Employer
It is hard at this distance in time to imagine life for an employee in nineteenth century London. Harvey was keen to improve their lot. As soon as he became head of the firm he invited his sister Rachel to come and help him both at home and bringing changes to the work place. She was responsible for things such as introducing tablecloths and, with Harvey, a library and newspapers and other amenities. He also encouraged monthly discussion classes.
From 1842 he was involved in the early closing movement. The pattern when he first became head was for business to end at 9 pm (winter 8.30 pm). He got that down in his area first to 8 pm (winter 7 pm) then, in 1855, unilaterally, to 7 pm all year round, closing on Saturdays at 5 pm. He made a number of speeches in favour of such moves.
He also worked with the evangelical organisation the YMCA, begun in London by George Williams (1821-1905) in 1844.
On August 12, 1851, Harvey's diary reveals that he made a long considered resolve to make it a point to speak to young employees words of Christian caution and advice as appropriate.
The dread of wealth
The dread of wealth is a chapter heading in the memoir. The phrase is no exaggeration. Harvey was always successful in business (unlike Peto, who suffered bankruptcy). Nevertheless, his son comments that “in spite of his success, there was never in the City of London, a man who set his mind on money making less than he.” Proverbs 28:20 was a watchword, “A faithful man shall abound with blessings: but he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent”. He hated all sharp practice in business.
Addressing the YMCA at Aldersgate Street on February 28, 1878, having spoken of getting on in business, he said “Be careful, however, for what purpose you wish to get on.” Live according to your means. He quoted Proverbs 16:8 “Pride goeth before destruction ...” and urged fair play.
It was not simply that he feared money but, more positively, he also had a strong sense of stewardship. On May 26, 1853, he made the remarkable resolution about his income alluded to earlier - not to spend more than a third on himself and family, not to save more than a third and to give a third to religious and charitable purposes. He also resolved, perhaps unrealistically, never to be worth more than £20,000. He renewed these vows from time to time. The continual growth of his business made it impossible to remain worth no more than £20,000. It caused him some consternation but he sought to keep to the resolution as best he could and even carried it over into the terms of his will. His son remarks that this lifestyle made people think he was richer than he was. In truth, he was simply very generous.
Bowers picks up on something interesting about the “self-made merchant of stern cast and great generosity” that is in the biography. “He maintained that much of his giving should be anonymous, but some public to show Christian duty and as a stimulus for others” (Sense and Sensitivity)
In 1850 Harvey joined the Bloomsbury church and was soon made one of five deacons, alongside Peto and future brother-in-law, James Benham (1820-1885). He was very involved in evangelism in the nearby slums, an important part of the church's work.
In 1852 he wrote
I desire a wife, if it will help me to serve God better, to discharge my private and official duties more efficiently, and by these means to honour my Lord and Saviour; and not else. Do I believe that a Christian woman like-minded with myself would thus help me, and I help her? I do.
Ever a practical man, by November 1853 he had married Jane Benham (1828-1855), daughter of John Lee Benham (1785-1864), a Wigmore Street businessman – Ironmongers, bath makers, stove, grate and kitchen range manufacturers and hot water engineers. Jane, like Harvey, was the youngest of seven. The Benhams were a prominent family in the church (See Bowers, The Benhams of Bloomsbury, BQ).
The son describes his mother as a woman of judgement like the father. Though they were very practical about the arrangement, the son insists, “Never did man and woman love one another in holier and more devoted love than they.”
Father, widower
Their time together at 22 Bloomsbury Square was tragically brief. On August 17, 1855, their only son was born and by August 27 Mrs Harvey was dead. Two years later Harvey wrote of his continuing faith despite the severe blow. His sister Rachel had been helping an invalid since the marriage. He died around the same time and so she came to look after Harvey again, becoming what Alfred touchingly calls his “almost mother”.
Civic life
In 1853 Harvey became a Liveryman of the City Company of Lorimers. He soon gained the freedom of the City then became a Common Councilman. He retired in 1861 but not before he had made a resolute and successful attack, including the launch of legal proceedings, on abuses of poor law administration going on in his Farringdon Without ward.
He was Chairman of the Board of Guardians for many years. In this connection a dinner was given in his honour in August, 1859. In this capacity he was involved in the erection of a new West London workhouse, necessitated by the building of Holborn Viaduct (1865-69) sweeping business premises, including his own, from the area. He moved to Gresham Street in late 1865.
Even in the last 20 years of his life in Hampstead he was involved in civic life. His love of strict justice and individual liberty was reflected in his efforts to get the law on oaths changed. The new law allowed witnesses to simply affirm rather than go on oath, something atheists preferred.
Apologist
Harvey, it seems, always loved reading and was very interested in Christian evidences or Apologetics as it is now called. He regularly read The Reasoner, “a journal of free thought and positive philosophy” sending in letters signed “Inquirer”.
On October 21, 1855, he went to the Scientific and Literary Institution at 23 John Street, Fitzroy Square near Tottenham Court Road, a free thinker gathering place, to hear Robert Cooper (1789-1868) “a distinguished advocate of secularism”. Author of an 1852 booklet ridiculing death-bed repentances and editor of the secularist London Investigator Cooper spoke on Miracles. “The time is approaching, gradually indeed but surely,” he claimed “when this delusion - this imposition upon the understanding of mankind - will be consigned, as it deserves, to public contempt”. Harvey entered into debate with him and felt able to trouble him with at least one argument.
On March 30, 1856, Harvey had opportunity to reply to Cooper at the same venue. He begins by identifying with his audience, a first rule of rhetoric, saying he too is a free thinker, one with a good working class background. He is not an enemy, as he seeks just what they seek – the truth and the good of the people. He went on to speak of the reasonableness of the evidence for the truth of Christianity and what it is mankind wants, arguing that miracles are possible and the apostles reliable, before coming to what is really wrong with this world and how it can be rectified.
Having been able to say something worthwhile, he nevertheless resolved to give more time to reading and study in this area.
On January 11, 1857, he spoke at John Street again, this time in reply to a lecture by freethinker, atheist and editor of The Reasoner, George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906) against Christianity as a system of morality. Holyoake called Christianity indefinite, inadequate and inoperable; Harvey said it was definite, adequate and operative.
In September, 1862 Harvey was asked to umpire a six night debate between a Rev W Barker and notorious freethinker and radical, later MP and President of the National Secular Society, Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891) who until 1868 billed himself as “Iconoclast”. The first two evenings both sides had a chairman but Harvey's impartiality “gave so much satisfaction” according to a biographer of Bradlaugh, “that the last four meetings were left entirely under his charge”. Attendance at a school room on City Road on some nights was so great that people were turned away and averaged 1200, around a thousand hearing all the debate. People came from far and near. A book of over 200 pages was later produced, Bradlaugh's biographer says, containing “much that is interesting and much that is dull, a little that is witty, and more that is weak”. These debates were popular at the time.
Catholic and evangelical
Glover speaks of Harvey's “faithfulness to conscience, the Love of Christ, the scrupulous Honour, the carefulness to know the exact truth of God on all points of our Creed and Duty”. At the end of his memoir, however, the son speaks of his father's catholicity. Harvey was an evangelical first. “Baptist though I am,” he wrote “yet I have ever objected to work especially as a Baptist; I prefer to do so on the much broader basis of a disciple and servant of Christ.” Typical of him was how on holiday in Southwold he saw a need and immediately sent 10 guineas to the vicar to help.
He was happy to read Anglican Thomas Griffith (1798-1883). When his Fundamentals or bases of belief concerning man, God and the correlation of God and men came out in 1871 Harvey wrote offering to finance a wide distribution of the book. Griffith sadly was a universalist, which suggests that Harvey's broadness sometimes led him astray. This perhaps lays behind Spurgeon's later remark
He was a man of mark: independent, yet ready to learn; lenient towards doubt, but himself a firm believer. His views of truth were his own, and would not be parallel in all points with those of anybody else; but we always felt at one with him, and even where we judged him to be mistaken we were glad to love him just as he was.
Hampstead
Harvey spent his latter years just outside London, in Hampstead. It was thought that better air would help his sickly new born baby. This led eventually to a permanent move to Hampstead in 1861. They began on Haverstock Hill, moved up it once, then took up residence in newly built Mount Grove on the Greenhill Estate in 1870.
Baptist James Castleden (1778-1854) had laboured in Hampstead until his death but the only nonconformist chapel at that time appears to have been a high one in both senses - high in its Calvinism, high in its location - atop Holly Bush Hill. Harvey resolved, partly as thanks to God for his son's refound health, to build a new chapel but the people of the area were poor and there was no place for it anyway.
It was another four years before they obtained land - a former fruit and vegetable garden. A committee was formed to plan a building but it was too expensive and the committee was dissolved. However, at long last, on June 4, 1860, Harvey signed a contract to build a chapel and other buildings at a cost of £4,800. It was not built at his sole cost, others gave; but he was a generous contributor. The Heath Street building opened in July, 1861. The Freeman called it “a neat, light and elegant structure presenting the same architectural ensemble as Bloomsbury Chapel” with a schoolroom below. Its frontage is more ornamented than Bloomsbury.
Harvey became a member and deacon and a generous provider. They called William Brock Junior (1836-1919), Dr Brock's son, as first pastor. Once again the intention was that the membership would be “open to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ in truth and sincerity” with true believers being baptised by immersion.
Services were held in Heath Street in 1864 to celebrate the clearing of the debt on it with an afternoon sermon by the Methodist W M Punshon (1824-1881). In the evening Dr Brock spoke and Harvey, presiding over the meeting, revealed that the entire cost of chapel and school-room (upwards of £6,300) had now been covered.
In 1871 Harvey's son, Alfred, then just 16, made known his desire to be a gospel minister. Harvey Senior wrote that he had long “hoped for it and prayed for it and have expected it” yet he says it “... seems almost to take me by surprise ...”. He had pursued the policy of never hinting at the matter to him. Harvey Junior went on to be a vicar in Shirehampton, Bristol.
The article appeared in Reformation Today
