Philanthropists are a boring lot these days. Your modern seven-figure donor is either resolutely anonymous or else determined to be seen as approachable Mr Average, quiet and unassuming, who just happened to have the chequebook handy. Gone for ever, it seems, is the splashy, domineering article familiar to our great-grandparents, combining a certain Dickensian whiff of Bounderby and Pecksniff with an innocent delight in showmanship, exercising his benevolence as a kind of pantomime ‘Grand Transformation Scene’, ending in paeans of praise from a grateful proletariat.
William Hesketh Lever never wanted to be seen as philanthropic, and was always at pains to emphasise the self-interest of any step he might take towards improving other people’s lives. Yet his career, as founder of the soap empire which subsequently became Unilever, and as creator of Port Sunlight, that extraordinary late-Victorian essay in what the Italians call urbanistica, was marked by acts of faith and idealism consistently undermining the image of a granite-faced capitalist unmoved by anything more sublime than the rattle of sovereigns in the till.
Sunlight soap, ‘so purifying and cleansing’, according to the billboards, ‘that the dirtiest clothing can be washed in lukewarm water with very little rubbing’, started as a sideline of the grocery wholesaler’s business Lever took over from his Lancashire father in 1872.
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