publisher.
Eventually, Macmillan agreed to take the script, but they refused to risk extra money to secure copyright in the United States. It was not long before pirated copies appeared in America.
When the book did finally appear in bookshops, it was an instant success. Within months it had been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Italian.
The book brought Kidd worldwide fame, with some academics saying that Social Evolution was one of the most important philosophical and sociological statements since Darwin’s seminal work. Given that Kidd said that he was partly inspired by Karl Marx, such praise might be suprising given today’s perspectives.
Kidd’s view of Marx was not uncritical, but he agreed that “members of the ruling class were not superior”, and that the Establishment and aristocracy were “degenerating”.
Born in County Clare on September 9, 1858, Kidd was the son of a policeman and raised as a Quaker. He never went to university, but took advantage of a scheme which William Gladstone began, the entrance exam to join the Civil Service.
Kidd was appointed to a position in the Inland Revenue in Somerset House and moved to to work there in 1877.
Taxing work: Kidd won the admiration of Lord Milner at the Inland Revenue
In those early years in London, Kidd had to live entirely on his own income, as his family were unable to provide any financial support. His £80 annual salary – the equivalent today of being paid £12,000 per year – was barely enough for him to pay his lodging and for his food.
Kidd went without meals in his pursuit of knowledge, to pay fees for evening classes to improve his scientific knowledge. He even borrowed money to read for the Bar. He might have become a lawyer, but after three years of study he failed to complete the course owing to a lack of money.
He also tried to get into the consular service but this effort failed, too, when the rules were changed mid-course and he was deemed too old to apply.
At Somerset House, Kidd kept a low profile and got on with his work as a humble clerk. His colleagues saw him as being a bookish, studious chap who had tried to better himself but had been unsuccessful in his attempts to gain promotion or to find any alternate employment.
Kidd did make a name for himself when elected to be the secretary of the committee of the Second Division clerks. This group were working to redress situations where clerks had grievances but no suitable platform to air them. An early, white-collar form of trades unionism.
Kidd was a member of the team that helped bring about the Radley Commission, providing civil servants with more support in their work, paving the way for a more efficient modern service.
In 1887, Kidd married Maud Emma Perry, from Weston-super-Mare. They had three sons, Franklin and twins, Rolf and John. In the late 1880s the family lived in a small house in Wimbledon, and it was here that Kidd began researching his books.
The family moved to Croydon 1894, to a house in Croham Road, which gave him more space to write and a garden where he could feel totally at ease with life.
By 1901, Kidd held leases on several properties on Heathfield, although at least one had to be sold to pay for school fees and for a house in Tonbridge.
It was in 1904 that his family moved to Blenheim Park Road.
Among criticisms levelled at Social Evolution was that Kidd’s style of writing was more suited to journalism than to academic or philosophical ideas. Kidd said that he was writing for the common man who wanted difficult subjects explained in ways that were easier to understand than any “dry” textbook.
Kidd’s notion that there should be no artificial barriers placed in the way of equal opportunity for all may have stemmed from his time in the Civil Service.
Well-regarded: Kidd’s reputation remained intact at the time of his death, before the societal changes caused by World War I
The strain of working all day and writing in his spare time saw Kidd’s health suffer. In 1897, after 20 years in the Civil Service, he gave up his job to become a full-time writer. His leaving gift from his Civil Service colleagues was a purse containing 100 sovereigns, as well as a collection of books on philosophy.
A second book, The Control of the Tropics, published in 1898, contained many controversial points, not least the choice of title.
The work had one major supporter, Joseph Chamberlain, the Conservative government’s Secretary of State for the Colonies. Chamberlain said Kidd’s book had a considerable effect on British Colonial policy.
Kidd travelled widely, lecturing and talking about his work. He visited the United States and Canada in 1898 and South Africa in 1902.
After his return from Transvaal, Orange River Colony and Natal, Kidd declared that South Africa was a richer country than the United States, west of the Mississippi, and that its future was assured.
The principal problem for politicians there, he argued, was to create a middle class in the population with an ability to increase consumerism. Kidd never addressed the issues of racial segregation and white supremacy that were already deeply entrenched under British colonial administration just after the Boer Wars, and long before apartheid was introduced.
After his return from South Africa he lived a more reclusive life. He was for a time resident in Tonbridge, where he kept a menagerie of animals which he used with his studies of societal groups.
He became a sort of Dr Doolittle character, with a rapport with his animals. He studied cats, frogs, toads, crows and cuckoos as part of his work. He also observed wild bees and wasps as well as keeping bee hives, looking at how colonies of insects worked together.
In May 1908, he delivered the prestigious Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University, in the Sheldonian, entitled “Individualism and After.”
He started his next book, The Science of Power, in 1910. He had not finished it by the time the Great War broke out in 1914. By this time, Kidd’s health had continued to deteriorate and he was diagnosed as having heart problems. An accident in 1913 when he fell in a London hotel room, rupturing a blood vessel near a kidney, did not help his health.
It was still a shock, however, when he died, aged 58, just five weeks after his cardiologist had told him and his wife he should survive another five years. He is buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery in Wallington.
His son Franklin, who went on to become a professor at Cambridge University, completed the editing of The Science of Power, which was published in the US in 1918 and in Britain a year later.
The post-war world changed, and Kidd’s studies were considered to be dated. His writing was discussed as a way of looking at a life which had gone forever.
Despite this, Kidd kept a revered place within the sociological world as he was considered one the founders of the subject and was respected for the drive and determination to succeed after so many setbacks.
There are only a few authors who can say that their first published book proved instantly transformative for them. Social Evolution sold more than 250,000 copies, a bestseller of the day.
David Morgan, pictured right, has been chronicling Croydon’s history for Inside Croydon for a decade. Morgan is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster, who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- After eight years, Bishop prepares for his final Minster service
- The weather warnings from history: thunderbolts and lightning
- Roll up! Roll up! Enjoy Croydon’s summer fayre, 1920s style
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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