by Koven, Seth
SLUMMING
SLUMMING
SEXUAL AND SOCIAL POLITICS IN VICTORIAN LONDON
SETH KOVEN
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2004 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock,
Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
Third printing, and first paperback printing, 2006
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12800-9
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-691-12800-6
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows
Koven, Seth, 1958–
Slumming : sexual and social politics in Victorian London / Seth Koven.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-11592-3 (cl. : alk. paper)
1. Poor—England—London—History—19th century. 2. Slums—England—London—History—19th century. 3. Sex customs—England—London—History—19th century. 4. Voluntarism—England—London—History—19th century. 5. Charities—England—London—History—19th century. 6. London (England)—Social condition. I. Title.
HV4085.L6K68 2004
306.7'086'94209421—dc22 2003060514
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
To William Koven
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xv
INTRODUCTION
Slumming: Eros and Altruism in Victorian London 1
Slumming Defined 6
Who Went Slumming? Sources and Social Categories 10
Eros and Altruism: James Hinton and the Hintonians 14
PART ONE: INCOGNITOS, FICTIONS, AND CROSS-CLASS MASQUERADES 23
CHAPTER ONE
Workhouse Nights: Homelessness, Homosexuality, and Cross-Class Masquerades 25
James Greenwood and London in 1866 31
Reading “A Night in a Workhouse” 36
Responses to “A Night in a Workhouse” 46
Homelessness as Homosexuality: Sexology, Social Policy, and the 1898 Vagrancy Act 70
Postscript: Legacies of “A Night” on Representations of the Homeless Poor 74
CHAPTER TWO
Dr. Barnardo’s Artistic Fictions: Photography, Sexuality, and the Ragged Child 88
Facts, Fictions, and Epistemologies of Welfare 94
“The Very Wicked Woman” and “Sodomany” in Dr. Barnardo’s Boys’ Home 103
Representing the Ragged Child 112
Joseph Merrick and the Monstrosity of Poverty 124
Conclusion 129
CHAPTER THREE
The American Girl in London: Gender, Journalism, and Social Investigation in the Late Victorian Metropolis 140
Journalism as Autobiography, Autobiography as Fiction 142
Gender and Journalism 151
An “American Girl” Impersonating London’s Laboring Women 155
Conclusion 177
PART TWO: CROSS-CLASS SISTERHOOD AND BROTHERHOOD IN THE SLUMS 181
CHAPTER FOUR
The Politics and Erotics of Dirt: Cross-Class Sisterhood in the Slums 183
Cross-Class Sisterhood and the Politics of Dirt 184
“There will be something the matter with the ladies” 198
“Nasty Books”: Dirty Bodies, Dirty Desires in Women’s Slum Novels 204
Conclusion: “White Gloves” and “Dirty Hoxton Pennies” 222
CHAPTER FIVE
The “New Man” in the Slums: Religion, Masculinity, and the Men’s Settlement House Movement 228
The Sources of “Brotherhood” in Late Victorian England 231
“Modern Monasteries,” “Philanthropic Brotherhoods,” and the Origins of the Settlement House Movement 236
Religion and Codes of Masculinity 248
“True hermaphrodites realised at last”: Sexing the Male Settlement Movement 259
A Door Unlocked: The Politics of Brotherly Love in the Slums 276
CONCLUSION 282
MANUSCRIPT SOURCES 289
NOTES 293
INDEX 379
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FRONTISPIECE
Map of London
ii
“In Slummibus” (1884)
15
FIGURE 1.1
Cover of “A Night in a Workhouse,” penny and shilling editions (1866)
28
FIGURE 1.2
“The New Workhouse Porter” (1866)
50
FIGURE 1.3
Doré’s “Scripture Reader in a Night Refuge” and “Bathing in a Night Refuge” (1872)
79
FIGURE 1.4
Doré’s sketch, “La piscine dans le refuge” (executed in 1869)
81
FIGURE 2.1
Portion of the cover of the ninth annual report of Barnardo’s East End Juvenile Mission (1876)
96
FIGURE 2.2
Frontispiece, Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished (1884)
97
FIGURE 2.3
Barnardo’s Central Office and Boys’ Home (1890)
99
FIGURE 2.4
Dr. Barnardo (c. 1873–1877)
105
FIGURE 2.5
Barnardo’s beadle, Edward Fitzgerald, with boys: “The Raw Material As We Find It” (1875)
107
FIGURE 2.6
Barnardo’s before-and-after photographs: “Once a Little Vagrant” and “Now a Little Workman” (c. 1873–1875)
115
FIGURE 2.7
Barnardo Boys: “Drawn From Life” (1890)
119
FIGURE 2.8
“Out of the Depths,” the Williams children under burlap sacks (c. 1875)
125
FIGURE 2.9
Dorothy Tennant’s “London Street Arabs” (1890)
131
FIGURE 2.10
Barnardo’s Stolen Childhood Campaign: boy at urinal and girl in chair (2002)
136
FIGURE 2.11
“Images are Everybody’s Business” from Save the Children (c. 1995)
139
FIGURE 3.1
Elizabeth Banks in disguise: “I Felt Meek and Lowly,” and “Elizabeth Barrows, Housemaid” (1894)
144
FIGURE 3.2
Elizabeth Banks and her dog: “Self and Judge” (1902)
148
FIGURE 4.1
Vernon Lee (c. 1912)
206
FIGURE 4.2
“Mrs. L. T. Meade at Home” (1894)
207
FIGURE 5.1
Toynbee Hall (1885)
245
FIGURE 5.2
Drawing room and living room of Toynbee Hall
246
FIGURE 5.3
Winnington Ingram’s “Procession through East End in 1897” (1897)
255
FIGURE 5.4
Father Dolling with “Our Sailors” and “Our Workers”
258
FIGURE 5.5
C. R. Ashbee’s illustrations of the history of the Guild and School of Handicraft (1894)
267
FIGURE 5.6
Table of contents of “Wadham House Journal” (1905)
271
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BOOKS, LIKE their authors, li
ve at the intersection of many different communities, intellectual and personal. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge them—and many individuals within them—whose inspiration and support enabled me to complete this project according to my own lights.
My first debt of gratitude is to Villanova University and the departments of History and Women’s Studies for giving me such a lively home. The sort of intellectual and social comradeship I have enjoyed day by day, year after year, has happily made it hard for me to disentangle work from play. For their willingness to comment on whatever bits of this book—from sentences to entire chapters—I have thrust on their desks over the years, I thank my colleagues Scott Black, Mine Ener, Marc Gallicchio, Maghan Keita, Donald B. Kelley, Ann Lesch, Larry Little, Lucy McDiarmid, Evan Radcliffe, Vincent Sherry, Lauren Shohet, and Paul Steege. Adele Lindenmeyr, finding just the right balance between empathic enthusiasm, supportive friendship, and incisive intellectual candor, generously discussed, read, and reread chapters as I wrote them and pushed me to clarify my prose and think harder about my arguments.
My year as a Visiting Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, was full of salutary intellectual provocations that transformed this manuscript and emboldened me to take my arguments in new directions. For their insights and challenges, comments and conversations about various chapters, I thank Margaret Anderson, who inspired me to become a historian, as well as Kamilla Elliott, Paula Fass, Carla Hesse, Martin Jay, Alan Karras, Tom Laqueur, David Lieberman, and Mary Ryan. Past and present members of the Delaware Valley British Studies Seminar—in particular Andrew August, Caroline Levine, Mary Procida, Stuart Semmel, Tom Smith, and Julie Taddeo—offered me a forum to discuss my work and, perhaps more importantly, an ongoing community of scholars in Philadelphia whose researches and approaches have enriched my own. I have benefited from Lynn Lees’s friendship and mentorship as well as her own vast knowledge of the history of the poor and London. In addition to offering shrewd criticisms of my work, Lynn arranged for me to be a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and lent me her own office during a year of research leave. Many friends and colleagues in London have opened their homes to me and my family over the years. I extend my warmest thanks to Fiona Gibbs and Vimal Thavathurai, Merle and Joel Osrin, Olivia Dix and Michael Mockridge, Ruth Ehrlich and Peter Mandler, Pat Thane, and Anna Davin for making my life in London so rewarding and stimulating.
I benefited greatly from astute reader’s reports of the entire manuscript by James Epstein, Susan Pedersen, and Martha Vicinus, as well as one anonymous reader. I hope they can find traces of their ideas which guided my revisions. Sonya Michel remains an inspiring friend whose own work and readiness to engage with my own made this a better book. My bulging file labeled “Comments on Slumming from friends and colleagues” includes thoughtful responses to specific chapters (or conference papers which turned into chapters) from James Eli Adams, George Behlmer, Catherine Cocks, Anna Davin, William Fishman, Regenia Gagnier, Frances Gouda, Kali Israel, Lori Lefkovitz, Jean Lutes, Joseph McLaughlin, Douglas Mitchell, Deborah Nord, Yopie Prins, Mary Louise Roberts, Ellen Ross, James Sheehan, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Peter Stansky, Pat Thane, Pamela Walker, Judith Walkowitz, Chris Waters, Patricia Yaeger, and Julian Yates. Diana Maltz not only introduced me to Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown and commented on several chapters but has also shared her own ongoing work on aesthetic philanthropy in Victorian London. My thanks to Lorraine Blair for sharing her discovery of the Wadham House journal at Toynbee Hall. I am also grateful for the skills and dedication of able graduate research assistants, in particular Dana Bielicki, Carmen Breslin, Stephanie Fineman, Thomas Hajkowki, Kathryn Miele, Keith Rolfe, and Kevin Switaj. As this project moved into its final stages, Laura Salvucci provided extraordinary assistance with notes and copyediting. Mara Delcamp efficiently transcribed Elizabeth Banks’s letters at the University of Tulsa Special Collections Library. Brigitta van Rheinberg at Princeton University Press far surpassed my highest hopes for what an editor could be. Her excitement about this book was matched by frank editorial advice and substantive critical engagement with the arguments of each chapter. My thanks to the entire team of editors at Princeton University Press including Alison Kalett, Dimitri Karetnikov, Sara Lerner, and Gail Schmitt. The collective efforts of all these people have greatly enriched this book, but its limitations and errors remain entirely my own.
Many librarians and archivists on both sides of the Atlantic provided expert guidance and assistance in finding my way through their collections, including the staff at the British Library and Newspaper Library, Colindale; British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics; Bodleian Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library; Colby College, Maine; Kings College, Cambridge; Lambeth Palace Library; Library of Congress; London Metropolitan Archives (formerly the Greater London Record Office); Moffitt Library, University of California, Berkeley; New York Public Library; Public Record Office; Senate House Library, London University; Swarthmore College, Peace Collection; Tower Hamlets Local History Library; Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; Victoria and Albert Museum Library; Widener Library, Harvard University; the Women’s Library (formerly the Fawcett Library), London Metropolitan University. I am also grateful to the staff at various philanthropic and social welfare institutions who helped me track down materials in their archives, including Frank Emott at Barnardo’s Library; Kate Bradley at Toynbee Hall; Tower Hamlets Mission; Oxford House; Lady Margaret Hall Settlement; and the Women’s University Settlement. Closer to home, the interlibrary loan wizards at Villanova University’s Falvey Library—Therese Dougherty, Ann Ford, and Phylis Wright—have been indefatigable sleuths in tracking down my requests. Bernadette Dierkes and Donna Blaszkowski of Falvey Library’ Graphic Services Department offered exceptional expertise and good cheer in organizing images. In countless ways, the staff of Villanova’s history department—Christine Filiberti, Edith Iannucci, and Georgiana Kilroy—has contributed to this book. For their assistance in procuring images this book, my thanks to Stephen Povers and Carolyn Rich at Barnardos; Mary Shields at the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh; Alan Thomas at Save the Children; Kate Bradley at the Barnett Research Centre, Toynbee Hall; Patricia Burdick at Colby College; Rey Antonio at the library of the University of Virginia. My thanks to the Radical History Review for permission to reproduce materials from my article “Dr. Barnardo’s ‘Artistic Fictions’: Photography, Sexuality, and the Ragged Child in Victorian London,” in chapter 2 of this book. Research for this project was funded by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and Villanova University.
While Joan and our children, Daniel, Zoe, and Eli, may not have read this book, they certainly have lived with it. Their love has sustained me during its composition. Our family adventures on athletic fields across America have taken me far from the slums of Victorian London and remind me that the joys of the present are every bit as important as the lessons of the past.
This book is dedicated to my father William Koven, whose compassion, wisdom, and love of learning continue to guide me.
SLUMMING
Introduction
SLUMMING: EROS AND ALTRUISM IN VICTORIAN LONDON
FOR THE BETTER part of the century preceding World War II, Britons went slumming to see for themselves how the poor lived. They insisted that firsthand experience among the metropolitan poor was essential for all who claimed to speak authoritatively about social problems. To a remarkable degree, the men and women who governed church and state in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and dominated social welfare bureaucracies and the emerging profession of social work felt compelled to visit, live, or work in the London slums at some point in their careers of public service. Even the fiery Welsh radical Lloyd George, champion of popular rights against aristocratic privileges, sought out a friend to take him on a tour of the East London slums soon after he arrived in London in 1
890 to assume his seat in parliament.1 Lloyd George may have been intent to witness the scenes of human misery and sexual degradation made famous the world over by the serial murderer Jack the Ripper, but he also embarked on a journey routed for him by thousands of well-to-do men and women. By the 1890s, London guidebooks such as Baedeker’s not only directed visitors to shops, theatres, monuments, and churches, but also mapped excursions to world renowned philanthropic institutions located in notorious slum districts such as Whitechapel and Shoreditch.2
We will never know precisely how many men and women went slumming, but the fact that slums became tourist sites suggests it was a very widespread phenomenon. At any given time there were hundreds of private charitable institutions and agencies in the metropolitan slums, each visited regularly by scores of donors, trustees, and volunteer and paid workers. No doubt slumming was merely an evening’s entertainment for many well-to-do Londoners,3 but for many others, the slums of London exercised powerful and tenacious claims over their minds and hearts, drastically altering the course of their lives.
One such man was James Granville Adderley. Adderley was far too iconoclastic to be representative of anything, but his life provides one point of entry into the world of the women and men whose philanthropic labors are the subject of this book. Even those who disliked Adderley’s radical ideas liked the man himself. He bristled with righteous indignation about the world’s injustices, but he also radiated an inner calm and a joyful enthusiasm that drew people of all sorts and conditions to him. Well-born, charming in conversation, blessed with even-featured good looks, and bright without being ostentatiously intellectual, Adderley seemed destined for a lucrative career in law and politics. However, within a short time of leaving Oxford in the mid-1880s, he found himself the toast of philanthropic London as head of one of the metropolis’s newest institutions for translating vague ideals about cross-class brotherly love into concrete form: the Oxford House in Bethnal Green. A residential colony of idealistic university men planted in a slum district, it was devoted to constructing bridges of personal friendship between rich and poor through Christian work and wholesome “rational” recreation. There was something absurd about Adderley’s instant celebrity as an expert on social questions, and he knew it better than anyone else. He cannily recognized that his contemporaries saw him not as he actually was but rather as an embodiment of a new type of man: the “‘ecclesiastical young man,’” called upon to “address all kinds of meetings, and looked upon as a sort of freak—the fellow who might live in luxury in Belgravia but preferred [the poverty of] Bethnal Green.”4
