Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  Hinton was a philanthropic hedonist. Refusing to play the part of self-sacrificing do-gooder, Hinton urged contemporaries to seek pleasure through altruism which would in turn result in social and sexual freedom. At the very heart of his project was the imperative to train human desires to serve others and by so doing unlock those natural “pleasures, instincts, impulses” that society was so determined to repress.51 The conduct of his life, his outward appearance, and his manners were as striking and unconventional as his ethics and explain in part his impact on contemporaries. He wore ill-fitting and conspicuously plain clothes and had no tolerance for social formalities. In the eyes of Edith Lees Ellis, an ardent proponent of women’s rights and lesbian wife of the founder of British sexology, Havelock Ellis, Hinton was “the ascetic and the sensualist alike,” “a muscularly strong man with the tenderness of a woman.”52 Hinton’s body became the mirror of his social and sexual ethics: he was both masculine and feminine, self-denying and pleasure-seeking.

  Now forgotten by all but a small handful of scholars, Hinton exercised a magnetic personal and intellectual hold over his disciples, whose substantial contributions to Victorian debates about sexual and social problems bore no relation to their small numbers.53 In the 1870s and ’80s, Hinton’s followers included not only Edith Lees but also her future husband, Havelock Ellis.54 Ellis, along with Hinton’s wife, Margaret, and her sister Caroline, were original members of the Fellowship of the New Life, the precursor of the much better known socialist Fabian Society. The Fellowship consisted of approximately thirty men and women committed to discussing decidedly unorthodox ideas about society—including Hinton’s—and enacting them in their daily lives.55 Hinton’s teachings left an enduring mark on one of Britain’s best-known female social purity campaigners, Ellice Hopkins, who worked among prostitutes and demanded that men be held to the same standards of chastity as women.56 Hinton was a spiritual guide and mentor to the Oxford historian of the industrial revolution, Arnold Toynbee, and influenced Toynbee’s friends Henrietta and Samuel Barnett, who founded Toynbee Hall in 1884, the university settlement in Whitechapel named in Toynbee’s memory.

  Hinton’s writings may have focused exclusively on sex between men and women, but his ideas about sexual freedom struck a particularly resonant chord among well-educated philanthropic men and women like Edith Lees Ellis who were attracted to members of their own sex. The married aristocratic poet Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel (third son of the Earl of Gainsborough), possessed with “a soul Bisexual,” found in Hinton’s theories a way to combine his zeal to better the plight of poor children with his equally absorbing passion for describing and enjoying beautiful male bodies.57 Other university-educated men shared Noel’s interest in Hinton’s ideas as well as his search for an ethical creed compatible with their love of male comrades. When the Arts and Crafts socialist Charles Ashbee returned to Kings College, Cambridge, after a sojourn in the Whitechapel slums at Toynbee Hall, he talked over Hinton’s theories with his circle of friends and with Edward Carpenter, the age’s most outspoken defender of homosexual rights and one of Roden Noel’s confidants.58

  If Hinton mattered so much to thoughtful men and women destined to leave their mark on modern British history, why has he languished in such obscurity? Hinton’s virtual erasure from history must in part be attributed to the opacity of his prose and his lack of a coherent philosophical system.59 But his disappearance from history was also the result of a deliberate campaign of rumor and innuendo in the 1880s intended to discredit him and his ideas at precisely the time his disciples tried to secure his reputation as a first-rate thinker and social visionary. Hinton was pilloried for violating a litany of sexual norms: espousing free love and the virtues of nakedness; engaging in an affair with his sister-in-law; and offering attractive women an opportunity to experience the joys of sexual liberation with him.60 When his son Howard actually did abandon his wife and position as science master at Uppingham and entered into a free union with Mrs. Maud Weldon in 1884, many felt that the son’s transgressions vindicated their worst suspicions about his long-dead father.61 Hinton became persona non grata with many late-Victorian proponents of frank discussion of sex and social reform who felt too vulnerable to criticisms about the conduct of their private lives to risk association with the disgraced Hinton.62 The quicksand of sexual scandal, based wholly on unsubstantiated rumor, swallowed up Hinton’s good deeds and philosophy, leaving behind few visible traces of his once formidable influence on contemporaries’ understanding of the dynamics of eros and altruism.

  Even this cursory overview of the dense networks of discipleship and affiliation surrounding Hinton demonstrates that his ideas contributed substantially to innovative philanthropic movements and social purity crusades and formed part of the intellectual lineage of ethical socialism, radical sex reform, and the “science” of sexuality. In the chapters that follow, I reintroduce many of his followers as they wrestled with the legacy of his life and ideas in their day to day work in the slums. Just as men and women whose sexual subjectivities spanned a wide spectrum of same- and opposite-sex desires found spiritual and intellectual sustenance in Hinton, so, too, this book brings together their histories as they sought to integrate their approaches to urban poverty with their ideas about gender and sexuality.

  Each of the next five chapters delves into the tension between eros and altruism at a particular moment in the history of slumming in London. I offer neither a continuous nor comprehensive narrative, but rather a series of case studies presented in loosely chronological order. The weight of my evidence and arguments are drawn from the period from the 1860s to World War I, but I will also reach backward to the 1840s and forward to the interwar period and beyond. I will move freely across traditional disciplines including history, literature, art history, and sociology in bringing together men’s and women’s, cultural and political, feminist and queer histories.

  I am unashamedly opportunistic in my deployment of a wide range of methodologies and theoretical approaches but my championship of no one of them. My approach has been guided by pragmatic considerations: if a methodology makes it possible to tease out meaning from my evidence, I have used it to the best of my abilities. At the same time, I also have tried to interpret the words of my informants according to their own time-bound social and cultural logic. Understanding men and women from the past on their own terms is quite different from uncritical acceptance of them. I have sought to balance respect for the depth and extent of reformers’ commitment to serving the poor with awareness that they imposed their own assumptions about sexuality, gender, and class on the poor. A great deal of useful scholarly energies have been devoted to sorting out whether the flowering of Victorian philanthropy grew out of genuine Christian empathy for the downtrodden or fear of the disruptive powers of the underclass; out of a desire to love the poor or to dominate them. The evidence gathered in this book suggests that we stand to gain deeper insights by exploring how these seemingly contradictory approaches and impulses co-existed and fed off one another without reducing one to the other. Consequently, I often provide more than one way to think about specific evidence and broader arguments rather than artificially disciplining my findings to support a narrower and more apparently coherent interpretation. While some readers may find this approach frustrating or equivocal, it constitutes less a refusal to make up my mind than an interpretation sustained throughout the book.

  The book has a two-part structure. Part one, “Incognitos, Fictions, and Cross-Class Masquerades” consists of three chapters, each of which explores elites use of deceptive practices (incognitos, undercover investigative journalism, falsified photographs) to reveal “truths” about the poor that they claimed would otherwise have remained hidden. I explore contemporaries’ responses to the ethical conundrums raised by these techniques for producing knowledge about and images of the poor. All three of these chapters interpret texts and images of the poor, the context of their production and circulation, and their impac
t on the subsequent histories of social policy, sexology, literature, journalism, and photography. These chapters address broad themes in Victorian society, but I approach them through the narrower lens of the work of an individual or a key episode in that person’s life. While my aims are not those of the biographer, I hope that readers will feel as though they have had a chance to get to know my subjects in their complexly flawed humanity.

  These chapters build on the insight that clothing was both a metaphor and a marker of class and sexual identities.63 Given the vast scale of life in London and its limitless possibilities for encounters with strangers, most had no choice but to assume that the clothes a person wore defined who a person was. At the same time, Londoners knew all too well that clothes were unreliable signifiers of identity because they could be removed as easily as they were put on. The slum explorers, reformers, and journalists discussed in part one cast off their clothing—and with it the constraints though not privileges of their social status—to gain insights into the poor and themselves.64

  Disguise and the homoerotic possibilities of nakedness were key issues in the workhouse scandal and press sensation examined in chapter one, “Workhouse Nights: Homelessness, Homosexuality and Cross-Class Masquerades.” This chapter recreates the chain of social, cultural, and political responses to a series of newspaper articles published in January 1866 by the journalist James Greenwood, who audaciously disguised himself as a tramp and spent the night in the state-regulated ward for homeless men in the Lambeth Workhouse. Greenwood’s claim that the casual ward had been transformed into a male brothel for the “hideous” enjoyment of homeless men and youths unleashed a moral panic and led Londoners to wonder whether Greenwood was a selfless crusader exposing the cruel treatment of the homeless poor or an unscrupulous adventurer gratifying his own morbid curiosity. I trace the enduring impact of this workhouse scandal on the British state’s construction and regulation of male homosexuality and homelessness.

  A decade later, Londoners once again found themselves discussing the truthfulness and sexual morality of a man who claimed to be a champion of the outcast poor. Chapter two, “Dr. Barnardo’s Artistic Fictions: Photography, Sexuality, and the Ragged Child” recovers the meanings of photographs of street children, whose tattered garments not only revealed their vulnerable bodies but also beseeched viewers to act on their behalf. Such images have a long history—beginning in the 1870s, when the renowned evangelical philanthropist Dr. Thomas John Barnardo first photographed “street arabs” in his care, ostensibly to document the conditions under which he originally found them and to advertise his own benevolence. This chapter examines the 1877 arbitration hearing in which Barnardo defended himself against charges that he kept company with a prostitute, abused the children in his Home and circulated falsified and sexually provocative images of them (his so-called artistic fictions). The Barnardo controversy, like the workhouse scandal examined in chapter one, led contemporaries to contemplate the relation between eros and altruism. Was Barnardo an upstanding Christian or a sexual miscreant? Did his staged photographs of children, taken in his studio, capture the essential truths about their harrowing lives on the streets or did these images memorialize Barnardo’s self-serving exploitation of his helpless charges?

  Chapter three, “The American Girl in London: Gender, Journalism, and Social Investigation in the Late Victorian Metropolis” recreates the transatlantic world of female investigative journalists in the slums of New York and London from the 1880s to 1920s. I highlight the transatlantic migrations and elaborate self-inventions of one woman, Elizabeth Banks, who claimed for women the right to imitate James Greenwood by disguising herself as a laboring girl to garner copy for her articles. Unlike either Greenwood or Barnardo, Banks never pretended to be motivated by a desire to help others. This chapter explains why Londoners were so disconcerted and intrigued by Banks’s refusal to play the part of either the crusading journalist or Lady Bountiful. It sets Banks’s exploits against the backdrop of shifting constructions of femininity and the social and cultural history of women’s incognito slumming and their journalistic accounts of female labor and urban poverty.

  Part two, “Cross-Class Sisterhood and Brotherhood in the Slums” consists of two chapters analyzing the tensions between the rhetoric and practice and erotics and politics of brotherly and sisterly love for the poor. I move away from the biographical approach deployed in part one and offer a more panoramic view of philanthropic and religious institutions and movements in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century London. While scandals about sex (or, more accurately, about putative sex acts) figure centrally in part one, part two delves deeply into the subtle but also elusive articulation of sexual desire, sexual subjectivity, and gender ideologies. These closely linked chapters underscore how conceptions of fraternity and sorority shaped reformers’ programs and policies for the poor and their efforts to understand themselves as individuals. At the same time, I analyze how poor men, women, and children negotiated with their would-be benefactors and manipulated elite preconceptions about them to extract what resources they could.

  Part two extends my engagement with the impact of imperialism on slumming, a theme that enters briefly into part one. These two chapters demonstrate the ways in which the metropolitan slums and distant outposts of empire were linked in the British imperial imagination as places of freedom and danger, missionary altruism and sexual opportunity. Many male and female reformers discussed in part two not only constructed rhetorical analogies between the two but literally moved between them during the course of their own careers. The American philosopher William James was appalled by precisely the tendency to conflate slums with colonial possessions, which he detected in Rudyard Kipling’s writings. “Kipling knows perfectly well,” James complained, “that our camps in the tropics are not college settlements or our armies bands of philanthropists, slumming it; and I think it a shame that he should represent us to ourselves in that light.”65

  Dirt as a material phenomenon and as a sexually charged metaphor in the daily lives and writings of educated independent women forms the subject of chapter four, “The Politics and Erotics of Dirt: Cross-Class Sisterhood in the Slums.” The first part asks why elite women were so fascinated by dirt and shows how this influenced their analysis of the economics and sexual politics of female poverty in London. The second part turns more fully to the “erotics” of dirt by focusing on the relationship between dirt, dirty bodies, and dirty desires in women’s writings about slum life. Chapter five, “The New Man in the Slums: Religion, Masculinity, and the Men’s Settlement House Movement” opens with an overview of the history of fraternity and fraternal ideologies in Victorian Britain and then analyzes the interplay of religion and sexuality in benevolent institutions devoted to cross-class brotherhood. I focus on the first two settlement houses, pan-denominational Toynbee Hall and High Anglican Oxford House, as sites where elite men destined to play leading roles in church and state in the twentieth century experimented with unconventional ideas about politics and class relations, brotherhood and democracy, gender and sexuality.

  Asserting the historian’s peculiar prerogative to dwell in the past, I have largely left it to readers to discern for themselves the implications of this study for the world in which we live. In several chapters, I provide epilogues which briefly trace some of the more striking post–World War I legacies of the particular stories I have told. This book emphasizes the challenges several generations of energetic and compassionate men and women confronted in their efforts to better the lives of the London poor. In simplest terms, it shows just how difficult it was—and is—to translate the desire to be good into actually doing good for others. I hope that this study may perhaps inspire and chasten those intent to better the world to reflect deeply on the implications of the choices made by like-minded men and women a century ago.

  PART ONE

  INCOGNITOS, FICTIONS, AND CROSS-CLASS MASQUERADES

  Chapter One

  WORKH
OUSE NIGHTS: HOMELESSNESS, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND CROSS-CLASS MASQUERADES

  IN THE SUMMER of 1865, the reform-minded medical journal the Lancet commissioned three doctors, led by Ernest Hart, to investigate the deplorable conditions of infirmaries attached to London’s forty-three Poor Law Union Workhouses, those despised institutions of last resort for the indigent, the disabled, the aged, and the sick of the metropolis.1 In 1864, “wretched [Timothy] Daly,” had died in the Holborn Workhouse through the malign neglect of untrained nurses, themselves paupers, and of the Guardians of the Poor who had been too cheap to provide nighttime care for sick inmates. This case was followed by the equally harrowing death of Richard Gibson in the St. Giles and St. George Workhouse in Bloomsbury in 1865.2 Many of Britain’s most influential poor-law and sanitary reformers threw their weight behind the Lancet’s campaign, including the redoubtable champion of modern nursing Florence Nightingale, who entered the fray over the medical care of the London poor with the same gusto that had made legendary her work in Scutari during the Crimean War.3 Nonetheless, the Lancet’s articles failed to capture the imagination of the broader public who, understandably, lacked an appetite for administrative details about pauper diets, the cubic space requirements of the sick, and the professional qualifications and emoluments of workhouse nurses and doctors.4