Slumming
Page 5
However, the Lancet’s articles did catch the eye of Frederick Greenwood, the enterprising editor of the fledgling newspaper written by and for “gentlemen” readers, the Pall Mall Gazette.5 He believed that the Lancet had hit upon a story he could transform from a worthy public-health controversy into a media sensation. Frederick decided to launch his own investigation into workhouses. He recruited his brother James to undertake an audacious and unprecedented task, one he hoped would more effectively capitalize on public anxieties about the metropolitan underclass than had the Lancet’s initial campaign to make infirmaries into free hospitals for the poor. He asked James to disguise himself as a homeless tramp to see and hear for himself what it meant to spend a night I locked up in the casual ward for destitute wayfarers and vagrants that was attached to the Lambeth Workhouse.6
By mid-January 1866, a series of articles entitled “A Night in a Workhouse,” written by James Greenwood but reprinted under the pseudonym “The Amateur Casual,” appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette and overnight created a new mode of journalistic reporting—incognito social investigation using cross-class dress—and a new style of sensational and self-consciously theatrical writing about the poor.7 In the previous two decades, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew had trawled the back streets and alleyways of London seeking scenes of destitution to reproduce for their eagerly indignant readers, but they had remained sympathetic outsiders and observers of life among the poor. The Amateur Casual had undertaken a more daring assignment: he had masqueraded as one of the poor to experience firsthand what it meant to be an inmate in a ward for indigent wayfarers, tramps, and other homeless people.
“A Night” helped establish the Pall Mall Gazette as Victorian Britain’s leading paper devoted to exposing social evils and launched James Greenwood’s long career as one of the preeminent chroniclers of London’s netherworlds. Greenwood’s articles made the degrading conditions in the casual wards of workhouses an instant cause célèbre. The London Review feigned bored indifference to the stir but aptly captured the public’s perverse mingling of injured virtue with licentious hunger for scandal: “We are remarkably subject to periodical fits of reformation,” its writer explained. “The parochial gruel is not now more diluted than it was six months ago, and just as many paupers may have died on it then as at present; but our virtue is at this season roused to the point, and we must have our craving satisfied.”8
Greenwood’s series circulated widely on all levels of British society. In the midst of his first week as leader of the House of Commons, William Gladstone took time out from his worries about the fate of parliamentary reform to read “A Night.”9 The week before, “Conductor 1548” of a southbound Hampstead omnibus stole “a minute or two” from his work to peruse “A Night” “while his vehicle was slowly progressing over London-bridge.”10 The series sold by the thousands in penny broadsides for the poor and in shilling pamphlets for the well-to-do, in turn spawning popular broadsides responding to it11 (figures 1.1a and b). For a brief moment, Britons across the social and political spectrum put aside their anxieties about the attacks of Fenian nationalists in Ireland to contemplate horrors all too close to home. Reprinted in papers throughout the metropolis and Great Britain, “A Night” also attracted international notice. The socialist and historian of revolution, Louis Blanc, digested them for Le Temps, leading some French newspapers erroneously to attribute Greenwood’s discoveries to Blanc himself and to chide the English for needing a Frenchman to show them “the real state of their workhouses.”12
What had Greenwood discovered—or at least purported to have uncovered—during his single night in the workhouse? Why did it, and not the graphic descriptions of bodily misery and official ineptitude published in the Lancet, become a Victorian sensation? What have scholars had to say about “A Night” and its enduring significance? While less well known today than the exposés of poverty and vice of Henry Mayhew’s London Life and Labour series in the 1850s, Andrew Mearns’s Bitter Cry of Outcast London, and W. T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” series in the 1880s,13 “A Night” has not languished in obscurity. I first encountered it almost twenty years ago in the pioneering work of literary historian P. J. Keating, who had reprinted it entirely as the first selection of his anthology of Victorian writing about the slums and offered a perceptive critical assessment. Anthologized again more recently, “A Night” has been studied closely by historians of journalism and the press, theater historians, literary critics, and social historians of the urban poor.14 Quite remarkably, none of these scholars has noticed the “startling revelation” that made “A Night” a sensation rather than yet another assault on poorhouses: the supposed transformation of the male casual ward of the Lambeth Workhouse into a male brothel. According to Greenwood, public authorities were using public money to create the conditions that encouraged the most vicious male members of the metropolitan underclass to engage in sodomy.
Greenwood’s “A Night” established an ongoing tradition of imagining the precincts of poverty in London as “queer” and “eccentric”15 spaces in which social investigators, clergymen, reformers, philanthropists, social workers, and writers could explore and represent heterodox sexual desires and practices.16 The historical significance of “A Night” depends in part on the ways in which Greenwood and his diverse audiences linked together concerns about male sexuality with attitudes about the metropolitan underclass and social policies and practices. The publication of the articles precipitated a moment of remarkable convergence between high and low reading publics, between sensational journalism, social reform, and sexual politics. Unlike so many other Victorian exposés, “A Night” did have a lasting impact on how contemporaries perceived and represented the poorest of the poor in the metropolis and contributed significant momentum to those forces calling for reform of the Poor Laws and the government of London.17 The format, language, themes, and images Greenwood deployed in this series recur over and over in the writings of philanthropists, journalists, and reformers for the next seven decades.18 It served as a kind of template upon which renowned slum explorers, such as W. T. Stead, Jack London, and George Orwell, necessarily inscribed their own stories about the slums and against which we in turn can reread their narratives.
FIGURE 1.1a. “A Night in a Workhouse” was a publishing sensation that captured readers across the entire social and economic spectrum. While it was initially published in the Pall Mall Gazette, the newspaper for gentlemen, it soon sold in the thousands in the streets of London. The cover of the penny edition, intended for the working poor, emphasized the sensational disclosures awaiting readers.
Figure 1.1b. The cover of the shilling pamphlet, intended for well-to-do readers, conveys the seriousness of the topic and physically resembles countless other tracts on sanitary and social questions. Both editions were published in 1866. (Figure 1.1a reproduced with permission from the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.)
Claiming that “A Night” was a scandal about the putative sexual practices of homeless poor men raises the question: Why have other scholars not noticed the single most salient and salacious “fact” Greenwood disclosed about men’s casual wards?19 In what sense were sexual secrets at the heart of the text of “A Night” and public responses to it? How and why did its homoerotic dimensions come to be so securely and safely closeted? Recovering the diverse ways in which Greenwood’s mid-Victorian contemporaries understood the social and sexual dimensions of his investigation makes it possible to analyze the consequences of “A Night” for perceptions of the homeless and their treatment. What impact did “A Night” have on ongoing debates about metropolitan poverty and elite slumming, private benevolence and public policy, male sexuality and its regulation? The four parts of this chapter provide some answers to these questions. The first introduces Greenwood and the political and social setting of London in January 1866. Because “A Night” was first and foremost a news story written to satisfy the particular needs of a specific m
oment in time, understanding the context of its immediate production and reception is important. It helps to delineate some of the public preoccupations of Greenwood’s first readers that he skillfully mobilized in writing the series. The second offers a close—and sequential—reading of the individual articles comprising “A Night” as each originally appeared in installments in the Pall Mall Gazette during the week of January 12, 1866. By so doing, this section preserves the problematic striptease-like structure Greenwood chose to impose on his tale—with its partial disclosure of the naked truths he claimed to have discovered—in order to call attention to it as a rhetorical strategy. It also underscores the ways in which he used the literal limits of the newspaper page to create in his readers a desire to read the next installment. The third analyzes how Greenwood’s readers across the social and political spectrum responded to and appropriated “A Night” to serve their own varied agendas. This section charts the ways in which social responses to “A Night” simultaneously fed off but also occluded the story’s sexual dimensions. The sheer overwhelming number and variety of social responses threatened, but never quite succeeded, to dissipate entirely the initial sexual charge that animated the public’s interest in “A Night.” The fourth section considers the influence of “A Night” on sexology—in particular ideas about male homosexuality—and state policies toward the poor. The fifth section functions as an extended postscript in which I read several well-known works of social criticism and urban exploration from the 1870s to the 1930s against Greenwood’s “A Night.” By so doing, I show that the cultural logic underpinning representations of the very poor set in motion by “A Night” had all too real consequences for the way public officials and private individuals dealt with homelessness and homosexuality in modern Britain. Social and sexual politics became inseparable bedfellows in the history of “A Night” and its long afterlife in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
JAMES GREENWOOD AND LONDON IN 1866
James Greenwood was a prolific writer who produced a flood of articles and books between the 1860s and the turn of the century.20 And yet, for a man whose thoughts circulated so widely in public, we know remarkably little about his life. The younger brother and sometime collaborator of the founding editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Frederick Greenwood, James often presented himself to his readers as a “gentleman” reporter. He frequently exploited the contrast between his supposed status as a gentleman and the squalor of the scenes of his journalistic investigations. His gentility was a recent acquisition, more wishful pose than reality.21 One of eleven children of a carriage upholsterer, he entered the world of letters through his work as an apprentice in a print shop and later as a freelance journalist.22 At the time he wrote “A Night,” he was an obscure thirty-five-year-old journalist and hack novelist. The newspaper editor, Edmund Yates, who under the nom de plume “The Flaneur” commented on Greenwood’s exploits for the Morning Star, characterized the denizens of the Bohemian demi-monde of which Greenwood was a part as “young, gifted, and reckless; … they worked only by fits and starts, and never except under the pressure of necessity…. [T]hey had a thorough contempt for the dress, usages, and manners of ordinary middle-class civilization.”23
Greenwood wrote extensively in many genres about crime, poverty and empire, but London’s children especially engaged his sympathies. In the 1850s, he contributed frequently to the Boy’s Own Magazine. At approximately the same time he wrote “A Night,” he published the novel The True History of a Little Ragamuffin, which combined fiction with documentary reportage in examining the life of a London “street arab.”24 He followed up his casual ward workhouse sensation of 1866 with another commissioned exposé for the Pall Mall Gazette entitled the “Wrens of the Curragh”—about a community of female “Irish” prostitutes living in so-called nests made of “furze” and serving the sexual needs of the British army camp stationed in Newbridge, Ireland. Reminding his readers about the truthfulness of “A Night,” Greenwood explained that he had once again spent a harrowing and “long night” mingling freely with the forlorn objects of his inquiry.25 While the misery of the poor provided copy and hence a livelihood for Greenwood, he also participated in philanthropic work. In the 1890s he joined forces with John Kirk, the secretary of the Ragged School Union, to send slum children on country holidays. Although consistently engaged with social issues, he never developed a systematic program of reform. Had Greenwood died in 1900, at the height of his fame, he would undoubtedly have been hailed as a pioneering journalist and altruistic writer on social evils. But Greenwood was one of those minor Victorian celebrities who simply lived too long, his efforts long forgotten. His death in 1927 at the age of 96 went virtually unnoted by the London press, whose development he had so importantly encouraged.26
Greenwood’s premise for “A Night” was simple: he would disguise himself in what he imagined were the clothes of an unemployed casual laborer and spend a single night in the workhouse in Princes Road, Lambeth. Lambeth, site of the archbishop of Canterbury’s London residence on the south bank of the Thames, was also beset by chronic poverty.27 Greenwood aimed to investigate the workings of the recently enacted Metropolitan Houseless Poor Act from the perspective of an inmate of a casual ward. Greenwood published the articles in three consecutive numbers, January 12, 13, and 15, without his name. Anonymity, far from deflecting attention away from the author, added to the playful air of mystery Greenwood cultivated. The Birmingham Journal, for example, wryly remarked that
Who wrote the experiences of a casual in a Workhouse? has been almost as momentous a question during the week as “Who killed Cock Robin?” in the nursery tales. Mr. Oleby, Mr. Hollingshead, Mr. Halliday, Mr. Greenwood, Mr. Trollope, have been all named as probable authors … but it turns out it was written by Mr. Greenwood. Not the Mr. Greenwood, the Editor of the Pall Mall, but his brother…. For authority, it is said he doesn’t deny it.28
What impelled Greenwood to undertake such a novel descent? Greenwood anticipated that readers would question his motives and felt compelled to justify his actions. Others had written about workhouses, he averred, but he alone, “with no motive but to learn and make known the truth, had ventured the experiment of passing a night in a workhouse, and trying what it actually is to be a ‘casual.’”
Seeking “truth” may have played a part in Greenwood’s plan, but he had other, far less disinterested motives as well. The scheme was concocted by his older brother, Frederick, who offered the assignment to James, “a rough diamond” who “did not by any means jump at the proposal” until offered the very substantial sum of “thirty pounds down and more if it turns out well.”29 While James had a large financial stake in the success of his venture, Frederick was under even greater pressure. By the beginning of 1866, the Pall Mall Gazette was in jeopardy of closing down on account of its meager circulation and revenues; “when to stop or go on became a question daily renewed,” Frederick candidly recalled almost thirty years later.30
An array of specific and general circumstances made an incognito inquiry into the state of the casual ward of a workhouse attractive to Greenwood in January 1866. An unusually cold winter in 1865–66 exacted a high toll on the homeless poor, whose ranks were still swollen by the economic dislocations of the American Civil War and the ensuing unemployment caused by the Lancashire cotton famine. For many Britons, the cotton famine had revealed an admirably stoic and moral working class whose sufferings compelled redress.31 The day the first installment of “A Night” appeared, January 12, the streets were blanketed by snow drifting three and four feet high. Under these conditions, even the most hardhearted Londoner would probably have felt some compassion for the homeless poor.
The winter of 1865–66 was also an opportune time to test the efficacy of the Metropolitan Houseless Poor Act, which had only a few months before been made into a permanent statute.32 The act obliged guardians of the poor to provide food and lodging for all “destitute wayfarers, wanderers, and foundlings” regardless of t
heir character and place of settlement.33 It was a kind of bill of rights for vagrants, some of whom kept up with the latest enactments of the Poor Law and tenaciously invoked its clauses in their often brutal encounters with recalcitrant local officials. As Beatrice and Sidney Webb noted in their encyclopedic history of English poor-law policy, the act offered guardians of poor districts heavily populated by casuals a substantial bribe by “making … the cost of relief given in the casual wards a common charge upon the whole of London.”34 It was one of many attempts to more equitably share the burdens of caring for the poor across the entire metropolis. This was a matter of considerable importance as the last remnants of the resident urban gentry in parts of South and East London moved west and north or to the rapidly expanding ring of suburban “villadom.” Just barely respectable ratepayers (residents whose taxes—“rates”—supported local government and service) in slum districts were much less able than wealthy Londoners in fashionable districts to shoulder the high cost of helping their impoverished neighbors in time of need.