[than he had also been culpable of such vices] ... Look at Napoleon, where did he finish? In exile’.41 The parallels between the two men could not be clearer. Just as Napoleon had preached a culture of meritocracy and liberty to justify his expansionist ambitions to the oppressed subjects of the pays conquis, Chamberlain’s personal ambition had seemingly supplanted the humanitarian ends of the Civic Gospel. Indeed, the local satirical newspaper The Dart depicted Chamberlain as ‘Turning the Screw’ on local ratepayers and common citizens and chastised the lavish architecture of the prestigious ‘Corporation Street’, the centrepiece of the Improvement Scheme, rebranding it Rue Chamberlain. The Improvement Scheme, despite its pretentions to liberal progressivism and outwards portrayal as the manifestation of the Civic Gospel, became figured as a profligate endeavour designed only to propel the business and political interests of the mayor and his middle-class cronies.42 Even the Council House, an emblematic bastion of the moral and improving manifesto of the Civic Gospel, did not escape this criticism, with the Dart playing on its palatial Italianate architecture as evidence of it being little more than a Palazzo Ducale. The Council House was merely a ‘Mayor’s Palace’, it was conspicuously the largest and grandest building of the Council’s Improvement Scheme.43 For all its outward projections of the sanctity of public office and the dignity of its officials who were charged with implementing the Civic Gospel, to many, its opulent marbled interior and ornate classical exterior started to become signifiers for exclusivity. This beacon of the Civic Gospel was as accessible as the luxury banquets it frequently hosted in honour of the achievements of Birmingham’s bourgeois political elite. Chamberlain’s complex relationship with the Civic Gospel, so understated in the ‘official’ literature of the period,44 meant that by the end of Chamberlain’s mayoralty Birmingham ‘was adorned with expensive public buildings which had little to do with improving the welfare of poor slum dwellers’.45
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