Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  Impatient with the unending stream of visitors, reporters, and transient do-gooders to Oxford House, Adderley took his clerical vows and moved farther east into ever less glamorous slum districts. He joined the Catholic prelate Cardinal Manning and the trade unionist Ben Tillett in championing the cause of London’s grossly exploited dock laborers in their world-famous strike in 1889; he defended the rights of laboring men against puritanical attempts to deny them the pleasures of the stage and music hall; he threw his heart and soul into club work with the “rough lads” in his adopted neighborhood of Poplar and invited large numbers of them for holidays on the grounds of his ancestral home, Hams Hall. He helped form a new religious community within the Church of England that was founded on the rules of St. Francis: The Society of Divine Compassion. Adderley and his brothers in poverty exalted the beautiful while despising the exuberant materialism of late Victorian London. Jolly fellowship among men went hand in hand with severe austerity. “There was no carpet on the floors, a fire only in the common room, and the brothers did their own crude cooking,” one visitor recalled. A bare plank served as his only bed. Adderley felt that even this self-denying regimen kept him too far removed from the gritty struggles of the homeless poor. He spent weeks at a time disguised as a tramp, often sleeping rough on the streets. The depth of his compassion was matched by the breadth of his tolerance. He extended his hand not only to social outcasts but also to sexual outlaws like the celebrated playwright Oscar Wilde, convicted in 1895 for committing same-sex acts of gross indecency. Living in East London placed Adderley far from the starched-collar respectability and top-hatty conventions of bourgeois domesticity and freed him to develop distinctly heterodox ideas about class relations, male sexual celibacy, and social purity. When Adderley died in 1942, it was another man, Arthur Shearly Cripps, his “comrade in tramping, dossing, and in preaching the gospel,” who memorialized their loving friendship in a tender poem of chaste but sensual couplets: “He to whose lips the taste of old wine clings/ Asks no new wine. Ah me! My friend’s loss brings/ No wish for some new friend to fill his place.”5

  Why did Adderley renounce the privileges of aristocratic birth and the comforts of family to live for six decades in voluntary poverty and sexual celibacy among the London poor as a bachelor slum priest? His only biographer discouraged readers from seeking the psychological roots of Adderley’s singular devotion because he was “a man of simple ways and thoughts and friendships” who never worried about himself and instead did God’s work as a parish priest.6 We need not posthumously coerce Adderley onto the psychoanalyst’s couch to suggest that the private and public, sexual and social forces shaping his life choices may not have been as “simple” as his “ways.”

  This book tries to make sense of the ideas and movements, institutions and practices that made the slums of London and “slumming” seem so necessary to Adderley and thousands of members of the “comfortable classes.” It examines the complex historical and cultural circumstances in which such women and men found themselves and to which they importantly contributed. I attempt to save them from the misguided good-will of those who would make them into saints and the smugness of those who would dismiss them as marginal cranks, or worse yet, as hypocrites. They were none of these. Instead, I try to recapture the altogether messier mingling of good intentions and blinkered prejudices that informed their vision of the poor and of themselves. While exploring deep structures of thought and feeling in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British culture, I attend to individuals’ particularities. I portray slum reformers and workers not as mere tools of social or discursive forces outside their control—though such forces did influence their agendas—but as human beings who confronted ethical dilemmas and made difficult choices.7 I examine the interplay of sexual and social politics both at the micro-level of how women and men came to express and understand who they were and at the macro-level of public debates about poverty and welfare, gender, and sexuality. By so doing, I work within, but also reorient, a tradition of scholarship linking private conscience and public duty in Victorian culture and society.8

  The intimate, turbulent, and often surprising relationship between benevolence and sex, rich and poor, in Victorian London is my subject. I came to this topic circuitously through the history of elite men’s and women’s philanthropic endeavors to bring “sweetness and light” to the dark spaces and dirty inhabitants of the metropolis. As I immersed myself deeply in the sources, I found it impossible to keep sex, sexual desire, and sexuality out of their story. So what began as an inquiry into class-bridging institutions and social welfare programs took on a life of its own, propelled by several insights. First, it became clear that debates about “social” questions such as homelessness, social hygiene, childhood poverty, and women’s work were often sparked by and tapped into anxieties about sex, sexuality, and gender roles. To understand how elite men and women thought about the poor required me to reckon with how they thought about sex, gender, and themselves. Second, I discovered that the widely shared imperative among well-to-do men and women to traverse class boundaries and befriend their outcast brothers and sisters in the slums was somehow bound up in their insistent eroticization of poverty and their quest to understand their own sexual subjectivities. But how and why were these movements, both literal and imaginative, connected? And what were the consequences of such linkages for the histories of class, gender, sexuality, and welfare? An inquiry into the set of social practices and relations that Britons called slumming promised a means to untangle and knit together in a new way the history of sexual and social politics.9 Once I started looking for slumming, it was hard not to find it everywhere.

  The Oxford-educated journalist Henry Wood Nevinson, who lived with his talented wife Margaret and their growing family in an insectinfested slum flat in the 1880s, astutely observed that slumming expressed both “shamed sympathy” with the poor and an irresistible “attraction of repulsion” for them.10 Nevinson’s paradoxical formulation points to the double optic through which elites viewed the slums of London. Men and women like the Nevinsons knew only too well that slums were real places of monotonous material deprivation and quiet human suffering which both rightly elicited their sympathy and called them to action. At the same time, when elites wrote about slums, they tended to romanticize and exoticize them as sites of spectacular brutality and sexual degradation to which they were compulsively drawn.11 Slums were anarchic, distant outposts of empire peopled by violent and primitive races; but they were also conveniently close, only a short stroll from the Bank of England and St. Paul’s, inhabited by Christian brothers and sisters. They were prosaically dull and dangerously carnivalesque.

  The metropolitan slums provided well-to-do philanthropic men and women with an actual and imagined location where, with the approval of society, they could challenge prevailing norms about class and gender relations and sexuality.12 These men and women may well have needed the freedom the slums offered them more than the poor in their adopted neighborhoods benefited from their benevolent labors. Such claims capture the complex social dynamics of philanthropic encounters between rich and poor, as well as my own ambivalence about them. Reformers’ creativity and passion, their sincerely felt and lived ethos of service, inspire admiration. At the same time, many were deeply invested in the titillating squalor of the slums, which they used as stages upon which they enacted emancipatory experiments in reimagining themselves. Synonymous with squalid tenements and soiled lives, the slums of London ironically functioned as sites of personal liberation and self-realization—social, spiritual, and sexual—for several generations of educated men and women.13

  Upper-class men and women had long ventured into the low haunts of London in pursuit of illicit pleasure. In 1670, the Queen and the Duchesses of Richmond and Buckingham caused a public uproar when they disguised themselves as “country lasses” at Bartholomew Fair to mingle undetected with the common people. “They had all so over done it in their disguise,” Sir Henry
Ingilby reported in his diary, that they quickly drew the attention of the mob, which angrily pursued them all the way to the Court gate. Ingilby concluded his entry “thus by ill conduct was a merry frolic turned into a penance.”14 It would be easy to trace an unbroken history of such self-serving escapades from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. But by the mid-nineteenth century, altruists began to rival pleasure seekers in shaping public perceptions of the purpose and meaning of descents into the spaces of the poor. Well-to-do philanthropists justified their slum journeys as a way to do penance for the sins of their class, to investigate and study the poor, and to succor them. Far from concealing their slum explorations, they did their best to publicize them in the name of social science, civic duty, and Christian love. They used the materials they gathered—statistical, anecdotal, visual—to write sociological reports, political-economic treatises, novels, passionate sermons, and revelatory newspaper articles; to secure jobs in private voluntary associations and in expanding social welfare bureaucracies within local and national government; to bolster their credentials as expert witnesses before parliamentary commissions of inquiry and as members of parliament.

  If slumming was an indispensable method of gathering knowledge about urban poverty, it also revealed the extent to which charity was, according to the expatriate American novelist Henry James, “a kind of passion.” But what was the nature of this “passion”? How did this “passion” affect the ways in which well-to-do Victorians came to define social problems and their solutions? James’s understanding of the London poor was at best superficial. He was, however, an astute observer of the inner longings of his English peers, those extraordinarily articulate “public moralists” who molded opinion and devised policies on social questions.15 His writings suggest that the Victorians’ “passion” for charity was fueled by unconsummated and unacknowledged desires for all sorts of taboo intimacies between rich and poor, the clean and the dirty, the virtuous and the verminous, men and women, women and women, and men and men.16 James could not help thinking that there was “something indecent” about so much goodness.17

  Many kinds of love, sexual and nonsexual alike, animated Britons’ engagement with philanthropy. I investigate how the histories of sexuality and sexual desires usually associated with the private lives of individuals intersected with the public histories of benevolence to shape metropolitan philanthropy and social welfare. While I do not anachronistically impose the vocabulary of twentieth-century psychoanalysis on my nineteenth-century subjects, I do attempt to illuminate their psychological and sexual complexities. I examine the motives, representations, meanings, and consequences of their forays into the slums of Victorian and Edwardian London. At the same time, I reconstruct as best I can the responses of the poor to their uninvited visitors. The circumstances and survival strategies of the poor necessarily shaped their vision of the world and of their social betters.18 This book reveals the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories, overflowed their boundaries, affecting one another in profoundly consequential ways for our understanding of poverty and its representations, social policies, and emerging sexual and gender identities in modern Britain.

  SLUMMING DEFINED

  How did Victorian men and women define the activity “slumming” and its closely associated verb forms “to slum” or “to go slumming?” What meanings did they associate with these terms? How do I define and use them in this study? Let me answer each of these questions in turn.

  In August 1893, Adderley tried to answer the question “Is Slumming Played Out?” for the middle-brow English Illustrated Magazine. “The fashionable slumming of eight years ago,” he assured readers, “is given up as a wholesale practice.” He quickly defined “fashionable slumming” by offering several egregious examples of its excesses. He conjured “the languid lady” driven down to the docks to see a flesh-and-blood “stevedore” for the sole purpose of impressing her dinner guests that evening (841). He blasted the “provoking rich people” who arrived in East London so filled with literary preconceptions that actual slums were not nearly “slummy enough” for them.19 Fashionable slumming encouraged some observers to trivialize poverty, transform it into self-serving entertainment, and perpetuate absurd misconceptions about the savagery of the poor.20 It disguised prurient curiosity in the garb of social altruism. There was no reason to lament its passing as a fad.

  The clarity of Adderley’s moral judgments matched the slipperiness of his rhetoric and arguments. Despite his condemnation of fashionable slumming, he claimed that the attitudes promoting it spurred new approaches to charity, foremost among them the growing belief that “cheque-book philanthropy” (merely giving cash donations) was no substitute for giving one’s own best self to the poor in friendship. Adderley contrasted one set of practices he abhorred—fashionable slumming—with another he admired but to which he attached no name. However, the weight of the evidence he put forward undermined his own attempt to construct straightforward distinctions. The very institutions he singled out for doing genuine Christian work among the poor, such as Dr. Barnardo’s schemes to rescue street children and the university settlement in Whitechapel, Toynbee Hall, were also the epicenters of fashionable slumming in the 1880s and ’90s.21 Unable to wrest the word “slumming” from its association with prurient curiosity, Adderley nonetheless wanted to harness its social and cultural resources for benevolent ends. He concluded his article with a rousing call for thoughtful university men to join him in serving the London poor.

  Let no young man think his education complete until he has come to know the poor, their lives and their needs. Let the sons of the upper classes strike out courageously beyond the conventional philanthropy of their parents and get over their suspicions of “Socialism.” Let them investigate that creature whom they call a “cad” and discover his lurking heart and soul.

  Why did Adderley provide examples of fashionable slumming but yet never explain what “slumming” itself meant or how it related to the charitable schemes detailed in his article? His inclusions and exclusions provide several important clues. His article conspicuously ignored the vast army of philanthropic women—from the elite Ladies Bountiful to the working class Ranyard Bible nurses and Salvation Army “slum lassies” (estimated at 500,000 in 1893)—who were rapidly making benevolence into a feminized enclave of social life.22 While Adderley’s article ostensibly denounced the idle rich regardless of their sex, he subtly associated the vices of fashionable slumming with women by his choice of examples (recall the “languid lady”) and by the close identification of femininity and fashion. Excluding female benevolence in all its many forms made his appeal to the “sons of the upper class”—and not their daughters—seem inevitable and logical.23 My point here is not to show that Adderley was mean-spirited toward women. He was not. Rather, I am arguing that Adderley’s attempt to preserve Christian work among the poor from contamination by fashionable slumming depended on an unstated set of assumptions about gender and his own unacknowledged investment in making philanthropy appealing to men at a time when women were coming to dominate it.

  Slumming, the word and the activities associated with it, was distinguished historically by a persistent pattern of disavowal. It was a pejorative term used to sneer at the supposedly misguided efforts of other people. As a form of urban social exploration, it bore the obloquy of sensationalism, sexual transgression, and self-seeking gratification, not sober inquiry and self-denying service to others. Clergymen, journalists, novelists, philanthropists, social investigators, and reformers, therefore, went to great lengths to contrast their supposedly high-minded engagement with social problems with the activities of casual “slummers.”24 Attaching the rhetorical label “slumming” to a social practice was a very effective way to discredit it and to distance oneself from it. An editorial published in the radical journal the Link in October 1888 blasted the “gorgeously plumed birds of passage” who “slummed because … the horrors they brushed by threw into mor
e brilliant relief the daintinesses of their own fair surroundings … because a morbid curiosity, sated with novelistic pruriences, craved the stronger sensations of real abominations.”25 The Link’s outspoken editors, Annie Besant and William T. Stead, had themselves undertaken hundreds of slum journeys, seeking to bring justice to the disinherited through their inflammatory articles. Just as slumming itself brought together the high and the low, it confounded clear-cut distinctions between true and false charity.26

  Casual slumming often merged imperceptibly into sustained attempts not just to grapple with the costs of poverty in individual lives, but also to formulate systemic critiques of social and economic injustices. In the letters, memoirs, and autobiographies of leading reformers and politicians, we encounter a recurring pattern: an early episode of slumming, motivated largely by curiosity, sets the stage for deeper awareness of and commitment to redressing the evils of urban poverty. When William Beveridge first visited Toynbee Hall, he felt like “an American tourist doing Whitechapel in two days,” but by the time he left, he had begun to analyze the structures of wages and work that caused unemployment and to propose solutions to them.27 Jane Addams, the American feminist-internationalist, condemned the way in which slumming produced an “unfair,” “fragmentary,” and “lurid view of poverty.” But she also acknowledged that her midnight tour of East London in the autumn of 1883, perched safely atop an omnibus hired by a West London Missioner, left an indelible and salutary imprint on her imagination. The socialist H. M. Hyndman heaped scorn upon slumming as a general social phenomenon: it was one of the odious privileges of the bourgeoisie, a symptom of the ills of capitalist Britain rather than a means to solve them. But he, like Addams, confessed in his memoir that a “tremor of fitful sympathy among the well-to-do” in 1866 had pricked his social conscience and led him to join “guardsmen and girls of the period, rich philanthropists and prophets of Piccadilly, students of human nature and cynics on the make” to betake themselves “with hearts and pockets bursting with charity to the choicest rookeries to be found along the riverside.”28 Just as spiritual autobiographers following Augustine emphasized their youthful carnality to demonstrate God’s grace in leading them to sanctity, so, too, social reformers and political activists confessed their own guilty pleasures of “slumming” in order to criticize them.