Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  Even before coming into effect, the act had been attacked severely from many quarters in terms all too familiar to students of poor-law reform. Vestrymen, elected agents of the most local form of government within London, tended to be small businessmen and tradesmen who zealously tried to curb the costs of assisting the poor within their community. They complained that the Houseless Poor Act interfered unduly in the affairs of overburdened rate payers and forced them to enlarge their accommodation for the homeless but did not provide them with adequate funds to do so. Others grumbled that the act left too much discretion in the hands of mean-spirited local guardians who could not be trusted to meet their obligations to the poor.35 While champions of local government bemoaned the act’s tendency to expand the power of central government, the president of the Poor Law Board and his inspectors felt that the act had not given them enough authority to ensure uniform compliance.36 Its sponsors never pretended that it would solve the fundamental social and economic problems that produced vagrancy. Rather, by forcing poorhouses to make room for the homeless, the act aimed to clear the streets, doorways, and alleys of the very poor, whom many Londoners abhorred as an unsightly and foul-smelling public nuisance. The Greenwood brothers were determined to expose the iniquities of parochial treatment of the homeless poor, who had been so recently secreted from view by Parliament.37

  Throughout the final months of 1865, mistreatment of casuals had become a regular feature of the London press. Sanitarians, poor-law reformers, and journalists closely monitored workhouse deaths caused by inhumane management and grossly inadequate medical and nursing provision. Ernest Hart’s Lancet commission was only the most visible form taken by the campaign to reform workhouse infirmaries. In the late 1850s, a group of progressive women reformers led by Louisa Twining had already taken the initiative in demanding improved conditions in workhouses and in workhouse nursing by forming the Workhouse Visiting Society and its informative and forceful Journal of the Workhouse Visiting Society. In September 1866, Millicent N., a correspondent to the Victoria Magazine for Women made no attempt to conceal her anger that men were getting all the credit for discovering workhouse abuses for which women had earlier put forward “wise and careful” remedies.38

  The two workhouse campaigns complemented one another: while Greenwood’s articles about scandalous conditions in the casual ward attracted greater public notoriety, reform of workhouse medical provision engaged some well-established luminaries, such as Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens, and John Stuart Mill.39 Years later, Frederick Greenwood explicitly acknowledged his debt to Hart’s initiative in providing inspiration for “A Night.” Searching for a story that would draw attention to the Pall Mall Gazette, he began to ponder “some dreadful reports of investigation into certain infirmaries, which reports excited no public attention whatever, being printed in a medical journal. This recollection suggested a night in the casual ward of a London workhouse as a sort of knife that might accomplish several efficient bits of business at one stroke.”40 Only the week before Greenwood’s “A Night” appeared, papers in the metropolis followed the inquiry into the death of a rheumatic elderly casual named Fellowes or Flowers (the press apparently could not decide or did not care what his actual surname was). Locked in an unlit ward of the Bethnal Green Workhouse, he had fallen from his bed in the middle of the night and had been left to die without benefit of medical treatment.41

  It is also likely that the Greenwood brothers were influenced by Charles Dickens’s “night walks” published in his Uncommerical Traveller and by his latest novel, Our Mutual Friend, which appeared in serial form in 1864 and 1865.42 “A Night” bears striking resemblance to many aspects of Our Mutual Friend, especially in its use of cross-class incognito disguises and the confusion of altruistic, heteroerotic, and homoerotic impulses.43 Dickens’s journal, All the Year Round, published several articles about “A Night,” and commentators frequently described “A Night” as Dickensian and invoked characters from various Dickens’s novels in their responses to it.

  The Pall Mall Gazette and the Greenwood brothers also benefited from the way in which London, by virtue of its unique status as the seat of parliament and as the financial capital of a global empire, magnified and transformed local issues into national and imperial ones.44 If Manchester, with its filthy industrial landscape and strained relations between industrialists and laborers, was the shock-city of early Victorian Britain, London, with its dramatic contrasts between remarkable wealth and squalid poverty, increasingly preoccupied social commentators from mid-century onward. With the death in October 1865 of Lord Palmerston, the great Whig Prime Minister and inveterate opponent of parliamentary reform, the enfranchisement of a substantial number of laboring men seemed inevitable. Debates over the nature of franchise reform in 1866 and 1867 revolved around establishing the boundaries between one group of men deemed worthy of inclusion in the political nation—the respectable, independent working man living in a stable residence as head of household—and another deemed unworthy of the privileges of citizenship—the wayward “rough” and dependent pauper who flitted from one cheap lodging to another.45 By 1867, the great Liberal reformer John Bright had declared the existence of a class he called “the residuum,” whose exclusion from the rest of the male working class was essential for the nation’s well being.46 Controversies surrounding the democratization of the franchise contributed substantially to the overheated atmosphere with which London’s elites received disclosures about the state’s treatment of the poor. In writing and publishing “A Night,” the Greenwood brothers hoped to cash in on widespread anxieties about the government of the metropolis, the conditions of workhouses, and parliamentary reform and, at the same time, expand the Gazette’s readership and advance their own professional fortunes.

  James Greenwood’s claim that he was motivated solely by “truth” was but one of many misrepresentations concealed in “A Night.” Greenwood also erased entirely from his text a young stockbroker called Bittlestone, who accompanied him on his night’s errand.47 Perhaps Greenwood felt that acknowledging Bittlestone would diminish the drama, danger, and heroism of his singular descent. Once “A Night” was published and critics began to scrutinize it for factual errors, it was impossible for Greenwood to mention Bittlestone without compromising his credibility. The crusading journalist W. T. Stead, writing about “A Night” in 1893, felt that there was nothing more to say about Bittlestone beyond the fact that “four eyes were better than two” in observing and writing up the results of their investigation.48 I disagree. Restoring Greenwood’s invisible male companion to “A Night” leads the reader to ask new questions about each scene: Where was Bittlestone? What did he see and what did he do? Because Bittlestone remains a silent witness and participant in Greenwood’s escapades, the answers to these questions can be no more than speculations.

  Bittlestone’s oddly absent presence has come to embody for me all the other omissions, half-truths, and partially concealed messages contained in Greenwood’s text. His relationship to Greenwood mirrors the way sexual themes are both unmistakably joined to and yet also entirely hidden by concern about poor relief and vagrancy in the metropolis. He is, at least in textual terms, so completely absorbed into Greenwood that he leaves no trace of his existence. At the same time, Bittlestone’s pairing with Greenwood is just one of the many duplicitous doublings that structure “A Night,” including Greenwood’s double self as the journalist who writes about workhouse abominations and the gentleman disguised as a tramp who witnessed them. Greenwood’s omission of Bittlestone from his narrative gives us good reason to believe that Greenwood’s description of his incognito persona as a “sly and ruffianly figure” is also an apt description of Greenwood the philanthropic journalist and author of “A Night.”

  READING “A NIGHT IN A WORKHOUSE”

  January 12, 1866

  Exploiting the comic and ironic detachment of the third person singular, Greenwood opens the first installment of “A Night” with
a description of his costume and his descent from his carriage to the dirty street.

  He was dressed in what had once been a snuff-brown coat, but which had faded to the hue of bricks imperfectly baked. It was not strictly a ragged coat, though it had lost its cuffs—a bereavement which obliged the wearer’s arms to project through the sleeves two long inelegant inches. The coat altogether was too small, and was only made to meet over the chest by means of a bit of twine. This wretched garment was surmounted by a birds eye pocket handkerchief of cotton, wisped about the throat hangman fashion; above all was a battered billy-cock hat, with a dissolute drooping brim. Between the neckerchief and the lowering brim of the hat appears part of a face, unshaven and not scrupulously clean.49

  Greenwood’s costume ostensibly signals his self-refashioning into one of the casual poor. However, his ease of transformation may have unintentionally reminded readers that clothing was not only an essential source of information about a person’s social identity but also an unreliable one as well. After all, if Greenwood could pass for a casual, how could his readers know whether others were what they appeared to be? Such questions were consequential for Londoners who, lacking direct knowledge of so many of the people they encountered in their daily lives, nonetheless had to distinguish between the credit-worthy and the profligate, bona fide and false philanthropists, deserving and undeserving poor. When reformers discussed reorganizing charitable relief on a metropolitan-wide basis in the 1860s, they couched their arguments explicitly in terms of the need to curb imposture, importunity, and fraud.50

  Greenwood’s pleasure in the details of his costume underscores one of the many unacknowledged ironies of “A Night”: he has gone to great lengths and expense to acquire a costume to impersonate someone who cannot afford decent clothes. The details ostensibly illustrate Greenwood’s authority as an ethnographer of the poor by demonstrating that he already knows what a typical “casual” looks like and how he wears his clothes. The image he evokes of his own absurd appearance allows him to laugh with his elite readers at the expense of the ragged poor. As the tale unfolds, his readers learn that his “wretched garments” are in fact quite elegant by prevailing standards among his fellow inmates who, we must presume, are either “professional” or “actual” casuals in contrast to his own status as an “amateur” theatrical performer.51

  Greenwood’s experiment in disguise simultaneously reinforced and undermined the fundamentally mimetic goals of Victorian and Edwardian philanthropy. If philanthropy was supposed to encourage the poor to mimic their social betters without seeking to displace or become them, Greenwood’s incognito “inverted” this framework by making a spectacle of a dandy pretending to be, but never quite becoming, a tramp. Greenwood and his readers allow themselves to enjoy the otherwise forbidden pleasures and dangers of pretending to “become” tramps, the lowest of the outcast poor; but just as Greenwood can and does return to the reassuring and familiar comfort of his home, so, too, “A Night” never calls into question the existing structures of power that subsidized both Greenwood’s incognito descent and the fantasy of slumming in cross-class dress.52 His adoption of masquerade as a tool of social investigation ironically echoes the use of drag by London’s sodomites in the nineteenth century to advertise their sexuality and the widespread use of disguises by extortionists and undercover policemen from the 1830s onwards to entrap men on grounds of indecent assault.53

  It is not clear precisely when Greenwood assumed or was given the pseudonym Amateur Casual in the days following the publication of his unsigned articles, but he continued to use it for many years as did other slum explorers.54 The word “amateur” had deep resonance in Victorian culture. It carried with it connotations of a gentlemanly ideal of engagement in public life or in pursuit of an interest actuated by the pleasures of “love” as opposed to the money-grubbing imperatives of professionalism. Contemporaries celebrated local or parish government as a bastion of amateurism and as a distinctly English way of governing. Greenwood’s use of the name Amateur Casual was disingenuous: it implied that he was literally a lover of casuals while at the time obfuscating the fact that he was a professional casual, if not an habitual one, in that he was paid for his masquerade.

  “A Night” revolves around a series of overlapping and parallel tropes of dressing and undressing the body, hiding and exposing social evils, and saying and censoring the full truth. Its structure anticipates the emergence of the striptease as an erotic performance practice.55 While its outcome is always heavily pre- and overdetermined, the narrative inflames its readers’ desires for full disclosure by delaying or sometimes altogether refusing to expose the mysteries it has produced. In this respect, Greenwood participated in a tradition of writing about the city as mystery that had been popularized by Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris in the 1840s, which spawned imitators throughout the European and trans-Atlantic world.56 To heighten our sense of sharing in his dangerous exploits, Greenwood adopts the rhetorical strategy of doing what he says he cannot—or should not—do. For example, at one point he declares that “no language with which I am acquainted is capable of conveying an adequate conception of the spectacle I then encountered.” The claim that his discovery cannot be represented was a familiar device often used by writers describing conditions of the poor, the insane, and other suffering people. It invited—in fact, it required—readers to represent for themselves indescribable horrors. The pretense that the scene is beyond representation is immediately belied by the following paragraphs, which offer ample evidence of Greenwood’s ability to overcome this supposed limitation.

  Greenwood makes literal the rhetorical striptease of “A Night” in one of its most memorable scenes. Adopting the alias Joshua Mason, he enters the workhouse. He is received by an older man called Daddy. Daddy is the benevolent pauper warder, an inmate of the poorhouse who superintends food distribution and sleeping arrangements in exchange for extra daily rations. Like a real father, Daddy lovingly tends his flock of dependents. Daddy orders the infantilized Joshua to “take off your clothes, tie ’em up in your han’sher” so that he can lock them away for safety. Joshua Mason/James Greenwood compliantly removes his coat and waistcoat, but Daddy insists “that ain’t enough, I mean everything.” Transformed into a frightened, deferential school boy, Joshua asks, “Not my shirt, sir, I suppose?” “Yes, shirt and all” Daddy insists. Greenwood disrobes not only for Daddy, but also for the “gentleman readers” of the Gazette.57

  Greenwood’s ritual stripping is followed by his plunge into the repulsive water of one of the “three great baths, each one containing a liquid so disgustingly like weak mutton broth.” His “plunge” excited universal commentary and, more than any other episode in “A Night,” earned him praise for heroic self-sacrifice. A writer for Reynold’s Newspaper gave free play to his own imagination in fabricating “facts” about Greenwood’s bath and the previous bathers. The “grey and greasy appearance of the water,” he claimed, “was the result of the filth, floating and liquified, eliminated from the unclean carcases of miserable paupers.”58 In this nightmarish rewriting of Greenwood’s “mutton broth,” paupers’ bodies become “carcases,” their dirt almost excrement.

  Why did Greenwood’s account of the bath resonate so deeply with contemporaries? In part, the bath was noteworthy because Greenwood’s language and staging of the scene are so vivid. The “weak mutton broth” color of the water ironically comments on the absence of all meat products from the daily diet of adult male casuals, which consisted of six ounces of bread and a pint of thin gruel.59 More compellingly, the bath, like the workhouse itself, fails miserably to perform its task. Instead of cleansing Greenwood, the water fouls his body with the dirt of at least a dozen tramps who have entered the workhouse and the tub before him.60 Greenwood’s “desperate” plunge into the much-used basin of water produces a disconcerting intimacy between his naked gentlemanly body and those of the tramps who have left part of themselves—their dirt—in the water. Greenwood’s
description of the bathwater adumbrates an even more disorderly mingling of male bodies awaiting him in the sleeping shed of the casual ward and awaiting his readers as they consume his narrative. His entry into the mutton-broth bath signals his willingness to violate, at least for one night, bourgeois taboos concerning hygiene, the body, and modesty. It is a parodic baptism, not into a community of Christian brothers, but rather into an atavistic fraternity of casuals.

  Bathing had been a cornerstone of sanitary reformers’ public-health agenda in London at least since an 1844 meeting at the Mansion House (the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London). Reformers had attempted but failed to convince local governments and the laboring poor that frequent bathing was not merely a godly activity, but also an effective means of containing the spread of disease and pestilence. In 1850, the bishop of London headed the Committee for Promoting the Establishment of Baths and Wash Houses for the Labouring Classes, which lobbied for the erection of model public baths throughout London. A pamphlet published by the Manchester Statistical Society in 1854 made explicit an assumption underlying the movement: the filthy bodies and clothing of the poor harbored infectious diseases that led to fatal epidemics. The pamphlet contended that public baths had mitigated the extent and deadliness of the cholera outbreak of 1854 in London.61

  In the autumn and winter of 1865 and 1866, Britons were preoccupied with a widespread and costly cattle plague even as they prepared themselves for the likelihood of another deadly visitation of cholera. And, according to Norman Longmate, some even believed that “the cattle plague was really an animal version of cholera.” John Snow’s studies of the early 1850s linking the spread of cholera to impure water supplies and linens fouled by the excrement of its victims did little to allay popular perceptions that workhouses (and not water) were themselves sites of deadly contagion. Many continued to believe that filth, squalor, and sexual excess in themselves produced and predisposed people to disease. The brief appearance of cholera in Britain in late September 1865 offered no hint of the devastation destined to follow in the summer of 1866, but it did stimulate renewed public interest in preventing the spread of the disease and heightened public sensitivity to the dangers of precisely the sorts of unsanitary conditions prevailing in the casual wards of workhouses. While the mandatory dip into the workhouse bath was intended to prevent the spread of disease, the filthy bathing conditions prevailing in the casual ward struck many as a breeding ground of pestilence.62 Greenwood played upon these anxieties effectively in his description of the bath and by using images of infection and contagion throughout “A Night” to describe the effects of mingling decent men and boys with already depraved and degraded inmates.63